In Victorian fiction, female novelists often rendered their male protagonists blind – even temporarily so – in order to make them dependent on their wives. First of all, we could explore the significance and symbolism of his blindness. In giving that role to the heroine’s mother and positing a kind of ‘maternal telepathy’ between two women, Carter shows sisters (or mothers and daughters) doing it for themselves, without the need of a group of brothers defending their sister’s honour (and life).īut Carter’s introduction of Jean-Yves is more curious, and there are several ways in which we might interpret the introduction of such a character. One can see why Carter, a well-known feminist writer of the 1960s and 1970s, would want to avoid having a group of men rescuing her heroine from her husband’s toxic masculinity. The second of these modifications to what we might call the ‘source material’ for ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is easier to explain. She tells Jean-Yves to leave her on her own so she can confront her husband, and the piano-tuner reluctantly agrees. When dawn arrives, the Marquis returns and the narrator tries to wash the blood from the key, but it magically remains. She ends up telling him everything, and her story confirms the rumours he has heard about the Marquis. The piano-tuner she had recently employed, a blind boy named Jean-Yves, has been listening to her play the piano as she thinks through her options. When she tries to phone her mother, the line is dead. Retrieving it, she flees from the chamber and tries to plan her escape. The narrator drops the key to the room and it falls in a pool of blood. The first, an opera singer, has been strangled, while the model is hanging from a wall and the third wife, who was a countess, is inside the torture device known as an iron maiden, her body pierced by a hundred spikes. There, she finds the room is a torture chamber, containing the bodies of her husband’s first three wives.
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