The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Nearly all Carter’s writing is strikingly full of cultural and intertextual references – you could spend five years on an annotation of The Bloody Chamber – but this story is extremely so. It is an artfully constructed edifice of signs and allusions and clues

when he put the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife.

pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.

he sensed a rare talent for corruption.

Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.

I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it.

The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.

Not yet. Later. Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love.

there must, I thought, be a great deal to conceal if he takes such pains to hide it.

A ghastly hunger gnaws her entrails;