Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox, and Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”: Muse and Bride

Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox

Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, full of twists and discoveries, offers a set of variations and reversals on the old English folktale of Mr. Fox and Lady Mary. Though it has a number of differences from the Bluebeard tale, it has a mysterious, powerful, murderous husband. In Oyeyemi’s version, there’s Mr. Fox, a writer, Daphne, his wife, and then Mary, his muse who comes to life and upbraids him for all the women he kills in his books. The stories within stories in this novel display multiple configurations of triangles, alterations in the power structure, and new versions of old relationships. 

Oyeyemi, as so often in her work, creates a fabric of apparent digressions in and around the central threads of her stories, every one necessary (or perhaps some of them are merely delightful and resonant). She’s never only telling one story. And she often pauses to create a condition that illuminates an event she will never explain. Here’s an uneasy family in an apparently playful moment: 

There was always something strange about the three of us together. Little things that might have been fun but somehow weren’t fun. One sunny morning my father made my mother lie down – she was laughing, and she said she wanted to do it, but she was an actress; can you trust an actress and a sunny day? – he made her lie down in the garden in her bikini and he wrote all over her. I can’t remember what he wrote; it was a long poem, in blue ink, and original poem, maybe. I was ten going on eleven. I didn’t like what was happening and I didn’t know why. He wrote on her back first, kneeling beside her; then he made her turn over and wrote all across her front, pressing hard, and the letters were big and ugly, but she pranced around afterwards, holding out her arms and saying things like: “Am I in the poem? Or is the poem in me?” And he just sat in the deck chair as if exhausted by his work and watched her. I thought, Something very mad is going on, she doesn’t like this, but she’ll never say so. 

Oyeyemi, a virtuoso of uneasiness, evokes a problematic power dynamic, in which the wife, the mother, seems to be pretending to go along with the joke. Why shouldn’t she be an artwork? She’s been turned into a canvas. She’s taking it as an honor, a game, despite the discomfort; she’s trying to reclaim a role as subject. She’s not incidental to the poem, she’s somehow part of it. The child, the observer, knows she’s seeing something ugly, but not why. And if we didn’t have her observations, we might also think of it as an artistic game.  

At the same time, the idea of this poem, the body covered with ink, the prancing mother, and the watching father create a memorable image. Not one heavy with details – it’s all in the action. The details in this moment, so tense, are spare. The blue ink (a color that disappears when copied), the deck chair (he’s the captain). The paragraph echoes the novel’s preoccupation with artist and muse, small and large acts of violence. The focus, though, is not so much on the creation – we don’t even know what the poem was – as on the child’s wary observation of the creation, her consciousness. The language so plain, a child seeing, but not only that. The adult watches herself in the act of seeing. A few years, and pages, on, her father will kill her mother, stabbing her as she tries to run away. One of a whole series of murders in the book, some terrible, some fantastical.  

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

These British writers have a way with delicious dread. In her story “The Bloody Chamber,” Angela Carter plays lavishly with detail in her reimagining of the Bluebeard story, one with a far stronger role for nurses and mother than any traditional version. Along the way to the terrible discoveries we know are coming, the bride abandons herself to voluptuousness, luxury, and the promise of danger:

And I began to shudder, like a race horse before a race, yet also with a kind of fear, for I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his white, heavy flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of Arun lilies that filled my bedroom in great glass jars, those undertakers’ lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your fingers as if you had dipped them in turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.

Nearly every paragraph in this story builds up its details into a Gothic, sensual, dread-filled evocation of a poisonous romantic love. The erotic scenes verge on horror; the discovery of the terrible room and its exquisitely described torture implements and corpses feels faintly pornographic. A grand swoon. The narrating voice looks to the past as much to rediscover the old excitements as to retrace the path that led to violent disaster. In Mr. Fox, the muse becomes the active force. In “The Bloody Chamber,” the bride is still, always, a marked child, in the middle of her quiet life, revisiting in her tales the old glory and shame of her marriage to the monster who reminds her of white lilies.

Why explore more uneasiness right now, when everything is uneasiness? Of course, some writing is meant to comfort us, and most of us turn to intentionally comforting work at least some of the time, like mysteries in which the motives are clear and often safely venal, with a detective to solve the crime and explain it all in the end. Or certain beautiful poems about nature that feel like a trip to the present moment.

Those of us who love dark stories, including these reimagined fairy or folk tales, also find comfort in hearing complex truths, a writer putting words to the music of our dread. The truth is a cure for the lies, stonewalling, trickery, or gaslighting that can bring back a helpless childhood rage. At least that’s true for many of us. (If you want to ask, why all this murder this week, I don’t know. It’s fiction, right? If you want the facts, I refer you to Rebecca Solnit’s “The Longest War.”) If the language is sufficiently wonderful in these truth-telling examinations of power dynamics, the overall feeling for me as a reader, no matter how dark the material, is a kind of lightness, even a relief. Especially, in the case of these two books, because the overall progression of both Mr. Fox and “The Bloody Chamber,” however circuitous and complex, moves toward a growing sense of power for the (former) muse and bride. Both Oyeyemi and Angela Carter imagine new, fierce, exuberant endings to the old stories.