I will try to show the complexity of being female focusing my study on Angela Carter´s work The Bloody Chamber (1979) where tradition is one of the main points, and The Unbelonging (1985) by Joan Riley. I will treat topics in relation to the female characters such as marriage, loneliness, domestic work, virginity, patriarchal figure, physical appearance and rebellion. The female protagonist from the stories suffer because of the situation they are and being women make it worse. In The Bloody Chamber we can see that for "he", her husband, "she" is just another woman to add in his list. He is, apart from being male, rich and powerful as well, she is nothing. She is like another servant for him: "after my first shock, I was forced always to mimic surprise, so that he would not be disappointed" (pg. 8). She assumes the role that has been assumed by women throughout history: a passive attitude. But the reader knows that she has something else to show, she is young and clever, and she is specially a human being just like him. In The Unbelonging, every time Hyancinth speaks about "him", her father, we can see that she is referring to a person with power over her. He beats her and she is really scared of "him". He is her father, her master and her boss: "...let me see if you can remember who is boss in this house" (pg.34). In both stories we can see the relationship master/ slave, in The Bloody Chamber between husband and wife and in The Unbelonging between father and daughter. At the beginning of the story, the narrator of The Bloody Chamber is very excited because she is going to get married: "I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender delicious ecstasy of excitement". According to Simone de Beauvoir, marriage is he destiny traditionally offered to women by society. Most women are married, have been married, plan to be married or suffer from not being. Girls from childhood dream of marriage, in comparison with men who do not consider marriage as his fundamental project in life, and look to the male for fulfilment and escape. He is the liberator. She will free herself from the paternal home, from her mother´s hold, she will open up her future, not by active conquest but by delivering herself up, passive and docile, into the hands of a new master (Beauvoir, 352). From the moment she marries him the narrator ascends from her social class and at the same time she becomes his vassal. He shares with her his mansion, all the money, and jewels but she takes his name, belongs to his religion, his class, his circle, his family. She wears the expensive ring of his family: "but this opal has been his own mother´s ring, and his grandmother´s and his mother´s before that, given to an ancestor by Catherine de Medici" (pg.9). Both women share the same feeling: loneliness. In The Bloody Chamber once she gets married, she realises that she feels lonely: "Into marriage, into exile; I sensed it, I knew it- that, henceforth, I would always be lonely" (pg. 12). She married with girlish enthusiasm but now she becomes aware of reality. Marriage has taken her far from her family, her friends from youth. He can find company everywhere, he makes new contacts but she is nothing without a family. The role of housekeeper adopted by women since they marry makes them to be busy while the husband is not at home. In domestic work, a woman makes her house her own, finds social justification, and provides herself with an occupation. In this story this fact is exaggerated since she cannot even do that job because they have servants. She could even envy the traditional role of the housekeeper, which makes her dependent on her husband and children. She would be subordinate and secondary but at least she would feel useful. She does not have children to be busy with them either. She cannot maintain a friendly relationship with the staff she is really lonely. The same happens to Hyacinth but because of different circumstances. From the first moment she arrives to England she does not feel accepted because of her skin colour. Loneliness is her only companion. Soon we realise why these men want them for. They need them to keep them company when they arrive home after work. They use them sexually. They are aware of their superiority as men and women know they are inferior and assume it. Hyacinth´s father shows this when he tries to protect her against men: "I don´t want no man to take advantage of you" (pg.48). The funny thing here is that he is the one who forces her sexually. Adler makes a great point of the resulting feeling of inferiority: "From chilhood on, the notions of superiority and inferiority are among the most important; it is impressive to climb high in trees; heaven is above the earth, hell below; to fall, to go down, is to fail, and to go up is to succed; in wrestling, to win is to force the opponent´s shoulders down the ground. Now, the woman lies in the posture of defeat; worse, the man rides her as he would an animal subject to bit and reins. She always feels passive: she is caressed, penetrated; she undergoes coition, whereas the man exerts himself actively" (Beauvoir, 406). Women have no right to any sexual activity if it is not inside marriage but men can enjoy the pleasure before marriage and extramaritally, e.g: In The Bloody Chamber when he does not allow her to enter one of the rooms : "...where I can go, sometimes, on those infrequent yet inevitable occasions when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on my shoulders. There I can go, you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless". (pg.24) Both women are young and still virgin and men are going to steal their virginity. Simone de Beavoir points out that the woman is the most frightened because "the strange operation she must undergo is sacred, because society, religion, family, and friends have solemnly handed her over to her husband as if to a master" (Beauvoir, 461). It is the man who decides the position in love-making, especially when the woman is new at the game, and he also determines the duration and frequency of the act. She feels that she is an instrument. In The Bloody Chamber she feels like an object: "At once he closed my legs like a book..." (pg.23). In The Unbelonging, she is almost raped by her father and from that moment she will hate any kind of relation with other men: "(At University) she avoided the male students" (pg.109). Even when she thought she found the right male companion, she hates him sexually: "...he is just a man after all" (pg.127). Then, rejecting them she isaccused of provoking them, even her best friend says to her: "...if I were you, Hyacinth, I would stop being such a tease"(pg. 106). In The Bloody Chamber the narrator says: "He was older than I. He was much older than I"(pg.8), "I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world" (pg.9). Women seek the father image in their lives, and for his part, the husband sees in his wife "a baby" like in the story: "Have the nasty pictures scared baby ? Baby musn´t play with grownups´toys until she´s learned who to handle them, must she?" (pg.17). At the same time, her husband reminds her of her father who died when she was a little girl: "Then the flame the cigar glowed and filled the compartment with a remembered fragance that made me think of my father, how he would hug me in a warm fug of Havana, when I was a little girl, before he kissed me and left me and died" (pg.12). But the fact that she has sexual relations with him, robs him of prestige. He could not replace a father, much less a mother; he cannot deliver her from her freedom. Simone de Beauvoir says that since developed childhood, women like to be embraced, caressed. But crude men, with hard muscles, rough and often hairy skin, strong odour does not appeal to her desirable, he even seems repulsive (Beauvoir, 398). In the story we can see how she feels s repugnance towards him sexually: "...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..." (pg.15). They do not have many things in common. He has been married more times and she is young and new in the world of marriage. Tolstoy´s wife wrote a year after her marriage: "He is old, he is to absorbent, and as for me, I feel so young and inclined to folly!.Instead of going to bed I should like to dance madly, but with whom?". The protagonist of The Bloody Chamber has the same problem:"But, now ... what shall I do, now?", "How shall I pass the time?" (pg.23). However, she found someone to dance with: The piano-tuner. In The Unbelonging, the father figure is treated in a different way. She is scared ofhim. Her relationship with men is going to be difficult because of the way her father treated her. She won´t look for someone who reminds her of him but the opposite: "Small and thin, he was the opposite of her father. She felt safe with him..." (pg.84). One of the roles of women is to look beautiful physically. There is a pressure frfom society asking them to look pretty for men. In both stories we can see this. In The Bloody Chamber, he has been married before to rich and beautiful women. Now, she is one more in the list: "...he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women" (pg.10). Their style of dress is very important: "A Romanian countess, a body of high fashion" (pg.10). She feels jealous because all her husbands ex-wives where pretty and smart. She feels inferior. It is true that she is young and attractive but once married the beauty is the weakest of a woman´s weapons, it disappears with familiarity and there are other desirable women all about. In the other story, Hyacinth is ashamed of her look: "Her skinny body and large bottom/ her brittle hair, the thickness of her lips" (pg.78). She envies girls with long and soft blond hair and she does her best to make her stubborn hair straight as the fashion world dictates. But they do rebel. The woman soon discovers that what she has in front of her is not a master but a normal human being, a man. Now, she sees no reason to be under his thumb anymore. This is why in The Bloody Chamber she breaks the promise she made to him. She is curious to know what is inside that mysterious room and the evidence of her "husband´s true nature", so she takes the key and enters. And what she discovers is that he is really a monstrous, he is a murderer. now, she feels more scared, lonely and unprotected than ever. She knows he is powerful and can kill her too: "His forefathers had ruled this coast for eight centuries, from this castle whose moat was the Atlantic. Might not the police, the advocates, even the judge, all be in his service, turning a common blind eye to his vices since he was milord whose word must obeyed?..." (pg.89). This shows that world is just for men. However, the relationship mother- daughter will be more powerful than the man in the end. In the last minute her mum appears to rescue her with the gun and saves her from death shooting him. She calls it "maternal telepathy". "She" has beaten "him" and now, she is a rich widow at seventeen who is going to start a new life with the young blind piano-tuner, a man who does not represent any danger, any level of superiority, but equality. In The Unbelonging there is a similar situation. Hyacinth suffers during all her youth in England and the only thing that chears her up is thinking in her aunt Joyce and in Jamaica. It is another woman who helps her to fight in life although she just does this morally and from a long distance. Both female characters of the two stories show that the situation of women is changing nowadays. One of them gets rid of her husband and the other one could get to University and go back to Jamaica in spite of all the obstacles she found in her hard life in England.
Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber, 1979. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex, 1975. Riley, Joan. The Unbelonging, 1985.