Bloody Chamber text quotations Flashcards
Title story - the girl’s excitement at her upcoming marriage
“I lay awake in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement”
Title story - train sex reference
“great pistons ceaselessly thrusting”
Title story - description of mother
“my eagle-featured, indomitable mother”
Title story - innocence of girl
“I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world”
Title story - description of choker
“bright as arterial blood”
Title story - objectifying gaze of Marquis
“the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh”
Title story - isolation of marriage
“into marriage, into exile”
Title story - description of ocean
“amniotic salinity”
Title story - description of castle
“mysterious, amphibious place”
Title story - movements of Marquis
“deliberately coarse, vulgar”
Title story - description of naked girl
“scarlet, palpitating core”
Title story - resilience of girl
“I was innocent but not naive”
Title story - Marquis patronising
“Have the nasty pictures scared baby?”
Title story - violent description of sex
“a dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides”
Title story - girl’s loss of virginity
“I had been infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity”
Title story - castle as prison
“this lovely prison”
Title story - lair of Marquis
“subterranean privacy”
Title story - chamber
“Absolute darkness. And, about me, the instruments of mutilation”
Title story - dead wife
“she was cool, he had embalmed her”
Title story - pierced wife
“she was pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes”
Title story - piano tuner
“slight, stooping figure”, “not much use”
Title story - Marquis hunting
“used to hunt young girls on the mainland”
Title story - mother on horse
“her black skirts tucked up around her waist so she could ride hard and fast”, “avenging angel”
Title story - strength of mother
“great battering and pounding at the gate”
Title story - Marquis’ inactivity
“impotent at the last”
Title story - death of Marquis
“without a moment’s hesitation”, “she raised my father’s gun… put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband’s head”
Title story - dim passageway
“ill-lit”, “what a dim, lugubrious light”
Title story - lily
“ominous calm of a sentient vegetable”, “dismembered arms”
Title story - Marquis’ monstrosity
“his monstrous presence”
Title story - door to chamber
“like the door to hell”
Title story - Marquis’ face
“strange, heavy almost waxen face”
Lyon - fear of other
“she found his bewildering difference from herself almost intolerable; its presence choked her”
Lyon - look of the girl
“absolute sweetness and absolute gravity”
Lyon - the beast
“leonine apparition”
Lyon - transformation of the beast
“it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man”
Lyon - supernatural world
“all the natural laws of the world were held in suspension”
Tiger - unease around setting
“sweet south… treacherous south”
Tiger - landscape
“sunless, featureless landscape”
Tiger - valet
“prim hypocrite”
Tiger - supernatural
“the wondering peasants once brought my father a skull with horns four inches long on either side of it”
Tiger - insulting the Beast
“I struck The Beast to the heart!”
Tiger - mechanical servant
“marvellous machine”, “a musical box where her heart should be”
Tiger - dying landscape
“a bereft landscape in the sad browns and sepias of winter lay all about us”
Tiger - transformation
“each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin”
Erl King - entrapment by the woods
“perfect transparency must be impenetrable”
Erl King - ringing saying
“Erl-King will do you grievous harm”
Erl King - physical description
“his white, pointed teeth with the spittle gleaming on them”
Erl King - murderous nature
“the tender butcher… skin the rabbit, he says”
Erl King - vampiric
“you sink your teeth into my throat and make me scream”
Erl King - killing him
“with hands gentle as rain, I shall strangle him”
Snow Child - description of girl
“the child of his desire”
Snow Child - rose prick
“the girl picks a rose; pricks her finger; bleeds; screams; falls”
Snow Child - necrophilia
“thrust his virile member into the dead girl”
TLOTHOL - lady all alone
“the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone”
TLOTHOL - castle
“ornate and rotting”
TLOTHOL - colours
“velvet curtains, “white hands” and “black satin”
TLOTHOL - remains of boys
“mortal parcel”
TLOTHOL - boy’s virginity
“the special quality of virginity”
TLOTHOL - bicycle
“the most rational mode of transport in the world”
TLOTHOL - faces of ancestors
“quite memorable beastliness”
TLOTHOL - invitation
“I shall wait for you in my bride’s dress in the dark”
TLOTHOL - soldier’s disbelief
“a fundamental disbelief in what he sees before him sustains him”
TLOTHOL - solider’s lack of fear
“though he feels unease, he cannot feel terror”
TLOTHOL - fake surroundings
catafalque black paper, not ebony, “as in the theatre”
Werewolf - refection of setting in people
“they have cold weather, they have cold hearts”
Werewolf - supernatural
“on Walpurgisnacht the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches”
Werewolf - grandmother dying
“began to struggle, squawking and shrieking like a thing possessed”
Werewolf - girl afterwards
“she prospered”
Company - wolves
“carnivore incarnate”
Company - ogres
“ogres that will grill babies upon gridirons”
Company - time of year
“the night of the solstice, the hinge of the year where things do not fit together as well as they should”
Company - wolves’ eyes
“the eyes alone unchanged by metamorphosis”
Company - virginity
“invisible pentacle of her own virginity”, “she is a sealed vessel”
Company - granny religious
“she has her bible for company’, “pious old woman”
Company - kiss
“she freely gave the kiss she owed him”
Company - independence
“she knew she was nobody’s meat”
Company - flesh
“immaculate flesh”
Alice - description
“Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf” - liminal state of being
Alice - Duke
“both less and more than a man”
Alice - Duke’s state
“aborted transformation”
