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”
