Where her daughter fails to read the latent warning signs, though, the mother recognises her daughter’s dangerous situation. Her powerlessness is clear when she has to wear a “black silk” dress, the foreboding lucid, perhaps a silent taunt by the Marquis, yet she is unable to act.

However, the adverb “defiantly” indicates that it is a decision that she willingly makes against the oppressive patriarchal system. It appears that she is punished for owning her desire or marrying below her station “for love”. She “defiantly beggared herself for love”. Her agency is because of her family’s financial situation, and she becomes powerless when she loses that position. However, she is still the product of privilege, the “daughter of a rich tea planter”. An “indomitable mother” who “outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates”, she is the type of woman that Carter champions, someone who takes her agency in her own hands. Carter portrays her as powerful, a figure that stands up against the patriarchy.

In ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the mother is a central figure. It is clear that Carter’s mothers are not a simple binary, but something that Carter explodes to mirror each other and deconstruct motherhood in a patriarchal society dominated by male desire.

In The Bloody Chamber, the mother figure takes on different roles, acting as the heroic savior in the title story, the background character in the coming-of-age stories in the Wolf Trilogy, and a jealous step-mother figure in ‘The Snow Child’ that seeks to destroy the child. This relationship has perhaps imprinted itself in her short story collection The Bloody Chamber, a feminist intervention in the Gothic genre that seeks to liberate female sexuality from the chains of patriarchy, part of which parentalism is an underlying shadow. At 17, Carter decided to put some distance between her and her mother, beginning to rebel against the socially conservative values that her parents held, forcibly asserting her identity in a repressive environment. A neurotic housewife with a penchant for overprotectiveness, she refused to allow Carter to use the bathroom on her own, terrified of what could happen to her if the door was closed on her. Angela Carter had an unusual relationship with her mother.

The bloody chamber