Edgar Allan Poe and Angela Carter

We have read three Edgar Allan Poe stories in class so far, and a reoccurring theme has seemed to appear. The narrator meets a woman. The woman is beautiful. The woman is intelligent. The narrator is enamored with her intelligence. The woman becomes sick and wastes away and dies. Weird stuff ensues. I don't really know much about Edgar Allan Poe, so when it was mentioned in class today that his cousinwife died slowly after a stroke, it made sense to me why this theme was so prominent in what we'd read of Poe's works so far. Still, it gets a little tedious to read about what is (almost) the same lady over and over again, reading essentially the same description with different words. I do enjoy the stories though -- the tooth removal in  Berenice was gruesome! I think I liked Ligeia most though.

And on to Angela Carter. I enjoyed her writing. I feels like it's one intellectual step above me, which exercises my brain (and sends me looking up words relatively frequently) in a nice way. That's opposed to some things we've tackled for this class which felt waaaaaay over my level. We also talked in class a little about how her work is very sexual and whether or not we liked that. I think it adds a sense of reality that is sometimes missing when sex is completely ignored in stories. However some parts seemed a little over-the-top ("At this hour, this very hour, far away in paris, France, in the appalling dungeons of the Bastille, old Sade is jerking off. Grunt, groan, grunt, on to the prison floor... aaaagh! he seeds dragons' teeth. Out of each ejaculation spring up a swarm of fully-armed, mad-eyed homunculi."). Yeah. Okay.

Actually, that quote reminds me of something: "old Sade" is referring, I assume, to the Marquis de Sade, a crazy French dude from the 1700's. To quote Wikipedia, 

"He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality and blasphemy against the Catholic Church. He was a proponent of extreme freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law. The words "sadism" and "sadist" are derived from his name."

So this guy liked sex and violence. And he wrote a book called The 120 Days of Sodom about some rich french dudes who trapped  a few dozen teenagers in one of their castles and raped/murdered them all for a few months. Well the reason I bring this crazy guy up is that when I read The Bloody Chamber, the evil guy was referred to as The Marquis. Which made me think of The Marquis de Sade -- both are sexually sadistic evil people with similar names (or at least titles). I wasn't aware of the Blue Beard fairytale/myth when I first read The Bloody Chamber, so I figured that Carter had got her inspiration for the story from The Marquis de Sade, but now it seems to me more inspired by Blue Beard and shaped a little by Monsieur Sade.