Until someone unexpectantly comes to the girl’s rescue… She will be next in the macabre collection of dead wives, he informs her. She anxiously awaits the night in order to flee the castle, when her husband suddenly returns and finds the bloodstained key. No matter what she tries, the blood stain won’t come off.
Struck with fear and shock, the girl lets the key fall to the ground, into a puddle of one of the girls’ blood. Inside – true to the story’s name, she finds a bloody chamber: a room filled with the corpses of her husband’s ex-wives. As if pulled by gravity, the girl finds the room and unlocks it. As the girl is contemplating how to pass her time, she remembers that her husband gave her a vast amount of keys to various places of the castle, but forbid her to enter one special room. After their marital encounter in bed, the Marquis is quick to leave the castle – apparently, he needs to leave for America for a business meeting. She is already sure that she no longer belongs to herself, but her husband. The girl is anxiously, but also curiously awaiting their wedding night, which the Marquis is happy to have now, despite the broad daylight. After arriving in their new home, the Marquis shows the girl her new room, full of the sweet but heavy scent of lilies. The story revolves around an unnamed 17-year old girl who has just married a Marquis and is brought to his castle, away from her mother and their life together. Although it is far from my usual quirky and bubbly books, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to anybody who is interested in Gothic literature, or reading classics. I’ve read Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” (the first one in a collection of short stories) as a mandatory read in one of my university seminars on Gothic literature a while ago.
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