Theme and Symbolism

In The Courtship of Mr. Lyon

Physical appearance    

         

A huge theme in The Courtship of Mr. Lyon centres on innate and physical appearances. There is an ironic shift between the two protagonists. Stereotypically we would assume that Beauty the female character would be centred on more emotional, sentimental characteristics of inner beauty; there is a gendered expectation that Beauty would be the character to display this trait, “This lovely girl, whose skin possesses that same inner light so you would have thought she, too, was made all of snow”. However it is the Beast and his “Head of a lion; mane and mighty paws  of a lion; he reared on his hind legs like an angry lion yet wore a smoking jacket of dull red brocade” (pg.47) who is focused on the naturalness of a being and their innate beauty.

The Bloody Chamber

The Bloody Chamber is the Beast’s room and although the Beast’s physical appearance has a very dominating nature; the Beast has no intention to hurt anyone therefore the room represents the violent and animalistic reputation of the lion. The Beast is depicted as a form of masculine dominance and is hence associated to the imagery of the lion and his supposed ‘bloody’ reputation. The Beasts private domain is however representative of the budding transformation he personally desires firstly on behalf of himself and then secondly the transformation ‘the bloody chamber’ has on Beauty. A place of realisation also for Beauty, that she feels more than an attraction towards Mr. Lyon and she is in fact in love with the Beast; this chamber could also connote the sexual maturity and advancements of the new lovers.

The White Rose

The rose is highly symbolic and carries with it the understanding that the rose signifies purity and innocence, a trait that western cultures stereotypically relate to religion and its virgin like quality; “as if miraculously preserved beneath it, one last, single, perfect rose that might have been the last rose left living in all the white winter” (pg.46). This rose is special as it represents beauty growing un-naturally in a winter and managing to still remain perfect, the rose remains unspoiled like Beauty gentle and a virgin. Both the merchant father and Beauty desire the rose which implies the idealisation of Beauty and who she is, her father desires the rose to keep it safe and perfect and maintain its virgin form. Also, Beauty sends the Beast flowers “She sent him flowers, white roses in return for  the ones he had given her; and when she left the florist, she experienced a sudden sense of perfect freedom” (pg.51) which would represent Beauty as being the ideal woman and a cultural gendered role reversal.

Morals

The cliché here within The Courtship of Mr. Lyon is to ‘not judge a book by its cover’ as how things appear are not always as they seem to be. The Beast is described as “so monstrous, so benign” (pg.51) implying his outward appearance does not match with the inward appearance of his true being. Beauty also gives Beast a promise of her return there seems with her to be a sense of obligation that she return, probably due to his generous nature and kindness of heart he has bestowed upon Beauty; “She was moved almost to tears that he should care for her so ... But, yes, she said; I will come back. Soon, before the winter is over” (pg.51).

Objectification of women

At the beginning of The Courtship of Mr. Lyon, Beauty is used as a bargaining tool between her merchant father and the Beast “Take her the rose, then, but bring her to dinner” (pg.47) realistically Beauty is used by her father to repay the Beast his debt for stealing his white perfect rose. Although Beauty is treated as a heroine she is also seen as an object, an object of passion and desire to the Beast and an object of property to her father using his daughter to secure his freedom.

Mirrors

The mirrors in this tale are to represent Beauty’s transformation from an unspoiled child to a materialistic and pampered maturing adult “she took off her earrings in front of the mirror; Beauty. She smiled at herself with satisfaction. She was learning, at the end of her adolescence, how to be a spoiled child ... You could not have said that her freshness was fading but she smiled at  herself in mirrors a little too often, these days, and the face that smiled back was not quite the one she had seen contained in the Beast’s agate eyes” (pg.52). We can assume that from this form of narration Beauty is a little more obsessed with her physical image, although her preferred image is that from the Beast and the reflection from his eyes.

Alienation/ Otherness

This theme primarily centres on the Beast due to his physical appearance “Fascinated, almost awed, she watched the firelight play on the gold fringes of  his mane; he was irradiated, as if with a kind of halo, and she thought of the first great beast of the Apocalypse, the winged lion with his paw upon the Gospel” (pg.49). It also hints at religious elements because as the Bible states man was made in the image of God and the Beast is not the image of God, he is different and othered from humanity because of his physical appearance rather than the goodness of his heart. His physical appearance contributes to his alienation with humanity to because “He grudgingly admitted what she had already guessed, that he disliked the presence of servants because, she thought a constant human presence would remind him too bitterly of his otherness” (pg.48), with the Beast believing he would be mocked by other humans because of the way he looks hence, the isolation and limited interaction with humanity but rather his spaniel ‘a man’s best friend’.

The Tigers Bride

Beauty does not equate to happiness

The simulacrum maid bestowed upon the heroine is the depiction of beauty “out glides a soubrette from an operetta, with glossy, nut-brown curls, rosy cheeks, blue, rolling eyes” (pg.66) although this form of beauty is not real it is considered beautiful; it highly resembles the heroine that she names it her “clockwork twin” (pg.66).While the heroine is real and beautiful this does not make her happy “and all I saw was a pale, hollow-eyed girl whom I scarcely recognized” (pg.73), and this hints at Beauty not being happy in her human form and her quest for happiness could be consequent to another physical form?

Objectification of women

Like many other female protagonists the heroine is treated as an object and gambled away via her father “My father lost me to The Beast at cards” (pg.56) quite different to that in The Courtship of Mr. Lyon who loses his daughter out of love by stealing her a rose but instead in The Tigers Bride the loss of a daughter is subject to the fathers own weaknesses. She is evidently a manipulated character used at a male’s disposal; we could argue that the father sees her as a sought after high prize (due to her purity and innocence). There is also an insinuation that there could be a poor father/daughter relationship, because her father has lost her she upholds more ride and anger than Beauty “My father said he loved me yet he staked his daughter on a hand of cards” (pg.59) there’s a sense of betrayal and in return the heroine reacts, “My tear-beslobbered father wants a rose to show that I forgive him. When I break off a stem, I prick my finger and so he gets his rose all smeared with blood” (pg.61). This reaction could be to foreshadow the sexual maturity of his daughter from that of a rose which represents love, beauty and sexuality is now going to be stained from her purity to the loss of her virginity.

The heroine is clearly aware of this objectification and openly expresses her hatred as she reflected “I certainly mediated on the nature of my own state, how I had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand” (pg.70). Her objectification is witnessed throughout where she states “the six of us – mounts and riders, both – could boast amongst us not one soul, either since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts or women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things” (pg.70). It is from this reason that the heroine feels some connection towards the Beast, than she could ever possibly feel towards a man; she then implies that the way men objectify females is the same as animals (the Beast) and other inanimate objects, to man they possess little physical worth.

Sex and Sexuality

Sex and sexual desire are the two catalytic components of her accepted transformation. Initially Beauty is asked “My master’s sole desire is to see the pretty young lady unclothed nude without her dress” (pg.64) to which her response was “I promise you I will pull my skirt up to my waist, ready for you” (pg.65) her refusal to the Beasts commands hurt him, although at this point Beauty does not understand that it is not mere voyeurism; the Beast only wants to witness her inner animal-self and in return he is seeking the acceptance of his animalistic nature from Beauty. If the Beast had been voyeuristic he would have accepted Beauty’s earlier promise of lifting up her skirt, the Beast did not want that kind of gratification.

Sexualised symbols are used to enhance the importance of sexuality, the rose primarily used to represent purity, innocence and virginity. The rose she passes to her father as an act of forgiveness represents her virgin self because it is white perfect and beautiful, however when she pricks her hand on the thorns of the rose it tarnishes this perfect rose red, “all smeared with blood” (pg.61). This new red rose now represents the embodiment of sexual lust and desires, a transformation of character from virginal white to coitarche. The stripping of the rose “This white rose, unnatural, out of season, that now my nervous fingers ripped, petal by petal, apart” (pg.57) is implied to mean Beauty is striping away at her features to find her own true core of how she metamorphoses over the story.

The narrator does not make the scene sexual it is Beauty who is the agent of the story from a young girl who can identify with her cultural and social station “I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves” (pg.70) to then the uncontrollable urges of sexual desire “I felt my breast ripped apart as if I had suffered a marvellous wound” (pg.71).Beauty’s transformation into her real- self, the tigress is highly sexualised and it combines sexual imagery “beasts in bondage” (pg.69) with that of birth, (or in Beauty’s case rebirth) a “fear of [sexual] devourment” (pg.74) by, “a tremendous throbbing, as of the engine that makes the earth turn ... he began to purr. The sweet thunder of this purr shook the old walls, made the shutters batter the windows until they burst apart ... the reverberations of his purring rocked the foundations of the house, the walls began to dance” (pg.75) is the metaphorical way Carter implies for sexual activity. The Beast’s actions here aid in Beauty’s transformation “He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue” (pg.75). Licking is considered a sexual act but an animal act for cats too, a way of cleaning and with “each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin” and Beauty is reborn as a tigress with “a nascent patina of shining hairs” (pg.75).

The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; ... the lamb must learn to run with the tigers

Carter wants to make clear that as a collaborative act of creation, where man claims the women it is rather the opposite. From Beauty’s decision to take off her clothes she could sense herself coming into her own being (before the aid of the licking) “I felt as much atrocious pain as if I was stripping off my own underpelt and the smiling girl stood poised in the oblivion of her balked simulation of life” (pg.73). It is rather the heroine who claims herself, it is her own decision to go the Tigers chamber rather than return home to her father and the fact that coming into her own self-hood was painful and strenuous compared to the act of having to give birth to herself to attain complete self satisfaction and a return to her basic instincts becoming a beast. 

Appearance as Pretence

Again appearance is a key theme; The Beast here is different to Mr. Lyon but belongs to the same cat family, a tiger. He is described as “only from a distance would you think The Beast not much different from any other man, although he wears a mask with a man’s face painted most beautifully on it ... with too much formal symmetry of feature to be entirely human ...He wears a wig, too, false hair tied at the nape with a bow” (pg.58). Although he is a unique character, The Beast feels he needs to adjust himself to what society deems as acceptable; as when he is out his appearance is total pretense and hopes that people are attracted to his manner and appreciates his character rather than his physical appearance which he hides via his mask. The Beast like Beauty has an air of vulnerability about him too, by not being able to be the person he is without the judgemental opinions of society; he has to pretend to be someone else to be an accepted figure rather than “A great, feline, tawny shape whose pelt was barred with a savage geometry of bars the colour of burned wood ... the tiger sat still as a heraldic beast, in the pact he had made with his own ferocity to do me no harm” (pg.71).