Angela Carter's work in the short story collection "The Bloody Chamber" frequently uses concrete objects as expressions of abstract concepts, including freedom, slavery and death in multiple forms, not just physical. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay In the short story “The Bloody Chamber,” the world the protagonist lives in is archaic. Although timeless in technicality, the reader gets the idea that the film takes place in the Victorian era or slightly after. This idea is reinforced by the clothing of the characters, the behavior of the majority of women and the use of carts and horses as means of transport, the “automobile” being a luxury item. The reader is shocked by the presence of the phone, first revealed as the protagonist and her new husband make love for the first time: "A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while meowing seagulls swayed on invisible trapezoids in the outer void. I came to my senses thanks to the insistent howling of the telephone” (TBC 17). Carter's use of anachronism highlights the importance of the telephone in the story. In this case, the phone seems to symbolize security or freedom. It is with the phone that she can call her mother. This maternal bond between mother and daughter, via telephone wire, ends up being stronger than her bond with her husband in marriage. Carter's use of concrete objects in place of abstract concepts is not limited to anachronisms. “The Bloody Chamber” and “O Belo Adormecido” use intertextuality as an effective strategy for subverting conventions. Ana Raquel Fernandes argues that Carter hinges "The Bloody Chamber" on several objects, relevant to the setting, whose meaning increases throughout the story. Among them are the lilies in the bedroom and the ruby ​​choker. The islands, she says, are a deadly illusion. She also notes the association that the protagonist makes between the lilies and her husband: "In this first part of the story, the first-person narrator, the young girl who tells her story retrospectively, describes the marquis by focusing on the stillness of his face. and comparing it to a lily” (Fernandes 3). The part of the text that Fernandes refers to is the protagonist's first description of her lover. “He was older than me... And sometimes this face, motionless when he listened to me play, with the heavy eyelids folded over the eyes which always disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask... Even when he asked me to marry him and I said, "Yes," he didn't lose his heavy, meaty composure. I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me to be a lily” (TBC 8-9). The marquis himself, then, through this comparison with a lily, becomes an object in the story representing death. Fernandes goes on to explain the recurrence of lilies throughout the story as foreshadowing impending death on several levels: "The lilies reappear in the description of the marital bedroom...although the lilies are white, they stain the narrator, their scent confuses his senses. and later in the story, the stems become: “dismembered arms, drifting drowned in greenish water” (TBC 22), an explicit reference to death. Indeed, from its first description, the room is a death chamber” (Fernandes 4). The choker carries powerful symbolism of both death and the bondage of marriage. As a symbol of death, it refers to both.