Bodies in the Bloody Chamber

On curiosity as care and how one friend pulled me back from the brink of bulimia

images from pinterest, collage by me

Niki noticed. She noticed when I slipped away from the table after eating. She noticed how I popped a piece of gum in my mouth when I got back. She noticed the steady thrum of the running faucet. She noticed how long I spent in the stall. 

I don’t know if she noticed the way I languished over my own reflection, prodding unsatisfactory bulging bits of myself. How I forked my food into misshapen piles on my plate to mimic consumption. How I dragged myself out of bed to run at five in the morning, no matter how late we’d been up the night before. How I held my hands over my stomach on the beach, covering what my swimsuit wouldn’t. How I hated my body, militantly, with a hardened, unflinching resolve. 

Three years later, in my final year of college, I would sit with another friend, perched on a brick wall, facing each other, legs crossed, and she would ask me, “What do you think made the difference?” 

I thought for a while, considering how both of us had scrabbled up the craggy cliff face, reached the top, and stepped to the edge. We had both gazed unsteadily at the devouring sea below, feeling the irresistible pull of oblivion. 

My friend tumbled over the cliff, plunging into a years-long, near-fatal battle with bulimia that would see her in and out of treatment centers and hospitals. But, though we had followed near identical paths to the edge, something, or someone, had pulled me back. And now, in an effort to understand her own path, my friend wanted me to explain. How had I walked back from the edge? What had stopped my eating disorder from wreaking havoc in my life the way it had in hers? 

Of course there are so many factors that could have made the difference in the end, but, for me, there’s only ever been one that I felt truly changed my trajectory: Niki. 

Fairy tales, old and new, are full of benevolent figures who arrive at just the right moment to provide help, guidance, or protection—Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, the Seven Dwarves in Snow White, the brothers in Bluebeard—but it is this last example that interests me the most. The dwarves provide Snow White a bed and a roof over her head. Cinderella’s fairy godmother provides a dress and a carriage. But it is in Bluebeard when the agent of salvation rescues the story’s protagonist from the brink of annihilation. 

There has been much research and writing on the Bluebeard tale, but few scholars have focused on the ending. Norton’s anthology on classic fairy tales defines the key elements of a Bluebeard story as “a forbidden chamber, an agent of prohibition who also metes out punishments, and a figure who violates the prohibition,” neglecting to even include the just-in-time rescue that characterizes the majority of these tales. 

In the most well-known version of the story by Charles Perrault, a girl marries a strange man with a blue beard. When he goes away on business, he gives her free reign of his castle, handing her a ring of keys and saying she may use any of them except the smallest key—that room is forbidden to her. Of course, the girl’s curiosity gets the better of her, and, when she opens the forbidden chamber, the floor is covered in blood, the bodies of Bluebeard’s previous murdered wives swinging from the ceiling. Bluebeard discovers her treachery when she returns and vows to kill her for her disobedience. Overpowered and isolated, the girl can do little to prevent her horrible fate. Bluebeard’s axe is poised above the heroine’s neck when her brothers burst through the door and save her. 

While “Bluebeard” is often discussed in the context of domestic violence or the dangers of curiosity, I have never seen anyone discuss that it is an example of how, sometimes, the situations we find ourselves in are so dire we must rely on the help of others to extricate ourselves. 

Niki and I were randomly placed together as roommates for a twelve-week summer study abroad program in Valencia, Spain. Our twin beds were so close we could have held hands when we slept. We ate every meal together. We shared one tiny bathroom. In the mornings, we rode the bus across the city to our classes, we spent all day in class together, and at night we huddled together to complete our homework by the light of our phones as our house mother was against “excessive electricity use.” “Apaga las luces!” was her constant refrain. 

We became friends, because it would have been impossible not to in such close quarters, and I felt lucky to have ended up with Niki, of all the roommates, even though I didn’t yet know just how lucky I was. 

The first indication that our similarities might go deeper than an interest in majoring in Spanish occurred two weeks into study abroad. We were not permitted to use the kitchen, so we had to eat whatever our house mother prepared for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For many students, this was one of the most charming aspects of the program—authentic home-cooked meals three times a day. But our house mother was not particularly interested in cooking. 

Each night for dinner, she would empty a package of hot dogs or sandwich meat into a steaming skillet of oil, fry it up, and then dump it onto our plates into two steaming, slippery piles. 

One night after eating yet another dinner of oil-soaked hot dogs, I came back from the shower to find Niki crying in the bedroom. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked, plopping on to the edge of her bed. 

Niki explained that she had suffered from severe bulimia for years, that, after extensive treatment, she was finally in recovery, and that a huge part of that recovery was healthy eating. 

“Fruits, vegetables, lean protein, it all allows me to eat without panicking, without relapsing. But this food. I swear. Tonight after dinner I almost threw up again, and I haven’t felt tempted to do that in so long.” 

Something lodged in my stomach, a sweaty, guilty feeling. I couldn’t look at Niki. 

Neither of us had any money to spare, but I suggested that we go to the grocery store and treat ourselves to some fruits and veggies. 

“I’ve kind of felt like that too,” I mumbled, not mentioning that I had already purged several times in our house mother’s bathroom. 

Niki’s eyes flashed, catching on this half-admission, but she didn’t push the point, and we returned from the grocery store with two huge containers of strawberries, which we ate with relish in our beds while watching Game of Thrones. 

The Bluebeard Tale is type 312 in the Aarne-Thompson fairy tale and folklore classification system, and across seven versions of the tale I explored in this tale type, the heroine, despite her own cleverness, finds herself in such a dire situation that help from others is essential for escape. 

In Angela Carter’s famous retelling of “Bluebeard,” called “The Bloody Chamber,” it is not the brothers that rescue the unlucky bride, but her mother. In the Brothers Grimm version of the tale, called “Fitcher’s Bird,” the third wife of Bluebeard rescues Bluebeard’s two previous wives, who are also her sisters. The tale reads, “There in the basin were her two sisters, cruelly murdered and chopped to pieces. But she set to work gathering all their body parts and put them in their proper places: heads, torsos, arms, legs. When everything was in place, the pieces began to move and joined themselves together. The two girls opened their eyes and came back to life. Overjoyed, they kissed and hugged each other.” She smuggles her reassembled sisters to safety in a basket, and her relatives help her burn the castle to the ground with Bluebeard in it. In “The Robber’s Bridegroom” a girl unknowingly wed to a robber who lives with a troop of cannibals is rescued by an old woman who hides her, puts sleeping potion in the cannibals’ drinks, and then escorts the girl back to safety. In another version of the tale called “Mr. Fox,” the girl gets herself back to safety without the help of the old woman, but then “her brothers and her friends [draw] their swords and cut Mr. Fox into a thousand pieces.” In a Jamaican version of the tale called “Mr. Bluebeard,” the bride’s brothers also arrive to save her. And in a Pueblo version of the tale a fairy-woman figure appears named Chumushquio and “the fairy-woman and the girl [escape], and [make] their way to Acoma.” Again and again, in each version of the tale, on the brink of destruction, these desperate girls receive help at the moment they most need it. While the protagonist in Perrault’s tale is a bit simple and helpless, many of the women depicted in these tales are very clever and cunning—but there is a recognition that, despite their intelligence, the situations they find themselves in are too dire to escape without help. 

In American culture where self-reliance and independence are particularly prized, these old tales are a reminder that sometimes we’re in too deep, sometimes we need others to walk into the bloody chamber with us, look at the blood-stained key and the mangled bodies, and not run away screaming but extend a hand, or raise a sword. I hid my eating disorder like a locked chamber in my hollow chest, concealing its hideous contents as best as I could. But Niki noticed. She helped me at a dire inflection point, just before the disease had fully taken a hold on my mind and my life. 

The first time I made myself throw up was four months before I moved in with Niki, at the start of my second semester of college. I had gained about ten pounds first semester and was repulsed with myself, but there were too many social activities that revolved around eating. If I had stopped eating, people might have noticed, grown concerned. So I resorted to purging. 

It’s ironic, because much of my desire to be skinnier was fueled by a desire to be more attractive to men. But the things I did to achieve that skinniness were repellent. I kneeled on hideous frat bathroom floors with my hand down my throat. I plunged my vomit-soaked fingers into my mouth to make myself vomit again, and again, to ensure I had gotten everything out. I gagged, teeth scraping the back of my palm as I pressed against the fleshy wall of my esophagus to make myself pretty. 

Like Bluebeard and his bloody chamber, maintaining the secret was paramount. 

Unlike Bluebeard, the body I kept secret was my own. No one was allowed to see it, hunched like this on the bathroom floor, grotesque with insatiable desire. 

In Valencia, the pressure around social eating did not diminish. On weekends, when our house moms did not prepare dinner, we would all go out to eat together. There was so much food. Steaming skillets of seafood paella. Teetering piles of patatas bravas, drizzled with aioli. Huge slices of tortilla espanola, a sort of egg and potato pie that I found irresistible. Chips, guacamole, salsa, margaritas, sangria. 

At one such dinner, I excused myself fifteen minutes after I started eating. I had learned that fifteen to twenty minutes was an ideal time to throw up. It was enough time to inhale an entire meal, but not enough time for that food to fully digest, for your body to absorb the calories. Although Niki would later tell me that your body adapts as your bulimia worsens, starting to digest your food more quickly to avoid starvation.  

Niki’s eyes followed me to the bathroom. I crouched on the sticky bathroom floor, and made myself vomit once, twice, three times. By the time I could recognize the loose corn of the elote appetizer, I knew I had gotten everything. I washed my hands and returned to the dinner, able to enjoy myself without the pressure of calories weighing me down. 

Though my memories of the summer have clouded and collapsed into each other with time, I think it was on our walk home from the restaurant that Niki finally confronted me. She asked me, simple and straightforward, “Are you making yourself throw up?” 

I nodded. I knew she already knew the answer. I wondered how long she had seen straight through me. 

In many of the Bluebeard tales I studied, the savior is able to rescue the protagonist not just through brute strength, but because they possess knowledge the protagonist needs, knowledge that makes them uniquely suited to warn, help, and guide the doomed bride. 

In “The Robber’s Bridegroom,” the old woman tells the girl, “This is a den of murderers. You think you’re a bride about to be married, but the only wedding you’ll celebrate is one with death. Look over here! I had to heat up this big pot of water for them. They will cook you, and eat you, for they are cannibals. You’re lost unless I take pity on you and try to save you.” She is uniquely positioned to save the girl because she knows something the girl doesn’t. In the Pueblo version, titled “Mast-Truan,” the fairy-woman knows how to complete the impossible task the girl has been set: shelling and grinding four entire rooms of corn. Only after she uses her knowledge to successfully shell and grind all the corn do the two have an opportunity to escape. The fairy-woman tells the girl “Do not fear, daughter, for I will help you.” 

Over the weeks we lived together, Niki shared her own hard-won knowledge with me. I had never known anyone who was bulimic, but she walked me through the inevitable ending to the dark path I was on. She described how she barely had a gag reflex anymore, because she had broken it throwing up so many times. She described how her body had begun to digest her food in her mouth in order to survive. She described the struggles of treatment, how long it had taken her to get back to herself, how, even now, things would never be the same. She told me I was on a path towards a robber-groom, towards a castle of cannibals, towards a bloody chamber. She urged me to turn back. Like the old woman, she guided me back along the path I had come, walking alongside me each step of the way. 

I think if I had studied abroad for only a few weeks, Niki’s care and vigilance might have had no impact. I would have stopped for a few weeks, then returned to college where I was able to successfully hide what I was doing from less watchful friends. But Niki and I were together for months. By the time I returned home, there was enough light visible at the end of the tunnel that I could continue to crawl towards it on my own.  

Still sitting on the wall, my friend crinkled open a brown paper bag and handed me a bagel. We each unfolded our bagels from parchment paper, and dug in, eating a quick lunch before we had to leave the spring sunlight and go to class. 

“I wish I could have been there for you,” I said. “Before things got bad.” I wanted to be able to return the favor Niki had done for me, but this friend was well into her recovery when we met. 

“I know,” she said, “Me too.” She took a bite of her bagel, chewing and thinking. “But it’s not over, you know that.” 

I nodded. Even when you make it out of the woods, it’s hard to banish the body dysmorphia, the self-hate, completely. It’s hard to forget that you were once the agent of your own harm, to know that that capacity exists inside you, to fully quell the fear that it may rear its ugly head again. 

Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” ends with a simpering stanza of poetry that states: 

Curiosity, in spite of its many charms, 

Can bring with it serious regrets; 

You can see a thousand examples of it every day.

Women succumb, but it’s a fleeting pleasure;

As soon as you satisfy it, it ceases to be. 

And it always proves very, very costly.

My friend continued her thought, “Things are better now,” she said. “But not fully. I still have moments, slips. You’ll be there for those.” 

Niki’s curiosity pulled me back from the brink. I vowed to be curious, like Niki, like the girl in Bluebeard, because Perrault is wrong, the cost doesn’t lie with curiosity, but with a lack of it, with a failure to care. 

So maybe it is more accurate to say not that Niki noticed, but that Niki cared.