Explore the significance of setting in Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'.

The setting of The Bloody Chamber bares way to a suitable 'atmosphere' for the exploration of the speaker's unconscious mind. The speaker moves away from the busy musical life of her home in Paris, to the isolation and "faery solitude" of the Marquis' castle. The castle itself represents an ideal arena for exploration into the deepest, darkest parts of the mind of the narrator. Here, enclosed by 'naked rock' and the 'bosom of the sea', continually surrounded by mirrors, the narrator is (sometimes actually physically) cut off from the realities of the world outside her existence within her own mind; giving way to a strange sort of liminality. She is almost simultaneously confined within but free to roam in her mind (reflected in the quote "...this lovely prison of which I was both the inmate and the mistress..." )forcing her to look inwardly on her 'self', allowing for the process of individuation to begin. In this way, the story can be seen to be about the speaker's journey in discovering her 'shadow' self, and then the assimilation of that unconscious shadow in her conscious ego.
However, the castle does not merely represent the overpowering presence of her shadow. On the night where she finally goes to discover the contents of the chamber, she proceeds it with illuminating the entire house, all the rooms "switching on every light I could find". This perhaps represents her opening her mind to parts of her psyche that she had never thought to discover before, lighting up areas like a "birthday cake lit with a thousand candles, one for every year of its life...", like a divulgence back into her own memories stored in the dustier parts of her head. Carter's construction of the castle with both the language of light and openness, and the language of seclusion and darkness allows for multiple possible avenues of exploration within the narrative; including the giddy heights of enlightenment, and the deep, dark vaults of personal horror.