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    The Company of Wolves

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    renzo_ermitano2741
    The document provides an analysis of the short story "The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter. It summarizes the key elements of the story, including the setting on Christmas Day, the retelling of Little Red Riding Hood as a more mature story where the girl dominates the wolf. Symbols of clothes, redemption, and the themes of subverting conventions of the town versus the forest and female sexuality are also analyzed. The document places Carter's version in contrast with the original Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault versions, noting how Carter challenges patriarchal values.

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    The Company of Wolves

    Uploaded by

    renzo_ermitano2741
    277 views25 pages
    The document provides an analysis of the short story "The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter. It summarizes the key elements of the story, including the setting on Christmas Day, the retelling of Little Red Riding Hood as a more mature story where the girl dominates the wolf. Symbols of clothes, redemption, and the themes of subverting conventions of the town versus the forest and female sexuality are also analyzed. The document places Carter's version in contrast with the original Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault versions, noting how Carter challenges patriarchal values.

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    The document provides an analysis of the short story "The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter. It summarizes the key elements of the story, including the setting on Christmas Day, the retelling of Little Red Riding Hood as a more mature story where the girl dominates the wolf. Symbols of clothes, redemption, and the themes of subverting conventions of the town versus the forest and female sexuality are also analyzed. The document places Carter's version in contrast with the original Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault versions, noting how Carter challenges patriarchal values.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as ppt, pdf, or txt
    277 views25 pages

    The Company of Wolves

    Uploaded by

    renzo_ermitano2741
    The document provides an analysis of the short story "The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter. It summarizes the key elements of the story, including the setting on Christmas Day, the retelling of Little Red Riding Hood as a more mature story where the girl dominates the wolf. Symbols of clothes, redemption, and the themes of subverting conventions of the town versus the forest and female sexuality are also analyzed. The document places Carter's version in contrast with the original Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault versions, noting how Carter challenges patriarchal values.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as ppt, pdf, or txt
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    The text discusses Angela Carter's retelling of Little Red Riding Hood and how she challenges patriarchal norms and female sexuality. It also covers symbols, themes, and the setting in the story.

    Carter challenges the morals and lessons of traditional fairy tales. Her version questions conventional values and encourages rethinking previously held ideas in a more complex way. She liberates female sexuality which had been suppressed in patriarchal society.

    Symbols discussed include the red hood (possibly representing menstruation), clothes (and their removal representing defiance of patriarchal norms), and redemption through an external mediator for the wolf.

    The Company of Wolves

    Angela Carter

    The Company of Wolves


    1. 2. 3.

    4.

    Setting Plot and Character Symbol Theme

    Setting

    forest Christmas Day

    description of the setting has strong associations with the solstices (sol = sun; sistere = to stand still)

    summer and winter solstice


    summer solstice longest day of the year June 20 - 22 in the Northern Hemisphere aka Midsummer fertility other associations: May Day Eve (evening of April 30) = night of the witches

    Walpurgisnacht / May Day Eve

    May Day Eve (April 30) = night of the witches

    Walpurgisnacht (Christianitys appropriation of the pagan day and naming it after a Christian saint, St. Walpurga)

    summer and winter solstice


    winter solstice longest and darkest night of the year Dec. 21 - 22 in the Northern Hemisphere death and rebirth (of the sun) pagan celebrations around the dates are eventually appropriated by Christianity and celebrated as Christmas

    in The Company of Wolves

    the night of the solstice, the hinge of the year when things do not fit together as well as they should, the longest night, . . . (par. 15) The malign door of the solstice still swings upon its hinges, . . . (par. 22)

    Structure
    A kind of Prologue (1 - 21)

    The story itself: a retelling of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood (22 - 89)

    A kind of Prologue: 3 embedded narratives (1-21)


    1. 2.

    3.

    girl, old man, hunter, werewolf witch (the spurned woman), werewolves (the male wedding guests) wife, first husband (disappears on wedding night and is revealed later to have transformed into a wolf), second husband

    stereotypes of women in patriarchal society


    Virgin Virgin Mary life-giver; nurturer pure Whore; witch Eve; Mary Magdalene life destroyer impure

    someone to be someone to be saved, reverenced, served, punished, mocked, comforted, exalted enslaved, injured, debased

    The retelling of Little Red Riding Hood (22 - 89)


    Plot and Character: Exposition more mature than the traditional Little Red Riding Hood more description of her virginity exudes confidence: she is not afraid of anything; she does not shiver

    The retelling . . . (cont.)


    Plot and Character (cont.) Complication when she meets the hunter, she flirts with him and deliberately delays her arrival at grandmothers so the hunter can win the wager and get his kiss takes an active part in the seduction

    The retelling . . . (cont.)


    Denouement

    she laughs at him when he says All the better to eat you with; she knows she is nobodys meat

    she throws away his clothes and takes an active part in the seduction

    liebestod

    liebe (love) + tod (death) romantic love for which the lovers are willing to die to be with the loved one forever (Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Anthony and Cleopatra, etc.) sexual: culmination of the sexual act loving is dying to the self or the ego so that one can be in a new unity with the loved one

    Irony of situation

    We expect the girl to be eaten by the wolf but she dominates him instead

    (See! Sweet and sound she sleeps in grannys bed, between the paws of the tender wolf. (par. 89)

    Symbol: redemption

    the howl of the wolf is filled with despair; not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the wolf from its own despair, only through some external mediator . . . (par. 14) Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh appeases him.

    Symbol: clothes

    red hood (menstrual blood?) girl is unnamed and and is simply identified in terms of her clothes (in the traditional version, this is about the way she has to behave within patriarchal society) discarding and burning of the clothes in the Carter version (contesting of patriarchy and acceptance of her sexuality denied to her by patriarchal society)

    Theme: subversion of town vs. forest opposition


    town
    reason order civilization humane values

    forest
    unreason chaos savagery animalistic

    clothes

    absence of clothes; nakedness

    town vs. forest (cont.)


    parental and social authority
    norms, taboos, morals male space; hence site of patriarchal values suppression of female sexuality

    suspension of all forms of authority


    suspension of norms, taboos, morals female space

    liberation of female sexuality

    Brothers Grimm
    Meanwhile, Little Red Cap thought to herself, Never again will you stray from the path by yourself and go into the forest where your mother has forbidden it. Moral: Do not stray from the path.

    Charles Perrault
    From this story, one learns that childre, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers. And it is not an unheard thing if the wolf is thereby provided with his dinner. I say wolf, for all the wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable . . .

    Charles Perrault (cont.)


    . . . disposition--neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging, and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not kow that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!

    Charles Perrault (cont.)


    Moral: Do not talk to strangers!

    though there is a suggestion of something far more dangerous--boys, males, the opposite sex

    Angela Carter

    challenges and contests patriarchy and offers the way for women to liberate themselves from patriarchal rules about female sexuality

    traditional fabulation vs. modern fabulation


    traditional teaching of a clear moral modern question, challenge, contest, subvert conventional values; provokes rethinking of previously held conceptions; looks at them in more complex ways

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