All the cool girls love wolfmen, honest.

I'm wearing a wolf jumper today. Spooky.
So we are in The Company of Wolves today and I'm supposed to be blogging on the ending but I thought I'd comment on the rest of it first...it seems something a responsible literature student would do.
From the beginning the wolf is shown to be the...best...? Is that the right word? She refers to them as 'One beast and only one'. She also shows them to be the epitome of the hunter, calling them 'carnivore incarnate'. They are unstoppable: 'he cannot listen to reason', and shown to be part of the supernatural. However she also shows they are to be pitied to some extent: 'never cease to mourn their own condition', 'not one...hints at the possibility of redemption', 'he half welcomes the knife that despatches him.'
For the most part of this piece Carter writes anecdotally, telling legends of the men who turn into wolves, it is portrayed as folklore; a warning. She sets up women as victims, especially newly wed brides whose husbands get turned into wolves and then come back to haunt them. There is also a special emphasis on clothes; they link to society and humanity, but also protection from sexual predation.

The girl in the story is virginal: 'moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity', but not naive or innocent: 'She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.' She welcomes the sexual advances of the man she meets in the woods: 'she wanted to dawdle on her way to make sure the hadnsome gentleman would win his wager.' When she arrives to the obvious daner of a wolf man in her grandmother's house she takes control of the situation. She shows pity instead of fear for the wolves outside the door which gives her power. Then....strangely enough she decides to take off her clothes. No messing around just gets naked. Guess she knows what she wants. Within this story the significance of the clothes shows us the girl is ready to strip herself of her humanity, or her social standing, for this man/wolf. She burns them, so there is no going back. Maybe this is her giving up everything for love, like the mother in The Bloody Chamber 'defiantly beggared herself for love'. Or maybe I'm reading too much into that and she's actually just getting frisky. Ha. No I think the actual ending shows this to be a story about loving the wrong person. Carter is showing it to be noble, and there is an equality at the end between the girl and the wolf which I guess is like the ending of The Tiger's Bride, or maybe The Courtship of Mr. Lyon. Actually it is different to those two, cos there is no change in either of the lovers, the girl is still a girl, and the wolf is still a wolf, but they don't care.
Good for them. Screw the system. Marry a wolf.

Call off the torches and pitchforks...she's a werewolf not a witch! What a relief.

So I was thinking The Werewolf may have the same structure as earlier versions of Little Red Riding Hood but actually the differences make it something entirely new.

In the original the girl is innocent and sweet whereas in this one she's got some balls. Then there's the wolf being a talking wolf, accepted as supernatural, but in this one the wolf is actually the grandmother in wolf form. And finally the ending is somewhat grimmer than the original in which the girl and grandmother are cut alive from the wolf's belly...highly unlikely but a happy ending nonetheless. But in Carter's version the superstitious locals stone the grandmother to death believing her to be a witch.
I had planned to write more but this was so long ago I can't bring myself to it.
Inabit.

maaaan I love that lady's house.

I've just been for a run so I warn you I might fall asleep on the keyboard.

So Lady of the House of Love is the token vampire story of this collection. Interesting as I can't recall many vampires in fairytales. I suppose they come in different forms, nameless monsters that drink your blood. Makes sense, linking to the unknown.

The biggest thing you pick up on when you start this story is the loneliness, despair and inevitability of the lady's tragedy. When she repeats the action of turning over her Tarot cards and gets the death card, we may well wonder if it is her death being predicted or her victims'. Perhaps it's just the omniscience of death in her fate.

I think an interesting aspect of this story is the ending. This girl is living death, trapped in the past and alone. You would think that the introduction of love to the story would be a redemptive feature but it isn't, it is what kills her in the end. So love equals death. But actually it is the death of someone living an awful existence, so is love actually a release from suffering rather than a damning event? Reference to Sleeping Beauty here would be appropriate I suppose. In the original, true love's first kiss wakes the princess up. So assuming the vampire lady's life was something similar to sleep, then death is waking up...I can't make sense of that so I'll just move on.

Question is do I have anything else to say?

Or the strength to say it?

I guess the whole thing is also good for looking at the struggle in the gothic between logic and the supernatural. Logic would lead us to the assumption that when we die, we die. But no...obviously we are wrong. The Countess shows us the supernatural side of things. Then the soldier represents reason, or the natural, with his reliance on technology like the bike. What I'm finding it hard to decide is, which one wins? In Dracula and Faustus it's easy to prove that in the end of the gothic reason triumphs over the absurd. But here, even though the vampire dies, the legend lives on in the rose the soldier brings back to life, and it is not a happy thing that she is dead, as they had loved each other. How sad.

:(

My fingers are tired.

See you tomorrow guyyyyss.

oh look...another huge metaphor for sex :|

Today is Hans Christian Andersen's 205th birthday. How fitting. Or...not fitting as the story I'm looking at now has nothing to do with him. Ha.

Sooo...
The Snow Child.
Well first of all I should mention how much I bloody love this story. It makes me laugh so much. Congrats Angie you truly surpassed yourself. It's written in the present tense and is quite short, so we guess that Carter meant it as some sort of allegory. It's based on the story Snow White by the Brothers Grimm, the major difference in that story being that it is the mother, not the father, who makes the wishes for a daughter, gives birth to her then dies shortly after. I think Carter made this alteration to portray the girl as a product of male desire, merely as a projection of how men idealise women. This version of the story was endorsed by Bruno Bettelheim who wrote The Uses of Enchantment, an analysis of fairytales, in which he claimed fairytales to be portrayals of oedipal conflicts between mother and daughter.
The child is a passive object, and in the Sadeian Woman Carter explores this kind of character:
"To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case--that is, to be killed... This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman".
In this one the man has the power of the narrator, to make things happen at his will ie. create the snow child, he symbolizes controlling, possessive man. He is also portrayed as a pornographer, like in the Bloody Chamber, clothed, he imagines up the perfect female: naked, pure and ready to defile. Both females in the story are under man's control, and because of that they can only exist as rivals, so the Countess hates the child, which seems to agree with Bettelheim's interpretation of fairytales.
The Count's almost ritual undressing of the Countess displays his power over her, taking away her individuality, and her social status if clothed means civilised and nakedness means inferiority.
In the original of this tale the Count has to choose between the Countess and the child when his wife forces him to, but Carter instead portrays man's ultimate power in not having to choose, being able to assert masculine power over female sexuality.

The objects that inspire the Count's desired child are snow, blood and a raven's feather. There's the obvious implications here, snow meaning purity ie. virginity, blood indicating the violence of man's desire, and the raven is sometimes a symbol of gluttony and the antithesis of the dove's purity.
The Countess' clothes are symbols of her status as wife, but also her dependance on the man, shared by the child which is shown by their transferal to the child's body. The Countess' high heeled, scarlet, spurred boots cast her as the whore of the complex (Madonna whore that is), as a sexual object. Her pelts of black foxes portray her as a wild animal, something base and uncivilised perhaps.

The conclusion to the story is that the child is pierced by the thorn, bleeds and dies. This symbolises the loss of her innocence, the blood could be menstrual or that shed in the loss of virginity. The Count rapes the corpse, showing man to be desperate in sexual desire, and the child melts away, as she has served her purpose to the man, that is her sexual purpose. Her melting also shows her as a part of nature, casting the whole story as male power vs. female sexuality being an allegory for society vs. nature. The death of the puppet of man's ideal woman, and desire, could portray a death of male dominance, as afterwards the Count picks up the rose and offers it to his wide, submitting to her? The fact that the rose bites represents the pain that accompanies female sexuality.

I'm quite proud of that. Think I'll go watch Lost now.

i need some new boots actually

Maybe i'll go on asos instead of doing this...
Ok no I have no money anyway.

PUSS. in boots!
So this narrator is the first male one, and he comes across to start with as arrogant and sex-driven. I wonder what Carter could have meant by that? He seems to be smart though and comes up with schemes to help his master, but actually the the big plan of the story is thought up by a girl, though Puss takes credit for it. It's as if Carter felt bad about not letting men have their say in the book, but couldn't bring herself to be nice about it.

The characters in this one are based on the Italian Comedia dell'Arte. The cats represent the harlequin and the colombina as they are poor but witty and manage to get their own way in the end. The Pantaleone obviously fills the role of the Pantalone, as the old, greedy man, but the hag also fills this role as the baddie. The man and the woman represent the lovers, defined by their desperate love for each other, and aiding no other purpose other than to create a scenario for the other characters to revolve around.
The woman is an interesting character because, although she is one of the passive lovers, she is not the passive, yielding woman you might expect her to be. She takes an active role in wanting to be rescued from her awful marriage (and from virginity). Like in previous stories such as The Tiger's Bride the woman steps up to the initiation of sex rather than submitting helplessly. This shows Carter's theme of strong women as equal to men in sexuality and everything else.

Sexuality itself in this story is much different to the other stories. It is portrayed as something to be laughed at and enjoyed, rather than something to indicate power and control, or ownership over someone. To begin with Puss views sex as some sort of 'cure' for love, perhaps indicating a belief that woman are just something to be used and disposed of. However this changes as the narrator falls in love with the other cat, and he starts to see that it is about mutual gain rather than male pleasure.

Goodbyeeee

has it come to this?

That my sunday nights are so empty I choose to write a blog when I have a whole two days left to do it last minute?
How awful.

Oh well I'm here now.
I'm gonna do The Tiger's Bride and The Courtship of Mr. Lyon together cos I find the parallels and contrasts interesting.
Ok I'm not. I'm going to bed and finishing this tommorow...maybe.

Good morning, good morning! We haven't talked the whole night through but I have been thinking about lions and tigers.
I think the major contrast between these two is how the two narrators begin in terms of free will. In Mr Lyon the narrator, Beauty, is loving and obedient to her father, and goes willingly to the lion's house. However in Tiger's Bride the narrator is disgusted by her father's actions and by the beast himself, at his request to see her naked.
However both narrators end the story by willingly loving the beast. In Mr. Lyon is he revealed to be a man, and in Tiger's Bride the narrator reveals her inner beast. I think both these endings portray the message that noone has to submit to anyone, not women to men or the other way around, but that we are all the same underneath.

Obviously both these texts are interpretations of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast, and I like the way Carter has used elements of the fairytale genre in each. In both Mr Lyon and Tiger's Bride the family in question has a recently lowered status and are looking to get it back, which i seem to find is often the case in tellings of fairytales. Another fairytale concept is the easy acceptance of the abnormal, like the father's lack of acknowledgement at a dog that wears jewels in Mr Lyon.

Right...yeah I'm gonna stop now.

im shutting the door on the chamber now

Like the chamber of secrets. I feel like reading Harry Potter. If only there was as much innuendo in it as there is in The Bloody Chamber.
So I finished last time on the character of the marquis. What a tw*t he was. A much nicer example of a man is the piano tuner. I won't go into detail on him cos I did a whole labour of love on him last week. Basically he rocks despite his blindness. Carter is widening access here. Nice one. Except the narrator doesn't need any wider access cos she's a ssshhhllaaagg. JOKES don't lynch me feminists (rosie f).
Anyway with the whole feminism thing, the character of the mother is a hugely powerful one. The other powerful figure in the story, the marquis, is a symbol of corruption and evil, whereas the mother's power is wholly good and admirable. From the very start we are aware that the narrator emulates her mother, and she is shown as strong and courageous, having shot tigers and fought pirates, even though those seem the kind of stories we are told as children which may not actually be true. My mum is weird like this. She used to tell us stories and change all the male heroes into female ones. Hence my confusion at seeing the film of the snowman...i was sure it should be the snowoman. Regardless, this mother figure actually is as powerful and wise as she seems. Her 'mother's intuition' tingles when she talks on the phone to the narrator. Because of course crying at gold bath taps means your daughter's husband is about to murder her. Duh. She rides in and saves the day. She is a great example of a powerful woman but I dislike the way she is portrayed as masculine, as if a woman has to be manly to be strong.
Another feminism thing is the 'shame' the narrator mentions at the end. I think this refers to shame at being a weak woman, having submitted to her husband's will, and accepting his decision to murder her. That's just insane. I would be ashamed of that. The narrator is comparing herself to her mother, who is powerful and independant, traits the narrator doesn't show.

I did have more to say but I'm hungry and my genius is spent.