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.