“Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” The Motif of the Wolf in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber

Abstract

[Abstract] The object of study of this end-of-degree project is the wolf trilogy of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, written in 1979. The aims that I will pursue are two: to analyse the figure of the wolf in this work, and, by doing this, to demonstrate how the feminist rewriting of fairy tales allows Carter to focus on the aspects which remain hidden in the original versions. I will also examine aspects related to female sexuality, patriarchal conventions, identity, otherness and binary oppositions as male/female or human/animal. All of these concepts are relevant in the fields of Gender and Feminist Studies. The methodology that I followed consisted, first of all, of an in-depth reading of Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. After doing this, the presence of the wolf in three of the stories made me consider the possibility of studying the multiple interpretations that the figure of this animal represents in this work. As a result, before beginning my analysis, I needed to obtain information about basic aspects; therefore, I consulted different books and some articles that I found in JSTOR or Google Scholar. Consequently, I read about wolves’ relevance in culture and literature—e.g. Dundes, Mitts-Smith—, about the poetics of feminist rewriting of fairy tales—e.g. Bacchilega, Sellers, Warner, Zipes—and, lastly, analysis of Carter’s stories—e.g. Al-Kassasbeh, Ekmekçi, Lau. Finally, the use of dictionaries, such as The American Heritage Dictionary of English Language or Cambridge English Dictionary was also useful. The structure of this undergraduate thesis consists of two main parts, whereas the first one includes two sections, the second one contains three. The first part examines the basic elements that need to be explained before the analysis of Carter’s tales: primarily, the relevance of the figure of the wolf in culture, focusing on its presence in “Little Red Riding Hood,” owing to Carter’s interest in this story when writing her wolf trilogy. The second section studies the literary tendency in which the author is considered a pioneer and, thus, a referent: the feminist rewriting of fairy tales. These renewed stories defy gender roles and unmask the hidden elements of the original versions. The second part of this dissertation focuses on the analysis of Carter’s wolf trilogy: “The Werewolf,” “The Company of Wolves” and “Wolf-Alice.” Subsequently, this section includes three chapters, as I study each story individually. This paper finalizes with a conclusion, in which I summarize the main ideas and I ratify my aims, demonstrating that they have been met. The pages that follow will examine the motif of the wolf in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a work in which the readers can find the multi-layered wolves that inhabit the author’s universe: from a grandmother who is, in fact, an evil werewolf, through the attractive wolf who acts as a symbol of females’ sexual liberation, and, finally, Wolf-Alice, the hybrid wolf-girl who bravely embraces her “otherness.”