Discuss the portrayal of the child in "the Erl King" and "the Werewolf"

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Josh Ruegger

Discuss the portrayal of the child in “the Erl King” and “the Werewolf”

 

Carter Explores “young girls sexual hunger and the lure of the wild”a in both “the Erl King” and “the Werewolf”. Young girls are both seduce and seduced; both prey and predator, as illustrated through the medium of subverted fairy tales that Carter adopts.

Fitting patriarchal norms, the folkloric genre often portrays young passive women as protagonists. This is not so in Carters retelling where the females we meet are empowered by their femininity and desire. If we look at the social context of these stories this becomes significant. The text was written in the 1970s a time when women were challenging their roles, and as well known feminist writer this heavily influences Carter. This is further emphasized in Carter’s work by taking characters that a reader is already familiar with and changing both the aspects of their personality and accordingly their role in the story. This shocks the reader into paying attention and allows them to appreciate the childish heroines, and the female psyche they represent, in a different light.

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Carter is concerned with the male desire for sexual innocence and this is portrayed in the stories through the young protagonists. Youth is often seen to equate to purity and this assumption is made by the reader in the opening of both stories, particularly through the allusions to Red Riding Hood, the atypical “good”, “young” girl. Carter delights in shattering these presumptions later in the stories by having her characters behave unlike the youth we are used to seeing portrayed in this genre. Fairy stories have been used to repress women into passive, silent, subservient roles since males such ...

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