Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’

— Subversion of Women’s Objectivity and Men’s Subjectivity

This portfolio is an interrogation of Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Company of Wolves’

from the perspective of feminist criticism, in order to solve two questions: 1) what are the

power relationships between men and women characters represented in this short story? 2)

how does this work challenge the patriarchal authority? Based on the textual analysis, this

paper aims to prove that through subverting men’s subjectivity and women’s objectivity,

Carter demonstrates her objection to the absolute antagonism between men and women in the

patriarchal culture, and conveys her calling for the symbiosis of males and females.

First of all, Carter dismantles the patriarchal dualist account which usually tends to

objectify women by men’s desires through this short story. To be more specific, the little girl

who encountered the wolf during her way to her grandmother’s house in the forest and even

handed over her only weapon, no longer waited to be devoured by the beast passively and

helplessly. On the contrary, she resolutely refused to show her fear, “since her fear did her no

good, she ceased to be afraid” (117), and bravely laughed at the wolf’s wish to eat her, as if it

was merely a daydream: “the girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She

laughed at him full in the face….” (118). Moreover, at the end of the story, she successfully

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neutralized the threat that the wolf posed against her life by taking the initiative to become the

latter’s lover and taming the latter into submission: “she ripped off his shirt for him and flung

it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing” (118) and “she will lay his

fearful head on her lap” (118). To sum up, by challenging the stereotypes of women as passive

objects in the patriarchal system and depicting her female character active in mind and action,

Carter queries the idea that women have no choice but to submit themselves to the desires of

men, who are often regarded as the subject and the absolute.

Secondly, the subversion of men’s subjectivity parallels the deconstruction of the

traditional womanhood. When the little girl managed to be active sexually, the wolf, who

actually assumed the male role in ‘The Company of Wolves’, not only failed to satisfy his

previous desire of eating his prey, but also lost his chance to initiate a sexual relationship,

which is one of the most typical demonstrations of men’s subjectivity in the patriarchal

culture. Furthermore, it seems almost impossible that he would be capable of dominating the

little girl in this sexual relationship, when he submissively allowed the latter to take control of

one of the most important parts of his body—his head, and fell into sleep tenderly at the end

of the tale.

However, Carter’s subversive representations of women’s objectivity and men’s

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subjectivity is aiming at manifesting her advocacy of the syncretic sexual relationship, rather

than the substitution of one authority for another:

All silent, all still.

Midnight; and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves’ birthday,

the door of the solstice stands wide open; let them all sink through.

See! Sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws wolf. (118)

Obviously, this is a harmonious world, in which the characters of different sexes maintain a

reciprocal relationship, instead of treating each other as enemies. To a large degree, this

ending echoes the implicit subversive discourse contained in the title of this short story. In

fact, by using the word “company”, which lays stress on the state of being with somebody

else and not alone, Carter puts forward a possible solution for the gender problem that largely

derives from the radical feminist idea, that is, men are the enemies. In Carter’s opinion, it is

not the destruction of men but the symbiosis of the seemingly oppositional sexes that is

effective in undermining the patriarchal sexist constructions.

Angela Carter’s ‘The Werewolf’

— Phallic Female Characters and Readers Informed by Feminism

This portfolio is an analysis of Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Werewolf’ from the

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perspective of feminist criticism, in order to solve two questions: 1) Do female characters take

on traits from opposite genders and what is the effect of this characterization? 2) How has this

story been read and how does this kind of reading further activate the effect of the

characterization of this tale? Based on the textual analysis, this paper endeavors to prove that

both the grandmother and the little girl are the female characters with phallic power. However,

the deconstructive effect of this kind of characterization largely relies on the readers who are

informed by feminism to be activated.

Firstly, the grandmother is depicted as a phallic woman in this story. It is easy to find that

the grandmother was the werewolf in essence from the second half of the tale: “…and the

wolf’s paw fell to the floor. But it was no longer a wolf’s paw…she knew it for her

grandmother’s hand” (109). By identifying the grandmother with the werewolf, Carter not

only transgendered this female character —the name of werewolf implies the sex of this

creature, as in the Old English “wer” or “were” refers to “man” as biological category, but

also casted the latter in the role of the male predator that was established in the Little Red

Riding Hood tradition. In short, through this positioning, the grandmother was turned into the

symbolic order with masculinity.

Regarding the little girl, both protecting herself and rendering her grandmother impotent

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were dependent on her phallic power—her mastery of her “father’s hunting knife” (Carter

109), which was the typical phallic object that she took good command of. To be more

precise, it was due to the possession of her father’s knife that she turned herself from the prey

to the predator, as Carter wrote, “it went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great

swipe at it with her father’s knife and slashed off its right forepaw” (109). Besides, it was also

with her father’s knife that she made her grandmother suffer an acute fever that led to the

latter’s eventual death, thus inhabiting the latter’s house and thriving at the end of the story:

“…and armed with her father’s hunting knife; she managed to hold her grandmother down

enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump where her right hand should

have been, festering already” (109), and “now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she

prospered” (110).

Through endowing the female characters with phallic power, the cultural gender

stereotype—women are so weak that they are prone to be preyed upon, just like the naive

heroine who was devoured by the wolf in Charles Perrault’s story and the innocent

protagonist who waited to be rescued by the hunter in Brothers Grimm’s tale—is subverted.

However, the deconstructive effect of this characterization needs the participation of the

readers who are informed by feminism to be activated effectively. There is no doubt that the

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readers do not have to be a feminist to read ‘The Werewolf’, even though Carter apparently

drew on a feminist discourse in her story. However, if the readers show no interest in

undermining stereotypical female images, or have no awareness of the sexist constructions,

the textual dissatisfaction and challenge closely related to the discrimination against women

usually contained in the previous works will be ignored easily, and even very disgusting to

digest. To engage with the feminist discourse in Carter’s story and even to enjoy reading the

author’s rewriting, the readers need to position themselves out of the phallocentric culture, at

least during the process of their reading. In fact, first published in 1979, ‘The Werewolf’ was

clearly engaging with the readers situated at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the

1980s (and even beyond) well-informed by feminism, and active to put forward plenty of

questions about the cultural constructions of femininity. This not only makes Carter’s

evocation of an active engagement with the feminist discourse become possible, but also

gradually consolidates the canonical position of ‘The Werewolf’ as the feminist fiction to a

large degree.

George Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’

—Different Treatment of the Colonial Masters and Subjects

This portfolio is an analysis of George Orwell’s essay ‘Shooting and Elephant’ from the

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perspective of postcolonial criticism, in order to solve two questions: 1) How does this

literary text represent the colonized and colonizers?2) How are colonialist ideologies

reinforced or challenged in this essay? Based on the textual analysis, this paper is aiming at

proving that by demonstrating how the colonial masters gradually lost the sense of self in

Burma, Orwell challenged the validation of British colonial practices. However, the effect of

this subversive discourse was greatly undermined when the author continuously animalized

the Burmese.

First of all, as a member of the colonizers, the narrator experienced a loss of self when he

literally and symbolically journeyed into the space of the colonized. During his way to shoot

the must elephant, he gradually realized that his self never came from his own choice, but

largely depended on the colonized people: “I perceived in this moment that when the white

man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing

dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall

spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’ expect of him” (36). Later, he emphasized this

feeling once again, “…the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If

the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a

steam-roller” (37). Here if we agree that “geographic allegorization becomes a central

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constituent of identity…the significance of landscape is that it serves as a situational marker

of subjectivity” (Tyner 264), we can reach a conclusion that the narrator was aware that his

sense of self irreparably depended on the “Others”—the space of the colonized and the

elephant, which can be symbolically regarded as the Burmese who were oppressed by the

British empire. The narrator’s sense of the lost self was further deepened when he found that

he was unable to “fix” the colonized upon whom his subjectivity was mainly dependent. After

giving his first shot in this “roundabout” event, the elephant was hurt, but not dead

immediately. Unable to bear the dreadful noise made by the beast, the narrator continued to

shoot it until it fell down. However, even though it laid down on the ground miserably, it did

not die until half an hour later. By stating that “it seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying

there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him”

(Orwell 39), the narrator admitted his impotence to “fix” the elephant. Although he could

actively make up his mind to eliminate the beast, he was incompetent in giving the instant

death to the latter as he wished in reality. Under this circumstance, the narrator not only

understood that his subject position was inextricable from the colonial subjects. More than

that, he gained an explicit awareness that his colonial identity had no possibility to be

perfectly achieved. In summary, as a colonizer, neither his subjectivity was chosen by himself,

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nor could it be stabilized. He was doomed to experience a loss of self.

Compared to expressing the great concern with the colonial masters’ sense of self through

the narrator, Orwell paid almost no attention to the colonial subjects’ internal world. On the

contrary, he frequently associated the natives with the animals. At the beginning of the essay,

Orwell’s narrator said, “the wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups,

cowed faces of the long-term convicts….” (32), and confessed that “I was stuck between my

hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts” (32). Here the

animal state of local people is clearly revealed through the words “huddling”, “cage”,

“cowed” and “beast”, which are often associated with animals. In fact, the image of animal-

like natives is represented in many places in this article. For example, during the way to shoot

the wild elephant, the narrator came across a dead black Dravidian coolie and related, “the

friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a

rabbit” (34). More than that, the crowd in this accident also behaved more like animals.

According to the recollection of the narrator, they followed him all the way because “it was a

bit of fun to them” (36) and “they want the meat” (36). Here the linguistic feature of the

sentence “they want the meat” deserves to be mentioned. When the locals’ eager for the meat

was portrayed in such a succinct way—only using one word “want”, which is often adopted to

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describe one’s inner desire— the narrator seemed to imply that these people were just like

carnivores, who ran after the meat for no other reason but their natural instinct for flesh. At

the end of this essay, the brutish scene—Burmese rushed to the dying beast and “stripped his

body almost to the bones by the afternoon” (40)—further consolidates the image of the

Burmese as savage carnivores.

Through an illustration of the colonizers’ lost sense of self, Orwell manifested how the

colonial system enslaved its masters, thus invalidating the rationality of the British colonial

system in Burma. However, rather than making any effort to understand the psychology of the

Burmese, Orwell kept dehumanizing the locals and associating the latter with the animals,

especially fierce carnivores. Due to this distinctive treatment of the colonial masters and

subjects in this essay, the effect of Orwell’s challenge to the colonialism was significantly

undermined.

Bibliography

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber and other stories. Gollancz,1979

Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays. Harcourt, 1981.

Tyner, James A. “Landscape and the Mask of Self in George Orwell's ‘Shooting an

Elephant’.”

Area, vol. 37, no. 3, 2005, pp. 260–267. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20004459.

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Accessed 21 Nov. 2020.

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