In “A Company of
Wolves” Angela Carter uses the syntax of her third person narrative to
represent femininity in opposition with masculinity. “The wolf had massacred the sheep and goats; eaten up a mad old man who
used to live by himself in a hut halfway up the mountain and sing to Jesus all
day; pounced on a girl looking after the sheep” The fast paced and ongoing
narrative, broken only by semicolons, suggests that the male character is
erratic and driven by lust as he “cannot
listen to reason” and is driven by only his natural urges. If we are to
take the wolves in this story as a representation of the male gender then the
verb “pounced” evokes the sense of
aggression and violence that Carter suggests men encompass. The three victims
Carter has chosen all emit a sense of innocence; the whiteness of the sheep (prominent
in biblical stories), piousness of the old man and youth of the female only heightens
the sense of vicious self-satisfaction of the male character. This contrasts
with the selfless and clear thinking of the “strong
minded” female character and implies that femininity is acting in the
opposite way to the wolves.
In “The Tiger’s Bride” the Beast and heroine swap gender roles and the
Beast shows aspects of stereotypical femininity. In Carter’s controversial book
“The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of
Pornography” she states that while “man
aspires; woman has no function but to exist, waiting.” The Beast is seen to
be waiting which is suggested by the “pacing
backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards”, reminiscent of Proppian fairy-tale
victims, waiting for the heroine to come and “[fill him] with meaning”. By subverting the typical fairy-tale
structure Carter suggests that the female can orchestrate her own life’s course
and not be the possession which is suggested by the first sentence of the
story: “My father lost me”.
By the juxtaposition of female
characters in “The Company of Wolves”;
Carter presents her own ideal of femininity as present in women who possess
both masculine and feminine traits and revolt from the typical conjugal life.
The grandmother is a symbol of piousness and female conformation to society “She has her Bible for company, she is a
pious old woman… wrapped up in the patchwork quilt she made before she was
married”. Carter could be presenting a negative view of what it
stereotypically “feminine” as the old woman, who is protected only by the
patchwork quilt, a product and symbol of her domestic life, meets a grizzly end.
Whereas, her granddaughter, who envelops both the Proppian character types of
the victim and the hero, can sufficiently look after herself as “she is afraid of nothing” and in Atwood’s
words the contrast between the two characters implies that “it is Carter’s contention that a certain amount of tigerishness may be
necessary if women are to achieve an independent as opposed to a dependent
existence”.
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