Peter and The Wolf

Peter and the Wolf
Angela Carter
Peter and the Wolf
Angela Carter
PETER AND THE WOLF

~ ANGELA CARTER~
Urdea Roxana-Florina,
Romanian-English
First Year
2
Peter and the Wolf
Angela Carter
Peter and the Wolf
Angela Carter
Angela Carter, born as Angela Olive Stalker, was an English fiction writer and journalist
known for her feminism and magical realism works. She was born in 17 May, 1940 in
Eastbourne, were she lived with her parents until the German aerial attacks of Word War II, when
she moved in Yorkshire with her grandmother. Carter was hired as journalist at The Croydon
Advertiser and after that she attended the University of Bristol where she studied English
Literature. Angela took her father as a model who worked as a journalist. Carter became fluent in
German and French. Troughout the 1970`s and 1980`s she worked as a writer in residence at
universities as University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide and the
University of East Anglia.
As I said, Angela was well known for her writings that embodyed a commitment to
feminism and magical realism, so in 1978 Carter speaks about the works of Marquis de Sade
(The Sadeian Woman the Ideology of Pornography). In her essay, Angela claims that the Marquis
de Sade is one of the first writers who changed the perception through women, by exceeding the
mentality in which a woman is created with the function of producing babies.
In 1979 Angela Carter publishes the most important collections of short fiction The
Bloody Chamber. She comes over with articles in The Guardian and New Statesman, she writes
drama and novels as Nights at the Circus. Some creations also had been addapted for the silver
screen. Angela interprets many tales from The Bloody Chamber just as Little Red Riding Hood,
The Werewolf, Wolf-Alice and The Company of Wolfs. (http://www.egs.edu/library/angelacarter/biography/ 30.12.2014)
As we see, the central ideea around which revolves all those tales mentioned earlier is the
Wolf, such as in the short story Peter and the Wolf. Firstly, it was a composition written by Sergei
Prokofiev in 1936 in Russia. It is a story for children, where the narrator is accompanied by an
orchestra while speaking. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_the_Wolf , video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfM7Y9Pcdzw 30.12.2014) Angela is reinventing a wonder
tale, a renowned Russian tale, moving away from the classical children`s story to a creation
dominated by grotesque images and rough scenes.
Carter`s wolf-stories can be approached through the lens of the grotesque, this being
caused by the figures highlighed in our tale: the part-human, the part-animal (The combination of
human and animal traits is... one of the most ancient grotesque forms Mikhail Bakhtin,
Rebelais 316). ( Betty Mosse- Desire and the Female Grotesque in Angela`s Carter Peter and
the
Wolf
Google
Ebooks
https://books.google.ro/books?
id=mcLy81hgirIC&pg=PA188&lpg=PA188&dq=angela+carter+peter+and+the+wolf&source=bl
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Peter and the Wolf
Angela Carter
&ots=zyiF1PvZM8&sig=lblUkZZlZzgClxQSTkSEki4jSE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zVWhVNmtF8vsUsS6grgN&ved=0CDMQ6AEwA
w#v=onepage&q=angela%20carter%20peter%20and%20the%20wolf&f=true
page
187,
30.12.2014)
In Angela`s tale we can observe a different approach: in the traditional tales of wolves the
ancient animal is a symbol of masculinity and dominance, it means danger and threat and it
conveys fear. Carter`s re-visionings work against this tradition and in our tale the wolf character
is embodied by a female. Also, comparing Carter`s tale with Prokofiev`s story, we can observe
two different types of character: One that proves his own masculinity by capturing the wolf and
one builds differently emboying a little boy that discovers the wolf-girl, but where Peter does not
function as a heroic guide.
Carter`s retelling of Peter and the Wolf deconstructs and defamiliarizes original tales,
most recognizably Prokofiev`s, thus calling attention to both literature and reality as constructs
or perceptions. ( Betty Mosse- Desire and the Female Grotesque in Angela`s Carter Peter
and
the
Wolf
Google
Ebooks
page
188,
30.12.2014) In the begining, we capture the moment in which the narrator notes that with
familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the Alps with
the indifferent eye of those who always live there (59). In the ending of the tale, after the vertigo
of freedom experence we are told that for the first time , he saw the primitive, vast, magnificent,
barren, unkind, simplicity of the mountain (67)
Mikhail Bakhim talks about Angela`s tale and her feminism writing, reconizing that
literature is an inseparable part of the totality of culture and cannot be studied outside the total
cultural context (Notes 140) and he theorizes grotesque realism as a mode which discloses
the potenciality of and entirely different world, of another order, another way of life. (48, 210)
He also thinks that Carter`s creation correspunds with Helene Cixous`s vesion of the feminine
writing: Her (the feminine writer`s) libio will produce far more radical effects of political and
social change than some might like to think (Laught, 339).
Carter talks about story of a little girl who has been living in a remote cabin with her
parents until some wolves attacked them, killing the two older members of the family. They had
a brutal death even if the wolves didn`t mutilate mother`s body. We understand from the story
that the little girl was abducted and raised by those wolves. The whole action moves foward eight
years later where Peter, an old woman`s nephew, who turns to be also the grandmother of the lost
little girl, meets the wolf-girl while he was guarding the family`s goats. There he sees the thing
he had been taught most to fear advancing silently. In this scene we can observe that, according
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Peter and the Wolf
Angela Carter
to the narrator, the fear was taught, a sensation that suppresses other ways of thinking, an
elemantal magnitude. We can see similarity between Peter and the Wolf story and the revised tale
Little Red Riding Hood from The Bloody Chamber: the granddaughter had been taught to fear,
just like our character, but she dares to laugh at the masculine predator, the wolf, knowing that
she was nobody`s meat and after that she sleeps with the creature. Red Ridding Hood opens new
ways of thinking about desire and sexuality just as in our story, where the grotesque and the
feminine are bond offering an other vision of sexuality and desire. ( Betty Mosse- Desire and
the Female Grotesque in Angela`s Carter Peter and the Wolf Google Ebooks
page
191,
30.12.2014)
In the scene where Peter observes the little wolves, Carter makes a comparison between
the familiarity of mountains that no longer provokes astonishment and the unknown that he
wants to discover (If they had not been the first wolves he had ever seen, the boy would not have
inspected them so closely). He then sees that the third one is not similar with the rest of the
animals (hairless on the body, only on it`s head).
The next part is also interesting if we concentrate on the moment when Peter figures out
that the creature he saw was a girl. He tries to explain to his grandmother that he saw a little girl
standing with the wolves. But how did Peter knew that the little creature was in fact a girl, if she
was walking on all fours? Carter insinuates that we must understand the gender as a construct.
The narrator speculates that maybe her hair was so long, so long and lively. Angela insists that
gender and sexuality are not fixed according to anatomy or essences.
After hearing Peter`s story, his grandmother is sure that the wolf-girl is in fact her
grandchild, Peter`s cousin. The three ones, including the boy`s father go to find the girl and to
bring her back home. The capture is a symbolic ritual that hyperbolizes the brutality of masculine
containment of the feminine; the little girl challenges the men`s power: Somebody caught her
with a sliding noose at the end of a rope; the noose over her head jerked tight... The girl
scratched and fought until the men tied her wrist and ankles together with twine and slung her
from a pole... Then she went limp ... and pretended to be dead(61). We can see the way the girl
struggles to resist, but even in all her wildness, she can`t stand against those powerfull man and
their tools. This dramatical scene reveals that men`s power is related with violence.
The portrayal of the girl is described in detail, drawing an grotesque image to the little
wolf. ...and how filthy she was! Caked with mud and dirt. And every inch of her chestnut hide
was scored and scabbed with dozens of scars of sharp abrasions of rock and thorn. As we can
see the description is gloomy and tenebrous. The narrator tells us that the girl stanked and her
5
Peter and the Wolf
Angela Carter
hair was so dirty you could not see what color is was. The analytical category of grotesque is
represented by the body. She never rose up two legs; she crouched, all the time, on her hands
and tiptoes; yet it was no quite like crouching, for you could see how all fours came naturally to
her as though she had made a different pact with gravity than we have. In my opinion, this may
suggests her animal nature and the idealization of the female with which we are accustomed is
missing from Carter`s story. The little wolf-girl conveys fear: Even the old woman, who had
contracted with herself to love the child of her dead daughter, was frightened when she heard the
girl howl.
An important scene is that when Peter discovers the female sex: Peter`s heart gave a
hop, a skip, so that he had a sensation of falling; he was not concious of his own fear because he
could not take his eyes off the sight of the crevice of her girl-child`s sex... It execised an absolute
fascination upon him(63). Just like in the first meenting with the wolves, the boy discovers
something unknown. He has the sensation of fear, but also of fascination. The girl`s body is a
secret place, that awakes in the mind of the boy contradictory feelings, shattering him. Without
intention, she opens her lips, offering him a view of whorled flesh that seemed to open one upon
another in herself..
After Peter`s discovering of the female sex, the wolf-pack invaded the home, trying to
recover its human member and bringing with them dissonance and terror. Every member of the
family was scared and the boy was now experiencing the fear and the shock of being in danger .
As in the previous part, the boy feels both fear and fascination, terror and a nostalgic desire to
turn back time: He was full of nervous dread. He would have given anything to turn time back,
so that he might have run, shouting a warning, when he first caught sight of the wolves, and
never seen her.
A several mounths later, after the incident with the wolf-girl, Peter`s grandmother dies
from a wound made from her grand-child bite. Peter blames himself for his grandmother`s death
(consumed by an imperious passion for atonement), reason why he learns how to read the Bible
from a local priest. The boy is living for a period of time in an abstract world - the world of
universal truths and core essences- electing to deny the flesh. Peter`s movement toward
religion - metaphisical transcendence - denies his experience with the female grotesque.
However his path is marked by unease for, as if to spite the four evangelists he nightly invoked
to protect his bed, the nightmare regulary disorded his sleeps, where all those bad dreams show
his internal struggle with his fears. He also starts to learn latin and when he turns fourteen the
priest asks his parents to let Peter attend to a seminary in the town; there the boy would learn to
become a priest. ( Betty Mosse- Desire and the Female Grotesque in Angela`s Carter Peter
and
the
Wolf
Google
Ebooks
6
Peter and the Wolf
Angela Carter
31.12.2014)
page
197,
On his way to the seminary, Peter stops near a stream to wash his face, moment when he
meets for the second time his cousin. Peter began to tremble and shake... he felt he had been
made of snow and now might melt (66). The visionary ecstasy inspired by the compelling
elemental grotesque of the half-human/ half-animal defeats the cosmic terror from which Peter
suffers, and propels him into possibilities; he wonders,What would he do at the seminary, now?
For now he knew there was nothing to be afraid of. He experienced the vertigo of freedom (66).
In the end, Peter gains freedom, liberty, he abandons tradition and starts a new jorney into
an unmapped world, he starts a new chapter in a different story. Peter refuses to look back in the
past If i look back again he tought with a last gasp of superstition terror, I shall turn into a
pillar of salt.
In Pokofiev`s story, Peter marches triumphantly carrying the capture of wolf like a hero.
In my opinion, Carter`s character proves the same qualities, he exceeds his fears and he decides
to live another way of life.
Bibliography:
1. Angela`s Carter Biography: http://www.egs.edu/library/angela-carter/biography/
30.12.2014
2. Content: GOOGLE EBOOKS FILE - Danielle M. Roemer, and Cristina Bacchilega.
Angela Carter and the fairy tale. Detroid, Michigan 48201: Marvels&Tales, 1998. Print.
I used Betty`s Mosse-Desire and the Female Grotesque in Angela`s Carter Peter and
the Wolf chapter.
Link of the virtual format of the book: Betty Mosse-Desire and the Female Grotesque in
Angela`s Carter Peter and the Wolf Google Ebooks https://books.google.ro/books?
id=mcLy81hgirIC&pg=PA188&lpg=PA188&dq=angela+carter+peter+and+the+wolf&so
urce=bl&ots=zyiF1PvZM8&sig=lblUkZZlZzgClxQSTkSEki4jSE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zVWhVNmtF8vsUsS6grgN&ved=0CDMQ
6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=angela%20carter%20peter%20and%20the%20wolf&f=true
page 197, 31.12.2014
3. YouTube Video of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra performing Sergei Pokofiev`s Peter
and the Wolf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfM7Y9Pcdzw

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