All of the stories in The Bloody Chamber re-imagine the plots and revisit the themes of traditional fairy tales, making explicit their sexual subtexts. For example, Carter offers several different versions of ‘’Little Red Ridinghood” and ”Beauty and the Beast” that focus on innocent young girls’ seduction by animalistic men. Carter observes in her introduction…
Tag: The Erlking
The Erlking by Angela Carter – Themes
Nature and Its Meaning The deep woods where the story is set is a lonely, melancholy place, giving in to the creeping coldness of the oncoming winter. It is also a truly wild place; it has ”reverted to its original privacy.” It has a disorienting effect on any human passerby, as indicated by the second-person…
The Erlking by Angela Carter – Summary
The story opens with a long descriptive passage depicting the stark and gloomy atmosphere of the woods in late October. These woods are characterized as entrapping and menacing, not so much because of any physical danger they present as because of their ability to undermine human identity: “It is easy to lose yourself in these…