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Marissa Cook
Professor von Wallmenich
English 420
12 April 2016
The Rehabilitation of the Beast: Male Subjectivity in Angela Carters The Bloody Chamber
I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine
makes the old bottles explode, Angela Carter explains in her feminist essay Notes From the
Front Lines. Her collection of re-authored fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, are perhaps exactly
that. Throughout the text Carter appropriates the form of the fairy tale as a conscious infiltration
and disruption of western patriarchal ideologies and the binary modes of thinking traditionally
embodied therein, an effort to question the nature of gendered reality (Jennings 1). Carter
seeks to explore gendered reality in a new, transformative manner, and she uses the fairy tale as a
vehicle of demythologising tales that originally reflected material human experience (Notes)
A number of critics such as Mary Kaiser and Kimberly Lau have focused distinctly on the
feminine side of this human experience, and others like Merja Makinen have read The Bloody
Chamber specifically as a complex vision of female psychosexuality (9). These critics have
examined, and rightfully so, the ways in which Carter uses the tales as a point of redefining or
rediscovering female sexuality and identity in a world of men. However, her fairy tales seem
perhaps just as preoccupied with the definition of male sexuality in a culture in which it is often
constructed as violent, predatory, and impulsive. In The Bloody Chamber, Carter explores not
only the woman but pays particular attention to the man as the other, especially in the form of the
beastly characters that populate the text. In doing so, she plays off of Laconian notions of lin-

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guistic binaries and, ultimately, rehabilitates the beasts animalistic, abject nature back into a
fuller notion of humanity.
According to Lacans theories of development, psychosexual development is linked intrinsically to the subjects ability to recognize signs and, eventually, language, which necessitates
a break from a sense of the Real. Lacan proposes that it is the tension inherent between the Real
and social laws, conventions, and so on (systems of the symbolic order), that determine our psychosexual lives. Entering into language requires entering into a set of binary oppositions which
only gain significance in relationship to their opposites. A subject comes to understand themselves as I, an empty signifier which exists in comparison to all that is not I, the other, within
a system of language and culture. This position of the subject, according to Lacan, especially involves gender differences in which male and female act as binary oppositions that can only
be understood in comparison to each other within the linguistic system. Furthermore, for Lacan
male and female subjects enter into language in different fashions. While the female subject, who
never fully accesses the power of the phallus, remains tied more closely to her material bodily
drives, the male accepts the dictates of the Name-of-the-Father, or the authority of the social
structures that govern the life of the subject. He consequently loses his last link to the Real of his
sexuality by denying his sexual desires. In doing so, he comes to understand his relation to others
from within his cultural system of rules, gender, and differences (Felluga, Modules on Lacan).
Kristeva, commenting on this theory, also contributes the concept of the abject, or the threat of a
breakdown of meaning that occurs when distinction between the self and other is lost (Felluga,
Modules on Kristeva). Within the symbolic order, Kristeva says, abjection arises due to what
disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between,

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the ambiguous, the composite (qtd. Jennings 4). Furthermore, the terror of the abject that indicates a collapse of the subjects structures of self occurs because within the symbolic order, any
sexual pleasure must be in pursuit of the Ideal-I, and therefore in the face of the abject, the subject must [express] dominion over the other and [keep] them as other, [require] the annihilation
of the partner to prove the egos triumph (Jennings 6). Kristevas abject refers specifically to
the rejection of the mother and to the feminine body. However, especially combined with Lacans
theories of male psychosexuality, I believe that this concept could also be applied to the development of male subjectivity as well, in which desire can only be coded through systems of binaries that can lead to the estrangement of portions of the subjects identity.
Carter continually plays with the Laconian division of the male character from his Real in
her examples of beasts, all of whom appear to represent, in some way, a schism within the self,
an inability to comprehend the totality of their beingas if, in gaining language and accepting
the Name-of-the-Father, these characters had to deny so much of their natural state that they
could no longer accept themselves as subjects among their social systems but only as the Other, a
being severed from humanity. By nature of the structures imposed upon their sense of self by
their cultural surroundings, the strict binaries inherent to language, they lost their own subjectivity, their I; they became only abject desire due to the fact that they had desires, which could
only be prescribed within the binary of language as predatory and monstrous in the male figure, a
figure that must assert its subjectivity against its other, the feminine. Carters process of rehabilitating the beast is most apparent through The Bloody Chamber and the two Beauty and the
Beast tales near the start of the collection and across the last three tales, the so-called wolf trilogy. Across these two connected sections of the book, Carters treatment of the beast progresses

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from an ironic exaggeration of the gender roles exhibited in the original text to a reintegration of
sexual desire and pleasure not as abject and binary, but as an irrevocable aspect of humanity that
exists mutually between genders. As Carter complicates these stories, each of them representing
a different step in this development toward a deconstruction and rebuilding of the identity of the
beast, she suggests a different path that rejects strict binary identifications by which humanity
has come to separate themselves from the others.
The book opens with The Bloody Chamber, Carters Bluebeard tale which, rather similar to its original, depicts male desire in its perhaps most oppressive, cruel, and violent form in
the character of the Marquis. Carter deliberately draws from the tale the misogyny and perverse
vulgarity that can stem from the binary construction of male sexuality in a phallocentric culture,
in which the sexual desire of the ego must be coded as desire for the complete domination of the
other and the destructive drives of which prove inescapable for the subject caught within the binary opposition. The Marquis sexual advances on his new bride are deliberately coarse,
vulgar, and overtly pornographic (15). His bride herself is defined by his gaze, by the sheer
carnal avarice of it, which examines her with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting
horseflesh (11). At the same time, she feels in his presence the imponderable weight of his desirea force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence but by its very gravity (9). The
Marquis is the embodiment of male desire in a patriarchal culture in which women must be the
weak, submissive counterparts to aggressive, dominating male sexuality. In his oppressive nature, cruelty, and even seductive magnetism, the gravity of the Marquis presence reflects all
the power of the phallocentric culture, the enforcer of the gender binary that structures his desires
and behaviors.

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The Marquis desires are coded in terms of the perverse and violentit seems as if he is
unable to feel pleasure without obeying sadistic, destructive urges which he knows to be perverse. When he realizes that his wife has disobeyed his prohibition and entered the forbidden
room, for instance, he reacts with a sombre delirium compounded of a ghastly, yes, shame, but
also of a terrible, guilty joy (36). His wife recounts also the claim of her husbands favorite poet
that, There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a
torturer (27). Within this binary system of gender, any relationship of the subjectin patriarchal
culture, most often malewith the other is an attempt to exert power and control over that other.
The affirmation of the Marquis subjectivity requires the annihilation of his bride (28). Yet at
the same time, Carter does not allow us to simply take the murderous Marquis at face value. In
one short moment before his wife hands him the keys that will seal her fate, she sees him sitting
with a stench of absolute despair and feels a terrible pity for him, for this man who lived in
such strange, secret places that, if I loved him enough to follow him, I should have to die. The
atrocious loneliness of that monster! (35). In spite of the perverse joys the Marquis finds in his
acts of cruelty, he is confined to that definition of his own self; he cannot overcome the very
bonds of gender binary and social codes that makes him into the all-powerful predator. The nature of the Marquis drawn out by Carter reflects Bruno Bettelheims reflections on the original
Bluebeard tale itself: Bluebeard, bent on having his will and possessing his partner, cannot love
anybody, but neither can anyone love him (303). This projection of male identity cannot exist in
a relationship of mutuality and respect. He becomes a beast according to the binary by which
he is constructed and, as he cannot escape it, can only be destroyed by his wifes tiger-slaying
mother, as sort of maternal avenger against the forces of patriarchy that the Marquis wields. In

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that moment, the Marquis, impotent at last, sees his dolls break free of their strings, abandon
the rituals he had ordained for them since time began and start to live for themselves (39). The
end of The Bloody Chamber shows a monster fostered by a binary of patriarchal language defeated by dissenting, feminine forces. Yet, Carter has opened room for further exploration of
male identity in speaking to the loneliness and entrapment of the Marquis himself, a discussion
which leads directly into a new example of male identity in her following beast tales.
The metaphorical beastliness and vicious appetite of the Marquis draws a direct line to
the next tale, The Courtship of Mr. Lyon, the first of the two true beast tales. In the wake of the
destructive lust of the Bluebeard character, it seems appropriate that Carter chooses to move forward with a tale which, in the view of scholars like Bettelheim, both father and daughter realize
that their anxieties [about the daughters marriage] are unfounded. What was feared to be a
beastly experience turns out to be one of deep humanity and love (Bettelheim 306). In Beauty
and the Beast tales, the animal husband is to the human father and daughter the Other, and Beauty has to adjust to his otherness. Carters version reflects this in Beautys awareness of the
Beasts bewildering difference from herself, which feels almost intolerable; its presence
choke[s] her, strikingly similar to the heavy presence of the Marquis (45). As she adjust, however, Beast loses his beastliness, becoming, in the end, only human. Beastliness is still seen as
Other, like Bluebeard, but this marks the beginning of reintegration. Carter plays upon the traditional pattern in which male desire is revealed as natural and nothing to be feared.
According to Maria Tatar, Beauty and the Beast tales similarly involve the union of two
antithetical allegorical characters which, as male and female, beast and human, present a clearcut binary that the two characters manage to overcome (25). Bettelheim echoes this explanation

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in his description of Beauty and the Beasts marriage as a symbolic expression of the healing of
a pernicious break between the animal and the higher aspects of mana separation which is described as a sickness (Bettelheim 309). Carter, I believe, uses this essential arc toward the marriage of binary oppositions to further her deconstruction of the beastliness of male sexuality. Her
source material, however, traditional Beauty and the Beast tales like the popular western version
by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, served mainly as a way to console and advise young
women faced with arranged marriages. The edited focus of these courtly tales advocate for a reinscription of patriarchal norms, the subordination of female desire to male desire, and a glorification of filial duty and self-sacrifice (Tatar 27). Essentially, Beauty and the Beast tales were rewritten to function as a means to teach young ladies to fit themselves within the pre-existing binary, in which male sexuality equated predatory and animalistic appetite, severed from his humanity, and to which virtuous women were meant to submissively yield.
As Tatar further claims, Carters The Courtship of Mr. Lyon works to demystify these
natural virtues by subjecting them to gross exaggeration (27). Carter, I would add, also does
precisely that in her depiction of the gender binaries inherent in Beauty and the Beast. Beauty,
who sees herself as Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial and endowed with a sense of obligation
to an unusual degree, prescribes flawlessly to the western construction of compassionate, submissive femininity (Carter 45). Meanwhile, the Beast is literally a lion, a beast of prey who
carries an assertiveness in his large size (42, 44). He characterizes himself immediately as no
good fellow and demands that Beautys father must call him exactly what he isBeast (44).
Beauty herself sees the Beasts great paws as the death of any tender herbivore (45). The
characterization of Beauty and Beast point explicitly to a binary predator and prey divide that

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constitutes traditional constructions of male and female sexuality. This is cemented by the fact
that the Beast requires Beautywithout her, he could not go hunting and could not eat (50)
and also, reciprocally, Beauty seems to need the Beast. When she leaves him to return to her
father, in her attempt to sever herself from the Beast by sending him flowers, she oddly feels a
desolating emptiness. Meanwhile, safe in London, her face begins to acquire instead of beauty,
a lacquer of the invincible prettiness that characterizes certain pampered, exquisite, expensive
cats (49). She needs the Beasther identity, her virtue, what makes her beautiful is centered
around her feminine willingness to sacrifice herself to him. This mutual need emphasizes exactly what the Beauty and the Beast tales point to in their traditional forms, that although females
and males look very different, they are a perfect match (Bettelheim 306). This mutual union
presents a healthy relationship, and Beautys declaration to the Beast that If youll have me, Ill
never leave you, transforms him into perfectly normal man, as he now seems to have been all
along (Carter 51). He had always kept his fists clenched but now, painfully, tentatively, at last
began to stretch his fingers, as if he could only now, after Beautys acceptance of his animalistic
nature and willingness to see him as subject rather than other, accept himself as human (51).
Promptly after his transformation, Beauty and Beast are reintroduced as a married couple,
Mr and Mrs Lyon, contentedly strolling in their garden (51). Beauty has reintegrated the Beast
back into humanity, as in the original tale, if only in her own perception. However, it should be
noted that this occurs by maintaining traditional binary gender roles for male and female sexuality. The Beast proves to be, actually, quite tame. His first description shows him as an angry lion
yet wore a smoking jacket of dull red brocade and was the owner of that lovely house and the
low hills that cupped it, gentlemanly details that work as almost humorous asides that speak to

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the contradictory nature of the Beast (44). His home likewise is exquisitely kept, with flowers in
great, free-standing jars of crystal even in winter and a King Charles spaniel, both representations of domesticity, of man exerting control over nature (42, 43). The Beast also, as a lion, naturally needs to hunt, but when Beauty asks the spaniel if he has gone hunting the spaniel
growled, almost bad-temperedly, as if to say, that she would not have answered, even if she could
have; clearly, drawing attention to such base matters are in poor taste (47). If his behaviors are
any indication, the Beast wants to be human, and his union to Beauty codes his animalistic desires into a socially approved construct, that of heterosexual marriage. His desire is unmasked as
harmlessly human; he is domesticated by his relationship with Beauty.
In spite of this full transformation of the beast character into a harmless and kindly man,
these motifs of domestication and rather pat ending tinge the text with a hint of irony. The story
concludes as a farcical echo of its original that seems unsatisfactory in its abrupt resolution: Not
moments after proclaiming himself on the verge of death and transforming into Mr Lyon without
so much as a start of surprise, he comments rather poshly, Do you knowI think I might be
able to manage a little breakfast today, Beauty, if you would eat something with me(51). Later
on, Mr and Mrs Lyon walk in the garden; The old spaniel, again a symbol of domesticity,
drowses in the grass, in a drift of fallen petals (51). This calm and simple conclusion, especially in the shadow of The Bloody Chamber, seems incomplete, idealized and wistful if not read
as subtly sarcastic. While Carters beast has certainly taken another step toward the rehabilitation
and rebuilding of male identity, this tale is perhaps less about rehabilitating the beast as it is
couching male desire in more palatable terms, making it tame and safe. The predator versus prey
binary is claimed as the essential construct of a normal marriage, and any sense of perversity gets

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swept to the side. Beastliness is cured by a transformation back into supposedly natural, human
terms rather than legitimately reintegrated through a deconstruction of binary oppositions into a
more holistic understanding of humanity.
Carters second beast tale, The Tigers Bride, repeats the rehabilitation of the male
beast; on the other hand, where Carter makes the social constructs and binaries at work in Beauty
and the Beast explicit in the first, here she clearly questions and dismantles them. Much like
The Courtship of Mr. Lyon and, in fact, the courtly Beauty and the Beast tales, The Tigers
Bride approaches the beastly male figure as the other from the perspective of his female counterpoint. The female protagonist, caught up in a rather sick economic exchange in which her
father lost [her] to The Beast at cards, first approaches the Beast as the perverse other, a man
subjecting her to a humiliating pornographic gaze with the request to take off [her] clothes for
[him], like a ballet girl (51, 61). Yet, as the story continues, it becomes clear that the Beast actually has very little place in the human society in which he feigns assimilation. His appearance,
with an odd air of self-imposed restraint, as if fighting a battle with himself to remain upright
and entirely covered in costume and crowned with a mask, a beautiful facetoo perfect, uncanny, draws the protagonists attention immediately to his drastic difference (53). Likewise, he
intentionally chooses an isolated location in which to live, in a palace dismantled, as if its owner
were about to move house or had never properly moved in; The Beast had chosen to live in an
uninhabited place, refusing to live fully within the world of man (64). Unlike The Courtship of
Mr. Lyon, this tale shows a creature that is too great to remain in his true form within human
society; with his domed, heavy head, so terrible he must hide it, he needs to disguise himself in
an attempt to stay safely unnoticed when within human reality (64). His true identity is too much

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to be accepted; he does not fit, but pretends at humanity as if to protect himself from that very
difference.
If the Beast of The Tigers Bride is other, then in this story Carter moves a step further
by examining more explicitly the female protagonist as a woman in a world of men, as simultaneously other herself. In the company of only beasts as she rides with the Beast outside of his
uninhabited castle, she reflects that she is similar to all of the creatures around her in that she is
a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied [her] rationality just as they denied it to all
around [her] (63). Furthermore, she had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand, and
continues, That clockwork girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only
the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her? (63). She, rather
like the Beasts perfectly painted mask or the clockwork simulacra that replaces any human
presence in the castle, lives a life to which she does not quite belongshe as the other in a world
of subjects. Similarly, as Barbara Fass Leavy in her discussion on swan maiden tales claims,
woman was a symbolic outsider, was the other, and marriage demanded an intimate involvement in a world never quite her own, a point which fits easily into the nature of the Beauty
character, navigating the foreign realm of a husband in Beauty and the Beast tales (qtd. Tatar 31).
While the female takes the role of the patriarchal other, as a body coded as pure/impure that
becomes dangerous and threatening to [the] transcendental ego, the concept of femininity
need not exclusively apply to women as such; as Toril Moi explains, it encompasses that which
is marginalized by the patriarchal symbolic order (Jennings 4). Therefore, the man that is truly a
beast, a disruption of social norms and binary divisions, can also take the part of the other. The

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both of them recognize themselves as these others, separate from the patriarchal society that defines itself against their difference.
In the final scenes after this realization on the part of the protagonist, she finds the Beast
pacing out the length and breadth of his imprisonment before the empty house of his appearance, the disguise which he has abandoned, herself unclothed and approaching him as if offering, in [herself], the key to a peaceable kingdom in which his appetite need not be [her] extinction (66, 67). In this key scene, both of them encounter the other in their natural state, in
spite of the protagonists assertion that it is not natural for humankind to go naked ever since
the Fall from paradise, the ultimate symbol of the separation between man and woman as well as
human and animal (66). The Beast as well as the protagonist abandon their disguises and escape to a state before the system of binary cultural codes prescribed anything outside of the definition of man as other, denying them subjectivity, even souls (63). Without this escape, neither of them can ever fully own themselves. In their abandonment of these codes, their relationship becomes one of mutual desire and agency: The tiger will never lie down the the lamb; he
acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers (64).
Rather than the normal Beauty and the Beast transformation, the Beast becoming a man, the female protagonist undergoes a transformation and becomes an animal herself, the Beasts tongue
rip[ping] off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and leaving behind
beautiful fur (67). Meanwhile, the sweet thunder of his purr [shakes] the old wallsTiles
[come] crashing down from the roofthe walls [begin] to dance and the protagonist thinks, It
will all fall, everything will disintegrate (67). Her acceptance of the Beast in his true form and

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her acceptance of herself as sharing this animalistic nature equates to a complete demolition of
human culture in their coming together; they disintegrate the structures that kept them bound.
Even so, this transition forms not necessarily a new definition of humanity but a complete
shaking off, a destruction of all cultural codes altogether, a move completely to the beasts side
of the binary and an abandonment of all things specifically human. Carter seeks to hollow out the
binary even further, and greater binary slippages and ambiguities begin to fill the text of her last
three stories. In the closing trio of wolf stories based on Little Red Riding Hood, Carter reinforces the pattern seen in the progression of the beast tales, illustrating once more the transition
of the male beast from purely violent, predatory Other to a rehabilitated figure, able to integrate
sexual desire in a means outside of the gender binary, as non-destructive even as it is wild, and,
especially as it is animal, fully human.
The starting point of the wolf trilogy, The Werewolf, is more reminiscent of The Story
of Grandmother recounted in its perhaps more original peasant tale form by Paul Delarue, in
which Little Red Riding Hood never becomes the victim of the wolf, but instead a trickster character who outsmarts the wolf and escapes back to her home (Tatar 3). Once again, Carter exaggerates the content of the original tale as a means to demythologize the forces at work. She conspicuously illustrates the werewolf as a violent character, albeit with a habitual air of irony, while
simultaneously, quietly subverting traditional gender roles. When the wolf first appears, for example, the western reader, steeped in a culture that codes the monster as automatically male and
expecting the usual Little Red Riding Hood script, may easily assume the wolf to be male, in
spite of its description using the neutral pronoun it (Carter 109). The text only specifies the nature of the wolf when its cut paw transforms in the little girls basket into the hand of the grand-

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mother. According to the interpretation of Kimberly Lau, the grandmother-as-werewolf makes
her into a phallic mother, a figure who still imposes the power of the Name-of-the-Father (Lau
4). She represents the predatory moves that a phallogocentric language in wolfs clothing make
on a young girl (5). While the grandmothers female version of authority does call into question the ideological solidarity of phallus and masculine authority, Lau continues that the slashing of the werewolf by the girl opens up the possibilities by which womenmight exist in the
symbolic order, might even "prosper" there" (5). I would diverge from this view in claiming
that, rather than freeing the little girl through the destruction of the grandmother, the tale functions in a similar way as The Bloody Chamberas a hyperbolic version of the tale, used to
demystify the cultural values places over the text by courtly rewritings. The girls defeat of her
grandmother is the action of a good child who does as her mother bids (109). She even
cross[es] herself when she sees the proof that her grandmother is indeed an unnatural other, not
contained by binary rules and therefore she [cries] out so loud the neighbors [hear], calling the
power of the social hegemony to her side to stamp out the threat (109). The girl prospers in the
symbolic order not because she has destroyed the binary social structure but because she chooses
to integrate herself within the realm of the binary, following the dictates of her culture, and the
beast she destroys is merely the dangerous other.
Carter draws ironic attention to the girls prescription to the binary with her lengthy preamble of village superstition, which in its grave arbitrariness and exaggeration reads with a veneer of sarcasm: a witch is "some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbours' do not,
another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! follows her about all the time, and whom the
villagers strip to search for marks." Since the "crone" is already guilty, they justly "stone her to

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death" for the mark which they soon find as a matter of course (108). This system of cultural
codes and rules is that which drove out the old woman for her otherness, and with its harsh description it seems difficult to read their immediate recognition of the grandmothers wart as a
witchs nipple without a hint of doubt (110). Far from finding a new route outside of the rules,
the good child who obeys authority comes to prosper in place of her grandmother, the beast who
must be destroyedhardly a tale of empowerment so much as making clear the strict binaries
and didactic qualities at work in Little Red Riding Hood.
The next in the trilogy, The Company of Wolves follows this ironic conscription to
hegemonic culture in a manner that seems reminiscent of the vicious wolf in The Werewolf:
One beast and only one howls in the woods by night. The wolf is carnivore incarnate and hes as
cunning as he is ferocious; once hes had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do (Carter 110).
The wolf is framed immediately as the most fearsome of predators, the manifestation of insatiable hunger, but, also immediately, the wolf is once again coded as a specifically male monster.
Carter devotes the first portion of the text that follows in defining the destructive nature of the
beast: The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering (110).
The wolves are further treated as pieces of abject reality that keep creeping back into the
lives of the humans who pushed them away, creatures that have ways of arriving at your own
hearthside (111). The narrative continues, we try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them
out. There is no winters night the cottager does not fear to see a lean, grey, famished snout
questing under the door, and there was a woman once bitten in her own kitchen as she was straining the macaroni (111). Humanity tries to keep the wolves strictly outside of their borders by
living well, but the creatures always seem to return, the repressed rising back to the surface

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while we try to carry on our domestic, usual lives (115). The significance of the wolves, as it
could be argued is the meaning of the predator in the original Little Red Riding Hood tales, expands beyond an ordinary animal to an expression of abject humanity, of repressed desire. Bettelheim, for instance, interprets the wolf as the representation of all the asocial, animalistic tendencies within ourselves, and especially as an aspect of the contradictory nature of the male,
which is either the dangerous seducer[or] the hunter, the responsible, strong, rescuing father
figure (Bettelheim 172). As with the Marquis, as with the beasts, the wolf in The Company of
Wolves has no other means to comprehend his masculine desire apart from an identity as the
dangerous seducer, rapacious and destructive. Carter, however, echoes her earlier moments of
empathy for the loneliness and psychological schism of the beasts in her description of the canticles of the wolves, a sound of melancholy infinite as the forestthat mourning for their own,
irremediable appetites (112). The wolf is trapped within his desire, and, more than that, not one
phrase in [his howl] hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the wolf from
its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if
he half welcomes the knife that dispatches him (112). The wolf, or the man, as Carters later
interweaving of werewolf lore implies, has developed his own subjectivity within the gendered
binary of language and hence cannot escape his own psychosexual state; some other intermediary needs to shatter his confines, which are made of gender binary itself and necessarily constricts male identity.
This intermediary, once again, comes in the form of Little Red Riding Hood, when
Carters tale switches gears to retell her story. In her introduction, the girl becomes almost immediately the subject of the male gaze: Her breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like lint,

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so fairher cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her womans
bleedingShe stands and moved within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut
tight with a plug of membrane (113-114). She is an innocent but knowing child whose desirability in a typical male fantasy is rooted in her virginity (Lau 6). When she enters the forest naive in
the belief that the wild beasts cannot harm her, the reader knows in what direction the story
heads (Carter 113).
Through several binary slippages, however, Carter begins to present drastic alterations to
the well-treaded path of Little Red Riding Hood. First, the wolf crosses the girls path not as a
wolf at all, nor of a naked man, neither but as an ordinary man, a fully clothed one, a very
handsome young one, in the green coat and wide-awake hat of a hunter (114). The wolf and the
hunter, the latter meant to rescue the girl and her grandmother, the two contradictory sides of he
male, have been combined in the same person, making all the more explicit the nature of Carters
werewolves as projections of desire that cannot be accepted into male identity but cast off as violent and destructive. As the young werewolf continues along the path with the girl, the details
seem to follow tamely the basic plot structure of its original: he continues the faster way to the
grandmothers house while the girl remains in the forest; he enters the cottage, and the destructive, asocial other that humanity has tried to keep out, night and the forest, comes into the
kitchen with darkness tangled in its hair (116). Then, the gaze shifts from any feminine object to
the wolf, who essentially performs a striptease: He strips off his shirt. His skin is the colour and
texture of vellum. A crisp stripe of hair runs down his belly, his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruitHe strips off his trousers and she can see how hairy his legs are. His genitals,

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huge (116). The gaze has shifted from a male gaze to the female gaze of the grandmother
watching the wolf approach her, a curious reversal of gender roles. The form of the wolf, furthermore, remains ambiguousis he a wolf, carnivore incarnate, or half a wolf with eyes like
cinders and hairy legs, or merely a young man (116)? The slippages between binaries of
human and animal, male and female, and even the two binary sides of male identity, suggest that
the werewolf himself remains stuck in an in-between state, unable to make sense of his contradictory nature except through the social structures he knows and which code his desires as destructive. Consequently, he follows the script of the carnivore incarnate up until the girls arrival at her grandmothers house. When the girl encounters the wolf, the familiar script of questions and answers follow: What big eyes you have. All the better to see you withWhat big
arms you have. All the better to hug you withWhat big teeth you have!All the better to eat
you with (117-118). The girl seems to be playing her expected role, either powerless or complicit with the situatoin, as she continues asking the questions, obeying the wolfs dictates to remove her clothes and throw them in the fire. At the wolfs traditional final line, All the better to
eat you with, however, The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobodys meat. She
laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the
fiery wake of her own discarded clothing (118). The girl is revealed to possess sexual agency of
her own, capable of her own aggression and wildness, and she proves their desires to be not only
mutual, but not as destructive as the wolf seems to believe. In burning her clothes at the wolfs
command, she throws off the human code that separates man from beast; but by burning his
clothes as well, at her own discretion, she condemn[s] him to wolfishness for the rest of his life
(113). As in The Tigers Bride, both of them, in the end, choose animalistic desire and toss

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away the binary that fixes their identities. In some ways, their savage marriage ceremony,
while erasing boundaries of gender, of sacred and profane, human and animal, also speaks to the
union of the two contradictory halves of male identity, as seen at once in the wolf. In the aftermath of this union, the girl sleeps sweet and sound in grannys bed, between the paws of the
tender wolf, the wolf at once beastly as well as tender, a protective, even docile force that can
also possess desirethe contradictory parts of male identity in coexistence (118).
In spite of this conclusion, the root of the restrictive binaries that construct identity remains untouched by Carters stories. Wolf-Alice, the final tale in both the The Bloody Chamber and the wolf trilogy, explores the very entrance into subjectivity and language that creates
these binaries and, finally, suggests that a completely different route into subjectivity is possible.
As a number of critics have already noted, Carter uses Wolf-Alice quite consciously and explicitly to engage Laconian psychoanalytic theoryYet, inevitably, the text also complicates and
critiques Lacans theory of the subject as constituted by language and the gaze, in short, by the
desire of the other (Jennings 2). Wolf-Alice charts the entrance into subjectivity of Wolf-Alice, a feral child who is neither wolf nor human, in a path outside of language, gendered repressions, and with an identity that exists as not merely a reflection in the eyes of others (2). WolfAlice lives contentedly in the imaginary order and experiences the recognition of self in the mirror stage, yet her relation with the mirror was now far more intimate since she knew she saw
herself within it (Carter 124). Rather than Lacans misrecognition of the Ideal-I, she sees her
reflection merely as an ingenious variety of the shadow she cast (124). Without any misrecognition or development of an Ideal-I, she avoids entering the Laconian symbolic order, instead

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developing subjectivity without language and the binary oppositions and fixed identities it imposes (Lau 10).
Wolf-Alices male counterpart, the pseudo-werewolf Duke, exists in a different form of
isolation than Wolf-Alices solitary new order. In stark contrast to Wolf-Alice, whose reflection
in the mirror becomes a source of contemplation, the Duke has ceased to cast an image in the
mirror (120). The story revolves around the mirrors reflectionor lack thereofin the development of self, but the Dukes eyes, much like the wolves of the previous two stories, perhaps
even like the Marquis, see only appetite. These eyes open to devour the world in which he sees,
nowhere, a reflection of himself (120). This statement draws almost directly to Laconian notions of subjectivity by means of developing an Ideal-I. Read with Kristeva, the Dukes attempts
to reach his Ideal-I leads him to require the dominion of his ego over all that is other in order to
assert his own subjectivity (Jennings 6). Clearly, his sense of irremediable appetite links to the
very same schism between animal and man, predator and protector, that plagues the psychosexual identities of the beasts throughout Carters book, and that he disowns any relation to his
specular image seems indicative perhaps of his failure to reconcile the two sides of
himself (Jennings 4). Thus the Duke, being ambiguously, partially beast and man at once, unable to prescribe to the set binaries that should govern his identity but which he cannot fit,
presents an otherness, a heterogenous in-between [state] that Wolf-Alice also shares in, a
state that prove[s] traumatic to the villagers, whose reaction is to expel them (Jennings 4).
They isolate them both in the bereft and unsanctified household that is the Dukes home
(Carter 120). The difference between Wolf-Alices apparent lack of regard for this expulsion and
the Dukes weird burden of fear consists of the Dukes existence within the symbolic order;

Cook !21
only, since he was unable to reconcile all of himself to the orderly binary systems of the symbolic, he was dejected by society as the abject other, cast in the role of the corpse-easter, the bodysnatcher who invades the last privacies of the dead, a role which he has no choice but to play
(121). As this abject figure, nothing deters him: he respects no human rules of propriety or sacredness when in his other form, an ambiguous combination of vampire, werewolf, and crazed
man. He will use the holy cross as a scratching post and crouch above the font to thirstily lap up
holy water without concern (121). In his in-between state, cast inescapably as the other, he
believes himself to be both less and more than a man, as if his obscene difference were a sign of
grace and continues to exist in solitude, the culmination of the lonely, unclear existences of
every beast throughout The Bloody Chamber (124).
In this state, trapped within the constrictions of fixed binaries, he can never be whole,
only a Poor, wounded thinglocked half and half between such strange states, an aborted
transformation, an incomplete mystery (126). His state of being contrasts sharply with that of
Wolf-Alice, whose extra-linguistic awareness of self might prove her to be the wise child, if
transported back to the beginning of human subjectivity in Adam and Eve, who leads them all,
with her silence and her howling a language as authentic as any language of nature (121). In
the final scene, Wolf-Alices own brand of subjectivity is what begins to provide healing to the
bullet-injured Duke, who lies writhing on his black bed in the room like a Mycenaean tomb,
howls like a wolf with his foot in a trap or a woman in labour, and bleeds, Here, he is described
with language that merges death and birth, woman and man, beast and animal, indicative of a
being that will fit no clear categories, as he never has (126). Wolf-Alice, on the other hand, exists
exterior to the symbolic order that requires such fixed identity: she has never been socialized into

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disgust. Instead, compassionate as her gaunt grey mother, the wolf that raised her, she leap[s]
upon his bed to lick, without hesitation, without disgust, with a quick, tender gravity, the blood
and dirt from his cheeks and forehead (126). In this act of compassion, a comprehension and
acceptance of the other that requires no binaries and no dominance of the ego to fix identity, the
Duke has the space to form himself again, incorporating all of what he is, like Wolf-Alice, into
one whole and complex being. The mirror begins to show his image: Little by littlelike the
image on photographic paper that emerges, first, a formless web of tracery, the prey caught in its
own fishing net, then in firmer yet still shadowed outline until at last as vivid as real life itself, as
if brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue, finally, the face of the Duke (126). This
concluding sentence seems to emphasize the slow development of the beast into this pinnacle
moment of complete subjectivity, moving closer from a formless web of tracery that forms the
subject attempting to fix their own identity to the prey caught in its own fishing net, the blurring of definitive binaries, to a distinct image vivid as real life itself, the return to holistic sense
of self, unsimplified by binary opposition. It is no coincidence that Carter closes the tale with
the revelation of finally, the face of the Duke reflected in the mirror. At last, the other, the
beast, has been rehabilitated into a subject, entered subjectivity through an entirely new means.
Through each consecutive story of The Bloody Chamber, Carter explores male sexuality
and subjectivity in a progressive manner, a journey from the sheer patriarchal power and cruelty
of the Marquis to the alteration of female perception and beginning of transformation in the following beast tales. In the last portion of the book, the wolf trilogy, this cycle occurs once again,
returning to further hollow out notions of fixed and binary gender through first an ironic revealing of the gender binaries in play in the original forms, then a subsequent opening of the binaries

Cook !23
and, in Wolf-Alice, creating an entirely new route to subjectivity, free of linguistic binary. The
treatment of Carters beasts, their ultimate rehabilitation into a world free of binary restrictions,
is paramount to the development of her stories and her work toward the liberation of human desire and identity: To truly advocate the freedom of female subjectivity within the confines of patriarchal society, one must strive to free all of human subjectivity from its effects. If we learn
anything from Carters beasts, men, just as much as women, require that freedom.

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