The Known and Unknown

Reading Angela Carter’s “In the Company of Wolves” and “The Lady of the House of Love” this week was a really great way to close a semester studying monsters, because they reflect two ways that ordinary people can protect themselves from the monster― and the anxiety or uncertainty it represents.

Little Red Riding Hood, Gustave Dore 

“In the Company of Wolves” is a pastiche which subverts the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”, featuring a girl who confronts and embraces (both physically and metaphorically) the werewolf who has consumed her grandmother. And my take-away from that as a reader is that though a monster may be threatening, and your culture or family may have stories about it that beg you to stay away, sometimes the best thing you can do is look a “monster”― or any issue― in the face and accept it for all of its disturbing traits. It’s the same way that in the Harry Potter series, the character of Dumbledore insists on saying the villain Voldemort’s name, stating that now oft-quoted phrase: “fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself” (Rowling, 298). This point, and I think Angela Carter’s as well can be interpreted as an acknowledgement that sometimes a subject becomes more frightening the more unknown they are, and that to make it more known takes away a large degree of its power. And I think this can also be seen in the gradual medicalization of monstrous births― the move away from viewing them entirely as “divine prodigies” to more “natural”, affected by conception results and practices as well as God (Park and Daston, Unnatural Conceptions, 1981).

Now obviously many monster stories play with the idea that the known is scarier than the unknown― and we see that in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, through both Jekyll’s terrible pursuit of scientific knowledge, and Dr. Lanyon’s death when he finally receives understanding. This is also the case in Frankenstein, though one could argue that Victor may have become less frightened of his creation if he had ceased to run away from it, and instead stared at its horrible visage and had a conversation.

Another element I think Carter plays with, this time in “The Lady of the House of Love” is that a monster can be resisted through a personal shield, or a kind of purity. This can perhaps explain why in Stephen King’s It, children are the only ones capable of defeating the monster― even when the characters return to Derry as adults, they revert to their childhood dynamics, habits, and memories to kill the creature. That is not to say all children are resilient; indeed, plenty of children have been sacrificed by authors to feed a monstrous appetite, so not all children are immune. 

But there is innocence, purity, and― in “House of Love”―specifically virginity that protects the soldier from the countess Nosferatu’s deadly appetite― making the conclusion of the story so much more poignant, as his leave for the war-front indicates an innocence that will be destroyed for an entire generation by World War I. Not to mention one has to wonder how many young (and perhaps legitimately virginal) men died in the war, having signed up through a childish naiveté. And their deaths, occurring before a proper transition to adulthood, would leave them frozen in youth forever to their families much in the way the countess has been.

The Teenage Soldiers of World War I (Getty Images)

And I think metaphorically in this story, the countess (and all the young men she consumes) stand as a metaphor for the war. Which is also perhaps why her innocent soldier is English, considering the enormous effort and sacrifice the English contributed to the First World War. Angela Carter herself was English and born after World War I, but before World War II, so it’s arguable that her pure, innocent, straightforward English soldier represented the barrier all British soldiers formed in their fight against frightening foreign powers.  And it was largely through their sacrifice, through the innocence and youth of all the allied powers that the wars were won.

Works Cited

Carter, Angela. "The Lady of the House of Love", and "In the Company of Wolves". The Bloody Chamber, 1979. PDF File. 

Little Red Riding Hood, by Gustave Dore. Digital Image. Owlcation. 7 March, 2019. https://owlcation.com/humanities/Angela-Carters-The-Company-of-Wolves-as-Folktale-Variation

The Teenage Soldiers of World War I. Digital Image. BBC News. 11 November 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29934965

P 

Park, Katharine, and Lorraine J. Daston. “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England.” Past & Present, no. 92, 1981, pp. 20–54. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/650748.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York: Scholastic Inc., 1998.

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