Angela Carter,

Wolf-Alice

Published in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). The fo otnotes are not part of Carter s text; they have been added to this version for cl assroom use. Could this ragged girl with brindled lugs1 have spoken like we do she would have called herself a wolf, but she cannot speak, although she howls because she is lonely - yet 'howl' is not the right word for it, since she is young enough to m ake the noise the pups do, bubbling, delicious, like that of a panful of fat on the fire. Sometimes the sharp ears of her foster kindred hear her across the irr eparable gulf of absence; they answer her from faraway pine forest and the bald mountain rim. Their counterpoint crosses and criss-crosses the night sky; they a re trying to talk to her but they cannot do so because she does not understand t heir language even if she knows how to use it for she is not a wolf herself, alt hough suckled by wolves. Her panting tongue hangs out; her red lips are thick an d fresh. Her legs are long, lean and muscular. Her elbows, hands and knees are t hickly callused because she always runs on all fours. She never walks; she trots or gallops. Her pace is not our pace. Two-legs looks, four-legs sniffs. Her lon g nose is always a-quivering, sifting every scent it meets. With this useful too l, she lengthily investigates everything she glimpses. She can net so much more of the world than we can through the fine, hairy sensitive filters of her nostri ls that her poor eyesight does not trouble her. Her nose is sharper by night tha n our eyes are by day so it is the night she prefers, when the cool reflected li ght of the moon does not make her eyes smart and draws out the various fragrance s from the woodland where she wanders when she can. But the wolves keep well awa y from the peasants' shotguns, now, and she will no longer find them there. Wide shoulders, long arms and she sleeps succinctly curled into a ball as if she wer e cradling her spine in her tail. Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf; it is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin an d become part of it, although it does not exist. Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuou s, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair. When t hey found her in the wolf's den beside the bullet-riddled corpse of her foster m other, she was no more than a little brown scrap so snarled in her own brown hai r they did not at first think she was a child but a cub; she snapped at her woul d-be saviors with her spiky canines until they tied her up by force. She spent t he first days amongst us crouched stock-still, staring at the whitewashed wall o f her cell in the convent to which they took her. The nuns poured water over her , poked her with sticks to rouse her. Then she might snatch bread from their han ds and race with it into a corner to mumble it with her back towards them; it wa s a great day among the novices when she learned to sit up on her hind legs and beg for a crust. They found, if she were treated with a little kindness, she was not intractable. She learned to recognise her own dish; then, to drink from a c up. They found that she could quite easily be taught a few, simple tricks but sh e did not feel the cold and it took a long time to wheedle a shift over her head to cover up her bold nakedness. Yet she always seemed wild, impatient of restra int, capricious in temper; when the Mother Superior tried to teach her to give t hanks for her recovery from the wolves; she arched her back, pawed the floor, re treated to a corner of the chapel, crouched, trembled, urinated, defecated - rev erted entirely, it would seem, to her natural state. Therefore, without a qualm, this nine days' wonder and continuing embarrassment of a child was delivered ov er to the bereft and unsanctified household of the Duke. Deposited at the castle , she huffed and snuffled and smelled only a reek of meat, not the least whiff o f sulfur, nor of familiarity. She settled down on her hunkers with that dog's si gh that is only the expulsion of breath and does not mean either relief or resig nation. The Duke is sere2 as old paper; his dry skin rustles against the bedshee ts as he throws them back to thrust out his thin legs scabbed with old scars whe re thorns score his pelt. He lives in a gloomy mansion, all alone but for this c

hild who has as little in common with the rest of us as he does. His bedroom is painted terracotta, rusted with a wash of pain, like the interior of an Iberian3 butcher's shop, but for himself, nothing can hurt him since he ceased to cast a n image in the mirror. He sleeps in an antlered bed of dull black wrought iron until the moon, the gove rness of transformations and overseer of somnambulists,4 pokes an imperative fin ger through the narrow window and strikes his face: then his eyes start open. At night, those huge, inconsolable, rapacious eyes of his are eaten up by swollen, gleaming pupil. His eyes see only appetite. These eyes open to devour the world in which he sees , nowhere, a reflection of himself; he passed through the mirror and now, hencef orward, lives as if upon the other side of things. Spilt, glistering milk of mo onlight on the frost-crisped glass; on such a night, in moony, metamorphic weath er, they say you might easily find him, if you had been foolish enough to ventur e out late, scuttling along by the churchyard wall with half a juicy torso slung across his back 1 Brindle is a streak pattern in canine coats, not a color, usually consisting of a lighter background with black stripes of varying size and density. lugs : ears. 2 sere: dry . The white light scours the fields and scours them again until everything gleam s and he will leave paw-prints in the hoar-frost when he runs howling round the grave at night in his lupine5 fiestas. By the red early hour of midwinter sunset , all the doors are barred for miles. The cows low fretfully in the byre6 when h e goes by, the whimpering dogs sink their noses in their paws. He carries on his frail shoulders a weird burden of fear; he is cast in the role of the corpse-ea ter, the body-snatcher who invades the last privacies of the dead. He is white a s leprosy, with scrabbling fingernails, and nothing deters him. If you stuff a c orpse with garlic, why, he only slavers at the treat: cadavre provenal.7 He will use the holy cross as a scratching post and crouch above the font to thirstily l ap up holy water. She sleeps in the soft, warm ashes of the hearth; beds are tra ps, she will not stay in one. She can perform a few, small tasks to which the nu ns trained her, she sweeps up the hairs, vertebrae and phalanges8 that litter hi s room into a dustpan, she makes his bed at sunset, when he leaves it and the gr ey beasts outside howl, as if they know his transformation is their parody. Unki nd to their prey, to their own they are tender; had the Duke been a wolf, they w ould have angrily expelled him from the pack, he would have had to lollop along miles behind them, creeping in submission on his belly up to the kill only after they had eaten and were sleeping, to gnaw the well-chewed bones and chew the hi de. Yet, suckled as she was by wolves on the high uplands where her mother bore and left her, only his kitchen maid, who is not wolf or woman, knows no better t han to do his chores for him. She grew up with wild beasts. If you could transpo rt her, in her filth, rags and feral disorder, to the Eden of our first beginnin gs where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, picking the lice from one another's pelts, then she might prove to be the wise child who leads them all an d her silence and her howling a language as authentic as any language of nature. In a world of talking beasts and flowers, she would be the bud of flesh in the kind lion's mouth: but how can the bitten apple flesh out its scar again? Mutism is her lot; though, now and then, she will emit an involuntary rustle of sound, as if the unused chords in her throat were a wind-harp that moved with random i mpulses of air, her whisper, more obscure than the voices of the dumb. Familiar desecrations in the village graveyard. The coffin had been ripped open with the abandon with which a child unwraps a gift on Christmas morning and, of its conte nts, not a trace could be found but for a rag of the bridal veil in which the co rpse was wrapped that was caught, fluttering, in the brambles at the churchyard gate so they knew which way he had taken it, towards his gloomy castle. In the l apse of time, the trance of being of that exiled place, this girl grew amongst t hings she could neither name nor perceive. How did she think, how did she feel, this perennial stranger with her furred thoughts and her primal sentience9 that existed in a flux of shifting impressions; there are no words to describe the wa

y she negotiated the abyss between her dreams, those wakings strange as her slee pings. The wolves had tended her because they knew she was an imperfect wolf; we secluded her in animal privacy out of fear of her imperfection because it showe d us what we might have been, and so time passed, although she scarcely knew it. Then she began to bleed. Her first blood bewildered her. She did not know what it meant and the first stirrings of surmise that she ever felt were directed to wards its possible cause. The moon had been shining into the kitchen when she wo ke to feel the trickle between her thighs and it seemed to her that a wolf who, perhaps, was fond of her, as wolves were, and who lived, perhaps, in the moon? m ust have nibbled her cunt while she was sleeping, had subjected her to a series of affectionate nips too gentle to wake her yet sharp enough to break the skin. The shape of this theory was blurred yet, out of it, there took root a kind o f wild reasoning, as it might have from a seed dropped in her brain off the foot of a flying bird. The flow continued for a few days, which seemed to her an end less time. She had, as yet, no direct notion of past, or of future, or of durati on, only of a dimensionless, immediate moment. At night, she prowled the empty h ouse looking for rags to sop the blood up; she learned a little elementary hygie ne in the convent, enough to know to bury her excrement and cleanse herself of h er natural juices, although the nuns had not the means to inform her how it shou ld be, it was not fastidiousness but shame that made her do so. She found towels , sheets and pillowcases in closets that had not been opened since the Duke came shrieking into the world with all his teeth, to bite his mother's nipple off an d weep. She found once-worn ball dresses in cobwebbed wardrobes, and, heaped in the corner of his bloody chamber, shrouds, nightdresses and burial clothes that had wrapped items on the Duke's menus. She tore strips of the most absorbent fab rics to clumsily diaper he In the course of these prowlings, she bumped ag ainst the mirror over whose surface the Duke passed like wind on ice. First, she tried to nuzzle her reflection; then, nosing it industriously, she soon realise d it gave out no smell. She bruised her muzzle on the cold glass and broke her c laws trying to tussle with this stranger .

notes: 3 Iberian: Spanish 4 somnambulist: sleepwalker 5 lupine: ha ving to do with wolves 6 byre: a shelter for cows 7 Cadav re provenal: (French) cadaver in the style of Provenal cooking (from the Provene re gion of southern France), typically with generous amounts of garlic. 8 phalanges: bones of the fingers or toes 9 sentience: cap able of feeling and perceiving

She saw, with irritation, then amusement, how it mimicked every gesture of hers when she raised her forepaw to scratch herself or dragged her bum along the dust y carpet to rid herself of a slight discomfort in her hindquarters. She rubbed h er head against her reflected face, to show that she felt friendly towards it, a nd felt a cold, solid, immovable surface between herself and she - some kind, po ssibly, of invisible cage? In spite of this barrier, she was lonely enough to as k this creature to try to play with her, baring her teeth and grinning; at once she received a reciprocal invitation. She rejoiced; she began to whirl round on herself, yapping exultantly, but, when she retreated from the mirror, she halted in the midst of her ecstasy, puzzled, to see how her new friend grew less in si

ze. The moonlight spilled into the Duke's motionless bedroom from behind a cloud and she saw how pale this wolf, not-wolf who played with her was. The moon and mirrors have this much in common: you cannot see behind them. Moonlit and white, Wolf-Alice looked at herself in the mirror and wondered whether there she saw t he beast who came to bite her in the night. Then her sensitive ears pricked up a t the sound of a step in the hall; trotting at once back to her kitchen, she enc ountered the Duke with the leg of a man over his shoulder. Her toenails clicked against the stairs as she padded incuriously past, she, the serene, inviolable o ne in her absolute and verminous innocence. Soon the flow ceased. She forgot it. The moon vanished; but, little by little, reappeared. When it again visited her kitchen at full strength, Wolf-Alice was surprised into bleeding again and so i t went on, with a punctuality that transformed her vague grip on time. She learn ed to expect these bleedings, to prepare her rags against them, and afterwards, neatly bury the dirtied things. Sequence asserted itself with custom and then sh e understood the circumambulatory principle of the clock perfectly; even if all clocks were banished from the den where she and the Duke inhabited their separat e solitudes, so that you might say she discovered the very action of time by mea ns of this returning cycle. When she curled up among the cinders, the colour, te xture and warmth of them brought her foster mother's belly out of the past and p rinted it on her flesh; her first conscious memory, painful as the first time th e nuns combed her hair. She howled a little, in a firmer, deepening trajectory, to obtain the inscrutable consolation of the wolves' response, for now the world around her was assuming form. She perceived an essential difference between her onl self and her surroundings that you might say she could not put her finger on y, the trees and grass of the meadows outside no longer seemed the emanation of her questing nose and erect ears, and yet sufficient to itself, but a kind of ba ckdrop for her, that waited for her arrivals to give it meaning. She saw herself upon it and her eyes, with their sombre clarity, took on a veiled, introspectiv e look. She would spend hours examining the new skin that had been born, it seemed to he r, of her bleeding, she would lick her soft upholstery with her long tongue and groom her hair with her fingernails. She examined her new breasts with curiosity ; the white growths reminded her of nothing so much as the night-sprung puffball s she found, sometimes, on evening rambles in the woods, a natural if disconcert ing apparition, but then, to her astonishment, she found a little diadem of fres h hair tufting between her thighs. She showed it to her mirror littermate, who r eassured her by showing her she shared it. The damned Duke haunts the graveyard; he believes himself to be both less and mo re than a man, as if his obscene difference were a sign of grace. During the day , he sleeps. His mirror faithfully reflects his bed but never the meagre shape w ithin the disordered covers. Sometimes, on those white nights when she was left alone in the house, she dragged out his grandmother's ball dress and rolled on s uave velvet and abrasive lace because to do so delighted her adolescent skin. He r intimate in the mirror wound the old clothes around herself, wrinkling its nos e in delight at the ancient yet still potent scents of musk and civet that woke up in the sleeves and bodices. This habitual, and at last boring, fidelity to he r very movement finally woke her up to the regretful possibility that her compan ion was, in fact, no more than a particularly ingenious variety of the shadow sh e cast on sunlit grass. Had not she and the rest of her litter tussled and rompe d with their shadows long ago? She poked her agile nose around the back of the m irror; she found only dust, a spider stuck in his web, a heap of rags. A little moisture leaked from the corners of her eyes, yet her relation with the mirror w as now far more intimate since she knew she saw herself within it. She pawed and tumbled the dress the Duke had tucked away behind the mirror for a while. The d ust was soon shaken out of it; she experimentally inserted her front legs in the sleeves. Although the dress was torn and crumpled, it was so white and of such a sinuous texture she thought, before she put it on, she must thoroughly wash of f her coat of ashes in the water from the pump in the yard, which she knew how t o manipulate with her cunning forepaw. In the mirror, she saw how this white dre ss made her shine. Although she could not run so fast on two legs in petticoats,

she trotted out in her new dress to investigate the odorous October hedgerows, like a dbutante from the castle, delighted with herself but still, now and then, singing to the wolves with a kind of wistful triumph, because now she knew how t o wear clothes and had put on the visible sign of her difference from them. Her footprints on the damp earth are beautiful and menacing as those Man Friday left .10 The young husband of the dead bride spent a long time in planning his reveng e. He filled the church with an arsenal of bells, books and candles;11 a battery of silver bullets; they brought a ten-gallon tub of holy water in a wagon from the city, where it had been blessed by the Archbishop himself, to drown the Duke , if the bullets bounced off him. They gathered in the church to chant a litany and wait for the one who would visit the first deaths of winter. She goes out at night more often now; the landscape assembles itself about her, she informs it with her presence. She is its significance. It seemed to her the congregation in the church was ineffectually attempting to imitate the wolves' chorus. She lent them the assistance of her own, educated voice for a while, rocking contemplati vely on her haunches by the graveyard gate; then her nostrils twitch to catch th e rank stench of the dead that told her her co-habitor was at hand; raising her head, who did her new, keen eyes spy but the lord of cobweb castle intent on per forming his cannibal rituals? And if her nostrils flare suspiciously at the chok ing reek of incense and his do not, that is because she is far more sentient tha n he. She will, therefore, run, run! when she hears the crack of bullets, becaus e they killed her foster mother; so, with the self-same lilting lope, drenched w ith holy water, will he run, too, until the young widower fires the silver bulle t that bites his shoulder and drags off his fictive pelt, so that he must rise u p like any common forked biped and limp distressfully on as best he may. When th ey saw the white bride leap out of the tombstones and scamper off towards the ca stle with the werewolf stumbling after, the peasants thought the Duke's dearest victim had come back to take matters into her own hands. They ran screaming from the presence of a ghostly vengeance on him. Poor, wounded thing... locked half and half between such strange states, an aborted transformation, an incomplete m ystery now he lies writhing on his black bed in the room like a Mycenaean tomb,1 2 howls like a wolf with his foot in a trap or a woman in labour, and bleeds. Fi rst, she was fearful when she heard the sound of pain, in case it hurt her, as i t had done before. She prowled round the bed, growling, snuffing at his wound th at does not smell like her wound. Then, she was pitiful as her gaunt grey mother ; she leapt upon his bed to lick, without hesitation, without disgust, with a qu ick, tender gravity, the blood and dirt from his cheek and forehead. The lucidit y of the moonlight lit the mirror propped against the red wall; the glass, the m aster of the visible, impartially recorded the crooning girl. As she continued h er ministrations, this glass, with infinite slowness, yielded to the reflexive s trength of its own material construction. Little by little, there appeared withi n it, like the image on photographic paper that emerges, first, a formless web o f tracery, the prey caught in its own fishing net, then a firmer yet still shado wed 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. 10 In Daniel Defoe s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Crusoe first discovers that there is someone else on his island when he sees footprints in the sand, made by the nati ve that Crusoe will name Friday. 11 Bells, books, and candles were traditional par ts of a medieval excommunication ceremony in the Roman Catholic church 12 Mycen aean refers to the city of Mycenae, which was one of the major centers of civili zation in ancient Greece (flourishing c. 1600-1100 BC). Mycenaean culture is par ticularly known for its fairly elaborate chamber tombs. Wolf-Alice" Summary Wolf-Alice is a child raised by wolves. Even though she is physically a woman, " Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf"; she runs on all fours , is nocturnal, howls rather than speaks, and does not wear clothes. What distin guishes Wolf-Alice most from other humans is the fact that she is unaware of her own mortality. Peasants discover Wolf-Alice sleeping next to her wolf mother, w hom they shot to death. Once they realize she is human, they bring her to live i

n a convent. She learns to cooperate with the nuns in order to get food, but the y cannot break her of her animal habits. Exasperated, they send her to live with a werewolf called the Duke. The Duke is a lonely, invincible creature who does not cast a reflection. When t he moon comes out, he becomes ravenous and devours humans and human corpses. To the townspeople, he is an abhorred ally of the devil, but their attempts to scar e him off are hopeless because he is not afraid of garlic or Christian symbols. Even wolves would not accept the Duke, because he eats his own kind. Since he do es not belong among humans or wolves, the Duke is terribly lonely. Presumably be cause she is so "inhuman," the Duke does not devour Wolf-Alice. She lives in the Duke's castle and serves as a sort of primitive maid to him, using skills the n uns taught her. Wolf-Alice lives in a strange state that is neither dreaming or waking. That is, until a major event occurs; she begins to menstruate. Confused by her bleeding, Wolf-Alice is struck with wonder for the very first time. She is accustomed to being dirty, but she cleans up the blood out of shame. While searching the house for rags to stop her bleeding, Wolf-Alice sees her reflection in a mirror for t he first time. She tries to play with her reflection because, like an animal or very young child, she does not recognize it as her own. As months pass, Wolf-Alice's menstruation makes her aware of the passage of time . Simultaneously, she acquires a sense of being different from her surroundings. Whereas before she felt at one with nature, as though it was "the emanation of her questing nose and erect ears," now she sees it as "a backdrop for her, that [waits] for her arrivals to give it meaning." Wolf-Alice, previously as engaged in the moment as a baby or animal, starts to become more withdrawn. Then one day , she discovers the truth about her reflection. As she plays with her reflection , she spies a wedding dress behind the mirror. She finds the dress so beautiful that she makes a point of washing herself thoroughly before putting it on. WolfAlice leaves the castle wearing the dress. At the same time Wolf-Alice wanders into the town, a young bridegroom is plottin g revenge against the Duke for his bride's death. He waits with a group of towns people in the village church, which he has filled with every known anti-werewolf device including silver bullets and holy water. Wolf-Alice sits outside the chu rch, fascinated by the people's chanting. Just when she smells the Duke approach ing, Wolf-Alice senses that something is amiss. She and the Duke flee as the tow nspeople throw holy water and fire bullets in their direction, one of which hits the Duke's shoulder. When the townspeople see Wolf-Alice running after the Duke in her wedding dress, they assume that she is the bride's ghost wreaking vengea nce upon him. Awed and frightened, they flee. Back at the castle, the injured Duke lies bleeding and howling in his bed. WolfAlice jumps onto the bed and begins to tenderly lick the blood and dirt off his face. Now we turn our attention to the mirror. Little by little, the Duke's face begins to appear in its glass until it is reflected there fully, "as vivid as r eal life itself." Analysis "Wolf-Alice" borrows themes from Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, and Lewi s Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. It also invoke s twentieth-century case studies of 'feral children' who were actually raised by wild animals, such as world-famous Victor d'Aveyron. In many of Carter's storie s, we see heroines embrace their bestial or lustful natures to become enlightene d; in "The Tiger's Bride," the heroine even becomes a beast. Wolf-Alice's develo pment is opposite from these heroines' because she begins as a de facto beast an d becomes human. Whereas in "The Werewolf," Carter combines grandmother and wolf into one character, in "Wolf-Alice," she combines girl and wolf into one; hence the title character's hyphenated name. Because wolves raised Wolf-Alice, she behaves exactly like a wolf and has no awa reness of being human. By being human and inhuman at the same time, Wolf-Alice c alls into question what defines humanity. It cannot be our physicality, because Wolf-Alice has a human's body. Carter points to several things that distinguish humans from animals: knowledge of our mortality, the ability to feel shame and s

ubsequent desire to wear clothing, and the belief that we are more important tha n, and masters of, our surroundings. All of these human characteristics are late nt in Wolf-Alice, but she cannot realize them until she is in the presence of hu man things: a house, a mirror, a dress. Wolf-Alice is a somewhat bracing reminde r that we are mere beasts without our culture. As the narrator admits, the towns people "[feared] her imperfection because it showed [them] what [they] might hav e been." Whereas the heroine in "The Company of Wolves" ends up safe in the wolf's den, W olf-Alice starts out there. Because she grows up without society to inform her o f how she should behave, she is the antithesis of the well-pampered, well-behave d, and sheltered woman. In his book, The Myth of Irrationality, John McCrone exa mines the case of Amala and Kamala, two children raised by wolves until the ages of three and five, respectively. McCrone says that just like babies, Amala and Kamala were "mentally naked" when they were found because they did not have othe r humans to shape their thinking. So, too, is Wolf-Alice "mentally naked" as wel l as physically naked. She walks on all fours because no one has taught her to s tand, goes naked because no one has taught her to wear clothes, and howls becaus e no one has taught her to speak. Bacchilega calls Wolf-Alice "a new Eve" becaus e she retains an authenticity of being that has been lost on humans since we tum bled out of Eden. Through her largely undisturbed experience of her surroundings , the audience sees the world objectively and anew. The narrator goes so far as to suggest that Wolf-Alice's ignorance makes her a visionary and even a messiah by predicting, "[she] could prove to be the wise child that leads them all." Wolf-Alice's penchant for original vision connects her to one of her namesakes, Alice from Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. Alice is a young girl who gains knowledge by adventuring through the world on the oth er side of her mirror. Her strength, like Wolf-Alice's, is her childish curiosit y; having no magical powers, Alice manages to step through her looking glass jus t by wondering what is on the other side. In the same way, Wolf-Alice's enlighte nment stems from pure wonder at her own reflection. For a time, Wolf-Alice think s that it is another creature, whose presence comforts her in her loneliness. Du ring that time, she becomes more restrained and therefore more human simply beca use menstruating causes her to experience both time and shame. But it is Wolf-Al ice's realization about the mirror that truly separates her from her surrounding s and makes her realize her own power. Once she sees that her reflection is her "shadow," she understands that she has control over it. Her perspective shifts f rom animal objectivity to human subjectivity. Once she is human on the inside, s he is inspired for the first time to look human on the outside by wearing clothe s. Having gained control over her own mirror-image and begun to create a self-im age, Wolf-Alice is able to help the Duke regain his own. We can isolate the mirror in the story as a distinguisher of human, beast, and h alf-being. Humans recognize their reflections, beasts do not, and half-beasts ca st no reflection. Both Wolf-Alice and the Duke are trapped in liminal existences , which the mirror brings to light. Wolf-Alice is trapped between being a beast and a human until she recognizes her reflection. Her revelation draws her out of the timeless, undefined beast's experience into the calculated human experience . The Duke is a half-being in two ways; he is a half-beast-half-wolf and is trap ped between the physical and metaphysical worlds. He is "an aborted transformati on, an incomplete mystery." The Duke is 'real' enough to kill and eat people, bu t not 'real' enough to cast a reflection in the mirror. His image breezes over i t as though he is dead. Just as the mirror witnesses Wolf-Alice transform from b east into human, it witnesses her transform the Duke from half-being into being. When the Duke is shot, he is in danger of disappearing entirely into the metaph ysical world. He is so weak that his body barely occupies space in his bed. Wolf-Alice takes pity on the Duke because she recognizes that he is imperfect, j ust as the wolves pitied her for being a human, a 'flawed' wolf. Like the heroin e in "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," she transforms the tormented half-being by her kindness alone. We must not mistake Wolf-Alice's pity and kindness for human tr aits, however. The heroines in "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" as well as "The Tiger 's Bride" have to become less civilized and less human in order to save their re

spective beasts. They both reject their fathers' wealth and the urban social sce ne in favor of lives with their beasts, whom the rest of humanity has forced int o seclusion. The heroine in "The Tiger's Bride" regresses so far that she actual ly becomes a tigress. Wolf-Alice's pity, like the other heroines', is a function of her animal side an d not her human side. All the other humans in the story want to kill the beast b ecause they cannot understand his ravenousness and his torment, but Wolf-Alice c an because she has experienced these sensations in the way he has. In "The Tiger 's Bride," the heroine transforms into a tigress. In "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon, " the beast transforms into a human. In "Wolf-Alice," the heroine becomes more h uman throughout the story, but still retains enough animal kindness to save the Duke. Because her name does not change like Mr. Lyon's does, we know that Wolf-A lice is still caught between worlds. As for the Duke, we cannot be sure whether he transforms into a human or a wolf. We are told only that the mirror reflects "the face of the Duke." Carter leaves both characters in liminal ambiguity to su ggest that authentic living requires one balance one's humanity and beastliness. -----------------------------------------------------------------When the Reflection Becomes Reality: Wolf-Alice and the Fine Line of Beastliness and HumanityThe mirror is a marvel of humanity; it holds no secrets, tells no lies. The mirror is unbiased, inanimate, and hauntingly accurate. Most humans would generally, if given a choice, avoid mirrors at all costs. Contrarily and ironically, however, this painstaking truth fulness of mirrors is not enough to turn away the self-conscious, vain, insecure , aswell as the egotistical. A mirror can tell us what no one else can; painting a picture ofabsolute truth, i mitating back who we are (which may or may not be who we try to be).In order to assess the results which a mirror regurgitates, the viewer must first be entirel y aware the image is of course, his or her self. Humans recognize themselves as separate entities from others, from the world. This ability draws the line betwe en beast and human. A literary exploration of this idea is Angela Carter s Wolf-Al ice. In the story, the main character is a feral child who has been raised by wo lves since birth and recognize herself as a human. Although Wolf-Alice is a hu man, nothing about her is human is except that she is not a wolf She functions in an animalistic state oftimelessness, existing strictly in the now, oblivious to the past and the future. Shewalks on all fours because she cannot stand. She howls b ecause she cannot speak. Bybeing a human physically but acting inhuman as well as failing to recognize herself as a human, Wolf-Alice brings into question what se parates beast from humanity. By gaining existential knowledge with the ability t o recall experience as well as shifting from a mode of animal objectivity to hum anistic subjectivity, Wolf- Alice is able to understand as well as execute huma n traits which are expected from her in a contemporary society. Wolf-Alice possesses human characteristics but it is not until she is in the pre sence ofhuman belongings such as a mirror or a dress which she can realize them a nd consider them beyond her initial animalistic view.Wolf-Alice begins by explain ing the animalistic manner in which she operates on a day to day basis. She poss esses no concept of time, inhabiting only the present tense ,a fugue of the conti nuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair This nature of Wolf-Alice to live in only a present tense is decidedlyinhuman as huma ns live with existential reality as well as reaction to experience. Wolf-Alice, a t this point, cannot discern between past events or learn from the experiences s he has already had. Essentially, time is nonexistent to her as it is a humanly d efined characteristic of the world. Wolf-Alice is found her laying next to her b ullet ridden mother and brought to aconvent. In true hubristic nature, the nuns take her in to try to teach her how to act as a human. When their attempts fail she is deposited at the house of a Duke who is half-man, half-beast and presumab ly does not eat Wolf-Alice due to the fact she is so inhuman. She does not entir ely react to the change of location and when she is left with the Duke she settle d down on her hunkers with that dog s sigh that is only the expulsion of breath an d does not mean either relief or resignation . She is unphased by the events which have occurred more-so than even an animal or beastwould be without the presence

of time or experience to relate to. In her time at the Duke s castle, she exists in a dreamlike state, barely employin g the small tasks which the nuns had taught her for the Duke, such as making his bed,sss serving as an extremely primitive maid. She grew in the castle amongst things she could neither name nor perceive until a major event occurs she begins to menstruat e. For her, the flow seemed to continue on for a few days, which seemed to her an endless time . This seemingly endless continuation of her menstrual cycle only se emed so because she had no human concept of time as well as her nature of being ruled by an animalistic endless now . Although she is, at this point, accustomed tob eing dirty, she cleans up herself as the narrator notes it was not fastidiousness but shame that made her do so . This feeling of shame is unusual to Wolf-Alice, a s it denotes a humanistic characteristic that is only present when one is self a ware as well as a conscious minded individual, an inescapable human characterist ic. Additionally,Wolf-Alice learns to track her menstrual cycle as well as prepar e for it ahead of time,which lends itself to force her to understand the concept of time. She learned to expect these bleedings, to prepare her rags against them and afterwards, neatly to bury the dirty things you might say that she discovered the very action of time by means of this cycle .While Wolf-Alice searches for ways to stop her bleeding in the house, she discovers a mirror. Here Carter utilizes the mirror to draw lines between beastliness aswell as humanity. This echoes to an earlier passage drawing parallels to the Duke with his half-beast-half-wolf a ppearance, when it is stated he ceased to cast an image in the mirror . Wolf-Alice does not understand what she sees in the mirror is her own reflection such as wh en she was lonely enough to ask this creature to try to play with her, barring he r teeth and grinning; at once she received a reciprocal invitation . In his book The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim comments on this phenomenon of the re flection that is found in animals and children. He notes "When he spies his m irror image, he wonders whether what he sees is really he, or a child just like him standing behind this glassy wall" -While this characteristic is true of both child and animal, the realization of the product of a mirror ultimately sets be ast apart from human. The realization that her reflection is just a shadow force s her to realize she is in control of her surroundings. It is then her perceptio n begins to shift to a form of human subjectivity. She succeeds in separating he rself in a physical form from her surroundings as well as a psychological form f rom others, she goes out at night more often now. The landscape assembles itself about her; she informs it with her presence. She is its significance (1037). Wolf -Alice is caught between two worlds much as the Duke is, but her ability to reco gnize herself in the mirror is what draws her out of her timelessnes sand into a realm of human experience. Her first memory, evidence of her growing existentia l reality, is one of her foster mother wolf. It is then she perceived an essentia l difference between herself and her surroundings that you might say she could n ot put her finger on only, the trees and grass of the meadows outside no longer se emed the emanation of her questing nose and erect ears, and yet sufficient to it self, but a kind of backdrop for her (1036). Wolf-Alice explores her new self as well as the boundaries of her existence. The more human Wolf-Alice feels on the i nside, the desire to outwardly look human becomes stronger.When the humans in the town try to take revenge on the Duke for killing as well as eating a bridesmaid , Wolf-Alice shows she has not completely abandoned heranimalistic nature by sho wing pity towards the injured Duke. When she lived with thewolves, she was looked upon as flawed as noted when the narrator says, The wolves hadtended her because they knew she was an imperfect wolf (1034). Much in the same wayWolf-Alice was con sidered like a defective wolf, the Duke is considered a flawed human. Wolf-Alice had completely abandoned her animalistic instincts as well as complet elyembraced her newly found human experience she would have been inclined to seekr evenge on the Duke as well. The townspeople cannot understand his torment as Wol f-Alice does because she has felt those sensations in the way he has. It is throu gh her own kindness alone which she is able to save the Duke at the end of the s tory; she is capable enough to recall her own innate animal kindness in the face of a terrorizing matter, she as one stuck between a beast and wolf transformati

on. Through her grasp of her internal as well as external human, she is able to help the Duke regain control of his own. Studying cases such as the one describe d in Wolf-Alice is a contemporary issue as well as an ancient one. In his book F eral Children and Clever Animals, Douglas Candland demonstrates the pertinence b ehind the case studies of wolf-children or feral children as he states The import ance of feral children and clever animals is not that they are feral or thinking , but that we human beings ascribe characteristics to these situations. Such cha racteristics tell us much about ourselves, if less about the children and animal s we study" . Here Candland is referring to the manner in which we place importa nce of communication through language as well as behavioral habits that are char acteristic of humans, such as sitting at a table while eating or standing uprigh t.When Wolf-Alice was at the convent, human s hubristic nature came out as she was forced to behave like a human rather than animal. Despite the nun s efforts, howev er,Wolf-Alice is not able to complete most of the tasks and in frustration, is ki cked out. This is not because Wolf-Alice is not able minded enough to learn but because in her animalistic mind, walking on four legs is not efficient and utili zing a bathroom is not needed. Wolf-Alice, despite learning to recognize human qualities in herself, does not ev er learn to communicate with language. According to his article entitled "Myster ious People: Feral Children" Archeologist Brian Haughton asserts "Study of such children can cast light on the differences and similarities between human and an imal natures, the process of how language is acquired, and whether certain human characteristics are learned or genetic" (1) . No account of a feral child comin g back into civilization hasbeen successful due to the complications that are inv olved with the proper training that is needed.Wolf-Alice channels themes from Thr ough the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll, The Jungle B ook by Rudyard Kipling, and Little Red Riding Hood. These stories are additional examples of children who not only embrace their animalistic or childish curiosi ty, but utilize it as a tool for self-identification and definition. Wolf-Alice employs similar thematic elements such that her childish curiosityis view as stre ngth, as well as challenges human s hubristic nature to impose accepted societal n orms on a child who was only exposed to the animalistic and primal culture ofher wolf family. Angela Carter leaves the transformation of the two at the end of th e story ambiguous to demonstrate the fine line between human reality and innate, yet inherently primal instincts. The ending also offers a dichotomized picture of physical outward appearance of beastliness coupled with reality. Wolf-Alice i s a human who acts in a primal manner which includes acting upon her animalistic pity. The Duke is a half-beast transforming into a human-like appearance. Wolf-A lice demonstrates the hubristic notion that the existence of culture is what def ines a human from an animal.Wolf-Alice also demonstrates the relationship between behavior and cultural expectations while calling into question what defines a human from a beast, from a human's point of view. Da : http://www.scribd.com/doc/22734045/Wolf-Alice