Detailed and comprehensive notes of 'The Erl-King' from Angela Carter's anthology 'The Bloody Chamber'. These A* level notes select key quotations from the story and analyse them in depth, in a clear layout, making up all the foundations for a powerful essay.
The Erl-King
The Male gaze (1975) – Laura Mulvey – dominant perspective in art and literature – women
viewed through the eyes of men
The Madonna Whore Complex (1905) – Freud – defining and classifying women by their
sexual behaviour as means of controlling ad subjugating it, originally a medical term for
psychoanalysing
Post Modernism/structuralism – late 20th century – dismantles established ideas
Metafiction (1970) – William H.Gass – emphasises its own construction
Context
- The Erl-king was depicted in a number of Germanic ballads and legends as a
malevolent creature who haunts forests and carries off travellers to their deaths,
young children in particular
- In Goethe’s poem ‘Der Erl-Konig’, he preys on a child
- Some texts focus on his daughter, a fairy who lures men to their doom
- He has been depicted as a goblin, a sprite, an elf and a demon
Female Independence
Metafiction
- “The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was sufficient to itself”
Intertextual link to Emily Dickinson’s ‘Light is Sufficient to Itself’ (1863)
Nod to her as a progressive female Gothic writer, while also signposting her
postmodernist stance will be explicit in deconstructing the ideas explored
- “light is sufficient to itself” – could be a metaphor for female authors (or women in
general) being able to stand alone by themselves, separate from their gender
- On pg.97 Carter employs a ‘labyrinth of language’ (term coined by Daphne Marlatt),
heavily confusing tenses, pronouns and story chronology
Could align the woods with the Minotaur’s labyrinth, who preyed on sacrifices, in the
same way the Erl-King does to women wandering off into the woods. Erl-King is also
the sacrifice, the masculine idea must die for women to thrive. Generalised by the
shift from “I” to “She”
- “As trustingly as Little Red Riding Hood” – breaking the third wall to display
awareness of fairy tale style signposts that these constructs present in the genre will
be broken down, but could also be Carter mocking the absurdity of a tale – a women
would never be so foolish – the patriarchy does not allow freedom
Male Gaze
- Erl King is the metaphorical embodiment of the male gaze
- Reference to Othello the green eyed monster, Carter juxtaposes it as the girl is the
one who kills him
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