"Wolf-Alice" OR "Lycanthropolicious!"

The plot is always a good place to start. To me, Wolf-Alice seems to be the story of a feral child. What, you ask, is a feral child? Well… A feral child is a child that is not raised as most human beings would regularly be raised. A Feral child is a wild child, they are usually children lost or abandoned in the wild, the result being the formative years of the child’s life are spent without the usual human interaction. I know, that’s really formal sounding, but think “Tarzan” and you’ll get the picture. I took a children’s literature course one summer and one of the lectures dealt with the topic of feral children. Lemme to scrounge up the notes and see what I can find.

Aha. Here we go.

Such cases are rare; there are only about 6 documented cases. But these cases raise interesting questions. “What does it mean to be human?” “What is the role of biology?” “What distinguishes from animals? Is it biology? Education?” “What role does socialization play in the acquisition of language and communication skills?” the child that isn’t socialized, how does it effect their communication?

From the first few paragraphs that I read of Wolf-Alice some of the questions above were set off in my mind and I had a sneaking suspicious that this story would serve as a vehicle where in Angela Carter would discuss the speculations and finding surrounding feral children. In terms of plot I thought the story would be about a young doctor trying to understand the enigma of a child raised by wolves. Yea… Not so much. Seems Angela Carter decided to veer away from that and go gothic and have werewolves and shit like that. That’s cool, a totally unexpected, yet welcomed twist.

There are a couple of themes I picked out this short story. There is Transformation (obviously), The Gothic (Très obviously), Mirrors, and if I really wanted to reach I could say Identity. I suppose I could also link that up with Transformation. I suppose it could be done if we’re talking about the feral child coming into her realization that the image in the mirror is not a playmate but a representation of herself. I take Alice’s realization that the image in the mirror is actually a reflection of herself as a symbolic turning point in the story as well as for Alice herself. See, Alice knows herself to be a wolf, a pack creature. When she sees the other feral girl in the mirror she instantaneously assumes that the “other” girl is another wolf-cub. When Alice realizes that the other wolf-cub is actually just her reflection in the looking glass she experiences epiphany; she understands the idea of a separate self. It’s kinda heavy handed the way Carter goes about showing us all this, not that I’m complaining (thank god for heavy handed.) She writes, “She poked her agile nose around the back of the mirror; she found only dust, a spider stuck in his web, a heap of rags.” While her playmate is ruined for her now, Carter writes, “A little moisture leaked from the corners of her eyes, yet her relation with the mirror was now far more intimate since she knew she saw herself within it.”

Hmmm… I guess I had more to say about Identity and Transformation than I thought. Moving on.

It’s kinda fun to think about how wolf-Alice starts off as a human child, but is really more wolf than she is human, but then she becomes a wolf in (excuse the following) children’s clothing (I couldn’t resist) It’s like she is all these things at once, and the only determining factor, the element that allows her to stay in one form, are the blocks within her mind that are at first erected involuntarily, due to her upbringing, and by the end of the story how Alice learns to “conform”. She is aware that she is a wolf, yet she is also aware that other modes of being benefit her in specific situations.

Now I don’t really know what to make of the Duke. He’s kind of a crackpot. I can’t really tell if he’s actually a werewolf, or if he just thinks he’s a werewolf, or if the villagers just think he’s a werewolf. Since I only really understand Alice I guess I can see why she’s drawn to him. Weather or not he’s really a werewolf is not really a big deal. Sure it gives the piece a different reading when you change what the Duke may or may not be, but the one thing that is finite is that Alice sees something in him that’s familiar. She’s obviously not pissing herself scared when she sees him because she is a wolf-girl. She sees something like herself, especially when we see the Duke hurt. In the last few paragraph we have a description of Alice tending to the wounds of the Duke... Giving it some thought I’m thinking that since Alice sees herself in the mirror and realizes her own image and thus the idea of an individual self, the act of caring for the Duke who is so much like her kind of reaffirms, for me anyway, that though Alice realizes herself, she doesn’t see human. Since she tends to the familiar “hurt animal” the Duke, it’s gotta have something to do with being an individual but yet being part of a larger group.

I wanna say something about how Alice’s shifting between herself and her “pack” ties into our transformations that we the reader go through in our daily lives. We come to York; we are part of that pack. We go home; we are part of that pack. If we are religious, we go to church; we are part of that pack. But all the time we are ourselves. Some people say they are alone they can be “themselves”, but doesn’t it then beg the question, “what does it mean to be ‘yourself’”? If I had to answer satisfactorily or else have a piano dropped on my head I’d probably say that we don’t really have a singular “self”, and that the self that we refer to is really an amalgamation of the “selves” we are.

Or something like that.