featherxquill

*mutters* Excuse the centred post. Stupid rich text mode. This probably will not be of any interest to anyone else, but I'm posting it here so when I email it to my English Professor (or Dr - whatever I'm supposed to call her), I don't fill her inbox with a stupid word attatchment, or have to send it in the body of an email, which sucks to read (besides, the backdrop of my journal is an appropriate place to read this essay). Like I said, unless you're interested in Angela Carter, Dorothy Parker and gender in short stories, this will probably be of no interest to you at all.

How do narrative strategies create the depiction of male-female relations in any two of the short stories studied in this unit?

Gender is a social construction. In asking how narratives ‘create a depiction of male-female relations’, the question assumes that male and female are already defined. Postmodern feminist critics would argue that this is not the case, instead believing gender to be socially and culturally constructed. If male and female are not already fixed entities, a narrative must create a definition of male and female in relation both to one another and to the context in which the narrative is written and consumed. In short stories like Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’¹ and Dorothy Parker’s ‘The Waltz’², narrative strategies must be cleverly applied to create these definitions within the constraining brevity of a short story.

Joan Scott, quoted in the article ‘Confounding Gender’, defines gender as “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes,…a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”³Betsy Lucal notes that “Because gender is a social construction, there may be differences among one’s sex, gender self identity (the gender the individual identifies as), presented identity (the gender the person is presenting) and perceived identity (the gender others attribute to the person)”⁴. By identifying a narrative character as male or female, we are reading the gender display constructed for that character by both the writer and our own expectations. The very first sentences of ‘The Waltz’: “Why, Thank you so much. I’d adore to. I don’t want to dance with him.” ⁵are gendered; although there is no attribution to the speaker being a man or a woman, we recognise the character as female. Parker is relying upon her implied audience’s understanding the gendered, social situation and context in which she has placed her character – the dance floor – in order for the irony of the piece to be appreciated. The character is presenting herself to her dance partner in a feminine, socially acceptable way, but her inner thoughts have a very different view of the circumstances, and indeed her own femininity. Gender displays in ‘The Company of Wolves’ are depicted through clothing – by taking away the clothes of a werewolf, one condemns him to inhumanity; the girl’s read cloak is symbolic of her burgeoning womanhood; the young man’s coat and hat make him recognisable as a hunter. “Seven years is a werewolf’s natural span but if you burn his human clothing you condemn him to wolfishness for the rest of his life… as if clothes make the man.” Carter uses clothing in such a way that it denotes gender as we understand it, and, by implication, associates gender with humanity. When the hunter removes his clothing, and thus his gender, he loses his humanity and becomes a beast. By removing her own clothing, the girl consents to becoming animal as well, and destroys the power relationship that gender, and humanity, have established. Writers like Carter and Parker must use social and cultural signifiers to define and create gender relations in their narratives.

In narratives as short as ‘The Waltz’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’, plot, characterisation and meaning are condensed, and thus intense. The same affect that is achieved by a novel over many sittings must be achieved in the one sitting a reader allots to consume a short story, so the writer must use every technique available to them for maximum effect. In defining gender and depicting male-female relations, texts must draw upon intertextual references. This is most obviously apparent in ‘The Company of Wolves’. Carter’s narrative takes the traditional Little Red Riding Hood⁶ folk tale and appropriates it into a contemporary, feminist context. By far the most prevalent versions of the tale are Charles Perrault’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and the Grimm’s ‘Little Red Cap’⁷, the latter adapted from the former, and the former from an oral folk tale. The main aim of Perrault’s version was “a warning to little girls that they should not stray from the straight and narrow path of obedience (and chastity).”⁸ Carter’s version, however, could be seen as an adaptation or return to the oral folktale, researched by Paul Delarue and recorded c.1885 as ‘The Story of Grandmother’⁹. Further research by Marianne Rumpf¹⁰ suggests that the original villain was probably a werewolf. The girl in the folk tale was shrewd and resourceful, escaping the wolf without the help of hunter or grandmother. The pins and needles upon which wolf and girl travel in the folk tale “were related to the needlework apprenticeship[s] undergone by young peasant girls, and designated the arrival of puberty and initiation into society”¹¹. Carter’s text avoids any pretence at being a traditional fairytale, opening not with an innocent young heroine but with reference to the wolf: “carnivore incarnate”, a heavy emphasis on flesh, with all its social connotations. The tale has a sense of immediacy, facilitated by structure (short sentences, emphasising certain phrases by giving them their own lines) and by a mixture of past and present tense. She draws elements of the original folktale into her narrative alongside those added to the tale by Perrault¹², and thus encompasses the tale in all its variations as warnings against female sexuality, and subverts them. “Male werewolf and female virginal human are no longer predator and victim.”¹³Instead, “she knew she was nobody’s meat”. With references to “dead souls on Walpurgisnacht”, she conjures images of female power, of wild, dancing witches – quite possibly the most potent symbol of female power in western culture. Carter’s ingenious use of intertextual references takes depictions of gender and male-female relations from past contexts and weaves them into a context of her own, allowing the references themselves to depict a change in gender relations, through similarity and difference to those past texts.

Parker’s text creates gender and depicts male-female relations with different narrative strategies, such as character and place. Eudora Welty argues that place is overlooked as an important aspect of fiction, and that “It is by nature of itself that fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place.”¹⁴ Parker’s ‘The Waltz’ is very situated in a certain place and time. The entire story is narrated while on the dance floor, and narrative time moves almost as real time would. Place, in this instance, is gendered and culturally coded. “Paradoxically, the more narrowly we can examine a fictional character, the greater he is likely to loom up. We must see him set to scale in his proper world to know his size.”¹⁵ Indeed, Parker’s character is made larger by the constraint of the narrative place. Is only within her context, playing the part of passive dance partner, that she can fully utilise her ironic wit. Social mores force a certain role upon her, but, by virtue of her intelligence, she is able to twist the power balance and come out on top. Immaculate flesh makes tame the werewolf, perhaps, but an intelligent woman makes a mockery of the social power of men.

Both Angela Carter and Dorothy Parker utilise narrative strategies in order to define gender in socially constructed ways, then use those very constructions to challenge the power of men in male-female relationships. The significance of this lies in the ability that an author has to represent and re-present reality in ways that often challenge social norms. It could be argued, then, that the narrative does and had played a vital role in the social construction of gender, now and throughout history.

Notes

¹ Angela Carter, ‘The Company of Wolves’, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 110-118

² Dorothy Parker, ‘The Waltz’, in The Elements of Argument, 6^thed., ed. A.T Rottenberg (Boston and New York: St Martin’s, 2000), pp. 256-259

³ Mary Hawkesworth, ‘Confounding Gender’, Signs, Vol. 22, No. 3. (Spring, 1997), pp. 649-685.

⁴ Betsy Lucal, ‘What It Means To Be Gendered Me: Life On the Boundaries Of a Dichotomous Gender System’, Gender and Society, Vol. 13, No. 6. (Dec., 1999), page 784

⁵The Elements of Argument, page 256.

⁶ I have not enclosed the title of the work in quotation marks because I am not referring to any specific, written work in this instance, but to the unwritten myth that comes from combining many versions of the story.

⁷ Both included in an anthology complied by Jack Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1983).

⁸Peter Hollindale, ‘Why the Wolves Are Running’, The Lion and the Unicorn - Volume 23, Number 1, January 1999, pp. 97-115

⁹ Zipes, page 5-6

¹⁰ Cited by Zipes, pages 2-3. Evidence includes a “wealth of historical material”.

¹¹ Yvonne Verdier, cited by Zipes, page 7.

¹² Perrault’s tale was the first time the red cloak became part of the story – red was generally associated at the time with sin, sensuality and the devil. Zipes, page 9.

¹³ Hollindale, page 103.

¹⁴ Eudora Welty, ‘Place In Fiction’, in Critical Approaches to Fiction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), pp. 249-264\

¹⁵ Critical Approaches, page 204.

List of Works Cited

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979)

Hawkesworth, Mary. ‘Confounding Gender’, Signs, Vol. 22, No. 3. (Spring, 1997), pp. 649-685.

Hollindale, Peter. ‘Why the Wolves Are Running’, The Lion and the Unicorn - Volume 23, Number 1, January 1999, pp. 97-115

Kumar, Shiv and McKean, Keith, ed. Critical Approaches to Fiction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968)

Lucal, Betsy . ‘What It Means To Be Gendered Me: Life On the Boundaries Of a Dichotomous Gender System’, Gender and Society, Vol. 13, No. 6. (Dec., 1999), pp. 781-797.

Rottenberg A.T, ed. The Elements of Argument, 6^thed., (Boston and New York: St Martin’s, 2000)

Zipes, Jack. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1983).