SOURCE: Moss, Betty. “Desire and the Female Grotesque in Angela Carter's ‘Peter and the Wolf’.” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies 12, no. 1 (1998): 175-91.

[In the following essay, Moss analyzes female desire in Carter's wolf tales.]

Angela Carter's artistic evolution moves toward the realization of an alternative vision of creative desire as positive and productive rather than driven by Lack—as in the dominant traditions of Western thought since Plato; Carter develops a fictional idiom adequate to the expression of such desire. This distinctly Carterian idiom participates in the aesthetic of the grotesque and inflects the grotesque in a specifically feminine and feminist way, maximizing its potential as an instrument of social and personal transformation. Integrating the feminist discourse of Hélène Cixous, French writer and critic, with the theory of the grotesque advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin, renowned Russian literary and cultural critic, opens a useful way to explore Carter's fiction.¹ Carter's admiration for, appropriation of, and reinvention of wonder tales demonstrate her regard for realms of the fantastic, a category intrinsically connected with the grotesque. While any of her tales can be approached through the lens of the grotesque, her wolf stories offer one of the most elemental of grotesque figures: the part-human, part-animal; as Bakhtin points out, “[T]he combination of human and animal traits is … one of the most ancient grotesque forms” (Rabelais 316. Subsequent citations of Bakhtin refer to this text unless otherwise indicated). Carter's wolf-narratives both deconstruct received assumptions of gender and desire, and offer alternative possibilities for understanding and constructing desire and sexuality.²

Traditional tales of wolves (and werewolves), such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” cast the wolf as masculine threat and danger, a force to be fought on its own terms of violence and dominance. Carter's re-visionings both appropriate and work against this tradition; her “Peter and the Wolf” in the collection Saints and Strangers is one such tale. Given her use of the same title, Sergei Prokofiev's popular musical score Peter and the Wolf, written for children in 1936 as an instructional guide to musical instruments, undoubtedly served as at least partial source material for her re-visioning.³ Prokofiev tells a story of masculine initiation: Peter, the youthful hero, proves his own masculine (predatory) power by capturing the predatory wolf. Prokofiev's well-known hero exhibits time-honored traits of a folktale's hero—courage and cunning—to rid his community of their enemy, the wolf; for his actions Peter is duly honored.⁴ Carter's story appropriates the masculine initiation narrative, but her Peter does not function as a heroic guide for children's socialization. Indeed, Carter's Peter exists as hero insofar as he challenges his community's traditions; after much unease and uncertainty, he repudiates the options offered him by tradition and accepts initiation into unmapped territory. In his reaction to encounters with the grotesque wolf-human, a girl-child, he subverts prevailing masculine conceptions of desire and sexuality, and offers an initiation story for the adult reader, not the child. My essay presents a reading of Carter's “Peter and the Wolf” as a tale in which the female grotesque, as a representation of otherness or difference, profoundly confuses Peter, ultimately propelling him, and the story, into the potential of an other desire. Preceding that discussion is a foundational accounting of matters relevant to that reading: Carter's insistence on the need for re-visioning; her feminist position regarding desire and sexuality; an integration of Bakhtin's and Cixous's theories; Carter's critical regard for the tale as genre; and an important connection between the tale as genre and Bakhtin's grotesque.

Carter understands that transparent realism—that category of fiction which renders events “as if” the reader is looking through a window at the familiar world—is bound to ideological presumptions of what constitutes reality; that is, it reflects a familiar, consensual reality, thereby implicating itself in dominant political and social conventions. She elects to explore possibilities for discovering, even inventing, alternative realities, ones not bound to convention or assumption. She does not presume to display a familiar “real life” and thus avoids the possibilities of indifference or, perhaps worse, of misleading readers into believing they are reading a representation of actual lived experience.⁵ Carter's retelling of “Peter and the Wolf” deconstructs and defamiliarizes original tales, most recognizably Prokofiev's, thus calling attention to both literature and reality as constructs or perceptions. In the tale itself, Carter textually reveals the operation of defamiliarization through the story's setting, the mountains of the Alps. The narrator notes that “with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there” (59); at the conclusion of the story, after Peter experiences the “vertigo of freedom,” we are told that “for the first time, he saw the primitive, vast, magnificent, barren, unkind simplicity of the mountain” (67). In her retellings, Carter defamiliarizes well-known tales, bringing both deeper understanding and renewal of those earlier versions.⁶

As a feminist writer, Carter particularly seeks to expose the constructed character of cultural representations of gender. While Carter does not presume to convey a “reality” of sexuality and desire, she does offer new, sometimes tentative, sometimes startling, ways of understanding and conceptualizing how they work. In opening new possibilities, Carter's appropriation of the wonder tale provides a genre within which she can deconstruct and subvert cultural mythology, leaving the reader the opportunity to consider alternative realms of desire. Carter engages the reader as a participant who is continually challenged, within and beyond the text, to expand possibilities of knowing and understanding the world—and other worlds—through story.

Recognizing that “[l]iterature is an inseparable part of the totality of culture and cannot be studied outside the total cultural context” (“Notes” 140), Mikhail Bakhtin theorizes grotesque realism as a mode which “discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life,” for it is “always conceiving” (48, 210). His belief in the transformative power of literature not only compares with Carter's creative desire but also corresponds to Hélène Cixous's utopian vision of the potential for cultural transformation contained in feminine writing: “Her [the feminine writer's] libido will produce far more radical effects of political and social change than some might like to think” (“Laugh” 339). Cixous contends that a feminine text poses a certain challenge to the reader: “A feminine text goes on and on and at a certain moment the volume comes to an end but the writing continues and for the reader this means being thrust into the void” (“Castration” 488-89).⁷ With the sense of ongoing movement, this void becomes one of potentialities; the reader must take the leap into this Cixousean void of potentialities, becoming a participant in the movement toward a potentially renewed futurity. In contrast to the obsession with the negative (death, loss, fear) that masculine writers evince, Cixous declares that feminine writers “have no womanly reason to pledge allegiance to the negative” for “they do not fetishize, they do not deny, they do not hate,” and “Wherever history still unfolds as the history of death, she [the feminine writer] does not tread” (“Laugh” 341, 348, 348). Masculine desire—as Lack in Western tradition—implies a void of finality in contrast to Cixous's void of potentiality which parallels Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque as a site of another way of life always conceiving.⁸ I contend that Carter's narrative of “Peter and the Wolf” depends upon an aesthetic of the grotesque inflected by a feminist desire for transformation, and that the theories of Bakhtin and Cixous provide an avenue for articulating that narrative's movement.

In the Afterword to her short fiction collection Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, Carter mentions two aspects of the tale as genre that link her creative aesthetic with the grotesque: first, tales are not implicated in deceptions of realism, and, second, they provoke an unease. To begin, she tells why short fiction, broadly considered, is an important genre to her: “The limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative” (Fireworks 132). This relatively uncomplicated fusion of sign and sense in her short fiction allows a sharp, intense narrative focus on particular aspects of desire and sexuality. Then, adding further to an understanding of the operation of her short fictions as a genre, she identifies those in Fireworks as tales, not short stories, a distinction that extends to her other short fiction collections as well. She defines what, to her, is the important difference: “Formally, the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretenses at the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience” (Fireworks 133). The tale, as she distinguishes it from the short story, is overtly interpretive, not descriptive of everyday life; it thereby offers an exploration of experience without presuming to convey either a projection or a reflection of lived experience. As Carter constructs tales that carry the reader into unfamiliar daily worlds of the marvelous and the fantastic, these worlds necessarily depend upon the tradition of the grotesque to plumb the “subterranean worlds of everyday experience.” Carter's grotesque subterranean worlds are relevant to lived experience and to the production of desire because they open avenues to the discovery of other ways of living and thinking; they toss the reader into a Cixousean void of potential.

Also in the Afterword to Fireworks Carter reflects back to another teller of tales who influenced her strongly: Edgar Allan Poe, creator of “Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror,” as she describes him (Fireworks 132). Noting his use of the tale as genre, she also maintains that the Gothic tradition of which he (and she) are part “retains a singular moral function—that of provoking unease” (Fireworks 133). In all her works, Carter, as “Peter and the Wolf” exemplifies, embraces the value of “provoking unease,” an unease produced when expectations of how the world operates are called into question or even shattered. Such unease prompts one of two reactions: either rejection of the “subterranean” or grotesque areas being explored, or the opening of different ways of understanding the world. Since the Gothic literary genre is inextricably bound to the grotesque for its effects, the unease that Carter designates as an effect of Gothic literature can be validly understood as indicative of the ambivalence which, as Bakhtin observes, is provoked by the grotesque. Bakhtin views ambivalence as regenerative and as central to understanding how the grotesque functions to achieve a transformative vision in literature. As struggle is set in motion, ambivalence liberates an energy that upsets and topples stasis. While regeneration is not certain, it is made possible by struggle. Ambivalence, equated here with the unease that Carter recognizes, denotes conflicting and/or confusing emotions; central to understanding the grotesque as an aesthetic category is the ambivalence it both constructs in the text and provokes in the reader. In Carter's “Peter and the Wolf,” the figure of Peter textually dramatizes this ambivalence, not the bravery of Prokofiev's Peter. Concurrently, the ambivalence aroused in the story's reader opens the way into the Cixousean void of potentiality, thereby setting in motion the transformative power of the grotesque.

Carter's “Peter and the Wolf” tells of an infant girl who was stolen and raised by wolves in the mountains of Eastern Europe. She had been living in a remote cabin with her parents when wolves attacked, killing the parents. The wolves did not mutilate the mother's corpse, but left only “a gnawed foot in a boot” as evidence of the father's probable defensive ferocity and his brutal death (59). When the story opens, eight years have passed since the girl's abduction. Her cousin Peter, only a year younger at seven, spies her one day while guarding his family's goats; he sees “the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently” (59). Carter's revisioning of wolf mythology underscores that fear is taught, and that fear, in its elemental magnitude, suppresses other ways of thinking. In “The Company of Wolves,” a tale in The Bloody Chamber that revises “Little Red Riding Hood,” the granddaughter dares to laugh at the wolf and at its representation as masculine predator, knowing that “she was nobody's meat”; she then sleeps “sweet and sound … between the paws of the tender wolf” (118). The granddaughter reconceives what she had been taught to fear and opens new ways of thinking about desire and sexuality. Similarly, Peter has been taught to fear the wolf; operating subtextually is that he has also been taught to fear the feminine, for it is the girl-child who is “advancing silently” with her wolf family. In this tale the grotesque and the female merge, creating a female grotesque that offers an other vision of sexuality and desire.

When Peter spies the wolves, Carter reminds us textually, as she did with the mountains, that familiarity risks the loss of discovery: “If they had not been the first wolves he had ever seen, the boy would not have inspected them so closely” (60). As a result of his close inspection, Peter discovers that “the third wolf was a prodigy, a marvel, a naked one, going on all fours, … hairless as regards the body although hair grew around its head” (60). When Peter later tells his grandmother that “‘There was a little girl with the wolves, granny,’” the narrator wonders, “Why was he so sure it had been a little girl?” for Peter would not have been able to see the genitalia since she was walking “on all fours.” Carter, while understanding gender as constructed, retains an enigmatic, elemental bodily link to sexuality with Peter's recognition of the girl's sex; the narrator speculates only that maybe “her hair was so long, so long and lively” (60). Although she hints here at a trace of body-inscribed sexuality, Carter comprehends the constructed nature of gender as, paradoxically, both determinant and potential. Contrary to prevailing, universalized notions and attitudes, Carter insists that gender and sexuality are not fixed according to anatomy or essences. In her “Polemical Preface” to The Sadeian Woman, Carter begins by voicing rejection of Freud's assertion that “anatomy is destiny”: “My anatomy is only part of an infinitely complex organisation, my self. The anatomical reductionalism … extracts all the evidence of me from myself and leaves behind only a single aspect of my life as a mammal. It enlarges this aspect, simplifies it and then presents it as the most significant aspect of my entire humanity” (Sadeian Woman 4).

The grandmother, hearing Peter's story, knows this girl-wolf to be her grandchild—Peter's cousin—and goes with Peter and his father to seize the wolf-child and bring her to the home. The ensuing ritualistic capture hyperbolizes the brutality of masculine containment of the feminine: “[S]omebody caught her with a sliding noose at the end of a rope; the noose over her head jerked tight. … The girl scratched and fought until the men tied her wrists and ankles together with twine and slung her from a pole. … Then she went limp … [and] pretended to be dead” (61). Even in all her ferocity, this girl-child does not, of course, stand a chance against several powerful men with their instruments of control. When a “big, grey, angry bitch appeared out of nowhere” and “Peter's father blasted it to bits with his shotgun” (61), Peter also witnesses the fate of a grown female wolf who challenges the men's power. Such scenes dramatize the logical extreme of masculine power allied with violence: utter repression or annihilation, the void of negation or Lack.

The particulars of the wolf-girl's body, pivotal to this tale, comprise a central component of the grotesque; as an analytical category the grotesque is represented by the body, and the metaphorical extensions of the grotesque body include the textual body and the social body. Bakhtin explains the importance of the grotesque body: “In grotesque realism … the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egotistic [contained] form” but represents “the epitome of incompleteness” (Rabelais 19, 26); it is “a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed” (317). Extended to the textual body, Bakhtin's celebration and elaboration of the grotesque body parallels Cixous's determination that a feminine text—a textual body—goes on and on; she extends the metaphor to include the reader who is catapulted into a void by the textual body's continual movement. Bakhtin contrasts grotesque bodies with those he refers to as existing in the “new bodily canon” (320) of the post-Renaissance modern world. These modern bodies are smooth and finished, and are reflected in “verbal norms of official and literary language” (320). He elaborates:

In the modern image of the individual body, sexual life, eating, drinking, and defecation have radically changed their meaning: they have been transferred to the private and psychological level where their connotation becomes narrow and specific, torn away from the direct relation to the life of society and to the cosmic whole. … [T]hey can no longer carry on their former philosophical functions. … All actions and events are interpreted on the level of a single, individual life. They are enclosed within the limits of the same body, limits that are the absolute beginning and end and can never meet.

(321-22)

The modern, individuated bodies cannot merge with the metaphoric social or cosmic body as does the grotesque body.⁹ Bakhtin asserts: “This bodily participation in the potentiality of another world, the bodily awareness of another world[,] has an immense importance for the grotesque” (48). Having developed the wolf's movements and habits, the girl-child of “Peter and the Wolf” has transgressed boundaries and fused with a disparate and alien realm, thus representing the potential inherent in the grotesque. When Peter “reads” her body, he will be tossed into a void; if he does not deny the implications of the grotesque body as “always becoming,” as not static, a potential will be generated in the void.

In an article that became part of her full-length exploration of the female grotesque, Mary Russo imagines a study that would explore the grotesque body in opposition to the modern idealized (static) body: “This category [of the female bodily grotesque] might be used affirmatively to destabilize the idealizations of the female beauty or to realign the mechanisms of desire” (“Female” 221). In “Peter and the Wolf” the girl-child's grotesque body does indeed both destabilize notions of female beauty and realign the mechanisms of desire, as Peter's reactions and actions indicate. Fundamental to Russo's category is the contrast of the static, closed, contained body of masculine idealization with the dynamic, open, boundless body of the female grotesque as it writes itself in feminine texts. Cixous maintains that the woman writer involved in feminine writing “will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display,” a display constructed by the male imagination (“Laugh” 337); in Carter's reinvented story of “Peter and the Wolf,” as in most of her fiction, the female body is a crucial site of transformation. In her essay “Coming to Writing,” Cixous describes the initial stages for (her)self of a process that is a personal “prospect of transformation,” the body that begins to write: “And in my body the breath of a giant, but no sentences at all. Who's pushing me? Who's invading? Who's changing me into a monster? Into a mouse wanting to swell to the size of a prophet? A joyful force” (10). Perhaps not coincidentally, Cixous's (feminine) written expression of her own transformative process relies on grotesque images: a giant, a monster, a mouse/prophet. Similar to Cixous's employing grotesque images to represent her feminine creative desire, Carter employs the female grotesque as a powerful catalyst for transformation. As “reader” of the female grotesque, Peter is catapulted into territory that indeed realigns the mechanisms of desire.

When Peter first views his cousin, she “was running … with her arse stuck up in the air” (60). A crucial quality of the grotesque body as Bakhtin describes it is its openness to, and connection with, the social and material world through its emphasis on the lower rather than the higher regions. Because the lower regions such as the “arse” are closer to the earth, they suggest the possibility of regeneration, whereas the upper region—the head—has traditionally represented the mind and its tendency toward abstraction and consequent universalized “truths” and essences. Further, the lower regions signify an important attribute of the grotesque body: degradation. The narrator exclaims, “[H]ow filthy she was! Caked with mud and dirt” and, bluntly, “She stank” (61). When Peter's father unties the wolf-child in the home, “[I]t was as if he had let a fiend loose” (62); not only does she ravage the room, but “[s]everal times, her bowels opened” (62). Filth and stench align and fuse the wolf-girl's body with the material world; she is even marked by the earth with “every inch of her chestnut hide … scored and scabbed with dozens of scars of sharp abrasions of rock and thorn” (61). In a surreal gesture, Carter further links this scene of degradation to the earth and its abundance when the wolf-child knocks over the meal barrel in her frenzy, and “the flour settled on everything like a magic powder that made everything strange” (62); the strangeness is both a defamiliarization and a blending of the profane (excrement) with earth's abundance (the magic powder of flour). The degradation of the family's simple home connects to the earth and potential regeneration, and displaces the sanitized and reified official world, thereby opening a space for transformation.

The climactic moment in the home occurs as the seven-year-old Peter, who is watching his cousin howl, views for the first time the female sex: “Her [vaginal] lips opened up as she howled so that she offered him, without her own intention or volition, a view of a set of Chinese boxes of whorled flesh that seemed to open one upon another into herself, drawing him into an inner, secret place in which destination perpetually receded before him, his first, devastating, vertiginous intimation of infinity” (63). With this powerful image, Peter encounters the female folds of flesh as signifier of infinity. For Freud, this moment of viewing female genitalia inscribes masculine fear of castration—the fear upon which masculine desire is constructed and from which springs a desire for control and containment; the Freudian female sex registers negation or Lack. Carter's retelling, however, turns this theory on its head, since Peter does not experience his first view of female genitalia as Lack but as Abundance. In a compelling essay, Jean Wyatt elucidates this moment: “[W]hen Carter's little boy, Peter, catches a glimpse of his girl cousin's body he sees what is there,” for “‘Peter and the Wolf’ attempts to revise this founding narrative [the Freudian narrative] of sexual difference by articulating the female genitalia as material presence,” not Lack (550, 551). Peter, unlike Freud's little boy, “doesn't reduce female difference to a logic of the same (having/not having the penis),” and thus “He enters a world unmapped by linguistic and doctrinal meanings, a world wide open to his discovery” (551, 552).¹⁰

Carter deploys the transformative possibilities of a specifically feminine grotesque, and offers another possibility of desire. Peter's story dramatizes a movement from the void of emptiness or Lack—the masculine void which originates in fear and manifests itself in the desire to contain or even to annihilate—to Cixous's void of potentialities and abundance. The female body in this story—a “secret place” of boundless movement without destination—recalls Cixous's description of the feminine textual body, the story that goes on and on, tossing the reader into a void. In his ambivalent reaction, Peter conceivably parallels the reader of the feminine text: “Peter's heart gave a hop, a skip, so that he had a sensation of falling; he was not conscious of his own fear because he could not take his eyes off the sight of the crevice of her girl-child's sex. … It exercised an absolute fascination upon him” (63). Peter is both frightened and fascinated; he has entered the world of the grotesque with its consequent unease—or ambivalence—that offers a potential realignment of desire and of categories of gender. If he should succumb to fear of this infinity, he will perpetuate masculine desire as founded upon Lack; if he resists fear, he will open other possibilities.

Soon after Peter's view of the female sex, a wolf-pack breaks into the home and reclaims its human member. When the “wolves were at the door” before breaking through to reclaim the girl-child, bringing with them “Dissonance [and] Terror,” Peter “would have given anything to turn time back, so that he might have run, shouting a warning, when he first caught sight of the wolves, and never seen her” (64). His ambivalence when he is confronted with the grotesque is apparent; he is besieged with both fascination and terror—as well as a futile, nostalgic desire to turn back time. Wolfgang Kayser, whose important study of the grotesque Bakhtin both appreciates and writes against, unconsciously and ironically demonstrates this ambivalence in his own admitted confusion as he explores the grotesque. Kayser perceives the site of the grotesque as an estranged, frightening, other world: “[T]he [perceived] order [of the world and of thought] is destroyed and an abyss opened where we thought to rest on firm ground” (59). He maintains that “The grotesque totally destroys the order [of recognizable reality] and deprives us of our foothold” and “We are unable to orient ourselves in the alienated world” (59, 185). The ontological uncertainty provoked by the grotesque disturbs Kayser's fascination with and appreciation of the grotesque.¹¹ Movement into an alien world necessitates a change in perception; transformation, which always involves a rupture with known reality, can be so frightening as to precipitate strong resistance in a desire to maintain order.

Kayser's discomfort with the power of the grotesque to disorient, combined with his fascination, demonstrates a reaction intrinsic to the grotesque: ambivalence. Even as he senses the grotesque as foreboding, he determines that “[i]n spite of all the helplessness and horror inspired by the dark forces [of the grotesque] … [its] truly artistic portrayal effects a secret liberation” (188). However, Kayser's fear eclipses the sense of liberation and manifests itself in a desire for order and control, for a hold on known reality and recognizable ontological categories. Kayser, fulfilling his own fear-induced desire to maintain control, emphatically sums up the grotesque in a final interpretive comment: “[W]e arrive at a final interpretation of the grotesque: AN ATTEMPT TO INVOKE AND SUBDUE THE DEMONIC ASPECTS OF THE WORLD” (188; capitalization in original). This final comment signals his fear of and successful retreat from the transformative power of the grotesque; Kayser resists falling into the “abyss” and regains his ontological footing through certitude and finality. Bakhtin, who views Kayser as mistakenly projecting his own fear onto the grotesque and as possessing a “somewhat distorted interpretation,” disputes him by rejoining that “[t]he existing world suddenly becomes alien … precisely because there is the potentiality of a friendly world” and that “[t]he world is destroyed so that it may be regenerated and renewed” (46). For Bakhtin, Kayser's fear represents “the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness” (47). The estranged world as Bakhtin perceives it can be productively compared to the Cixousean void into which a reader is catapulted and into which Peter is tossed following his second and final encounter with the grotesque female figure of his cousin.

In his grappling to understand his experience with the grotesque, Peter initially moves toward succumbing to fear and its resultant desire for containment and certitude, as exemplified by Kayser's reaction. A few months after the wolf-child has escaped with the wolf pack, the grandmother dies from a festering wound sustained when she had been bitten by her granddaughter wolf-child. Peter, “consumed by an imperious passion for atonement” as a result of his sense of responsibility for the grandmother's wound, asks the local priest to teach him to read so that he can pore over the Bible “looking for a clue to grace” (65). Peter seeks a traditional path to alleviate his troubling experience with the female grotesque—the path of transcendent religion, or, in this case specifically, a search for God's blessing on Man. For Carter, transcendence as traditionally understood is a dangerous illusion because it renders the physical, social world as relatively insignificant. Carter understands that meaningful transcendence can be effected, paradoxically, only via the material.¹² Not to contextualize desire or sexuality materially is to universalize them and thus to close them to transformative possibilities. Carter notes that “There is no way out of time. We must learn to live in this world … because it is the only world that we will ever know” (Sadeian Woman 110). And in an interview (1988), she speaks of her antipathy toward religion: “How do we know what is authentic behavior and what is inauthentic behavior? It's about the complex interrelation of reality and its representations. It has to do with a much older thing. I suppose it comes back to the idea of mythology and why I talk so much against religion. It's because it's presenting us with ideas about ourselves which don't come out of practice; they come out of theory” (“Interview” 16). Sexuality and desire are processes shaped by particularized social and bodily conditions; they are not determined essences. Peter initially elects to deny the flesh, the physical here and now, and enter a world of abstraction—the world of universal “truths” and core essences.

Carter's fictions work against this repressive universalizing, seeking to represent particularized voices of desire and sexuality. Peter's movement toward religion—metaphysical transcendence—denies his experience with the female grotesque. Striving to repudiate the flesh which irrevocably connects him to his wolf-cousin, he “fasted to the bone” and “lashed himself” (65). However, his path is marked by unease for, “as if to spite the four evangelists he nightly invoked to protect his bed, the nightmare regularly disordered his sleeps” (65); the unspecified nightmare signals his internal wrestling with his fears. Such dissonance and disorder characterize the grotesque in that they signify a disruption of stasis or containment. Peter, in striving to give himself up to religion, is seeking to contain, or explain, his encounter with the female grotesque, but he is later unable to do so.

At age fourteen, Peter sets off to study for the priesthood but remains ambivalent: “In spite of his eagerness to plunge into the white world of penance and devotion that awaited him, he was anxious and troubled for reasons he could not explain” (65). Peter has decided to enter the seminary to seek penance and to dissipate or control his fear of the world around him, particularly as provoked by the grotesque figure of his cousin. Bakhtin discusses fear's relation to orthodox seriousness: “[C]osmic terror … is the fear of that which is materially huge and cannot be overcome by force. It is used by all religious systems to oppress man and his consciousness” (12). Peter's plan to enter the seminary—a symbolic metaphysical space—promises to offer sanctuary from his fear, but its form of protection is suppression.

On his way to the seminary, Peter pauses to wash his face at a stream and once again sees his cousin, who, lapping the stream's water, projects “a different kind of consciousness,” one that might have existed “before the Fall” (66); this female wolf-human suggests the possibility of an other story following the Fall—with accompanying new stories of desire and sexuality. When two cubs roll out of the bushes, Peter “began to tremble and shake. … He felt he had been made of snow and now might melt” (66); any ontological certainty he was previously trying to maintain begins to dissipate. His wolf-cousin again strikes a grotesque figure at the stream with her wolf-cubs: “Her forearms, her loins and her legs were thick with hair and the hair on her head hung round her face … She crouched on the other side of the river … lapping up water” (64). When “[t]he little cubs fastened their mouths on her dangling breasts” (65), Peter stumbles toward them, “intending to cross over to the other side to join her in her marvellous and private grace, impelled by the access of an almost visionary ecstasy” (66). Peter experiences an epiphany but not one founded upon abstraction; Peter does not find the grace he seeks in the Bible's transcendent God but rather in the half-animal fleshly figure of the female grotesque. Even though his wolf-cousin and her cubs flee at his sudden movement, Peter has experienced a material transcendence—a “visionary ecstasy”—as effected via the flesh, the body. Sensing his own indissoluble connection to this alien figure, he apprehends life's abundant potential.

The visionary ecstasy inspired by the compelling elemental grotesque of the half-human/half-animal defeats the cosmic terror from which Peter suffers, and propels him into possibilities; he wonders, “[W]hat would he do at the seminary, now? For now he knew there was nothing to be afraid of. He experienced the vertigo of freedom” (66). Years earlier, the sight of the female grotesque had filled him with a vertiginous intimation of infinity, a void that could possess either negation or potential. With his second sighting of the female grotesque, Peter experiences the void as freedom or potential; he gains the liberation that Kayser only sensed. Peter then “determinedly set his face towards the town and tramped onwards, into a different story” (67). Revised by Carter, the story of Peter and the Wolf goes on and on. Whereas Prokofiev's Peter marches triumphantly carrying the captured wolf, thus fulfilling the expectation of a happy ending, Carter's Peter abandons tradition and journeys into unmapped territory—“a different story” or, as Bakhtin designates the grotesque, “another way of life.”¹³ The ending to Carter's wonder tale is triumphant in Peter's rejection of tradition. His initiation into a different story coincides with the reader's dizzying movement into the Cixousean void of potentialities as written into this text. The reader can understand the story as a representation of process; the story does not conclude but continues on and on. Peter (likewise Carter) repudiates the story a masculine tradition had scripted. The female grotesque—the unfamiliar, the other—shatters his known world and propels him first into fascination, ambivalence, and fear; when fear is replaced by an understanding of profound connection with the female grotesque (the Other), Peter is liberated and moves into other possibilities of living. He, like the reader, is then enabled to reconstruct, or rewrite, his desire and his story; there is no conclusive ending, only the potential of process. Carter writes in her story “Wolf-Alice” that if the wolf-child could be transported back to Eden, “she might prove to be the wise child who leads them all” (121); the same can surely be said of Peter's cousin—the female grotesque.

The Cixousean void is not meant to invoke a metaphysical, transcendent space; indeed, such a space would be anathema to Carter. I like to think of the Cixousean void as analogous to the void of quantum physics, which, paradoxically, possesses the whole of potential reality—a space not of emptiness or Lack but of an energy that creates all potential manifestations of reality. In The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra, exploring a comparison between the mystical Buddhist void and the quantum field of subatomic physics, notes that both conceptualize “a Void which has an infinite creative potential” that shapes the essential nature of reality (212). The physical vacuum of quantum physics pulsates endlessly in a rhythm of destruction and creation. This dynamic quality of continual death and regeneration is reminiscent of the grotesque, which both destroys and regenerates. Sexuality and desire cannot be adequately represented by static or contained forms but require continual transformation and movement into diverse shapes and forms. Confronting the grotesque text, the reader does not find a closed world of finitude, negation, or certainty; s/he is tossed into a dynamic void of regenerative potential. Through her re-visionings of tales, Carter reveals that continual reinvention—or process—imparts new possibilities. For Carter as a writer, continual exploration and regeneration are an imperative responsibility; as the reader celebrates a transformative narrative, s/he is propelled into realizable worlds of an other sexuality and desire that offer the possibility of social transformation.

Notes

1. In her study of the female grotesque, Mary Russo indicates the feminist need for modifying Bakhtin's theories of the grotesque: “Bakhtin … fails to acknowledge or incorporate the social relations of gender in his semiotic model of the body politic, and thus his notion of the Female Grotesque remains in all directions repressed and undeveloped” (Female 63). Cixous provides abundant theory on the social relations of gender, while Carter's fiction abounds with (feminist) configurations of a complex female grotesque that incorporates social relations of gender.

2. In his Introduction to the complete collection of Carter's short stories, Salman Rushdie mourns the loss of Carter to an early death and longs for the “full-scale wolf novel she never wrote” (xii).

3. In her 1986 review of Carter's story collection Saints and Strangers, Ann Snitow also assumes Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf as Carter's primary folktale reference source for “Peter and the Wolf.” However, the earliest sources of stories about shepherds, wolves, and boys are Aesop's fables, another probable source for Carter to have closely explored. Further, the enduring success and fame of Prokofiev's composition, for which he wrote both the text and musical score, is attributed to his high regard for the childhood imagination and to his lifelong love of fairy tale and fantasy. As one biographer puts it, “His interest in the fanciful manifested itself throughout his life. … He was very much attracted by myths, tales, bylini, and fantasies of all kinds. He conjured up in his music … images from such wonderful storytellers as Andersen and Gozzi, Perrault and Bazhov, as well as from ancient Slavic mythology and Russian, French, and Kazakh folk tales” (Nestyev 457). As I do with Carter, then, I also assume as highly likely Prokofiev's familiarity with Aesop's fables. Relevant fables—those that tell of wolves, shepherds, and boys—exist in almost any collection of Aesop. For example, Jack Zipes's collection includes “The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf” (72) and “The Wolf and the Shepherd” (201); the former tells the familiar fable of the shepherd boy who cried “Wolf,” and the latter tells of a shepherd who foolishly comes to trust a wolf, only to have the wolf devour his flock. Joseph Jacobs's 1966 collection includes “The Wolf and the Kid,” in which a boy spies a wolf from atop his family's cottage, not unlike Prokofiev's Peter who, peering from behind a protective gate, spies a wolf (40-41). Aesop's kid chastises the wolf, only to be scorned by the wolf who knows that the boy, from his distance, is not a danger. In Prokofiev's tale, however, the young Peter climbs a tree in order to lasso the wolf and save the smaller vulnerable animals. In “The Shepherd and the Wolf,” an Aesop fable found in the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library (92), a shepherd raises a wolf cub with his dogs, but must kill the wolf when he discovers it murdering his sheep; this fable's moral validates the notion of “unchangeable nature.” Certainly, Carter subverts this notion with the wolf-child of her story, who, though human, reveals no “human nature.” (None of these fables, though, gives a name to the boys or shepherds; Prokofiev assigns the name “Peter” to the character in his narrative, as does Carter.) With such wide-ranging source material, any speculation here as to specific source(es) for either Carter or Prokofiev is just that—speculation.

4. Prokofiev wrote the character of Peter as a Pioneer, a member “of a Soviet organization for children of grammar-school age—a sort of politicized Cub Scouts” (Robinson 321). The construction of Peter as hero is reflected in Prokofiev's original title for the composition: How Peter Outwitted the Wolf. Prokofiev was a Russian nationalist who, unlike other Soviet artists or intellectuals (such as Bakhtin), determined “to become more deeply involved in the Soviet musical establishment” (Robinson 285); indeed, Peter and the Wolf was written in 1936 for the Moscow Children's Musical Theater.

5. Carter writes in the Introduction to a collection of her essays, Expletives Deleted, of her mother's cautions regarding realistic fiction: “My mother preferred Boswell, Pepys—she adored gossip, … but she mistrusted fiction because she believed fiction gave an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: ‘Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary’” (1). But Carter also tells us, “Don't think I don't like real novels, though … I do like novels! I do! In spite of my mother's warning. Although, if a comic charlady obtrudes upon the action of a real novel, I will fling the novel against the wall amidst a flood of obscenities because the presence of such a character as a comic charlady tells me more than I wish to know about the way her creator sees the world” (3).

6. For an exploration of the historical intertextuality of the postmodern fairy tale, see Cristina Bacchilega's recently published book Postmodern Fairy Tales. Observing that “by working from the fairy tales' multiple versions, [the postmodern revisionist is] seeking to expose … what the institutionalization of such tales for children has forgotten or left unexploited,” she contends that such a project does more than “interpret anew or shake the genre's ground rules. It listens for the many ‘voices’ of fairy tales as well, as part of a historicizing and performance-oriented project” (50).

7. Cixous does not restrict feminine writing to women. In an interview, as well as in other writings, she repeatedly makes the point that “I do not equate feminine with woman and masculine with man” (“Exchange” 154). She explains:

   the preliminary question is that of a “feminine writing,” itself a dangerous and stylish expression full of traps, which leads to all kinds of confusions. … The use of the word “feminine” … is one of the curses of our times. First of all, words like “masculine” and “feminine” … that are completely distorted by everyday usage,—words which refer, of course, to a classical vision of sexual opposition between men and women—are our burden. … I speak of a decipherable libidinal femininity which can be read in a writing produced by a male or female.

   (129)

8. Margaret Atwood writes of the masculine construction of and fear of the void—a void that she says woman doesn't understand. Pointing to the masculine desire to divide, to arrange categories, to be “objective,” she concludes that

   This is why men are so sad, why they feel so cut off, why they think themselves as orphans cast adrift, footloose and stringless in the deep void. What void? she says. … The void of the Universe, he says, and she says Oh and looks out the window and tries to get a handle on it, but it's no use, there's too much going on, too many rustlings in the leaves, too many voices. … And he grinds his teeth because she doesn't understand, and wanders off, not just alone but Alone, lost in the dark, lost in the skull.

   (Good Bones and Simple Murders 76)

   Atwood's female character's perception of “too much going on, … too many voices” corresponds to Cixous's void of potential.

9. Bakhtin's celebration of the grotesque body in opposition to a sanitized body has been discussed in relation to the fact of Bakhtin's writing during the time of Stalinist Russia; in part he was reacting against Stalinist tyranny over the masses. (Compare with Prokofiev's position in Russia, endnote 4.) For instance, in their comprehensive study of Bakhtin's work, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson point out that “[i]f Socialist Realist art (and what today might be called fascist art) emphasizes the clean, closed-off, and narcissistic body, the art of the grotesque stresses exchange, mediation, and the ability to surprise” (449). Bakhtin, as a persecuted intellectual during the Stalinist regime, would celebrate the grotesque as a strategy of subversion.

10. Wyatt's essay, which only touches upon “Peter and the Wolf,” provides a cogent critique of castration images in two of Carter's novels, The Magic Toyshop and The Passion of New Eve. Pointing out that Carter understands Freud's narratives of sexual difference “as powerful ideological tools for inscribing and so insuring women's inferiority,” Wyatt draws upon Lacan and Irigaray as she explores how Carter employs the “castrated” female body to envision new possibilities for both the masculine and the feminine (549-50).

11. For another explication of Bakhtin's “positive” grotesque in relation to the “negative” grotesque of the post-Romantic (Kayser's position), see Heather Johnson's essay “Textualizing the Double-Gendered Body: Forms of the Grotesque in [Carter's] The Passion of New Eve.” Johnson uncovers elements of both the positive and negative grotesque forms in that novel, specifically as configured in the bodies of the two central hermaphrodite characters.

12. In a passage from The Sadeian Woman, Carter subtextually links the body with God via writing. For her, writing “turns the flesh into word” (13). The “word” in this transmutation reshapes the metaphysical metaphor of “In the beginning was the word, and the word was God,” that is, the metaphor of the transcendent authority of language, the authority of language to reveal the world. For Carter, the word—language—is the body transformed. The word might indeed reveal God, but God is the flesh, the body, the earthly—not a metaphysical non-presence. The flesh, being of the world, knows the world, and will discursively reveal, and re-create, its knowingness. For Carter, narrative enactments—words as story—deploy bodily pleasure (or displeasure). Cixous also develops her theory of écriture féminine on this supposition. For Carter and Cixous, desire and sexuality are inextricably bound both to the flesh and to language in their material contexts.

13. Regarding Prokofiev's conclusion in which there is “the victorious procession of the brave Peter and his hunter friends leading the captured wolf away,” Nestyev writes, “[W]hile all the principal characters pass before the listener, Peter's theme is transformed from a light, carefree tune into a pompous, sharply accented march” (281). In its conclusion, Prokofiev's tale glorifies, in both text and musical composition, the masculine story of dominance and control.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Good Bones and Simple Murders. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “From Notes Made in 1970-71.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 132-55.

———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. 3rd ed., exp. Boston: Shambhala, 1991.

Carter, Angela. Afterword. Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces. By Carter. 1974. New York: Penguin, 1984. 132-33.

———. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 1979.

———. Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings. London: Vintage, 1992.

———. “An Interview with Angela Carter.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 11-17.

———. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. New York: Pantheon, 1979.

———. Saints and Strangers. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Clxous, Hélène. ‘Castration or Decapitation?” Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York: Longman, 1989. 479-91.

———. “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays. Ed. Deborah Jenson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

———. “An Exchange with Hélène Cixous.” 1982. Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Verena Andermatt Conley. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984. 129-61.

———. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1.4 (1975): 875-93. Rpt. in Feminisms. Ed. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. 334-49.

Jacobs, Joseph, ed. The Fables of Aesop. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966.

Johnson, Heather. “Textualizing the Double-Gendered Body: Forms of the Grotesque in The Passion of New Eve.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 43-48.

Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963.

Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Nestyev, Israel V. Prokofiev. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1960.

Prokofiev, Sergei. Peter and the Wolf. Virgin Classics Ultraviolet, 1994.

Robinson, Harlow. Sergei Prokofiev. New York: Viking, 1987.

Rushdie, Salman. Introduction. Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. By Angela Carter. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. ix-xiv.

Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 1994.

———. “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory.” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 213-29.

Snitow, Ann. “The Post-Lapsarian Eve.” The Nation 4 Oct. 1986: 315-17.

Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library. The Medici Aesop. Ed. Everett Fahy. Trans. Bernard McTigue. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989.

Wyatt, Jean. “The Violence of Gendering: Castration Images in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, and ‘Peter and the Wolf.’” Women's Studies 25 (1996): 549-70.

Zipes, Jack, ed. Aesop's Fables. New York: Signet, 1992.