Analysis on the Erl King

Context.

The Erl King is a character depicted in a number of German poems and ballads as a malevolent creature whom haunts forests and carries travellers to their deaths. The 'Erl King' was most famous as the antagonist in Goethe's poem Der Erlkonig, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3nxyS8wf8E)

"I love you, your beautiful form entices me;

And if you're not willing, then I will use force."
"My father, my father, he's touching me now!
The Elfking has done me harm!"
It horrifies the father; he swiftly rides on,
He holds the moaning child in his arms,
Reaches the farm with great difficulty;
In his arms, the child was dead.

The Erl King could also be paralleled to the green man- the personification of nature found in many cultures in the world.

Quick Summary.

A teenage girl walking through a deserted, isolated forest is seduced by a wild man who lives there - The Erl King (personification of the woods). She falls in love with this man and becomes vulnerable under his power as she is taken in by him. As he teaches her the ways of his woods, she realizes that he is weaving her a cage to keep her in, along with the other birds which he keeps. The climax of the story is her actions following her realization as she strangles him with her own hair and sets the birds free. 

However the story is not so simple as The Erl King is the most innovative and experimental in its narrative form. 

Setting.

      The setting is very important in creating the tense atmosphere in ‘The Erl-King’, as she devotes 2 pages at the start describing the setting of the forest to create a gloomy threatening scene.  The forest represents the subconscious, a place of darkness away from ‘civilizing’ influences, where the narrator figure discovers and confronts alternative aspects of her personality. It is the Erl-king himself who comes to symbolize his alternative personality. The colors are dull and “discolored” giving a sense of decay and death. Overall the setting created is very depressing and typically Gothic – “dead bracken”, saddest time of the year”, “sulfur yellow”and “nicotine stained fingers”. As well as this in the opening to the text there is a reference to entrapment- Vertical bars of a brass-colored distillation of light coming down- giving an impression of a cage. This could foreshadow the intentions of the Erl king. 

The Narration. 

From the tale's beginning, slipping pronouns and sliding tenses suggest that "The Erl-King" is, in Daphne Marlatt's terms, a "labyrinth of language". On one level, "The Erl-King" is a series of broken contracts between writer and reader. Like the young girl who voyages trustingly into the woods on a visit to granny, the reader cracks the spine of this tale with certain expectations of intelligibility. Just as the girl never reaches granny's house, the reader is similarly refuse everything from a fixed ending to a clear differentiation of one narrator from another.

The confusion only increases with the realization that Carter's pronouns produce the reader as a character. The third-person narrator's early assertion, for example, that "You step between the fir trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up" situates the reader firmly within the woods.The tense shift from past, present and future also adds confusion to the story, giving the reader the same confusion of emotions as the narrator so that we can emphasize with her more. This change in tense may also contribute the idea of mortality and time, linking to the ideal of renewal presented by the green man. 

The Erl King. 

The reader can see the characterization of The Erl King becomes “blurred”- he may be described as an vampire and yet he is “innocent”. For example it captures the Gothic antithesis. The most accurate quote describing his “blurred” characterization ,which was contributed through the narrative technique of varying tenses is the following, which capture the Gothic antitheses surrounding the Erl-King perfectly:

"tender butcher" - this oxymoronic phrase is memorable and presents both extreme sides to the Erl-King in just two words by utilizing juxtaposition. 

"his touch consoles and devastates me" - this phrase can be used to relate the Erl-King to the Marquis in The Bloody Chamber - is Carter saying something about sexual psychology? Do we have any control as to who we are attracted to?

Key Themes.

The Blurring of moral boundaries

Metamorphosis

Power of nature.

Entrapment. 

Power.

Aggression

Supernatural

Mortality 

Women in the Gothic. 

In the original Gothic the place of women was very clearly delineated women were innocent, persecuted, usually on the run and had very little power on their own. This relates to the classic Gothic however such as Frankenstein. However the position of women in Gothic has changed recently due to the changing position in general in western cultures. For Angela carter there is a different approach to how women may experience and remake own desires even in the fact of imminent danger. For example the male characters reek of danger yet the women are able to become agents in their own right and manage to, in this case, overcome the danger. 

The Male Gaze

In her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema",Laura Mulvey introduced the second-wave feminist concept of "male gaze" as a feature of gender power asymmetry in film.

            The male gaze occurs when the camera puts the audience into the perspective of      heterosexual man. It may linger over the curves of a woman's body, for instance. The woman is usually displayed on two different levels: as an erotic object for both the characters within the film, as well as for the spectator who is watching the film. The man emerges as the dominant power within the created film fantasy. The woman is passive to the active gaze from the man. This adds an element of 'patriarchal' order and it is often seen in "illusionist narrative film". Mulvey argues that, in mainstream cinema, the male gaze typically takes precedence over the female gaze, reflecting an underlying power asymmetry.

This is of importance in the collection of short stories as there is a constant repetition over the motif of  "eyes" within the text, Eyes in the Erl-king and other stories such as ‘The Bloody Chamber’ represent how the male consumes the female both physically and in terms of destroying her 

independence and identity, by the way that the male visual desire determines how a women looks.

 For example: There are some eyes can eat you”. black vortex of his eye” (pg. 103) “green eye is a 

reducing chamber”  (pg. 103) "if I look into it long enough, I will become as small as my own 

reflection"

 Key Quotes. 

Perfect transparency must be impenetrable”

“Vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light coming down

“You step between the first trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the woods swallow you up”

“It is easy to lose yourself in these woods”

“Erl-king will do you grievous harm” (pg. 97)

“There are some eyes can eat you” (pg. 98)

“He came alive from the desire of the woods” (pg.98)

“white pointed teeth” (pg. 99)

 “all its strings are broken” (pg. 100)

“He strips me to my last nakedness” (pg. 100)

His touch both consoles and devastates me” (pg. 102)

 “black vortex of his eye” (pg. 103)

“green eye is a reducing chamber”  (pg. 103

 “the birds don’t sing, they only cry because they can’t find their way out of the wood” (pg. 103)

         “each with the crimson imprint of his love bite on their throats” (pg. 104)