AUDIO

All the stories for this week deal with a very controversial and delicate subject matter: the effects of sexual initiation or loss of innocence upon young women.

“The Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter

Wikipedia cites Charles Perrault as originator of the fairy tale genre, but of course these stories were around long before Perrault wrote them down. If you checked the Internet, you saw that there are many versions of “Little Red-Riding Hood.” (Little Red has no name –she is called instead by the name of her cloak – talk about a marked woman!)  In some versions, including Perrault’s, she is eaten by the wolf; others end more happily with her rescue by a handsome huntsman, or, my personal favorite, by a group of women who help her send the wolf to an unhappy end. The huntsman ending has the unfortunate effect of sending any prepubescent or adolescent girl the message that though evil lurks out there in the forest, a handsome young man will show up in the nick of time to rescue one.

The story has often been analyzed as a kind of “coming of age” story – the red cloak a symbol of the onset of menstruation and the wolf a sexual predator, not a literal hungry animal.(Wolves have a lot of undeserved bad press, but that’s another story.) Little Red’s being devoured by the wolf then is not necessarily the tale of a serial killer, but a variation on the old motif of “death and the maiden,”  in which sexual initiation has long been symbolized by death itself, symbolically the death of innocence.

Perrault turns this rich, multi-faceted legend into a simple morality tale cautioning young ladies to stay away from all men, even those who seem benign, for the wolf can disguise his bestial nature and appear charming, but once you’re alone with him and he has the advantage, watch out. Perrault does not mean that the wolfish young men will rape and kill the ladies. He is concerned with loss of virginity, in olden times and in some cultures even today, tantamount to death. His tale is one of seduction.

Is seduction rape? It’s not necessarily violent. The young woman may find herself lured into bed by sweet talk, her fledgling sexual responses aroused. She may be fooled into acting against her best interests (as the great numbers of teen age pregnancies will attest). What goes on between two people in bed? Who is the aggressor if indeed there is aggression at all? What if the woman, finding things going too far, calls a halt to the proceedings yet is ignored? Can we blame an impassioned young man for asserting his superior strength and ignoring her pleas? Is this simply the nature of the (male) beast? It is hard to imagine the opposite case scenario where the young man pleads with the young woman not to continue and she ignores him. Possibly more common still, what if the woman wants to stop but is afraid for various reasons, loss of the young man’s affections, for instance, confusion in her own mind about what is appropriate, her own passions contending with all kinds of Perraultish moral injunctions?

It is true that we have less sympathy for the older man who treats the seduction of virgins as a game, and none for the man, young or old, who ignores pleas and brutally insists on having his own way when it is very clear that the young woman does not wish to continue. But in many cases, the situation is murky – even to the participants.

This ambivalence is, I think, reflected in Angela Carter’s version of “Little Red Riding-Hood.” Carter prefaces her re-telling with eerie descriptions of the forest: “You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are. Step between the portals of the great pines where the shaggy branches tangle about you,” warnings to “[f]ear and flee the wolf; for, worst of all, the wolf may be more than he seems”; speculations on werewolf-nature, and interpolations of other werewolf legends. Then Carter introduces her version of Little Red, no shy violet but a little girl who has been "too much loved ever to feel scared.”  A “strong-minded child” who “insists she will go off through the wood” even though it is “the worst time in all the year for wolves.” She is prudent since though “[s]he is quite sure the wild beasts cannot harm her […], well-warned, she lays a carving knife in the basket her mother has packed with cheeses.”

It is good that this child is confident and prepared, for while the less gruesome versions of the older tales add the figure of the woodsman -- and thus split the generic lusty young man into two selves, wolves and saviors, Carter combines these two figures again, having the huntsman a werewolf, by far a more appropriate symbol of bestial male sexuality than the mere wolf of Perrault’s version.(Wikipedia will even tell you how to become a werewolf if this is your desire).

Carter makes the latent symbolic elements in the old story fully explicit, describing “the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow.” The young girl’s “breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like lint, so fair it hardly makes a shadow on her pale forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman's bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month.”

She is a virgin but a daring one: “She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.”

Clearly attracted to the charming young huntsman, she agrees to meet him at her grandmother’s house and then delays her arrival so that he can win the bet they made. How like a girl – let the man win! Of course, her delay gives him time to devour her grandmother and dress himself in the well-known disguise. The tale proceeds as usual until to our surprise and delight she is smarter than her predecessor, for when she sees “a tuft of white hair that had caught in the bark of an unburned log” she knows she is “in danger of death.” She is afraid but soon realizes “her fear did her no good,” so, instead of succumbing to the female stereotype and becoming powerless with terror, “she ceased to be afraid.” When he tells her his big teeth are “the better to eat you with,” she tries the best of all tactics (but use this one with care; you have to know your wolf): she “burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing.”  Her lust is fiercer than his own. Burning her clothes too she is fully awakened to her own sexuality and entranced by the size of his genitals, big like his eyes and teeth; she welcomes him with ardor as she “freely gave the kiss she owed him." The story ends with her not devoured but asleep in his tender loving arms.

What has she done? Awakened to her own sexuality and all its powers or made the best of a bad situation, succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome as many women do – the name for the situation where the victim identifies with and comes to love the victimizer?

It is hard to say: she assents to the wolf’s demands with such ardor, her kiss is given freely, and she is forthright about burning not only his clothes but her own as if willing to start a new life with him. On the other hand, the situation is prefaced with such dire descriptions of danger lurking in the forest, and it must be hard to feel comfortable with a wolf who is also a man, a man who is also a wolf.

The story reflects ambivalence, perhaps the author’s, perhaps an ambivalence shared by many women.

“Seeing” by Daphne Kolotay

No such ambivalence can be found in this story. There is no question that Brenda does not desire the rapist. Brenda also is no child on the verge of puberty, but a grown woman divorced from a cheating husband. But virginity and innocence are not synonymous.

This is no ancient legend set in a mythological village bordered by an ominous forest. Brenda works in an office and enjoys walking in the early evening. Like Red Riding-Hood she is lured by wilderness though less confident of her ability to survive it: “Evenings were her freedom. She loved watching the smooth folds of the Sangre de Cristo mountains bend sunshine into a series of dark shadows and bright slopes. Many of the dirt roads along her walk seemed to head straight into them, and though Brenda would have loved to follow those paths of winding gravel past farms and cattle right into the land itself, she never did.”  She does not indulge in bravado: “She was a young woman alone on an evening stroll, and those country roads seemed possibly dangerous, ruled by mangy, unleashed dogs defending no one's territory and hand-made crosses where loved ones had died in car wrecks.” There are no more werewolves or wolves either for that matter, just “mangy dogs.” And she is no stranger to ordinary harassment: “Some men in pickups passed, calling briefly to Brenda, their dogs yapping halfheartedly at her from trailer beds. Brenda had grown used to this. No matter where women went, men drove by in menacing, oversized trucks and leaned out of tinted windows to whistle at them.” That these relatively harmless men are accompanied by dogs perhaps suggests a remnant of the old tale with its juxtaposition of man and wolf, but the modern world seems robbed of fierceness though it is still a world where a lone woman is subject to harassment and danger.

Indeed the first man to accost Brenda with the insinuating “Hey Baby” is not a predator but simply Leroy Sanchez, a harmless happily married man (with a family of beloved dogs) from her office reminding her to bring donuts. But the second man is the genuine article, a creep in a red (note the color) pick up.

Like Carter’s Red Riding Hood in her encounter with the woodsman, Brenda responds courteously and we learn “Brenda had been taught to be polite,” a feature of American culture “influenced by the Northern European and British emphasis on public decorum” mentioned by Deborah Tannen in “Moving Violations”:  “Most of the American women [….] told me they had felt humiliated and helpless and had done or said nothing. Of the 25 stories Greek women told me, only eight concluded with the speaker doing nothing. In the others, she said she had yelled, struck back or both.”

As Brenda realizes she is in danger, she looks around for help and plans to ask a young bicyclist, but self doubts assail her:

“When the moment came, something happened: Brenda doubted herself. Who could say she was truly threatened? She didn't want to look a fool. Her ex-husband had told her she was too jumpy.”

Tannen sees this tendency too as cultural: Americans rarely get involved with strangers in trouble.

Brenda comforts herself with her innocent ideal of herself: “Nothing bad was going to happen to her. She simply wasn't that sort of person. She had lived for twenty-five years keeping out of trouble.”

Realizing like Carter’s little girl that her fear would do her no good, she too sees the predator’s vulnerability.“He's not sure, Brenda told herself. He's not entirely sure.” She like Carter’s heroine is not about to become anyone’s meat:

”Brenda walked straight toward the man. She looked him in the eye and placed her right hand inside the pocket of her shorts. In this pocket was a small flat key tied to a shoelace. She balled her fist around the little key and, looking into the eyes of the man, walked directly at him. Never had Brenda allowed herself to feel so preposterously confident.The frightening thing was that it worked. The man began to back away, toward the other side of the street, where his truck loomed like a sore bully.”

Here too the incident doesn’t end badly for the victim. In this case, the rapist retreats.

The story moves forward several months when Brenda is chatting with Leroy at the office. She has told no friends about her experience – many women do not -- though the reader learns that she had reported the incident to the police. She was right to be afraid, the man had raped another woman later that night. There is no Stockholm Syndrome here but another syndrome for our times -- post-traumatic stress disorder.  She imagines horrible things. A spot of red on the ceiling is a growing stain of blood. Though she survived unscathed physically, the experience has taken a mental toll. “Brenda understood: only a few people were able to see. Now she, too, because of the man in the blue bandana, could see, would forever see, all around her, the terrifying possibilities of the world.” For this also is a story of loss of innocence.

The young man on the bicycle who might have rescued her recurs in her imagination. “Often she thought of the bicyclist who had peddled so swiftly by on that July evening, how he had not seemed even to see her. He did not see because he could not. He was not one of those people.” In the world created by  Daphne Kalotay, there are no rescuers and a woman alone must know how to defend herself. Though she may do so, her peace of mind is gone and she remains haunted by the knowledge she has gained.

“The History” by Patricia Sarafian Ward

In this story there is no dark forest and no young woman walking a dangerous boundary between civilization and wilderness. The forest is replaced by war-torn Lebanon. War, the ultimate in patriarchy, where groups of men (and the women who support them or who are dependent on them) kill each other for power. Lara and Lulwa have lived with it for years and it has taken its toll on them and their father. He, robbed of any male feelings of effectiveness, is powerless to stop events. His characterization of his daughters as they grow up sees neither one whole – one becomes the angel in the house who must be protected at all cost; the other is the whore to be accused of betrayal, the bad child who is somehow responsible for her sister’s maiming.

The father senses Raymond is not staying with them just to learn about his heritage and write about the war in his adolescent journalist pose, but he fails to see that “[f]rom the moment he arrived, Raymond just could not stop looking at Lulwa's scars. He fell in love with those scars. Scars have astonishing effects on people, and missing body parts even more so, and little Lulwa's left side put hooks into his eyes and drew them this way and that all around the house.” Instead the father angrily interrogates his older daughter: “He slapped the book off my knees. ‘Why does he want to stay? [….] You will no longer wear only your towel when you come from the shower."   And later after Raymond’s death he accuses her of hiring a lover to kill Raymond: “He thinks I paid someone, probably a starving boy-sniper he imagines I'd had sex with, paid him to kill his boy-man nephew. I am bewildered by this. After so many years of chance, of the hilarity of surprises, the incomprehensible events that took Lulwa's body and distorted it, took my mother long ago, drove me mad, he thinks that plans like this can be made, that we can govern fate, pay fate to do what we desire.”

In this story the gulf between men and women’s worlds is as pronounced as in “Trifles.”  Men understand the world; women’s sphere is the home and their stories are not important. Lara does not want to drive around the city with her father and Raymond: “I could not imagine being confined to the back seat while my father explained the world to Raymond, while my father made his speeches about poverty and refugees and nationalism, omitting the most important truths, those about himself and his crazy daughter Lara, the one who when she was fifteen had bitten the flesh from her own arm to prove a point.”  It is only gradually that we understand why Lara did this, the “history” of what happened in this family, the history that Raymond is only interested in because it seems to excite him sexually. Lara recounts this history in third person narration toward the end of the story:

“Her sister Lara was immobilized by fear while Lulwa lay screaming on the asphalt. Blank spaces rested between these words, the story of her recovery. History would be incomplete in Raymond's notebook without the story of me on the floor of my bedroom praying to God, without the story of my father dragging me to Lulwa's room to apologize, and Lulwa crying, begging him to leave me alone, her bandages changed by the same hands that gripped my shoulders, held me in place at the foot of her bed.”

But Raymond would not write about family history. That’s women’s work: “Raymond's notebook was filled with writing about nothing of consequence, about pigeons and car rides, miserable little maimings that happen every day to anyone, the pathetic fears and mistakes common to every war. [….] "

Is Lara a betrayer? Did she delay responding to her sister out of unconscious jealousy or was she simply traumatized? The father’s feelings for his daughters as they grow up is not unusual, a perversion of what fathers are supposed to feel, a sexual response that cannot be effectively repressed and so comes out in twisted ways.

Into this came Ray, in one sense an innocent, in another way so secure in his identify and masculinity that he can regard this all as a game.He adopts the pose of worldly journalist and his immaturity is shown in his attraction to Lulwa. When Lara finds them having sex, his fate is sealed.

What kind of sexual encounter is this? Is Lara consenting? Did she want it to stop but go on because she didn’t know how to say no. Or did she really want sex? It is unclear. Her arms are only “loosely around his waist.” She is not clutching him passionately. Lara notes that the next morning she is uncommunicative and crying as she peels an onion, tears Lara feels are not due to the onion. Lara concludes, perhaps wrongly, that Lulwa “could not have wanted it.”

Meanwhile “the city waits for the invaders to break their promises, cross the limit they drew themselves.” On the same night that Lara finds Raymond and Lulwa having sex, the invaders reach the city. To Lara both Lulwa and the city have been invaded. The next morning Lara offers to take Raymond to the dangerous museum zone where she leaves him to his fate.

Is Lara coming to the aid of her innocent sister, revenging herself on Ray for Lulwa's loss of innocence? Or is this the revenge borne of jealousy once again for the beautiful sister whose beauty Lara was unable to stop from blooming? Who is Ray, a male version of Red Riding Hood, the innocent adolescent from France who doesn’t understand the realities of war? Or is he the wolf?

There is no clarity here just as in life itself.All three stories are examples of post modern literature where the old values no longer hold and the answers are not clear-cut. In this sense they seek to mirror life itself instead of providing neat tidy solutions or moralistic lessons. They are not comforting. No hunter is going to come to your rescue, they say. No story will help you. If you are to survive, you must take matters into your own hands. Throw the wolf’s clothes into the fire and make him your loving pet, threaten and menace the would-be rapist even if the trauma of it leaves you distrustful, send the interloping posing predatory foreigner into the heart of the war that has ruined you, where the snipers will get him; even if you will endure your father’s wrath forever, at least you have done something.