Welcome to the April 2018 Literary Meeting!
At the insistence of guest host Rachel Banka, our most recent literary theme was folk lore and fairy tale adaptations – particularly adaptations that maintained the spooky, scary, horrific, fantastic, and/or violent elements of the original stories.
As per usual, we have made informal references in text, with full references listed at the end.
Aromatic Accompaniment: Midsummer’s Night by Yankee Candle.
Wine: La Cuvée. Imported by Vinadeis. Languedoc: Mythique, 2015. Red Blend.
Ancient Vines. Contra Costa Country: Cline Family Cellars, 2015. Zinfandel.
Winemaker’s Blend. Modesto, CA: Apothic White, 2016. White Blend.
Guest host Rachel has always been interested in “traditional” speculative stories – myths, folk lore, legends, fairy tales, and the like. The intention of this meeting was to investigate how the themes, figures, and tropes from such stories have been adapted in modern short stories.
This meeting was structured to offer both an introduction to and an in-depth conversation of a small number of stories. As this meeting took place in the busiest part of the semester, we did not require or recommend any reading ahead of time. Instead, we read aloud two short stories (three and ten pages, respectively) about werewolves and discussed their similarities and differences. The guest host also offered some observations from her academic research on werewolves. Then, we went over synopses of two vampire stories (as each was about twenty pages) and discussed their differences and similarities, as well as their continuities and discontinuities with familiar twenty-first-century vampire lore.
First, we read Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf.” We examined how it differed from the fairy tale that inspired it (“Little Red Riding Hood”), the credibility of the narrator and how that influenced interpretation of the story, and how the story (or various interpretations of it) seem to relate to and/or subvert an oft-noted theme of “Little Red Riding Hood”: the vulnerability of young women to ill-intentioned men who seek to corrupt and “devour” them. Ultimately, we identified the idea that women can also serve as predatory forces toward other women as an innovation upon “Little Red Riding Hood” in “The Werewolf.”
Next, we read Angela Carter’s “Wolf-Alice,” a story that combines elements of werewolf lore, vampire lore, feral child tales, and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There / Alice Through the Looking Glass. We considered the connection between womanhood and civilization that is suggested by the causal link between menstruation and an understanding of time, and we pondered the similarities and differences between Alice and the Duke. We paid particular attention to the line: “Poor, wounded thing… locked half and half between such strange states, an aborted transformation, and incomplete mystery…” (162), noting that while the end of this sentence reveals that it is describing the Duke (a literally hybrid creature), its beginning seems to be intentionally vague about its subject. We hypothesized that this potentially leads the reader to believe that it is describing Alice, thereby illuminating her kinship with the Duke by emphasizing her own hybridity (as a creature halfway between human and animal, wild and tame, feral and civilized).
Finally, we reviewed a synopsis of Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” and watched a stop motion adaptation of the story, which can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snNE4elt76s. In conjunction, we discussed an overview of Karen Russell’s short story “Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” provided by the guest host. Although our discussion was limited by our moderate familiarity with the stories, we identified some themes shared by the two stories. Of particular note was the idea of death as the only possible escape to a lonely existence, and this led us to consider the significance of time in both stories. Here, we found slight differences in the two stories’ concerns. We observed that “The Lady of the House of Love” seemed to focus on the advent of modernity and the transition between epochs, while “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” seemed to explore the consequences maintain a traditional notion of love (which hold up finding “the one” or one’s soulmate as the ultimate goal) in a world in which lifespans are lengthening at a previously unimagined rate.
Content References:
Carter, Angela. “The Werewolf.” The Bloody Chamber, Penguin, 2015, pp. 137-140.
Carter, Angela. “Wolf-Alice.” The Bloody Chamber, Penguin, 2015, pp. 153-162.
Carter, Angela. “Lady of the House of Love.” The Bloody Chamber, Penguin, 2015, pp. 117-136.
Russell, Karen. “Vampires in the Lemon Grove.” Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Vintage, Books, 2013, pp. 3-22.
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