Neil Bowen on (Edited )
The wolf-girl
The ingénue and the best, the wolf becomes one character
Trapped in her abhuman state, she ‘howls because she is lonely’, but does not understand the language of either the wolves of humans and is out-of-place in both worlds.
Her ‘red lips are thick and fresh’, but she is also physically athletic – ‘her legs are long, lean and muscular’ and even masculine ‘wide shoulder, long arms’, but also like a baby – she sleeps ‘curled into a ball’. Like a wolf or vampire she has ‘spiky canines’
Her wolfiness has been internalised, ‘it is as if she the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin and become part of it’.
Her nose is ‘sharper by night’
Nuns, religion and demonising the other: ‘The nuns poured water over her, poked her with sticks to rouse her’. They cannot, however, ‘civilise’ her: ‘she always seemed wild, impatient of restraint, capricious in temper. Rejects social norms of decency – ‘when the Mother Superior tried to teach her to give thanks for her recover… she… urinated, defecated’
Why is she called Alice?
She is put to work, clearing up the Duke’s butchery.
The Duke
The ‘unsanctified household’ of the Duke.
The castle has a ‘reek of meat’, but not the ‘least whiff of sulphur’. Wolf-Alice also doesn’t smell anything familiar – i.e. the Duke is neither animal nor human. His castle is also a ‘gloomy mansion’.
His bedroom is red, as if ‘with a wash of pain, like the interior of an Iberian butcher’s shop’.
The Duke is ‘sere as old paper’ and does not ‘cast an image in the mirror’. His skin is ‘white as leprosy’ with ‘scrabbling fingernails’
Sadness – ‘inconsolable’
But also hunger ‘rapacious’, eyes that ‘devour the world’, ‘appetite’ – cannibalistic/man-eater/ ‘corpse-eater’/ ‘body-snatcher’
Loneliness – ‘he sees, nowhere, a reflection of himself’
Internal conflict: ‘his eyes… are ‘eaten up’ by his own ‘swollen, gleaming pupil’
Subversion of Gothic narrative tropes
The Duke:
Garlic is no deterrent
He will use the ‘holy cross as a scratching post’ and ‘lap up holy water’