An archetypal analysis of Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story”

Abstract

In literary studies, archetypes, as recurring motifs in literature or mythological narrations, are generally addressed by Jungian analysts to find out the meanings and representations which comprise the “collective unconscious” of a certain culture. The wolf as an archetype often appears in literary works as a symbol of violence. In Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf” (1979), generally regarded as a rewriting of the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” from a feminist perspective, a little girl meets a wolf in the forest which turns out to be her grandmother who, in the end, becomes the victim of the child, through which this study argues that the story blurs the boundary between the dichotomies of innocence/experience and good/evil. Ursula K. Le Guin, in “The Wife’s Story” (1982), portrays a society in which humans are marginalized and eliminated by wolves. Like Carter, Le Guin does not depict the wolf as a ferocious animal. The study puts forth that due to its close connection with nature, the wolf acquires positive qualities compared to humans, putting into question the binary oppositions of man/animal, culture/nature. Although both stories attribute the wolf a new, positive identity and incorporate archetypal meanings and symbols related to the “werewolf” motif, these meanings and symbols have not been focused on in earlier studies. Therefore, this study aims to offer a Jungian archetypal analysis of both stories to find out how the dichotomies of innocence/experience, good/evil, man/animal and culture/nature are blurred with the new meanings they attribute to the wolf image.