The Erl King
Quotes
- ‘Erl-King will do you grievous harm’
- ‘the wood swallows you up’
- ‘the stark elders have an anorexic look’
- ‘everything in the wood is exactly as it seems’
- ‘easy to lose yourself’
- ‘What big eyes you have’
Characters
- Erl-King
- ‘an excellent housewife’
- ‘came alive from the desire of the woods’
- ‘tender butcher’
- ‘skin the rabbit, he says!’
- ‘Eyes green as apples. Green as dead sea fruit’
AO2 - language, form and structure and how they shape meaning
- Language
- Oxymorons such as “the tender butcher” and
“appalling succulence” highlight the narrator’s conflict
- Isolated similes such as “green as dead sea fruit” add emphasis to
the comparisons
- Metaphor is used to link sex to drowning e.g. his ‘dress of water’
that ‘drenches’ her
- Structure
- ‘Erl-King will do you grievous harm’ - one line paragraph to emphasise significance
- Switches between tenses and
points of view in order to disorient the reader, creating a
Gothic sense of uncertainty, and reflecting the feelings of the protagonist
AO3 - connections between texts and different interpretations
- Fairy tale references - ‘What big eyes you have’ (see BC, EK)
- Superstition - ‘he says the Devil spits on them at Michaelmas’ (see
W, COW)
- Aggressive language - ‘he could thrust me into the seed-bed’ (see
BC)
Gothic Features
- Weather/setting
- Wood is personified and isolated - ‘the wood swallows you up’
- More fairy-tale than Gothic
- Bloody Chamber = Erl-King’s dwelling
- Idea of confinement - ‘vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation
of light’ look like bars of a prison/cage
- Erl-King can tie ‘up the winds in his handkerchief’
- Dominant males
- childlike, less predatory
- Romantic hero, she falls in love with him
- Passive females
- none, she is mature and purposeful
- Supernatural
- ‘magic lasso of inhuman music’
- He has a ‘bird call’
- Religion
- ‘he says the Devil spits on them at Michaelmas’
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