To What Extent Does Carter Depict the Ideas That Female Identity Is Determined by a Patriarchal Society in ‘Wolf Alice’ and One Other Story?

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To what extent does Carter depict the ideas that female identity is determined by a patriarchal society in ‘Wolf Alice’ and one other story? I agree to a certain extent that there is a theme of female identity being determined by a patriarchal society in ‘Wolf Alice’, although there are many other determining factors. ‘The Snow Child’ is then a story of which is almost entirely centred on the theme of female identity being determined through patriarchal society. Wolf-Alice is initially brought up by wolves. It has been suggested that through the masculine description of the wolves – although it may not be explicit in referring to the wolves, we can gauge an image of them through the initial animalistic description of the young girl as ‘lean and muscular’ and ‘thickly calloused’. It can be argued that the wolves represent a patriarchal society. Therefore it would be appropriate to assume that without the input of the wolves, it is likely that the young girl would have grown up as any other young girl. Therefore, the symbolically male-orientated wolves form her identity, giving her “a pace [that] is not our pace” and distinguishing her from humankind with phrases such as “two-legs look, four-legs sniffs.” This is significant as without the wolves there would not be a conflict of identity as she would as earlier mentioned, be the same as any other girl – whereas after being “suckled by wolves” she has been forced into an identity crisis. Interestingly, after living with the wolves she is taken in by the nuns. Whilst some would see this as a representation of a female society as the convent would be mostly, if not entirely made up of women, it could also be interpreted that the nuns are women of God and therefore have devoted their lives to a sublime representation of man, therefore as the nuns themselves are being controlled by a male, they are relaying the ideas of

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