Erl King

• Narrator: "Take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair...strangle him with them"


  -Encourages female autonomy

  -Reclaimed the power of her freedom using the power of his nature on him
• Narrator: "He strips me to my last nakedness...And we are like two halves of a seed"

  -Danger of men

  -Suggest her vulnerability to his predatory consumption as she is subsumed by his power
• "the woods enclose and then enclose again...she will be trapped in her own illusion"


  -Suggests the natural seductive allure of the Erl Kings world can also entrap women in illusions about sexuality and freedom

  -Over sexuality
• Narrator: "I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in cages"


  -Takes control of own fate

  -does not want to be confined like the other women who have fallen prey to the Erl King
• Carter moral and deviation

  -Subverts the initial moral by encouraging women to stray off the path as she believed they were strong enough to liberate themselves and other women in need

  -Original green man is generally depicted as kind and benevolent however Carter's Erl King is portrayed as cunning and evil
• AO5

  'The Erl King's violent and cruel actions are indeed those of a man rather than a non-human' [Wright]

  -Reinforces the stereotype of the male oppressor that Carter sought to portray in all her stories
• AO3

  "pretty cages" Angelou's 'I know why the caged birds sing', draws on themes of domestic violence and how women are entrapped within the house