In the fairytale tradition, specifically romance-oriented fairytales, there are often two main identifying components: the interspersion of magic and a “happy In the Western fairytale tradition, specifically romance-oriented fairytales, there are often two main identifying components: the interspersion of magic and a “happy ending” involving either reward through marriage or the punishment of social transgressions. In these stories, magic helps create conflict in the tale, while the story’s ending of heterosexual marriage between the protagonist and another party or its punishment of characters for social transgressions (e.g. lying, theft, premarital sex, etc.) help to underscore the fairytale’s moral function in society (Hixton 155). A consequence of this need for cultural stabilization through storytelling is that female agency is often overlooked. As emphasis is placed on resolving the conflict created by magical intrusion and restoring harmony through the reinforcement of cultural norms, the women in these stories and these marriages are no longer characters, but merely models of the virgin-whore paradigm and a means to marital end. Modern retellings of fairytales call attention to this problematic trope of silencing women for the sake of maintaining social norms through the introduction of female interiority and by offering alternatives to “the fairytale ending.”
In Haruki Murakami’s story, “The Little Green Monster,” a housewife is intruded upon by a lovesick, mind-reading green lizard, but what seems to be another animal-groom tale reminiscent of “The Frog Prince” ends in the retention of the housewife’s original marriage and the destruction of the monster. In Angela Carter’s “The Erl-King,” the female protagonist enters a sexual relationship with a wood spirit who may eventually turn her into an animal. Rather than creating a story punishing female sexual precociousness through magic, however, it is the Erl-King that is punished as the protagonist kills him in his sleep and frees the transformed girls in his keeping. Through the injection and intrusion of magic in “The Little Green Monster” and “The Erl-King,” the stories become primed for a fairytale ending, but as Murakami and Carter show, women do not need magic to determine their happiness; rather, they only need themselves.

“The Little Green Monster” and the Fairytale Tradition

In order to understand how “The Little Green Monster” fights against the fairytale tradition, one must first understand how “The Little Green Monster” relates to the fairytale tradition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines fairy tales as “a tale about fairies; a tale set in fairyland; esp. any of various short tales having folkloric elements and featuring fantastic or magical events or characters” and “Something resembling a fairy tale in being unreal or incredible, or in having an idealized happy ending” (OED). While “The Little Green Monster” neither involves fairies nor takes place in fairyland, it does contain fantastic elements that could never be attributed to the genre of realism. This can be seen in its titular character—a green long-nosed lizard monster that comes out of the ground (207, 153 )—and the story’s climactic telepathy battle (209, 155).

Yet, Matthew Strecher notes that “in virtually all of his fiction, with the one notable exception of Noruwei no mori [Norwegian Wood], a realistic setting is created, then disrupted, sometimes mildly, sometimes violently, by the bizarre of the magical” (267). Murakami is characterized by his use of the bizarre in his fiction, ranging from a story about lederhosen to the aforementioned titular lizard and telepathy battle seen in “The Little Green Monster.” Though Murakami’s fiction often uses magical elements, Stretcher’s decision to categorize Murakami as a magical realist speaks to why “The Little Green Monster” is not immediately a fairytale. In his article, Stretcher defines magical realism as “In a very simple nutshell … what happens when a highly-detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something ‘too strange to believe’” (267), and it is this meticulous sense of detail that separates this genre from fairytales. While magical realism injects itself with fantasy and the strange, the author’s attention to details of everyday life attempts to ground the story in reality, to maintain a sense of normalcy, and therefore a sense of removed plausibility. With fairytales, this attention to detail is much more lax, not only because of the tales’ mutability given its origins in a changeful and changing oral tradition, but because morality, not realism, is the main goal of these stories. The vagueness and lack of character-dimensionality in fairytales exist because they exist as allegories and ways of enforcing cultural values through the exaggerated means of magic and fantasy. As such, “The Little Green Monster” would not qualify as a fairytale solely based on its inclusion of the fantastic.
Though the inclusion of magic in itself is not enough to view “The Little Green Monster” as playing on and with the fairytale tradition, its specific use of the “animal groom” trope places it in conversation with “The Frog Prince” and the fairytale genre, becoming an exploration of the classic fairytale themes of love and marriage. Martha Hixton defines animal groom stories as “…stories in which the lover first appears in an undesirable form, typically as a beast of some sort, or is otherwise unable to serve as a fit husband or lover for the girl” (154). The criteria of the partner being “undesirable” and “unable to serve as a fit husband” are both met in Murakami’s story, not only through the housewife’s repulsion of the creature when it first emerges from the ground (207, 153), but also the larger social implications in the story. As she is already married, to engage romantically with the monster is to engage in bigamy; as it is unknown whether or not the creature is enchanted, she runs the risk of bestiality. The sudden interaction of a woman and a magical creature parallels the scenario raised in “The Frog Prince,” raising reader expectations of a fairytale end; however, in order to fulfill those expectations, the housewife must engage in social taboos, and it is in negotiating these opposing, contradictory ideas that Murakami creates an alternative to the “fairytale ending.”

“The Little Green Monster”

In his short story, “The Little Green Monster,” Murakami deliberately uses fairytale tropes and narrative dissonance as a way of raising awareness of reader complicity in female powerlessness in the pursuit of “a happy ending.” The story’s opening echoes that of “The Frog Prince” with a female character engaged in idle activity. Where the protagonist of “The Frog Prince” needed help retrieving a ball, the protagonist of Murakami’s story is much older and has a more abstract problem: her boredom as a wife stuck at home while her husband is at work. This monotony is broken by the intrusion of the monster in her life and in her garden, but it is Murakami’s framing of this magical invader that creates narrative dissonance with the fairytale tradition this story borrows from. When the monster is first introduced as a removed, unknown sound, the female narrator states, 「でも音は鳥肌が立つくらい気味の悪い響きを持っていた。」(206) [“But [the sound] made my flesh creep” (153)]. It is an understandable sentiment given the ominous circumstances she experiences this in: alone with an unknown entity moving ever closer to her, but this is not merely an emotional reaction; her flesh creeping shows a bodily reaction, a physical ramification to their interaction, all before she even sees the creature. Even after she sees it, this revulsion is maintained. Though she admits to no longer being disgusted by its physical appearance despite its long nose and human-like eyes (207, 153), it is the prospect of the monster’s ability to read her mind that repulses her. She complains,「私は誰かに勝手に自分の心を読まれたりするのは我慢できない。とくに相手が訳のわからない気味の悪い獣であるような場合には。私は体中にじっとり冷たい汗をかいていた。」(208) [“I hate to have anyone know what I’m thinking—especially when that someone is a horrid and inscrutable little creature like this. I broke out in a cold sweat from head to foot” (154)]. Here, it is not the monster’s physical traits that repulse her but, rather, its mental capacity, and more specifically, its ability to invade her thoughts. Though this plays on the idea of open communication and the value of honesty common in fairytales, the idea of telepathy here is made to feel unsettling and disgusting because it is nonconsensual. The narrator is unable to protect herself from being mentally laid bare to the creature, from its penetration of her thoughts, and it is through this forced vulnerability in combination with the evil aura of the creature that makes the fairytale elements of the story begin to feel oppressive.

The oppressive nature of the creature’s mental invasion does not stop with its ability to mind-read as the creature uses its telepathy to reframe and reclaim the narrator’s disgust. When the creature first breaks into her home, it seems to laugh at her when she thinks of defending herself with a knife against the home invasion (207,153), and in its long love confession to her, the lizard prioritizes its struggles over hers (208-209, 154-155). Though it argues that it came up to the surface because it could no longer be apart from her, its confession is always framed either in terms of how painful their separation was for hit or how gratifying this must be for her and how she should be grateful to have such a love in her life. It says,
「それで我慢が聞かなくなつて、ここに這い上がつてきたたたですよ。みんなとめたですよ。でも私は我慢できんかつたですよ。結構勇気もいりりましたよ。お前つみたし名獣が私にプロポーズするなんて圧かもしつて思われるんじやないかつてねえ」(209)
[They all tried to stop me, but I couldn’t stand it anymore. And think of the courage that it took, please, took. What if you thought it was rude and presumptuous, for a creature like me to propose to you? (154-55).]
In the English translation, this proposal seems mundane. Out of context, it could belong to any nervous lover. However, the original Japanese text contains repetition of 「ですよ」/ “desu-yo”, a grammar particle used to provide emphasis. Though emphasis is not negative in itself, given the strength of the particle in Japanese, the monster’s frequent use of this to a stranger is not only rude, but also highly condescending to the female narrator because it is telling her what to think. The monster is trying to rewrite the narrative of their interaction, telling her how to interpret its actions correctly, all while in her house and her head.
Given that this is their first time interacting, here Murakami plays with the fairytale ideas of “love at first sight” and “true love,” contrasting these tropes with the monster’s unpleasantness and forcing readers to confront their own expectations of the fairytale form. As the narrator has just been confronted with the creature’s ardent love confession in detail, this would be the point in the story where she would return the creature’s affections, having been swayed by its passions and now rewarding it for its struggles in reaching her. In recognition of its efforts to give her its love, it would be rewarded with her love in return. Yet the story makes it clear how distasteful and problematic that concept is by fleshing out its narrator. The first line in the story establishes her background: the narrator is married; she already has a home. By fairytale standards, the narrator has already achieved her ending, and to gratify the creature’s love with the narrator’s is to destroy her life to this point. To reward the creature is to place the needs and feelings of a potentially socially-disruptive interloper over those of a woman who—though bored—is content with her marriage, condoning the notion that a woman is not a person, but an object. A prize. More glaring is the lack of input allowed to the narrator during this confession despite the story’s framing as a first-person narrative. In a frame that should and has allowed for full interiority of its speaker, the fact that the narrator is forced to remain silent during this phase of the story speaks more to the lack of agency experienced by women in fairytales.
This lack of agency is quickly reversed though as the narrator loses her fear of the monster, restoring power to herself through the literal use of her voice. Immediately after the previously quoted confession, the housewife throws a verbal barb shouting, 「だって本当にその通りじゃないのと私は心の中で思った。私に求愛するなんて、まったくなんて厚かもしい獣かしらと私と思った。」(209) [“But it is rude and presumptuous, I said in my mind. What a rude little creature you are to come seeking my love!” (155)]. Here, the housewife is asserting her own opinion of the situation concerning the behavior of the monster, angrily berating its presumptuousness not only for being dismissive about breaking into her home and terrorizing her in the name of love, but also for attempting to degrade her by entertaining the idea that she would leave her husband to engage in bestiality with it. The way the housewife goes about this assertion is interesting too in the sharp contrast it provides with the previous paragraph. While the monster’s confession is a single paragraph spanning two pages, the woman’s rebuke is only a line and a half. It also notably lacks the monster’s uncouth use of 「ですよ」/“desu-yo,” but this is because she does not need it. The housewife is frank and is confident in what she has to say. She does not have to tell people how to think, because the message is clear enough in itself, and in the face of this, the monster begins to weaken in its resolve.
As the monster’s confidence begins to weaken, the housewife uses this emotional currency to empower herself, exchanging fear for confidence and moving from defense to offense. Upon discovering that the monster reacts negatively to her counterclaims to its fairytale reading of the two of them, the woman begins to assault the monster with her resentment for it, stating 「私はもう獣を怖いとは思わなくなっていた。私は試しに思いつく限り残酷な場面を頭に思い浮かべてみた。」(209) [“I wasn’t afraid of the monster anymore. I painted pictures in my mind of all the cruel things I wanted to do to it” (155)]. Now liberated from the emotional tyranny of the monster who has tried to implicitly control her thoughts, the woman is free to seek her revenge. While this may seem cruel and explosively exaggerated, the woman makes explicit what she has suffered, retorting when the monster pleads its case,
「でも私はそんな言い分には耳を貸さなかった。冗談じゃないわ、お前は突然私の庭から這いだしてきて、何の断りもなく勝手に私の家のドアの鍵を開けて中に入ってきたんじゃないか、と私は思った。私がやってきてくれと招いたわけじゃない。私には何だって好きなことを好きなだけ思いつく権利がある。だから私はもっともっとひどいことを考えてやった。」(210)
[But I refused to listen. In my mind, I said, Don’t be ridiculous! You crawled out of my garden. You unlocked my door without permission. You came inside my house. I never asked you here. I have the right to think anything I want to. And I continued to do exactly that—thinking at the creature increasingly terrible thoughts (155-156).]
The woman’s rage is derived from the monster’s presumption that she would want to leave her husband and run away with a strange creature of unknown origin, as well as from its utter invasion of privacy and its attempts to intimidate her. Its genesis in the garden violates her private space to think, while its genesis from under the tree she regards as a dear friend violates the mental associative relationship she shares with it (now unable to divorce the monster and the tree from each other). Additionally, by breaking into her home, the monster violates her physical privacy as its intrusion into her thoughts violates her mental privacy. It is not because the monster’s physicality is upsetting to her that she is so malicious in her attack; it is because the monster has attempted to coerce and control her thoughts and actions through a campaign of fear. It has attempted to ransack all vestiges of her life in order to overlay its own interpretation of how her life should be lived—with it—with little concern for the life she already has. Though this has all the trappings of a grand romantic tale—a fantastic creature, a female protagonist, passionate and ardent love that literally moves the earth (the monster having had to dig itself out of the ground to see her)—this is not a case of a hero coming in to sweep a maiden off her feet. The creature is not a knight or a poor but virtuous villager. It is an intruder and a bully. What attempts to be heroism is actually barbarism as the monster uses coercion and fear tactics to create the story it wants in the name of love.
The dissonance between the fairytale the monster desires and the reality of the female protagonist’s situation exists not because of any outright misogyny on the monster’s part, but its mistake in reading the narrator and her life as a prize narrative. Rather than viewing the narrator as an autonomous entity with thoughts, feelings, and a life of her own, the monster views the narrator as an object, something that has no responsibilities or social ties outside of its own existence as well as something to be retrieved or won (Sheets 649). As such, it pursues the narrator in forms of the fairytale tradition and the prize narrative: breaking into her home (storming the castle), the narrator’s initial terror (the narrator as the chaste maiden protecting her virginity), and finally, the lack of the narrator’s response to its affections (wooing the maiden). While these actions require physical engagement with the narrator, all of these actions are emotionally one-sided, placing the monster as the active hero and relegating the female narrator to the passive recipient of these actions. However at the climax of her attack, the narrator tells the monster,「ねえ獣、お前は女というもののことをよく知らないんだ。そういう種類のことなら私にはいくらだっていくらだって思いつけるのだ。」(210) [“See, then, you little monster, you have no idea what a woman is. There’s no end to the number of things I can think of to do to you” (156)]. The woman has severely weakened the monster in telepathic battle following her rejection of its affections, leaving it on the verge of death. When it looks to her for mercy and explanation, it receives the above quote, the narrator explicitly stating what the monster’s mistake was. Here the narrator implies that the monster underestimated the possible extent of female cunning and malice, but she also points out the monster’s mistake in understanding the role of women in narratives in general. Having read women as the prize in a prize narrative, where women are not agents of action but passive objects of conquest, the monster does not expect dissent, nor does it expect an agency rivaling its own. The monster fails to read women beyond their function as object in the prize narrative, and in failing to do so, pays for this with its eventual demise.
Having played with the fairytale tradition to show its glaring problems when it comes to overwriting female agency, Murakami’s decision to give the female narrator the last word—combined with the impotency of the lizard-creature—offers alternatives to female representation and male narrative in the fairytale tradition. In Hixton’s analysis of “The Frog Prince,” she argues, “Feminist critics have rightly deplored the subtext which exists in these storylines, that such a desire can only be granted to exceptionally self-sacrificing women or only after tremulous retribution is made for wanting to know the truth” (161). This generalization of feminist attitudes on “The Frog Prince” speak to a tradition of “deserving women being rewarded” and/or “female curiosity being mildly punished.” No word is made on male relations to the truth, and while oftentimes male pursuit of the truth is rewarded, I would like to posit that a similar failure to do so leads to punishment through impotence, death, or both. The creature standing in for the unwanted male suitor pursues the female narrator without attempting to gain awareness of the intimate aspects of her life, focusing instead on the surface relationship of how she may gratify it by returning its affection. As a result of this failure to know her, it underestimates her, allowing her to reverse the power-dynamic and destroy it. Watching it disappear, the narrator comments on the futility of the monster’s dying gaze:
「そんなことしたって無駄よ、と私は思った。何を見たって役には立たないわ。お前には何も言えない、お前には何もできない。お前の存在はもうすっかりぜんぶ終わってしまったのよ。するとそのうちに目も虚空の中に消えてなくなり、夜の闇が音もなく部屋に満ちてきた。」(210-211)
[That won’t do you any good, I thought to it. You can look all you want, but you can’t say a thing. You can’t do a thing. Your existence is over, finished, done. Soon the eyes dissolved into emptiness, and the room filled with the darkness of night (156).]
Upon defeat, one of the first distinct features to disappear is the monster’s mouth and therefore its ability to communicate and assert its own narratives. As a result, this allows the female narrator to use her own voice, which is relevant in terms of asserting her agency. In announcing these feelings rather than letting them exist as a mental projection, the extent of her agency’s effectiveness is more widespread and less likely to be ignored. The fact that the female narrator is the one left alive in the end also speaks to her narration’s overall use and effectiveness. In following antiquated modes of male-female interaction in the fairytale tradition, the monster fails to recognize the female narrator’s needs. In failing to take her happiness and agency into account, it is punished with destruction while the female—left standing at the end of the story—is rewarded for championing against coercion and preserves her own values with survival and the last word.

“The Erl-King,” Scopophilia, and Feminine Narrative Liberation
Where “The Little Green Monster” plays on the function of fairytale morality condoning romance for a marital end, Angela Carter’s “The Erl-King” is a treatment of and against the chaste maiden’s fairytale opposite: the sexually precocious woman. The tale begins with an unknown narrator’s meditation on the woods. As the tale goes on, a sense of physicality eventually emerges through the use of pronouns, but not before the narrator notes that “The trees stir with a noise like taffeta skirts of women who have lost themselves in the woods and hunt round hopelessly for the way out” (84-85). This is a bit of foreshadowing on Carter’s part as the narrator eventually becomes mired in the metaphorical woods of her romantic relationship with the Erl-King, but the description also comments on the nature of the woods in the fairytale tradition. The woods are a staple for the fairytale not only given the traditional roots in small, isolated villages nestled in the woods, but the woods have always symbolized the deep, menacing unknown of nature. Out in the woods, one was removed from human society and at the mercy of the elements and predators, imagined or otherwise. To be lost in the woods was to be lost from society; to be placed there was at once a punishment and a death sentence. In following the moral function of fairytales, for a woman to enter the woods was a metaphor for sexuality. For a woman to enter and exit the woods unscathed meant that she had successfully maneuvered through interactions with the opposite sex with her chastity intact. Alternatively, the taffeta-skirted women trapped in the woods speak to those who had failed, who lost their virginity and were punished with alienation and death (Sheets 649). The narrator, upon entering, risks becoming another one of those taffeta-skirted women, but the richness of the fabric in the description creates a tenuous underscoring against the punishment. Yes, to engage in premarital sex can lead to and possibly encourages death in the fairytale tradition, but the lush sensuality and hedonism implied in those skirts are tantalizing enough to ignore the danger.
To engage in the fairytale tradition, Carter retains the “sex as danger” metaphor through the Erl-King’s promised harm as well as his consuming gaze. Just before the unnamed narrator meets her romantic captor comes the statement, “Erl-King will do you grievous harm” (85). There is no obvious source for this information: it could be the narrator’s observation, an authorial interjection, an inference from a collective social value, or even the disembodied warning from the taffeta-skirted ghosts of yore. Lacking a source, the credibility of this statement is dubious. Its succinctness is at odd with the previously smooth-flowing prose, offering a warning, but no suggestions for how to avoid the danger. There is a threat in the message, but with little definition as to what that harm is and how to avoid it, the sentence ends up sitting like a rock in the forest, too large to completely ignore, but ultimately too small to hinder the path of the narrative. Equally foreboding and more concrete however is the narrator’s statement: “There are some eyes that can eat you” (86). Eyes have no mouths, no digestive systems, so read literally, the sentence makes no sense: eyes cannot consume. As a metaphor for the male gaze, the consuming gaze speaks to the nature of the objectifying sexual appetite, especially when read in relation to the other stories in The Bloody Chamber, the collection this story originates. Caleb Sivyer matches a term to this idea of the consuming gaze: “scopophilia,” defined as “…pleasure in looking, and is characterized by both voyeurism and fetishism” (2). This analysis relates to a reading of another Carter fairytale-adaptation, “The Bloody Chamber,” but the concept of scopophilia can also be applied in “The Erl-King.” There is sexual gratification to be gained from garnering the Erl-King’s gaze, but with it also comes the physical threat that comes to all his lovers—being turned into a bird and placed in a cage of his keeping—as well as the social threat of being ostracized, objectification, and death.
The narrator engages in sexual, romantic relations with the Erl-King, but rather than blindly submit to the death promised to unwed virgins, Carter offers an alternate fate by creating a character just as avaricious and deadly as her male counterpart. The relationship between the two lovers begins in the summer, but quickly sours as the dead of winter approaches (88-89). Early in the story, the narrator tells the audience of the feasts the Erl-King provides her. At that time, it is fall, a time of agricultural harvest and the bounty of nature and his generosity are welcome. However, when the same bounty is offered to her in winter, the narrator calls it “a goblin feast of fruit for me, such appalling succulence” (89). Having consumed half a year of his generosity, the narrator is beginning to become aware of the sinister dangers lurking in his goodwill, while the contrast of the plentiful food against the cold seasonal death around them only serves to emphasize the utter falsity of their relationship. On the surface, the relationship with the Erl-King is nourishing and bountiful, but it is built on a foundation of falsities—mischievous and malicious as the goblins she compares his generosity to—that will almost certainly doom her in the end. However, doomed as she may well be, she finds herself conflicted, stating,
When I realized what the Erl-King meant to do to me, I was shaken with a terrible fear and I did not know what to do for I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages although he looked after them very affectionately, gave them fresh water every day and fed them well. His embraces were his enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven. But in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me, although I knew from the first moment I saw him how Erl-King would do me grievous harm. (90)
Here, the narrator makes explicit her problem: to submit to the Erl-King means that she is able to pursue her heart in true fairytale fashion. Conversely, to submit also means she will be punished in true fairytale fashion: she may have her love, may retain his reciprocated love and attention, but must lose her freedom for engaging in sexual behavior outside a coded social norm. This loss of freedom is literalized by the imagery of caged birds–the fate of all the Erl-King’s lovers–which the narrator likens to death. Worse still is the Erl-King’s lack of sympathy in her narrative demise, but as the role of sexual punishments is a firmly female sphere, he is unable to aid in her problem because he is so wholly unaware of it. To him, the caging of birds and women is simply not problematic. Thus, the solution to a singularly-female issue lies with the narrator who must now choose between disavowing her love for the Erl-King and the loss of her freedom. Both choices promise to break her heart, echoing the earlier-stated promise of harm from the Erl-King, but also open the possibility for the narrator to regain and assert her own agency. If the Erl-King cannot and will not save her, she will have to save herself.
The threat of narrative punishment and the narrator’s desire for freedom come to a head in the final scene as she ultimately chooses to kill the Erl-King, refusing her promised death for a fate she determines alone. The decision comes as the Erl-King lays his head on the narrator’s lap in an intimate moment. It is here that Harriet Linkin argues that the narrator “. . . carves a path to another ending where the female is no longer sacrificed for the male poetic vision” (318) for “. . . if there is to be no collaboration and no nurturing, she will not inhabit a resentful silence but will gain her own voice by silencing his” (319). While Linkin asserts that the narrator is fighting against the Romantic poets that Carter mimics in this story, this idea can also apply to the larger oppressive workings within classic fairytales. Rather than submit to punishment as a result of the narrator asserting her own sexuality, it is here that she chooses to determine her own fate, to regain control of her life by choosing to preserve it. The sentences preceding this moment describe the oppressiveness of his gaze and her desire for more autonomy in the relationship. The narrator is unable to free herself from the forest, from her fate, and from her regard for him as long as he lives, and while she enjoys his love, she enjoys her freedom more. However, in order to gain her freedom, she is careful to avoid his gaze, telling him, “Lay your head on my knee so that I can’t see the greenish inward-turning suns of your eyes any more” (91). This is partially due to her regard for the Erl-King–her feelings for him possibly evoking guilt or remorse should he watch her kill him –but also due to the paralyzing, objectifying nature of scopophilia. For him to look upon her with those eyes is to invalidate all the agency she has struggled with in coming to this decision and acting upon it, instead relegating her once more to an object for his pleasure and delight.
Thankfully for her, the Erl-King does not look, does not fight his death because he probably never expected one of his girls to kill him. Thus, the narrator is allowed to assert her own will, shown as she immediately “let the [caged] birds free; they will change back into young girls, every one, each with the crimson imprint of his love-bite on their throats” (91). The narrator refuses to submit to the cycle of punishment for early sexual liaisons, breaking the cycle for herself, although her decision to free the other girls act as a metaphor for the larger ramifications of this sort of story. By immediately freeing the other girls after her own release, she is able to break this cycle of punishment in the narratives of other women as well. Though she has killed the object of her affections, she gains so much more from retaining her freedom, and in doing so for herself, is able to continue that trend in the lives of other women, liberating them from fates of shame, degradation, and death.

Conclusion
Fairytales have always functioned as a moral compass in society, strengthening social institutions while policing bad behavior. This can be most strongly seen in romantic fairytales that end in either marriage or severe punishment. By ending in marriage, the tale helps reinforce the idea that good deeds are recognized and rewarded, but it also reinforces the cultural values of marriage and family as institutions. Similarly, by ending with a character’s punishment, the tale aims at curbing bad behavior by showing its negative consequences. However, in their attempts to be allegorical representations of male-female interactions, the representations of the sexes are often unbalanced, containing reductive portrayals of women. As women are rarely determiners of their own fates in these tales, their narratives generally working towards marriage as pursuers of marriage or as part of the hero’s reward, these women are rarely fully fleshed out. Instead, they operate as idealized stock images of the female form. The lack of female voices and female representation in these tales lead to the dangerous readings of women by others. In “The Little Green Monster,” the monster does not view his violent intrusion into the life of the housewife as burdensome or antagonistic, because he does not view her as an entity capable of thoughts different from his own. In “The Erl-King,” the king is at once an active agent for the punishment of sexually precocious women (turning them into birds) but also complicit in his inability to recognize his own potential role in the narrator’s demise. Unable to read beyond the fairytale narrative, the women in their stories suffer and must take it upon themselves to assert their voices, leading to the deaths of their male counterparts. This is not always out of a feeling of hatred towards men, as seen by the love the narrator shows the Erl-King, but as a result of narrative need. As long as competing male voices exist, female voices will continue to be overwritten and suffer. As such, the destruction of the male voice and male fairytale reader is an unfortunate but necessary consequence in these texts as women pursue the desire to make themselves heard and have their needs recognized in romantic fairytale models.

Works Cited

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. New York: Penguin Books, 1979. Print.
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