Prompt: What questions about power has your study of two works of literature raised?
Context
Text 1. “The Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter from The Bloody Chamber
Freytag’s Pyramid (Plot)
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Exposition: The setting is a winter landscape, and the narrative introduces the dangers of the wolves that lurk in the forest. A young anonymous girl, dressed in a red shawl, sets out on a journey to visit her grandmother.
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Rising Action: On her way, she encounters a handsome, charming huntsman. He challenges her to a race to her grandmother’s house, wagering that he will get there before her. The girl, intrigued and confident, agrees to the wager, allowing suspense to build as the huntsman rushes ahead so that she could kiss him as his reward for winning.
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Climax: When the girl arrives at the grandmother’s house, she finds that the huntsman has already arrived and killed her grandmother, revealing himself to be a werewolf.
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Falling Action: Instead of succumbing to fear, the girl seduces the werewolf, using her confidence and sexuality as a means of survival. She tames him, showing no fear, and embraces her new reality.
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Resolution: The girl and the werewolf spend the night together, marking a transformation in her role from prey to an empowered figure. The ending suggests a blending of human and animal instincts, challenging traditional fairy tale morality and emphasizing themes of female agency and sexuality.
Carter’s Intention:
Carter’s retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” challenges traditional fairy tales that often depict women as passive victims who must be rescued. She reinterprets Red Riding Hood’s coming of age journey as one of sexual awakening that symbolizes her rejection of patriarchal fear and control. The ending suggests a blending of human and animal instincts, questioning rigid distinctions between civilization and savagery.
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Central themes: female empowerment, allure of the unknown, subversion of fairy tale tropes, transformation
Text 2. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Freytag’s Pyramid (Plot)
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Exposition: The setting is a barren road with a lone tree. Estragon and Vladimir, two tramps, wait for a mysterious figure named Godot, though they don’t know when or if he will arrive.
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Rising Action: Pozzo and Lucky enter. Pozzo, a pompous master, dominates Lucky, his slave. A boy arrives with a message: “Godot will not come today but will surely come tomorrow.” Estragon and Vladimir consider leaving but decide to wait.
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Climax: The climax is ambiguous because there is no traditional peak of action (hence an absurdist play). Some argue that the climax is the moment when the audience fully realizes that Godot will never come and that the waiting is endless and meaningless.
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Falling Action: Pozzo and Lucky return, but Pozzo is now blind, and Lucky is mute; their roles have changed. The boy arrives again with the same message: “Godot will not come today but will surely come tomorrow.”
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Resolution: Estragon and Vladimir consider leaving but remain in the same spot. The final stage directions encapsulate the absurdity: They do not move.
Beckett’s Intention:
Beckett’s absurdist play subverts the traditional Freytag’s Pyramid—there is no traditional climax or resolution, only repetition and futility. The cycle of waiting continues indefinitely at the end of the play, exploring the meaninglessness of human existence. This attitude captures the existential despair and disillusionment that people experienced after WWII. The intentional lack of resolution mirrors the unresolved nature of human existence.
Central themes:
existential despair, inaction, search for meaning, power dynamic, faith
Outline
Application of C&C Chart
Waiting for Godot | Similarity | The Company of Wolves |
Lucky (prey) and Pozzo (predator)
Techniques:
- Imagery
- Monosyllabic
-imperatives
-Syntax and punctuation
- Resolution
→ intention: fixed power dynamic | Can the barriers between a predator-prey power dynamic ever be broken? | Female protagonist (prey) and wolf (predator)
Techniques:
- Color imagery
- Metaphor
- Juxtaposition
- Imagery
- Symbolism
→ intention: shifting power dynamic |
Estragon and Vladimir waiting for Godot to appear throughout the entire play
Techniques:
- Motif of wasted time
- Dialogue repetition
- Circular structure
- Metaphor
→ intention: humans are powerless and life is a constant process of waiting for a higher power | Will we ever be able to take complete authority (power) over our identity? | Female protagonist taking authority of her situation at the end of the story
Techniques:
- Intertextuality
- Color imagery and symbolism
- Contrast
→ intention: women can be liberated from the societal restriction of their gender |
Essay
Prompt: What questions about power has your study of two works of literature raised?
The Bloody Chamber, a selection of short stories that retell traditional fairy tales, in this case focusing on “The Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter and 'Waiting for Godot', a modernist play about two men waiting for a mysterious figure called ‘Godot’ who never appears, by Samuel Beckett, both raise similar questions about power, but answer them in very different ways. They both question the idea of a ‘predator prey’ power dynamic, and whether the barriers between these roles can ever be broken, and also whether we are ever able to take complete authority over our identity. These questions are explored through presentation of character, dialogue, imagery and figurative language.
Beckett explores the consequences of a ‘predator/prey’ power dynamic through the relationship between Lucky and Pozzo. Throughout the play, Lucky acts as Pozzo’s slave, and thus Pozzo frequently inflicts violence on him, seeing his much lower status as an excuse for this behaviour. He whips him, and treats him like an animal. He pulls him with a rope ‘with magnanimous gesture’, and ‘jerks the rope’ repeatedly in different directions, almost as if he is playing a game. He calls him ‘hog’ and ‘pig’ and addresses him using one word, monosyllabic commands such as ‘stop’,‘whip’,‘back’, implying that he sees him as unintelligent as an animal, and as only capable of understanding very simple language. Vladimir expresses his concern to the extent of Pozzo's violence when he says ‘to treat a man...like that...I think...no...no human being...no’. Beckett’s use of ellipses and simple diction conveys Vladimir’s shock at the dynamic between them, thus emphasising the horrific nature of it. Although Lucky is self-aware of his status in society, criticising the upper class tendency to use complex language and ideas to convince others of their intelligence through his extensive, non-punctuated monologue of entirely unrelated ideas such as ‘Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua’, he does not in the play ever gain power. The power dynamic between them is fixed; Pozzo is the puppet master and Lucky is his puppet.
Carter, however, unpicks the traditional fairytale ‘predator/prey’ power dynamic through the presentation of the wolf, and young female character in the “The Company of Wolves”. The wolf is initially presented as dangerous, and as posing a danger to the entire local community. His eyes are ‘yellowish, reddish...red for danger’ then as gleaming ‘a cold and unnatural green’. The use of colour imagery of red, connoting danger, and yellow and green, unpleasant and unnatural colours in regards to eyes, expresses the hostile nature of the wolf. The wolf is described as ‘carnivore incarnate’ and a ‘forest assassin, reinforcing his dangerous quality. Furthermore, Carter uses figurative language to describe the wolf's howl as ‘an area of fear made audible’ and as a ‘wolf song'. The metaphor juxtaposing the beauty of an aria to the threatening howl of a wolf only emphasises its sinister nature, as although it is brutal, it also has beautiful qualities, implying its identity is more complex and mysterious than the traditional fairy tale trope of wolves being simply predatory or purely malicious. The young girl’s identity is similarly contrasted. On one hand she is innocent as her ‘breasts have just begun to swell, her hair is like lint’, both expressing her delicate purity, reinforced by the metaphor comparing her to ‘an unbroken egg...a sealed vessel’, both fragile objects, implying that although she is innocent, this can easily be corrupted (or broken). Furthermore, the fact she has just started menstruation, symbolising in this case sexuality, suggests that this corruption is near. Their contrasting presentation on one hand naturally creates an unequal power dynamic between them, yet it is implied that this dynamic is more nuanced than the dynamic between Pozzo and Lucky, with the potential for shift later in the story. Carter’s use of figurative language and colour imagery in building the characters of the Wolf and young girl contrasts Beckett’s use of dialogue; the power dynamic in Waiting For Godot is explicitly presented, whereas in “The Company of Wolves”, this is more implicit, and subtlety buried within descriptions.
However, despite questioning the idea of power dynamics, Beckett explores whether the idea of power is in fact superficial, and asks whether we can ever truly take power over our own lives, through the use of repetition and the motif of wasted time. Estragon and Vladimir, the two main protagonists, spend the entire play waiting for a mysterious figure called Godot to appear. They’re very low status characters in society: they live under a tree, struggle to find food and own little to no possessions. Beckett makes the point that this waiting means they can never take power over their own lives. They repeatedly are about to leave their tree yet realise they must wait for Godot. This is expressed through the repetition of the same four lines of dialogue: ‘Let’s go’ ‘We can’t.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘We’re waiting for Godot’. This means that they are unable to achieve anything. For example, they try twice to kill themselves, and to save both Pozzo and Lucky, but get distracted as they think they should ‘wait and see what he [Godot] says’. Not only are the lines repeated, but Beckett uses a circular structure, meaning both Acts end with the lines ‘Well shall we go?’ ‘Yes let’s go’ ‘They do not move’. The characters are therefore powerless to take control of their own lives due to the entrapping nature of their daily routine. The idea of the characters being out of control of their life is expressed in the metaphor ‘ They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ The comparison of birth and death portrays life as fleeting, and presents the idea that we are born only to die seconds later. Beckett therefore makes the point that humans are powerless in modern society, due to the restrictive nature of routine, and the fact that we are consistently waiting for a higher power (Godot) to take power of our lives for us, rather than doing it ourselves.
Carter poses this same question, like Beckett especially at the end of each story (or in his case Act), yet presents her female characters in her short stories as having the ability to take authority over their situations at the end of the stories. The way in which this question is presented in “The Company of Wolves” contrasts that of Beckett; as Waiting for Godot is a play, Beckett is restricted for the most part to dialogue and structural features as devices in which he can present his themes. However, as Carter’s story contains very little dialogue, she makes use of figurative language and symbolism to explore this question. In “The Company of Wolves”, after meeting the wolf in the forest, the girl returns to her grandmother’s cottage to find that he has eaten her, indicating that the earlier dangerous presentation of the wolf in comparison to her innocence is stereotypical of that of fairy tales. However, Carter quickly shifts the power dynamic between the two characters. The girl does not appear to be alarmed by this event, and instead begins to seduce the Wolf. She ‘takes off her scarlet shawl, the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses...and ceased to be afraid’. The use of red colour imagery and symbolism here is significant; both poppies and sacrifices are symbols of war and thus violence, and ‘menses’ a symbol of adulthood and sexuality. Similarly, the description of the wolf’s ‘red eyes’ reinforces this association between violence and sex. However, this is contrasted by her ‘small breasts’ that ‘gleamed as if the snow had invaded the room’ and her ‘untouched integument of flesh’ with her hair that ‘looked as white as the snow outside’. The use of white colour imagery reminds us of the girl’s purity and innocence, despite her increasing sexual power. She then undresses the wolf and climbs into bed with him. The girl has taken control of her sexuality, and seduced the wolf into sexual submission. Carter presents her as having had the power to revert societal expectations regarding female sexuality, which is signified when she ‘burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.’ The fact that she is able to laugh when faced with a situation in which she should be the prey highlights her liberation from the restriction of her gender.
Both “The Company of Wolves” and Waiting for Godot raise the same questions about our ability as humans to take power over our identity and situations, but answer them in very different ways: they present optimistic and pessimistic views of this idea respectively. This contrast in part comes from the time in which these texts were written. Godot is a modernist text, written post war therefore has a bleak, existentialist perspective towards this idea. Beckett argues that we are unable to take power in modern society, due to our reliance on routine and faith in a higher power to do it for us. He argues therefore that true power in a modern world is impossible. On the other hand, Carter’s contemporary perspective argues that it is possible for people, in the case of her stories women, to take power over their identity, and to take authority over the roles that society, often expressed in traditional fairy tales, condemn them to.
Marking Criteria (old)
Criterion A: Knowledge, understanding and interpretation (10 marks)
9 out of 10: This is a sophisticated, perceptive response to the question. The candidate writes with intelligence about the subject of power - comparing the two texts in a way that shows thoughtful engagement with each, ultimately coming to a compelling and convincing conclusion.
Criterion B: Analysis and evaluation (10 marks)
8 out of 10: There is plenty of reference to literary features, as well as analysis of their impact or effect. A mark of 9 might well have been justified, but there is arguably room for more frequent analysis of craft - and sensitivity to the way it represents, as well as describes issues associated with power.
Criterion C: Focus and organisation (5 marks)
5 out of 5: This is a well balanced essay, characterised particularly by its careful and methodical development of an argument. The top mark here often reflects capacity for independent control of a line of thought - the sense that a line of enquiry actually goes somewhere, and this very much a characteristic represented here.
Criterion D: Language (5 marks)
5 out of 5:
This is well written and articulate. Two or three sentences could have been more controlled in terms of syntax, but these do not detract from an overall mature command of language.
Marking Criteria (new)
Criterion A: Knowledge, understanding and interpretation (5 marks)
5 out of 5: This is a sophisticated, perceptive response to the question. The candidate writes with intelligence about the subject of power - comparing the two texts in a way that shows thoughtful engagement with each, ultimately coming to a compelling and convincing conclusion.
Criterion B.1: Analysis and evaluation (5 marks)
4 out of 5: There is plenty of reference to literary features, as well as analysis of their impact or effect. A mark of 5 might well have been justified, but there is arguably room for more frequent analysis of craft - and sensitivity to the way it represents, as well as describes issues associated with power.
Criterion B.2: Comparative Analysis (5 marks)
4 out of 5: Other than the idea that both texts depict a “predator-prey” dynamic, not many authorial choices were explicitly compared. The power dynamic of the two works could have been unpacked more specifically.
Criterion C: Focus and organisation (5 marks)
5 out of 5: This is a well balanced essay, characterised particularly by its careful and methodical development of an argument. The top mark here often reflects capacity for independent control of a line of thought - the sense that a line of enquiry actually goes somewhere, and this very much a characteristic represented here.
Criterion D: Language (5 marks)
5 out of 5: This is well written and articulate. Two or three sentences could have been more controlled in terms of syntax, but these do not detract from an overall mature command of language.