Where do they come but from the undergrowth of our psyche? Or from man’s own nature: ‘hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey!’Īngela Carter, who has re-written the rich repertoire of feral and bestial behaviour of the most celebrated fairy tales, seems to emerge from a different era of our civilisation (in terms of centuries, not of decades). There are so many wild beasts of all species in our mythology, lurking behind every tree, threateningly snoring in every den. Wolves must have been habitual acquaintances for rural populations until a few centuries ago, but what about lions and tigers, nowhere to be seen in Europe since the Ice Age? And yet they are the so frequent visitors to the hovel or hut of the heroes in our folklore.
Is the menagerie located at the outskirts of the city or inside our beds? It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civilised world. Our wild-beast ancestry fills our dreams and our legends, our myths and our fables if we sniff below, in our underwear or in the lingerie of folklore, what we find is a touch of silvestral life the odorous relic of a savage existence which lingers in our human body and urban culture. Where does the tiger live? Or the lion, or the wolf? I am not referring to the precise location of their cages in the zoo, or to the wild areas where beasts have their abode: I mean, where do they live inside us, underneath the cocoon of our human nature? In some crevice of our humanity there hides a tiny feral, leonine or tigerish element which shares a venue with our immortal soul.
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