The story opens with a long descriptive passage depicting the stark and gloomy atmosphere of the woods in late October. These woods are characterized as entrapping and menacing, not so much because of any physical danger they present as because of their ability to undermine human identity: “It is easy to lose yourself in these woods.” This point is further emphasized though disorienting shifts from second- to third- to first-person narration.
When a clear first-person narrator’s voice does emerge, she describes hearing a bird song that expresses her own “girlish and delicious loneliness” as she walks through the woods. She believes that she is alone. She then comes upon a clearing where animals have gathered. The Erlking enters playing a pipe that sounds like a birdsong and reaches out to the narrator. She is immediately subject to his strange charisma. She states that he has the power to do “grievous harm.”
The story goes on to describe the Erlking’s way of life. He lives alone in an orderly one-room house, surviving on the wild foods he gathers in the woods and the milk of a white goat. The Erlking tells the narrator about the ways of the strange woodland animals and teaches her to weave reeds and twigs into baskets, which he uses to cage the wild birds he keeps trapped in his cottage. He laughs at her when she accuses him of cruelty for doing this. In his house, full of the music of birdsong, there is an old fiddle, silent because it has no strings.
The narrator relates that, when she goes out for walks, she now feels compelled to go to the Erlking and have sex with him, which she describes ambivalently as both tender and violent. She claims that she is not afraid of him, though she is afraid of how he makes her feel. She describes this feeling as vertigo, a dizzying loss of orientation. Like the birds he calls with his pipe, the narrator is pulled toward him again and again, despite the danger he evokes.
The narrator describes one such encounter with the Erlking: She finds him playing his pipe, surrounded by birds, at one with the natural environment. It begins to rain and they retreat to his cottage. They embrace and he bites her neck. As they have sex, she reflects on her innocence before meeting him and his magical attraction. She imagines stringing the silent fiddle with his long wild hair, making music she would prefer to that of the caged birds that surround them in the room. She describes her feeling of being stripped by him and then clothed by his body. She wishes to grow small so that he could swallow her and then give birth to her.
As winter draws nearer, there is less to eat in the woods, and the wild birds are dependent on the Erlking for food. They flock to him and cover his body. Like a bird, the narrator accepts the “goblin feast of fruit” he has set out for her. Looking into his eyes makes her feel as if she has become small as a bird. The Erlking has the power to contain her. She realizes his plan to keep her in a cage, another singing bird, but says that she will remain silent out of spite. She doesn’t think the Erlking means any harm, despite the fact that he has captured her psychically with his strange powers.
The first-person narrator describes lying with the Erlking and combing the dead leaves out of his long hair. She says that, as he sleeps in her lap, she will take his hair and wind it into two ropes to strangle him with. There is a sudden shift to third-person narration. This narrator states that the protagonist will next open all the of cages and set free the birds, each of which will turn into a young girl with the mark of the Erlking’s red love bite on her neck. Then she will cut off his hair and string the silent fiddle with five strands of it, and the fiddle will play magically without a human hand. The strings will cry out a discordant music, saying “Mother, Mother you have murdered me!”
Jennifer Smith – Short Stories for Students – Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, vol. 12, Angela Carter, Published by Gale Group, 2001.