Becoming a Woman. The Semiotic and Symbolic, Represented in the Heroine of Wolf by Gillian Cross

Abstract

This essay will explore how Cassy, the teenage protagonist of Wolf by Gillian Cross, goes against culture – her grandmother – towards the wild semiotic to become a woman. Cassy has not dared to enter the feminine semiotic before because she has been following culture or the symbolic, represented in the novel with Nan, Cassy´s grandmother, all her life where all that is woman, wild and bodily is looked down upon. Another reason is that she does not want to become her own mother, and face her bodily side connected to the wild and sexual. It is important, as Julia Kristeva sees it, to return to the chora, which is dominant in a child´s life in its infancy, to reach puberty. Cassy slowly becomes a fuller part of the semiotic throughout the story. She is reluctant to do so at first as she has been so fully inside reason before with Nan´s mathematical strictness and coldness. When she gets to know Lyall, Lyall´s son Robert and her mother Goldie, and their wild living habits in the house she slowly enters her wild side, although the wilderness disgusts her. When Cassy confronts her father, which shows her independence, she has finally entered the semiotic. In the end she has masters her new found desires with her wild dreams, the sexual Lyall and finally returnes to the chora, in a symbiosis with her mother.