ABSTRACT
The hero’s triumph over the wild things dramatizes the mastery of the patriarchy. Their confrontation forms the climax of the story and encodes the major dualisms which shape it and which underlie Western attitudes and values: the opposition of the civilized and the wild, of order and chaos, of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, of reason and basic instinct. The story defines reality in terms of these binary oppositions, insisting upon their inherent antagonism. It does not envisage the possibility of rapprochement between the hero and his opponents for the aim of the wild things, as the story tells it, is always to destroy him.
