Carter, Angela. "The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter".

Characteristics

- setting: an isolated village high in the uplands

- dwellers: sullen people with flat, boneless faces like the Eskimo, eyes with slack skin of the Mongolian instead of eyelids

- men: particularly hirsute, filthy, and verminous

- women: "built for durability rather than delight", perform all the demanding agricultural tasks

- days filled with manual work, nights devoted to the imaginings of unspeakable desires

- foklore: wizards, shamans, practitioners of the occult

- the tribe was banished from their original more prosperous region by their neighbours who considered their common practice of incest abhorrent

Protagonists

The Executioner

- never takes off his mask because he would die of fright seeing his natural face

- lost his original face, became an object of fear and retribution

- demands for breakfast eggs precisely on the point of blossming into chicks

- the only who is allowed to commit incest with his beautiful daughter

- otherwise incest is punished here by decapitation

- executed his only son for committing incest with his sister Gretchen

 Gretchen

- the executioner's daughter, the only beauty in the village and the only tender-hearted creature here

- buried her brother's body beside the hen-coop where she goes each morning to collect eggs for her father's breakfast

- after an act of public execution decribed in the story, she sees her dead brother riding a bicycle in the night, though she does not know what a bicycle is 

- her dream ends with the cock's crow and her going out to collect the eggs

Questions to Consider

- The executioner beheaded his son for incest. What was the motive of the execution, was it the justice or rather jelausy?

- What might be the motives of incestual behaviour as such?

- What is the thing the village-dwellers desire? Does the incest stand for their desires? Do they desire incest just because it is forbidden?

- What part does the folklore play in the villagers' lives? Do they keep their traditions for their belief in them or out of fear of breaking them?