The company of wolves

Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” is a feminist and gothic retelling of the classic fairy tale “Little Red Riding-Hood”. Carter’s story involves the werewolf as sexual predator, a symbol for both danger and desire, over which a young girl triumphs, employing her new found sexual power and giving in to the symbol of carnal desire. This is definitely a new twist upon the original tale, in which the helpless girl and her grandmother are freed from the belly of a wolf by a passing man, as they were unable to fend for themselves. In this new, more harsh version, granny does indeed perish, but her granddaughter, able to give in to and use sexual desire to her advantage, escapes unscathed. This tale sings praises to female sexuality and liberation, and implies that nothing else, not God nor fear nor good living will save the victims of the wolf, and the only way to survive in a world in which temptation, danger and desire stalks you everywhere, is to fight fire with fire.

The story appears in two parts, one of which tells folk tales of the wolf and werewolf, the other of which tells of Little Red. It bombards the reader, in the first part, with terrifying descriptions of the wolf and his deeds. He, and what he stands for, is clearly and object of fear for the people in the story. Wolves are described as “forest assassins grey members of a congregation of nightmare” 1 (647). They are likened to be the worst of “all the teeming perils of the night and the forest, ghosts, hobgoblins, ogres that grill babies upon gridirons, witches” (647). These are all fictional monsters, and the irrational fear of these nonexistent creatures is like the fear of the wolf, which is real, but not nearly as dangerous as the villagers believe. So great is their fear that the children carry knives, sharpened daily, half their own size, when they go outside. The fear of the wolf is bred into the children and the women, almost like paranoia, and the danger is exaggerated to mammoth