KidLit Forum

The title of the work (The Company of Wolves) does not really sound as a fairy tale.As for the intertextuality, I think that here we've got implicit reference to a fairy tale in the text (in our case Little Red Riding Hood). The title is suggestive for the work, and from the very beginning the wolves are presented as dangerous, fierce and scary. It is like the story is divided in two parts: first there is the part in which the reader is warned about the impending danger that wolves represent (the author suggests this by describing the wolves, and also by showing some stories about the harms the wolves used to do when dominated by hunger), and then the author presents the actual story, that variant of Little Red Riding Hood.
At the beginning, the author seems to pity somehow the werewolves, and tries to justify their behaviour by stating that they only attacked people in the winter, when there was nothing else to eat, but at some point she says that humans decide whether they want or not to turn into werewolves and that they are in some kind of partnership with the devil.
At some point, the author compares the wolves with other dangerous creatures,and finally draws the conclusion that they are the most dangerous (”of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest, ghosts, hobgoblins, ogres that grill babies upon gridirons, witches that fatten their captives in cages for cannibal tables, the wolf is worst for he cannot listen to reason.”) Even more than that, she states that wolves are clever and cunning enough to fool people into letting them into their house and then kill them.
After pointing out all the dangers that werewolves represent, the author presents the main character of the story: a girl who wants to visit her grandmother in the woods, despite of her mother not allowing her. Even though the girl is presented as young and vulnerable, she looks like she is not afraid of anything. She carries a knife in her basket, knife which makes her confident and makes her feel safe in the dangerous wood. Also, it is worth noticing that the girl is wearing red, a colour which may represent the sexual maturation, sexual readiness.
What I found interesting in the story was the fact that the author seems to suggest that the element that saved the main character was the sexual desire and not the Christian belief (the grandmother's case). The reader may see that the young girl manages to save herself by fighting fire with fire. The girl seems to be very confident and not afraid at all: ” She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamour of the forest’s Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even when he answered:All the better to eat you with. The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.” It is like she knew he was not going to eat her as long as she acted that way.
Moreover, the girl seems to feel pity for the werewolf, as if she had forgotten about him eating her grandmother. The end is unexpected (I say unexpected because initially the reader is tempted to believe that the girl is willing to sacrifice herself) and differs a lot from the original fairy tale: ” See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.”

I suppose, all of us or a great majority, read this story of Angela Carter, so i would not make a summary of it. At the final of the story, thinking of the age in which has been wrote- postmodernism, thinking about the new perspectives that Angela brought: new writing style, new themes (reinventing the traditional ones), I thought that there is a similarity between " The Company of Wolves" and the movie "Twilight", but not so much. Just if we look at the heroine, both are characterized by innocence, both have the company of a beast. I think it would be a great thing to see this story screened!!!