KidLit Forum

When I first read this story it suddenly came across my mind the Little Red Riding Hood story. Maybe because of setting, characters ( the young girl has to bring food to her ill grandmother in the forest). Soon the story changes. We find out that the young girl is independent and competent, she is not afraid of the forest, she knows how to use a knife. It seems to be a real woman, courageous , independent, perfectly adapted to a northen country where weather is cold and people have a cold heart. She doesn’t seem an ordinary child...she believes in witches/ superstitions and helps stoning any witches found. During this story the girl’s position seems very ambiguous. She makes me feel that she isn’t in fact the true heroine, I can’t realize if her acts are good or bad. The limits are interchangeble. We observe that even if she is a little girl , she is the one who first uses violence when turns on over her grandmother/werewolf. More over she turns from an innocent hunted girl into a huntress when she cuts off the werewolf’s paw. Finally she gets rid of her grandmother, helps to stone her to death and takes all her belongings and uses them in order to achieve success in a country were people are very poor and die soon from bad conditions. It seems that all the action illustrates the competition between the two women and my impression was that in the end the real werewolf/ witch was actually the girl (maybe is not true, only my impression). Because the narrator did not make us definitely trust the heroine I can say that we can not for sure blame/hate the grandmother. She has no verbal replies in the action and we can even pity her for her lonliness, isolation in the forest, crying. Because the limits between good and bad are not fixed, they seem subjective, and so, we have to question ourselves who the witch actually is :the society (represented by villagers, girl) or the grandmother (the isolated individual)?

"She shook out the cloth from her basket, to use it to make the old woman a cold compress, and the wolf’s paw fell to the floor.
But it was no longer a wolf’s paw. It was a hand, chopped off at the wrist, a hand toughened with work and freckled with old age. There was a wedding ring on the third finger and a wart on the index finger. By the wart, she knew it for her grandmother’s hand."
But what was the "werewolf "doing in there that she managed to cut its paw??? Only coming to say "Hello,welcome to my haunted beastie wood!" The fact that grandma could metamorphose herself into such a beast, bloodthirsty,and willingly to scare her own niece while she was supposed to be ill and stay in bed, waiting for food, does it really make her a victim??? By the way, it was self defense to try to protect yourself in such a scary,haunted woods. And is the little girl really a werewolf/witch??? How was she supposed to know that the werewolf was her grandmother??? I think she acted normally from the point of view of a hunter...She was the little girl and the hunter, too.

I am shocked because I don't understand why the girl didn't show remorse for helping kill her grandmother. In general people feel remorse even when they kill a dog crushing it by car, by accident, so what happens in this FT?????????? when we talk about a grandmother, who is supposed to be loved more than a mother in our habitual life. And in addition she continued to live in her grandmother's house.

"The Werewolf" is very different from a traditional fairy tale.

First of all, there is a dark, gothic opening of the story:
"It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.
Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within."
And it continues in the same manner, describing other horrifying events: "the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them...".


Secondly, the grandmother(who should be a symbol of material and spiritual support, human warmth, etc.) is also the werewolf in this story: "a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops" which "went for her throat, as wolves do..", trying to attack her granddaughter.

And finally, if one of the standard gender roles in fairy tales is that innocent women are walking targets, passive and even naive, in "The Werewolf", the young girl is strong, skilled and experienced in self defense: "...she made a great swipe at it with her father's knife and slashed off its right forepaw".


So, Angela Carter manages to re-interpretate folk tales for modern times, using themes of gothic and horror, and challenging readers' expectations of how men and women are "supposed" to act in these stories.

This is called inter-textuality...the term invented by bulgarian-french theorist, Julia Kristeva.
Postmodern fiction is built from elements of other works, as we could see in Angela Carter's postmodern fairy tales.

Why didn't the girl feel any remorse??? Lydia has just answered the question.... because it's a gothic/horror story...and when everything is creepy and scary, the girl has to be tough to survive...

I think that the girl did not feel any remorse for her grandmother s death because she considered that her life is more important. I think that this is an act of cruelty but other people might consider that she did the right thing. Some people believe that our emotions, our love for the loved ones makes us primitive. And like my colleague Maria Maris said, she has to be tough in order to survive.