American Literature

In the story  The Company of Wolves  Angela Carter seeks to retell the tale of Red Riding Hood and her encounter with the wolf. More important than the rehashing of the fairy tale, is the manner in which Carter seeks to blend fact and fiction to illustrate man s ability to combine the unknown and the known within their own imaginations to gain a better understanding of the world around them. The simple facts of the wolf, as a predator and carnivore, are enhanced and dramatized with the addition of the werewolf myth and the story of Red Riding Hood to assist in illustrating how through imagination the lines between fact and fiction are distorted. The wolves  progression from animal to man, from natural predator to sexual predator, is a result of this combination of fact and fiction. The characteristics of men and wolves combined in a werewolf give man a basis for understanding the baser instincts and sometimes brutal actions that characterize the history of humanity. Subtly, juxtaposing the harsh realities of nature with the dramatics of myth and fairy tale, Carter shows how people utilizes imagination, the combination of reality and myth, to relate to the world around them.

In the beginning of the story, Carter establishes the animal ferocity and wildness of wolves,  The wolf is carnivore incarnate   once he s had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do  (Carter 1580). Throughout the story, Carter reasserts this idea within the growing context of the wolf and the animal immediately as representative of the violence of nature. However, at this early stage of the story, the wolf though  cunning as he is ferocious  (1580) is still just a wolf. In this way, Carter establishes that the wolf does and can exist outside of the imaginations of man but is always very different from people. Monika Fludernik notes, also, that the introduction,   is followed by a quasi-definitional characterization of the wolf and a paragraph of even more non-scientific folk-lore about wolves which provides instructions to a generic you traveling through the forest at night  (226). Not only is mans imagination being represented in Carters show of the manipulations of fact and fiction over the nature of the wolf but she is also appealing to this part of human nature and imagination in her reader.

The image of the wolf, as illustrated in Carter s description of not only the wolf but the wildness of the woods as well, shows a basic nature that is at constant conflict with the reasonable nature of man,  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 the worst for he cannot listen to reason  (Carter 1580). Left unspoken in this passage, but nevertheless present, is the idea that wolves are a constant natural reality. Unlike the ogre or the cannibalistic witch, the wolf is not fictional. The wolf is a representative of nature that does not need to be assigned any special motivations for his deeds nor has the creature been created for the mere use as a lesson in morality. In demonizing the wolf, creating the wolf in Red Riding Hood s story, man can give human attributes to the beast to better help humanity understand their own world. Carter uses the wolf and the stories which have grown around the creature to shows the manner in which,  social forces construct subjectivity (McGuire 129) The woods which shelter the wolves from the outside world become, in this manner, an accomplice to death,  the shaggy branches tangle about you, trapping the unwary traveler in nets as if the vegetation itself were a plot with the wolves who live there, as though the wicked trees go fishing on behalf of their friends  (1581).

As predators, wolves are in their very genetic make-up harbingers of death and in trying to make sense of this type of natural violence man has assigned them with a supernatural understanding. The seemingly senselessness of their attacks against people, rather than being explained and understood within the context of their survival, resulted in a the wolf becoming a kind of living nightmare,  They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, grey members of a congregation of nightmare hark His long, wavering howl   an aria of fear made audible  (1580). It is not the fear of the wolves that sings through the voices of the lone wolf or pack, scavenging through the forest at night, but rather the fear of man for his own mortality and lack of understanding that is represented by the wolves  howl. The wolf howls out of instinct, a need for communication, its only in mans imagination that it becomes a funeral song.

In addition to the conflict of man versus nature, Carter attempts to take on through outlining of imagination the basic myths of gender. In approaching gender in the way that the original fairy does, it also represents a way for human beings to mesh imagination and social reality. As critic Catherine Lappas notes in her essay on the concepts of female sexuality and spectatorship inherent to the story,  Carter juxtaposes myths of female sexuality against womens real dreams and desires the girl and the wolf become one   of mutual consent. Carter foregrounds the relationship between fairy tales and reality, both of which prescribe action for females within similar ideological parameters (Lappas 124). Not only is the myth of the wolf, as an unpitying foe of man presented and then is disproved in Carters story but the myth of female vulnerability is removed from this version of Red Riding Hood as she asserts her dominance and, more importantly in some respects, ability to choose for herself,  she knew she was nobodys meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire   the old bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them any heed  (Carter 1584). The girl is going against tradition and against the precepts than man has established for themselves in not only understanding nature but separating themselves from it. The description of grandmothers house as cozy and full of nice knick-knacks, shows how man tries to keep nature at bay by shielding themselves from both reality and the nightmares their imaginations create. As the narrator notes,  We keep the wolves outside by living well  (1583). We deny and indulge our imaginations, through creating new fears and exaggerating old ones.

Carter recognizes the power of human imagination and uses the act of storytelling as a means to express individual perspectives and agendas. Lappas quotes Carter on the piecemeal manner in which myth and belief are created from human ideas and fears,  the story has been tinkered with, had bits added to it, lost other bits, got mixed up with other stories, until our informant herself has tailored the story personally, to suit an audience of, say, children, or drunks at a wedding, or bawdy old ladies, or mourners at a wake - or, simply, to suit herself (qtd. in Lappas 125). A story is not simply the words and ideas of the writer, but the intentions and perspectives of both writer and reader.  The Company of Wolves  illustrates this idea perfectly by interjecting a new reality into the imagined myth of man versus wolfwerewolf. She shows how the imagination is both a product and a tool of human beings understanding of the world around them.