The Company Of Wolf Analysis

Aria of Fear: Shape-Shifting and Song in “The Company of Wolves”

For the characters in Angela Carter's “The Company of Wolves,” danger lurks in the the grey areas, the ambiguous spaces between opposites. The plethora of socially constructed binaries—male and female, passive and active, innocence and maturity, civilization and wilderness, man and wolf—have the ability to be harmful and restrictive, but perhaps more worryingly, they create an ill-defined middle ground between where the rules are vague and fluid, which allows for dishonesty and deception, and Carter foregrounds the resultant proliferation of untruths as the real peril. One vehicle for clear and honest communication, however, is the narrator's changing characterization of the

A natural wolf may have the same claws and fangs, perhaps even the same tendency toward killing humans, but it cannot lie. In issuing a warning about the predators in the forest, Carter writes: “fear and flee the wolf; for, worst of all, the wolf may be more than he seems” (111). The peril is framed not as death or dismemberment; “worst of all” is the possibility that the creature might also be a man. In her article on the “becoming-narrative” in the story, Wendy Swyt argues that this deep-rooted fear of lycanthropy comes from the transformation itself. “As a 'demonic animal,' the werewolf serves as a challenge to the fixed traits and social definitions that establish boundaries between self and Other, the stable community and the depths of the forest” (318). By moving easily between perceived opposites, existing as both fixed states when it is neither, the “becoming-wolf,” as she terms it, is in a perpetual state of dishonesty, which can only be revealed “by their eyes, eyes of a beast of prey, nocturnal, devastating eyes as red as a wound” (Carter 115). The narrative illustrates the danger of this lie with a crucial change to the original tale of Little Red Riding Hood: when the girl meets the wolf in the woods, he is disguised as the hunter. The original story builds its moral—“children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf” (Perrault 1)—from the basic assumption of the girl's oblivious trust. She does not know a dangerous predator when she sees one, and therefore must be forbidden from talking to any strangers at all. In “The Company of Wolves,” however, the focus shifts from her naivete to the wolf's deception; she knows what to look for and has a knife on hand, but sees “no sign of a wolf at all, nor of a naked man” (114). The fault lies in his active concealment