The Company of Wolves

The story

The story opens with an extended, relishing essay on the wolf as the forest’s great terror, followed by three brief inset tales of werewolves: a hunter who traps a wolf that turns into a dying man; a witch who turns a wedding party into wolves; and a bridegroom who vanishes on his wedding night, returns years later as a wolf to find his wife remarried, and is killed. Then the main tale begins. A strong-minded girl, so loved that she has never learned to be afraid, sets out through the winter forest to her grandmother’s house. She meets a charming young huntsman who wagers that he can reach the house first, the prize a kiss. He wins by taking a shortcut, reaches the grandmother, reveals himself as a wolf and devours her, hiding the traces. When the girl arrives she notices a tuft of her grandmother’s white hair caught in the bed and understands that the old woman is already dead and that she herself is in danger. Rather than fight or flee she chooses to meet it: she laughs when the wolf claims the kiss he has won, strips off her red shawl and feeds each garment, his and hers alike, to the fire, and lies down with him while the murdered grandmother’s bones rattle under the bed, unheeded beneath the lovers. The story ends with her sleeping soundly between the paws of the now tender wolf.

A closer look

The source tale: Perrault answered, and the wolf reconsidered

Carter knew Perrault’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ intimately, having translated it, and she found his brisk moral, that girls who talk to strangers get eaten, both cynical and incomplete. ‘The Company of Wolves’ is her long answer. Where Perrault ends with the girl consumed and a lesson attached, Carter refuses both the consumption and the lesson, letting her heroine bat away the wolf’s threat and take him to bed. The three prelude tales do important work here: they insist that the real danger is not the animal but the man who is a wolf, the husband who returns to call his wife a whore, so that by the time the girl meets her charming huntsman we understand the ‘wolf’ as male violence wearing a human face. Carter later expanded the story with Neil Jordan into the 1984 film, but on the page its argument is already complete: the tale is about what a girl does with a threat she has been taught to fear.

Method: the theatrical narrator, direct address and the shift to the present

The voice is the story’s great instrument. Carter opens in the register of a lurid narrator, half showman and half warning, piling on the adjectives until the wolf becomes ‘carnivore incarnate’, ‘as cunning as he is ferocious’, his eyes shining ‘like candle-flames’. This theatrical excess is a trap and a tease: the more gorgeously the horror is dressed, the more we are drawn to enjoy it. The narrator turns to address us directly and imperatively, ‘Fear and flee the wolf’, warning that ‘if you stray from the path for one instant’ the wolves ‘are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague’, so that the reader is implicated in the folklore of dread the story then dismantles. When the main tale begins, the prose shifts into the present tense, pulling us into an urgent, unfolding now. And Carter keeps her sharpest image in reserve: the truly dangerous wolves, she tells us, are ‘hairy on the inside’, the beast concealed within the plausible man.

The central concern: fear, desire and the terms of consent

The turn of the story is the girl’s refusal to be afraid. Seeing the evidence of her grandmother’s death, she reasons that ‘since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid’, and in that cold clear moment she stops being prey. Her most quoted line, ‘the girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat’, rejects the whole vocabulary of the woman as flesh to be consumed that runs through the collection. She reverses the ritual strip that men perform on women elsewhere in the book: it is she who ‘ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire’, and the kiss she owes she ‘freely gave’, a phrase Carter’s manuscript revisions worked hard to make active, changing a kiss he takes into one she chooses to give. Read one way, this is a triumphant claiming of female desire, Red Riding Hood finding bliss with the wolf. Read another, the girl is trapped in a room with her grandmother’s murderer and rewrites her only survivable option as consent, so that ‘nobody’s meat’ may be liberation or the bravado of the cornered. Carter stages the grandmother’s death as a veiled sexual assault, the naked wolf-man stripping to fall on her and keeping her nightcap as a trophy, so that the bed the girl climbs into is already a murder scene, and the horror of the choice is that it needs no visible force at all. Carter presses on that line between choice and coercion and does not resolve it. What is certain is the final image and its oxymoron: she sleeps ‘sweet and sound’ between the paws of the ‘tender wolf’, danger and safety folded into one.

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘carnivore incarnate’ (The Company of Wolves)	Epithet, theatrical excess	The narrator’s lurid billing makes the wolf a spectacle, luring the reader to relish the fear the tale will undo.
‘They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague’ (The Company of Wolves)	Simile, direct address, parallelism	The conspiratorial second-person warning builds the folklore of dread that the heroine then refuses.
‘hairy on the inside’ (The Company of Wolves)	Inversion, metaphor	The real predator is the man who looks human; monstrosity is internal, hidden by a plausible surface.
‘since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid’ (The Company of Wolves)	Aphorism, cause and effect	The girl reasons her way out of terror; the moment she stops being prey is a decision, not a rescue.
‘The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat’ (The Company of Wolves)	Climactic action, refusal of the meat motif	She rejects the whole language of woman-as-flesh; whether this is freedom or bravado is left open.
‘sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf’ (The Company of Wolves)	Oxymoron, final image	Danger and safety collapse into one; the ‘tender wolf’ leaves us unsure whether to feel triumph or unease.