On the feminism of 'The Company of Wolves' and Little Red Riding Hood (The Story of Grandmother)
In ‘The Company of Wolves’ (henceforth referred to as ‘Company’), Angela Carter takes a tragic fairy tale, The Story of Grandmother, and subverts it so that it ends happily for both the girl and the werewolf (uncommon in most versions). ‘Company’ is closer to the earliest orally-told Story of Grandmother than many versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story, although Carter does make the story less comic and more mature, with the girl taking sexual charge of the werewolf rather than running away, developing it “into a story of mutual lust” (Orenstein, 2002, p.167). The Story of Grandmother’s werewolf is described as a bzou, which could be a male werewolf or a female ogress (Orenstein, 2002, p.81). Carter’s new bzou is explicitly male – there is little confusion of his gender. Relating to traditional stories, Carter has written in The Sadeian Woman that “in the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes and woman is disposed of, just as she is disposed of in a rape” (Carter, 2012, p.6), thus her female protagonist in ‘Company’ challenges this status quo by proposing back to the werewolf, in a situation where only clothes and her interfering grandmother are disposed of.
The disposal of the werewolf’s clothing also indicates the protagonist’s active role in pursuing her desire, taking control of him as an equal sexual partner. In ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’, Carter turns beast into man, as in the original Beauty and the Beast – but in ‘Company’, Carter makes her heroine deliberately keep the beast as a beast by throwing his clothes into the fire. This preservation of the man as a beast could be seen to subvert the patriarchal notion that “nearly all that can be described as distinctly human rather than animal activity is largely reserved for the male” (Millett, 1983, p.26). It also gives the female character agency, something that few women are granted in fairy tales – Red Riding Hood being a prime historical example because the popular perception of Red Riding Hood comes from male writers (primarily Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm) rather than female writers. Virginia Woolf writes that in female-authored fiction “we are conscious of a woman’s presence – of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights” and because of this, women alter and adapt male-authored stories “until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought” (Woolf, 1996, pp.47-48). This seems particularly true of Carter in her intervention of previous Red Riding Hood stories.
Charles Perrault’s morality version condemns female sexual promiscuity, and scholar Catherine Orenstein writes that although Perrault’s wolf retained bzou characteristics, it “became no more than a salacious metaphor” (Orenstein, 2002, p.98). In France, “when a girl lost her virginity it was said that […] “she’d seen the wolf”” (Orenstein, 2002, p.26). While Perrault’s story has metaphorical sexuality, it seems likely that the protagonist of ‘Company’ literally loses her virginity as she sees the wolf – Carter was possibly referencing this phrase. Carter’s sexual allusions appear to promote a subversive agenda, as second-wave feminist Kate Millett wrote only a few years before Carter, that “the feeling that woman’s sexual functions are impure is both world-wide and persistent. One sees evidence of it everywhere in literature, in myth” (Millett, 1983, p.47). Post-Perrault versions of the story tend to cut his sexual moral, but Carter almost suggests another one, showing that a woman’s sexual decisions should not have to endanger her as they do not endanger the protagonist.
The Grimms’ Little Red Cap loses Perrault’s moral but uses the story for similar ends. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm claims that it “speaks of the male-female conflict” (Fromm, 1957, p.241) and Jack Zipes calls it “a coded message about rationalizing bodies and sex” (Zipes, 1993, p.34) which “virtually dwarfed Perrault’s version because of the prudent and puritanical modifications” (Zipes, 1993, p.36). Little Red Cap’s popularity grew due to the Grimms’ sexless and child-friendly approach. Wilhelm Grimm explained that they had “carefully eliminated any phrase not appropriate for children” (Grimm, in: Tatar, 1987, p.220), and “references to sex […] were purged” (Orenstein, 2002, p.54). It was through the Grimms’ own censorship that their version of the story “came to embody both the new nineteenth-century child and the new Victorian woman – two concepts that, it turns out, were in some ways indistinguishable” (Orenstein, 2002, p.49). This concept of a woman as girl-child was popular even before Victorian times, as early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in 1792 that men “try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood” (Wollstonecraft, 1992, p.101). Carter’s protagonist does not conform to the Grimm’s girl-child, though she is young.
One interpretation of the red cap (which is not present in The Story of Grandmother) by Fromm is that it “symbolized the onset of menstruation” (Orenstein, 2002, p.70). In ‘Company’, the protagonist is not described as wearing anything red, but the onset of her menstruation is explicitly referred to in Carter’s writing: “…she has just started her woman’s bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month” (Carter, 2006, p.133). While much violence is present in the Grimms’ tales, as it is in Carter’s tales, this exaggerated the good versus evil binary and served to “promote their German middle-class values for the new Victorian family: discipline, piety, […] and, above all, obedience” (Orenstein, 2002, p.55). Although Carter keeps violence in her stories (more inspired by the Marquis de Sade than the Grimms), it is not used to promote these agendas – ‘Company’ has a grey area between good and evil. In ancient pagan rituals, the “wolf-man was generally regarded with great awe by hunting tribes. As attitudes changed […] werewolves gradually became associated with hostile forces, or outcasts who lived in the woods outside society and preyed upon humans” (Zipes, 1993, p.67). While Carter still depicts werewolves as hostile predatory outcasts, she returns to a pre-Story of Grandmother perception of an awesome wolf-man who is – through his appeal to the protagonist’s female gaze – less villainous than in most versions of Red Riding Hood. Ancient societies portrayed wolves as good, such as in the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus who were raised by a wolf (echoed in Carter’s ‘Wolf-Alice’), and despite making the werewolf a murderer, Carter seems to have reclaimed this sympathy for the wolf rather than following an accepted status quo of wolves being evil.
Stylistically, ‘Company’ differs from Perrault and the Grimms’ conventional ways of telling fairy tales, particularly because Carter spends the first half of the text setting up a werewolf mythology for the second half to conform to. Orenstein writes that “Carter has drawn from the legends and historical writings on werewolves by, among others, Henri Boguet, the sixteenth-century French jurist” (Orenstein, 2002, p.166) – a witch-hunter who prosecuted “werewolves” as witches (Sconduto, 2009, p.165). The influence of Boguet on ‘Company’ and particularly Carter’s ‘The Werewolf’ can be seen in one of his accounts that describes a huntsman who severed a wolf’s paw – which subsequently turned into a human hand – and returned home to find his witch wife whose hand had been severed (Sconduto, 2009, p.166). Stubbe Peeter, a convicted werewolf, could also have been an influence on Carter’s mythology – he “admitted that he had made a pact with the Devil and that the Devil had given him a girdle to transform himself into a wolf” (Orenstein, 2002, p.91). This connection to the Devil and clothing tie into Carter’s werewolf mythology. Carter’s, however, is not the first Red Riding Hood story influenced by Boguet and Peeter – the earliest Story of Grandmother appears to have arisen from a real fear of werewolves in France, due to rampant wolf attacks (Orenstein, 2002, p.95).
Susan Brownmiller, an influential second-wave feminist writing before the publication of The Bloody Chamber, called Red Riding Hood a parable of rape as “there are frightening male figures abroad in the woods – we call them wolves, among other names – and females are helpless before them. Better stick close to the path, better not be adventurous” (Brownmiller, 1976, p.244). However, Carter’s female protagonist is rewarded for not sticking to the path, her ‘reward’ being an opposite of rape. Orenstein writes that some stories from the feminist movement “highlight the gap between the way men wrote the fairy tale and the way women read it, others offer a new vision of the fairy tale to bridge that divide” (Orenstein, 2002, p.153). Carter’s offers a new vision, in retaliation to her belief that, as a woman, her “symbolic value is primarily that of a myth of patience and receptivity” (Carter, 2012, p.5). Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, in her book Woman Hating (another precedent of The Bloody Chamber), suggested that this value comes from the fact that “we have taken the fairy tales of childhood with us into maturity […] as real identity” (Dworkin, 1974, p.33).
In conclusion, ‘The Company of Wolves’ undeniably challenges the sexual status quo of the past few centuries. This is “significant because it reflects the changing attitudes toward women and sexuality in Western society” (Zipes, 1993, p.64) by crafting a new “depiction of a young girl overcoming sadomasochism and taking charge of her own sexuality” (Zipes, 1993, p.380). Carter partly draws on The Story of Grandmother’s somewhat sexually liberal status quo of sixteenth-century French peasantry, but uses this to promote a second-wave (and third-wave) feminist agenda which challenges worldwide status quo of patriarchy and its representation of women in sexual relationships.
Bibliography
Brownmiller, S. (1976) Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, New York: Bantam
Carter, A. (2006) The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories, London: Vintage
Carter, A. (2012) The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, London: Virago
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