i Neil J-

Company of Uolves

n light of Irish fllmmaker Neil Jordan's inspired and acclaimed 1997 adaptation of Patrick
McCabe's The Butcher Boy ("with a script co-written by McCabe and Jordan), a look at
one of his earlier, and critically neglected fllms seems in order. When Jordan made The
Company of Wolves in 1984, it was onejjf-thcTace fllms in the horror genre that chose a
female character as its main subject, and displayed a,genuine concern for a woman's problems from a decidedly feminist persfiecti^-e.' The idea for the fllm came from British writer
Angela Carter's 1979 feminist/reviionit re-telling of L/H/e Red Riding Hood\ it provid^
the seed from which the script for The Compairy of Wolves grew and expanded into a n \
intricate narrative, interweaving storytelling and dreams, co-written by Carter and Jordan.2 j
The screenplay appropriates a variety of different folk-legends, fairy tales, and myths, both
oral and written, and shows an intelligent awareness ofthe ways in which fairy tales haye
been a tool for the acculturation of children for their prescribed social roles, (LibermanT85)
The way in which the tale of Little Red Riding Hood (Litlle Red Riding Hood will henceforth be known as LRRH) has transmogrified over time is instructive when approaching the
surfeit of meanings offered up by The Company of Wolves. Variations of LRRH can be
found in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Native American mythologies. In its original oral incamation, the folk tale marks the social initiation of a young
woman, and celebrates her coming of age. It is also, importantly, a waming. A common
story in the Middle Ages has an '",,, ogre, ogress, man-eater, wild person, werewolf, or wolf
. . . " attacking a child in the forest or at home, (Zipes 18-19) The stoiy functions socially as
an admonition to deter children from talking to strangers, or allowing them access to their
dwellings. In some versions of the story, when LRRH gets to Granny's house, the wolf
forces her to eat the grandmother's flesh and drink her blood, in a perverted ritual of
transubstantion. In all the early versions ofthe tale, LRRH outsmarts the wolf in a variety of
clever moves, and escapes.
The story was revised, with moral purpo.se. by Charles Perrault, who also cleaned up any
references to cannibalism. In the Perrault story, written for the court of Louis XIV, as Jack
Zipes writes, "He transformed a hopeful oral tale about the initiation of a young girl into a
tragic one of violence in which the gid is blamed for her own violation." (Zipes 7) In keeping with most feminist literature on the subject, Zipes equates the act of being eaten with

66

The Company ofWolvesltil

rape, and most certainly with violation. In Perrault's version LRRH and Granny are eaten
by the wolf; they don't escape; nor are they rescued, therefore depriving the characters any
measure of salvation or redemption.
In the later version by the Brothers Grimtn, LRRH survives, but only because of the
valiant ministrations of a huntsman, a strong male. He alone can save her from own lustful
desires, of which her red cloaktraditionally the color associated with violent sexuality
is but an external manifestation. Michel Foucault in The Histoiy of Sexuality, writes about
the Grimm's de-sexualization of the story as both a mirror and a response to the contemporaneous society's wish to guard against the sexualization of children. (Foucault 104)
The wolf, both in oral and written tradition is a sexual, lustful being. It is not coincidental
that in Italian, the word for tiiale wolf is liipo, and lupa, the word for female wolf, also
means vulva. Allegorically, as cited in a German text from the mid 180()s, DER Werewolf,
wolves have been the natural symbol of night, winter, death, especially bloodthirsty, swift,
lusty, hardy, bold [with a] desire for blood and hunger for the fiesh of corpses. (Jones 132)
Ernst Jones writes in On The Nightmare that the wolf is "... specially suited to represent the
dangerous and immoral side of nature in general and human nature in particular." (Jones
132)
But the wolf is also associated with fertility and phallic symbolism, and thus affiliated
both with birth and destruction. Significantly, werewolves were not associated with evil
until the end of the 15th century. In medieval times werewolves were looked on with positive feelings, and even sensations of awe, as beings capable of integrating both the wild and
cultural elements, beings at the intersection of nature and civilization. This harkens back lo
ancient rituals in which one lived in the wilderness in order to then be returned and recuperated within the social order.
Keeping the history of the tale of LRRH and the wolf in mind, we can tum to the film.
The Company of Wolves. Jordan's Turn hsgins with a framing story of a bourgeois family
mother, father, and two daughters, as they arrive at their rather posh country home. We are
then drawn into the scene of the imagination, of dreams, and nightmares that take place in
the room of a sleeping adolescent, the youngest daughter. Rosaleen. Her dreams or conscious or unconscious imagining.s form the material of the film's narrative. The setting of
her dream world would seem to be contemporaneous to the time in which Perrault was
writing, the end of the 17[h century, the age. not incidentally, uf Enlightenment. The dream
time is elastic enough to allow a diabolical figure litnned by the ever-detnonic Terrence
Stamp to arrive at one point in a gleaming white Rolls. Most importanily. though, it is the
time of "once upon a time," the universalized time of story-telling and fantasy.
Rosaleen as the dreamer sees herself as strong, fearless, powetful, and special, dreaming
a dream that enables her to have control over the story and the fictive world in which it takes
place. It is manifestly an anxiety dream of a young woman searching, in psychoanalytic
terms, for the integrity of her psyche, questing for identity, independence and sexual fulfillment.
Rosaleen's first dream places her antagonistic older sister (and rival ) in a magical forest.
Giganticized replicas of the stuffed animals and dolls we have viewed in Rosaleen's room
loom menacingly around the frightened sister. In a swift enactment of wish fulfilltnent. the
sister is violently dispatchedby a pack of wolves. Following the girl's funeral, we are introduced to Granny who says, "Your only sister. All alone in the wood and nobody ihere to
save her. Poor little lamb." Rosaleen replies. "Why couldn't she save herself?'" The dreamRosaleen is lough, independent, and unsentimental, but is also heavily inlluenced by the
superstitious folk tales and admonitions of Granny. If the film is about the quest for sexual
identity. Granny comes to represent one side of an archetypal view of the sexual. For her,
the sexual is the demonic, given a real existence in the film that is brutal, fearful, and evil.
Granny relates a tale to Rosaleen, establishing the narrative pattern in which the main
dream is segmented by narrated stories of characters within the dream. Granny tells of a
newly tnarried husband who, just before consummating his marriage, excuses bimself to
answer "the call of nature." What he mean.s by this becomes clear, when he forsakes the

6lThe Company of Wolves

marriage bed to rejoin his wolf-companions in the wilderness. It is an example of the way in
which, for Granny, sexuality is inextricably bound up with bestiality, with the evil of the
natural world, and with the irreconcilable split between nature and culture. Before Granny
is devoured by the wolf she says. "Get back to hell, where you came from." to which the
wolf/manreplies,"Idon'tcomefromheli,lcomefrmtheforest."But for Granny, they are
one in the same: the primeval, the unknown, the fearful. Granny constantly cautions Rosaleen
that when walking in the woods she must never "stray from the path," a common interdiction in folk tales. The path signals the safety in obedience and virtue, whereas the forest
signifies the dangers of defiance, and most especially of wantonness and sexual desire.
The second view of sexuality on offer to Rosaleen comes from her mother, who is associated with natural phenomena and the cycles of nature, as opposed to the superstitions and
fears of Granny. For the mother, wolves are dangerous because they are predators, nothing
more. Rosaleen witnesses her parents making love, and asks if her father has hurt her mother,
to which the mother replies, "No, No. not at all. If there is a beast in men, it meets its match
in women too." Granny, on the other hand, tells Rosaleen, "Men are nice until they've had
their way with you, then the beast comes out." Rosaleen, poised on the brink of womanhood, must choose between these competing attitudes to determine her sexual and social
roles, and even, as it turns out. her species.
The dream-Rosaleen is intent on pursuing her quest, and dares to stray off the path while
being courted by a clownish village boy. She runs playfully from the amorous lad until she
reaches a huge tree. Rosaleen smiles knowingly, and fearlessly begins climbing the large,
erect structure. A coiled snake hisses from amidst the branches. A long shot reveals the
enormity of the tree (designed by the brilliant, late Anton Frst), with the red-cloaked
Rosaleen perched high on its trunk. As she ascends, she reaches a nest, where she discovers
several eggs and a hand mirror. Rosaleen looks at herself in the glass with a pleased expression, then opens a tin of deep red lipstick, and daubs the lipstick sensuously on her mouth.
There is a cut to Rosaleen's smiling face reflected in the mirror as one by one, the eggs
hatch to reveal, not new-bom birds, but tiny, doll-like babies (reminiscent of Renaissance
portrayals of the Christ child). The girl reaches out to touch her new-found treasures. In the
next instant, the country lad, still searching for Rosaleen, comes upon the supine, bloodied
carcass of a cow. its calf standing by its side. A shot is intercut of a panting wolf with blood
streaked about its jaw. The hoy screams "Wolf! Wolf!" and runs to alert the villagers. We
next see Rosaieen peacefully walking through the forest, stroking her "baby," while another
shot of the wolf is intercut. The sense of impending danger is underscored by the dramatic
music. The village is in an uproar when Rosaleen returns to her desperate family. But she
calmly shows the "baby" to her mother, who smiles. A tear rolls down the "baby's" cheek.
The sequence is laden with significance, but perhaps most unmistakable, and most important is the resemblance to the tree of knowledge. There are the archetypal images of loss,
innocence, and entry into the world of experience; Rosaleen falls, like Adam or Eve, into
what Nortlirop Frye called "The order of nature as we know it." He writes, further,
"The tragedy of Adam . . . resolves, like all other tragedies in the manifestation of natural
law. He enters a world in which existence is itself tragic.... tnerely to exist is to disturb the
balance of nature. Every nattiral man is a Hegelian thesis, and implies a reaction: Every new
birth provokes the return of an avenging death . . . this crucial moment... is a moment of
dizziness, when the wheel of fortune begins its inevitable cyclical movement downward."
(Frye 213)
Rosaleen's entry into the world of experience and adulthood what Frye would call the
ironic mode of tragedy-isa movement away from the ordered, protected existence of the
parental home, as well as from the safety of "the path." It is a point of no retum, for as the
wolf/man is neither wolf nor man, Rosaleen is neither girl nor woman. Rosaleen's lipstick
is likened to the blood on the wolf's mouth, yet the wolf poses no apparent danger for the
young girl. While a tear is shed for her loss of childhood, Rosaleen's entrance into the
eroticthe emergence of appetite (she like the wolf, can be a predator; she wants the giant
phallus, not amere lad), the masturbatory stroking ofherlips with moist fingers, the specter

The Company of Wolves/69

of childbirth, her mother's natural acceptance of her daughter's rite de passage, do not
provokein the context of the dream woridfear or anxiety. The menstrual imagery of the
tree sceneRosaleen's red lipstick^is also typical of the references to "first blood" found
in so many fairytales. Sleeping Beauty is cursed by a fairy at birth to prick her finger on her
15th birthday; Rapunzel is locked away at age 12 in a tower; both near the age of their first
menses.
Rosaleen, off through the woods to Granny's house, meets with the wolf/man in his guise
as a handsome huntsman. We know he is a wolf/man, because, as Granny has warned, "his
eyebrows meet in the middle." and has a foreign accent, alwaysin filman indication of
romance or danger. In a meeting fraught with sexual tension, Rosaleen flirts openly with the
wolf/manthey joke about "the remarkable object in his pocket," a compass with which he
will find the way to Granny's house in a wager with Rosaleen. As in the traditional story of
LRRH. the wolf/man wins the race and makes a meal of Granny. Rosaleen enters the scene,
hut completely rejects the masochistic identity that is given to LRRH in the Perrault story.
Rosaleen wears the red cloak^the emblem of her sexualitybut unlike her counterpart in
the fairytale, Rosaleen can put on or take off her cloak, like a mask. She can choose her
identity and her destiny. In fact, once she accepts the alluring advances of the wolf/man, the
cloak is thrown in to the fire, in a heightened gesture of the acknowledgment of her own
desire. Rosaleen seems unafraid as the huntsman is transformed into a wolf, in an unmistakably .sexualized transformation scene. His back heaves, he sweats, his morphing body bursts
through his clothes. Perhaps most radically, in terms of both the story of LRRH and the
image of the wolf. Rosaleen is neither raped, devoured, nor otherwise hurt by the wolfin
fact, it is she who wounds him with his own weapon. After gently caressing the wounded
wolf, Rosaleen is apparentlyfor the metamorphosis occurs offscreentransformed into a
like creature. Tellingly, it is only her mother, the character closest to the natural worid. who
recognize.s the wolf as her daughter, and implores a group of gathered hunters not to shoot.
Rosaleen leaves with the wolf/man to integrate into her new society, the company of wolves.
Rosaleen chooses to become what Nol Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror names as
one of the defming characters of the horror genre the impure, the interstitial being, somewhere between woman and wolf (Carroll 46-47) If dragon slaying is part of the ritual quest
of the mythos of romance, in this case, Rosaleen chooses to join the dragon. She strays from
the path, choosing the pleasure principle over the reality principle, choosing what is pleasurable and sensual over duty and responsibility.
Rosaleen and her new acquaintances leap through the forest, jumping over the doll's
house and huge toys first viewed in the dream of the older sister's death. The camera moves
over the sleeping Rosaleen in her bedroom as the pack of wolves begin thundering down
the hallway and stairs of the family home. Only now the home seems abandoned-overgrown with cobwebs, strewn with blowing leaves, foliage sprouts amongst the furnishings.
The wolves crash in slow-motion through a portrait of a lady from a prior century. The pack
runs upstairs to the door of Rosaleen's room. She wakes, startled, then terrified, the hand
mirrorthe source of pleasure in her dreamon her pillow, her lips reddened by lipstick.
She clutches at her bedclothes and moans as the wolves mill outside her door. In an instant,
a wolf breaks through her bedroom window, tumbling over the toys we have seen in the
dream, as Rosaleen screams in terror A voice-over speaks from Perrautt's Petit Chaperon
Rouge, over the end credits: "Little girls, this seems to say/ Never stop along your way/
Never trust a stranger, friend/ No one knows how it will end/ As you're pretty, so be wise/
Wolves may lurk in every guise/Now as then "tis simple truth/ Sweetest tongue has sharpest
tooth,"
It is unclear whether or not this waking terror is yet another episode of Rosaleen's dream,
or if, in fact, the dreaming and waking worlds have collapsed into one mother Considering
the genre, perhaps it is a point of hesitation, an intersection between the worids of reality
and imagination, that would make it, according to Todorov's definition, a perfect exemplar
of "the fantastic." (Todonov 24-40) The family house is overgrown with elements of the
natural world, now resembling the fore.st more than the home. The common Gothic motif of

lOlThe Company of Wolves

opposing two settingsthe cultural, institutional, and the common (e.g. the castle, the school,
the church), witb tbe primitive, tbe intuitive, tbe dark, and tbe unknown (e.g. the dungeon,
the dark forest, tbe labyrintb)is here broken down. (Bunnell 82-83)
If The Company of Wolves can be seen to be about the exploration of Rosaleen's psyche
in terms of gender, social, and sexual roles, then at tbe fllm's end. wbat kind of identity bas
sbe discovered? If tbe film is about Rosaleen's awakening sexuality, it can also be seen to
be about the terror that sexuality holds. Rosaleen enters tbe world of experienceand teeters on tbe fulcrum between angst and pleasure that underwrites tbe process of growing up.
Tbe dream-Rosaleen tells ber motber the story of a pregnant witch, depicted clearly as a
figure from the underclass. Tbe witcb confronts tbe aristocrat/fatber of tbeir soon-to-bebom progeny on tbe day of bis wedding to a woman of his own class, Tbe party is elegant;
the table sumptuously set witb flne china, crystal, and linen; tbe assembled guests are exquisitely attired. In a ritual gesture, tbe witch breaks a mirror. Tbe guest tum into a pack of
ravening animals, "wolfing" down tbeir food, erupting from tbeir flne garments. Layers of
civilization and social propriety are stripped away as they are loosed into the wilds, Rosaleen
tells her mother that the wolves would come at night and sing to the witch and her baby. The
motber asks. "Wbat pleasure would tbere be in that?." to wbich Rosaleen replies. "The
pleasure would be in knowing tbe power she had,"
It is that sense of power, or fearlessness that is too anxiety-provoking for Rosaleen wben
awake, and which must be relegated to her dream self? Tbe ending oftbe film can be seen as
a reflection of tbe terror sbe finds in becoming a woman, and in finding herself deprived of
the sense of power sbe experienced in ber dream, Rosaleen dreams of transgression, of an
escape from repression: She dreams of joining an untamed society, thecompany of wolves.
Is the ending then tbe tragic fall, tbe calamity that must result from a woman's transgressive
desires? Or does the sweet and powerful sexuality of wbich Rosaleen dreams tum out to be
a nightmare, an attack by tbe "beasts in men" tbat Granny warned of? Altbough Rosaleen is
shown waking in tbe film's flnal moments, clearly the landscape of ber awakening is dream
territory, and cannot be taken as a realistic narrative topos. Yet Jordan and Carter have
chosen toendonthisnoteofpanicandhorror. Does the Him. then, finally endorse Granny's
vision of the terror of sexuality? Tbe fearful words "Sweetest tongue has sharpest tootb"
form the film's concluding tine, and the last we hear of our protagonist is her terrified
screaming. The sweet tongue is Rosaleen's dream of a mellifluous fusion of nature and
culture, of powerful femininity and desire without reproach. The sharp tootb must then
surely be the more painful reality into which Rosaleen must grow up. It is not a happy
ending.
Carole Zucker
Concordia University

Notes
' The exccpiinns were the sub-genre iif lesbian vampire films made in the 60s and 70s, purportedly based on J.
Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilta (1871),
^ Carter and Jordan, close friends, were scheduled to continue their collaboration on a vampire script, which wa.s
halted by Carter's untimely death of cancer at age 52. Jordan wrote his own feveted meditations on the subject of
transformation in his 1993 book, The Dream of a Beast (Londcm: Vintage). See FulseetLo, 75,

Works Cited
Bunnell, Charoletle, "The Gothic: A Literary Genre's Transition to Filtn " In Piaules of Reason. Ed. Barry K, Grant,
Metuchen. NJ: Scarecrow P, 1984,
Carroll. Noel. Tiw Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of ihe Heart. New York: Rouiledge, 1990.

. The Company of WolvesP I

Falsetto, Mario, Personal Vi.wns: Conversations with Independent Fitmmakers. London: Constable, 1999.
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality. Volume : An Introduction. NewYurk: Panihenn, 1980,
Fryctionhop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. 1957.

_^^~

Jones, Ernst. On the Nightmare. London: Hogarth P. 1949.

Jordan, Neil. The Dream of a Beast. London: Vintage, 1993,
Lieberman. Marcia. '"Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation Through the Fairytale," In Don't Bel
on tlie Prinve: Conlemporciry Feminist/Fairy Tales in North America and England. Ed, Jack
apes. New York: Melhuen, 986,
Todorov. Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structurt Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca. NY: Cornell UP, 1973.
Zipes, Jack, ed. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. New York: Roudedge, 1993.

And, In the Company of Actors. . . .

We are especially pleased to welcome Carole Zucker as a contributor.
She has published four books concerning the art of film acting, the
most recent of which. In the Company of Actors: Reflections on the
Craft of Acting (Tbeatre Arts Books/Routledge, 1999), has just been
uttered. It cotitains readable cotiversatiotis witb remarkable actors, such
as Nigel Hawthorne, Janet Suzman, Miranda Richardson, Stephen Rea.
Brenda Fricker, Judi Dench, Simon Callow, Alan Bates, et al. These
talents are so well known for their stage work that it almost seems
beside the point to list their many film and television credits. But what
an accomplishment to have interviewed them all!
Jim Welsh
Editor

Copyright of Literature Film Quarterly is the property of Salisbury University and its content may not be copied
or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.
However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.