“In the Company of Wolves”

by Angela Carter
Feminine wild and wiles
or same old, tame old?
“In the Company of Wolves” may be Carter’s most famous story, and also its
most divisive in its depiction of gender relations. Clark (1987) saw the narrative as
reductive:
In place of the idea that women should beware of men and pretend to have no sexuality
of their own, Carter’s version represents the woman enjoying her own sexuality and using
this as a power that tenderizes the wolf. These positive aspects, however, are achieved at the
cost of accepting patriarchal limits to women’s power: the woman is pursued, surrounded,
implicitly threatened. The wolf is agent, she is responsive object. He is huge and hair; she
is slight, almost transparent. The granny’s death is passed over in silence, old women being
presumed irrelevant creatures. When the girl strips off her clothes, the fact that the wolf is
essentially coercing her is obliterated as attention focuses on the surprising readiness with
which the girl undresses, and on the strip-tease as each item of clothing goes into the fire.
The point of view is that of the male voyeur; the implication may be that the girl has her
own sexual power, but this meaning lies perilously close to the idea that all women want it
really and only need forcing to overcome their scruples. Similarly, although “she knew she
was nobody’s meat,” what is on offer is the standard patriarchal opposition between the
feral domineering male and the gentle submissive female. She will do his bidding, softening
his heart. Old chauvinism, new clothing. (p. 149).

Swyt (1996), on the other hand, suggests that “Clark’s reading remains on the Oe-
dipal path in the psychosexual forest, a path that I believe Carter’s version actual-
ly foregrounds and critiques” (p. 315). According to Swyt, Clark’s crucial mistake
is ignoring the werewolf legends that introduce the story:
The move from these old wives’ tales to the “tamed” nursery fable challenges the op-
positions of purity and danger that Clark insists upon reading through story through.
Carter deliberately saturates the tale with a proliferation of genres and thus, in a sense,
reframes the sexual socialization that the nursery tale implies. These narrative transfor-
mations, or “becomings” as Deleuze and Guattairi term them, suggest a (dis)ordering
that explodes the “natural” sublimation of civilized glances and table manners that hold
the binaries of purity/evil, subject/object, and beast/girl. (p. 316)

Which critical view do you believe has more legitimacy?

References:
Clark, R. (1987). Angela Carter’s desire machine. Women’s Studies, (14) 2, 147-162.
Swyt, W. (1996). “Wolfings”: Angela Carter’s becoming narratives. Studies in Short Fiction,
(33)3, 315-323.