I'm wearing a wolf jumper today. Spooky.
So we are in The Company of Wolves today and I'm supposed to be blogging on the ending but I thought I'd comment on the rest of it first...it seems something a responsible literature student would do.
From the beginning the wolf is shown to be the...best...? Is that the right word? She refers to them as 'One beast and only one'. She also shows them to be the epitome of the hunter, calling them 'carnivore incarnate'. They are unstoppable: 'he cannot listen to reason', and shown to be part of the supernatural. However she also shows they are to be pitied to some extent: 'never cease to mourn their own condition', 'not one...hints at the possibility of redemption', 'he half welcomes the knife that despatches him.'
For the most part of this piece Carter writes anecdotally, telling legends of the men who turn into wolves, it is portrayed as folklore; a warning. She sets up women as victims, especially newly wed brides whose husbands get turned into wolves and then come back to haunt them. There is also a special emphasis on clothes; they link to society and humanity, but also protection from sexual predation.
The girl in the story is virginal: 'moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity', but not naive or innocent: 'She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.' She welcomes the sexual advances of the man she meets in the woods: 'she wanted to dawdle on her way to make sure the hadnsome gentleman would win his wager.' When she arrives to the obvious daner of a wolf man in her grandmother's house she takes control of the situation. She shows pity instead of fear for the wolves outside the door which gives her power. Then....strangely enough she decides to take off her clothes. No messing around just gets naked. Guess she knows what she wants. Within this story the significance of the clothes shows us the girl is ready to strip herself of her humanity, or her social standing, for this man/wolf. She burns them, so there is no going back. Maybe this is her giving up everything for love, like the mother in The Bloody Chamber 'defiantly beggared herself for love'. Or maybe I'm reading too much into that and she's actually just getting frisky. Ha. No I think the actual ending shows this to be a story about loving the wrong person. Carter is showing it to be noble, and there is an equality at the end between the girl and the wolf which I guess is like the ending of The Tiger's Bride, or maybe The Courtship of Mr. Lyon. Actually it is different to those two, cos there is no change in either of the lovers, the girl is still a girl, and the wolf is still a wolf, but they don't care.
Good for them. Screw the system. Marry a wolf.
