“The Company of Wolves” Reflective Evaluation

“The Company of Wolves” Reflective Evaluation Angela Carter’s, “The Company of Wolves” is a short story that is broken into two distinct sections that leads the reader to wonder the reasoning behind this. One option, that could be argued, is that it served the purpose of setting up background to a story within a story. The opening immediately begins by conveying the image of wolves with several anecdotes describing some of the tendencies of wolves and how they live. After the description of wolves, the beginning section serves to describe a slight view of people’s lifestyles and the magic or enchanted features of werewolves through a story about a woman and her two husbands; the second section then tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood but in a completely different way. This version incorporates a different style that includes innocence and sexuality through the girl and the wolf-like man. The young girl is an “unbroken egg” but strays from the innocence of a young woman at the time and uses her sexuality to save herself from the savage wolf (Carter 1088). All this leading me to ask: why did she split her story into two different sections? Also why did she portray her version of Little Red Riding Hood like she did? As the reader begins the story, it becomes easy to recognize Carter’s attitude towards wolves by her way of describing them, portraying their nature as savages and creatures like no other, “The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he 's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he 's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do” (Carter 1085). She gives the situation that almost puts the reader in the position of being in the woods at night and seeing those blood red eyes in the darkness. The words immediately strike fear into the reader; the “forest assassins” as she calls them, surround you and you now must run with the last hope that you may have of escaping. “If the benighted traveler spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched suddenly on the

Cited: Carter, Angela. “The Company of Wolves.” Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers. 5th ed. Ed. John Schilb and John Clifford. Boston: Bedford, 2012. 714-20. Print.