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Summary and Analysis of The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter

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A Summary and Analysis of Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Company of Wolves’ is the second of a trio of wolf stories in Angela Carter’s 1979 short-story collection The Bloody Chamber . It is also arguably the most controversial. The story is divided into two sections: a prefatory passage which discusses lycanthropy or werewolves, and the main story which is a version of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.

‘The Company of Wolves’, like all of Carter’s stories in The Bloody Chamber , is richly layered in symbolism and narrative texture, and so some words of analysis about this provocative piece of storytelling may be useful in illuminating it.

‘The Company of Wolves’: plot summary

The story begins with a long description of wolves which segues into a discussion of werewolves: men who turn into wolves. Carter’s narrator recounts several brief stories about lycanthropy (the name given to the act of men transforming into wolves), all of which relate to weddings: a witch turned a whole group of men into wolves when the groom married a woman different from his intended, while another groom, on his wedding night, went out to relieve himself and didn’t come back, having turned into a werewolf.

Years later, after his bride had mourned his ‘death’ and remarried and had children, her first husband returned, saw she had married someone else, turned into a wolf again, and bit off the leg of the eldest son. The man was killed by the second husband and as he died, he turned back into a man. Carter also tells us that werewolves can become men again as long as their original clothes aren’t destroyed.

All of this sets the scene for the main story in ‘The Company of Wolves’, which is a kind of retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. One Christmas Eve, a young girl is setting off into the woods to visit her grandmother, who lives there. The girl is on the brink of womanhood, about to begin her menstrual cycle for the first time.

As she is walking into the woods, she is accosted by a handsome young man who strikes up a conversation with her. They walk together, and he makes a bet with her: he will race her to her grandmother’s house, and if he arrives there first, the girl will owe him a kiss. She agrees to this, and they go their separate ways.

When the handsome man arrives at the grandmother’s house, there are clear signs he is a werewolf: he has blood dripping from his mouth and has obviously eaten some animal he’s caught. He enters the grandmother’s house and strips naked in front of her, before transforming into a wolf and devouring her in her bed. Then he turns back into a man and discards the bloody sheets and the grandmother’s bones and hair, and prepares for the girl’s arrival.

When the girl gets to the house, she immediately realises that she is in danger and the man has killed her grandmother. A large number of wolves have gathered outside the house, howling into the night. However, she goes along with his demands to strip her clothes off, before joining him in the bed. Instead of being devoured by him, she tames him by making love to him. When Christmas morning arrives, the ‘tender’ wolf lies in her arms.

‘The Company of Wolves’: analysis

‘The Company of Wolves’ is one of the most shocking stories in The Bloody Chamber because of the way in which the adolescent girl ‘tames’ the big bad wolf. In order to save her own life, she must give herself to the male by making love to him, giving up her virginity as only ‘immaculate’ flesh will satisfy him.

However, the story’s feminist ‘message’ is apparent in the girl’s refusal to be anybody’s ‘meat’, and in her demonstration of agency at the story’s conclusion. The focus throughout ‘The Company of Wolves’ is, as elsewhere in The Bloody Chamber , on the werewolf’s relationships with women, especially wives.

It certainly isn’t too much of an analytical leap to suggest that Carter is using the myth of lycanthropy as a way of exploring the ‘beastly’ aspects of male violence towards women, especially wives, and how every man has a ‘wolf’ within him which, if he cannot tame himself, the woman might be able to – as, indeed, the girl at the end of Carter’s story succeeds in doing.

The fiction of the English writer Angela Carter (1940-92) is, first and foremost, the fiction of ideas. Her 1979 collection of tales, The Bloody Chamber , is often described as a series of ‘versions’ or ‘retellings’ of classic children’s fairy tales. But as Carter was quick to point out, she was actually writing new tales which revealed the latent violence – including sexual violence – of those old folk tales.

And ‘The Company of Wolves’ is no different. For instance, the final scene where the girl takes her clothes off and lies with the wolf may have been shocking to readers in 1979 (and may still shock readers decades later), but what are we to make, then, of the nineteenth-century oral version of the Little Red Riding Hood tale, ‘ The Story of the Grandmother ’, in which the girl happily strips off for the Big Bad Wolf to avoid becoming her victim? Carter was clearly not updating the existing story, but, if anything, restoring the original – or at least, one version of it.

But if, as the girl insists, she is ‘nobody’s meat’, we should stop to reflect whether this defiant statement – delivered via the narrative device known as free indirect discourse – is meant to carry a modicum of irony. It’s true that she avoids becoming the wolf’s ‘meat’ in the sense that Little Red Riding Hood becomes the wolf’s meat in the Charles Perrault version of the tale (in which the girl is gobbled up by the wolf), but she nevertheless gives her ‘flesh’ to him in a different sense. She avoids death, but it comes at the cost of killing her childhood, and her virginity.

Perhaps we are meant to view this as a good thing: after all, Carter’s narrator had earlier told us that children did not ‘stay young’ for very long in such a wild and dangerous country. In using her burgeoning sexuality as the ultimate weapon – more powerful even than her knife – against her beastly enemy, she can survive.

And her actions – laughing defiantly in his face and tearing his shirt from his back – might be interpreted as the act of a woman in control, rather than desperate actions of a young girl doing anything she can to save her skin. Note how, as they consummate their ‘union’, Carter likens the act to a ‘savage marriage ceremony’, and weddings recur in all of the stories told throughout ‘The Company of Wolves’, including in the preamble to the main ‘Red Riding Hood’ plot.

But whereas the wife from the earlier story loses her first husband, only to have him return and maim her eldest son before being chopped up (by her second husband, rather than by her own hand), the ‘Red Riding Hood’ figure from the main story can protect herself and take what she needs from this wild beast. She has the upper hand.

Does the tearing of the werewolf’s shirt off his back, then, symbolise the woman’s triumphing over man’s dominion in this harsh, patriarchal world? The phrase ‘to have the shirt off someone’s back’ is often used of wives who ‘own’ their husbands and everything they have, such as in divorce settlements where the wife receives the house and much of the husband’s money. But there’s a more telling detail, which shows how the prefatory section of ‘The Company of Wolves’ will prove to be crucial to understanding the main story.

Note how the girl takes his shirt off his back and throws it into the fire . It’s a detail whose significance we might miss, especially as it seems natural for her to do this after her own clothes have been consigned to the flames.

But Carter had earlier told us, remember, that werewolves can only become men again if their original clothes survive. In burning the man’s shirt, the resourceful young woman (as she has now become) ensures that the wolf she has tamed will remain a wolf, unable to become a man again.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › British Literature › Analysis of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves

Analysis of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 20, 2022

One of Angela Carter ‘s most famous short stories, “The Company of Wolves” was first published in the innovative and imaginative 1979 collection of fairy-tale themed stories, The Bloody Chamber . “The Company of Wolves” skillfully interweaves peasant superstitions, such as old wives’ tales and folk remedies, with the Little Red Riding Hood theme, fully displaying Carter’s penchant for myth, folklore, and fairy tales. Carter believed that folklore and literature represented “vast repositories of outmoded lies, where you can check out what lies used to be a la mode and find the old lies on which new lies are based” (quoted in Easton, 22). She also argued that throughout history, the process of storytelling has helped perpetuate a constructed, as well as a constricting, reality for each successive generation, which is especially evident in gender role mythology and its psychological implications. Therefore, with “The Company of Wolves,” a provocative and sensual reimagining of “Little Red Riding Hood,” Carter has crafted a tale that serves the dual function of both illustrating how expected cultural traditions are indoctrinated in future generations and challenging those expectations, which she accomplishes by altering the classic fairy tale.

Angela Carter, circa 1974/The British Library

“The Company of Wolves” begins by describing in poetic yet realistic prose the dangers of living in close proximity to the forest, especially in winter when the wolves are starving because “the wolf is carnivore incarnate and he’s as cunning as he is ferocious” (212). Intermingled with the atmosphere of fear created by the wolf and the descriptions of the “grave-eyed children” who “always carry knives” (213) to protect themselves from these creatures, is werewolf lore, tales of humans who have been transformed into wolves. These tales, woven within the larger framework of the story, include the account of a witch who transforms the guests at a wedding banquet into wolves when the man she wishes to marry weds another. A second tale recounts the story of a woman whose husband went outside to urinate, only to disappear. When he returns several years later to learn that his wife has married another man and borne that man’s children, he changes into a wolf once more. However, when this particular werewolf is chopped apart with a hatchet, his human form is visible beneath the wolf’s skin. With these tales, Carter deftly illustrates the inherent metaphorical connection between man and beast. In myth, folklore, and fairy tales, the wolf has traditionally been representative of man’s savage animal nature, and women have been considered merely their prey. However, that is not the case in Carter’s fairy tale; in her rendering of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf meets his match.

In “The Company of Wolves,” although a little girl in a red cape journeys through the forest to her grandmother’s house, she does not meet a wolf along the path but instead meets a handsome huntsman, who is really a wolf in the guise of a man. The two become acquainted as they walk through the forest and decide to have a race to see which one of them will arrive at Granny’s cottage first. If the huntsman, who carries a compass, wins the race, he will be rewarded with a kiss. The huntsman arrives at Granny’s house first and devours her, just like in the original fairy tale, but that is where the similarities end. Carter’s version of “Little Red Riding Hood” features an erotic conclusion quite different from the more famous versions of the tale written by France’s Charles Perrault and Germany’s Grimm brothers. In Perrault’s adaptation, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are consumed by the wolf, never to be heard from again. In the Grimm brothers’ version, the two are eaten by the wolf, only to be rescued—cut out of the wolf’s belly—by a woodcutter. Instead, “The Company of Wolves” borrows its conclusion from the lesser-known oral version of the fairy tale, “The Story of the Grandmother,” in which the character of Little Red Riding Hood performs a striptease for the wolf instead of becoming the wolf’s victim. Reciting the memorable lines, including “what big teeth you have” (Carter, 219), Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood ceremoniously removes her clothes and throws them into the fire as the wolves howl outside the cottage. In the end, rather than being devoured by the wolf, this Little Red Riding Hood, who “knew she was nobody’s meat” (Carter, 219), climbs into bed with the wolf, allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions as to the outcome. Whether she joins the huntsman in his company of wolves is left undetermined, but at the very least, Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood has acknowledged the beast within herself, a vital component of self-knowledge and a powerful statement for feminism, as it is a substantial representation of gender equality.

“The Company of Wolves” displays Carter’s unique style, irreverent wit, and unrelenting ambiguity, but the story also exhibits Carter’s astute observations about the effects of social and political ideologies on human existence, and on women in particular. For Carter, writing represented a way to contest or demythologize these ideologies that most people take for granted as truth. As Carter herself once said, “my life has been most significantly shaped by my gender. . . . I spent a good many years being told what I ought to think, and how I ought to behave, and how I ought to write, even, because I was a woman and men thought they had the right to tell me how to feel, but then I stopped listening and tried to figure it out for myself” (quoted in Easton, 2). And so she has: Although “The Company of Wolves” has the appearance of a rather archaic fairy tale, by revealing that the wolf is an innate beast that exists in both men and women, implying that an egalitarian society is the ultimate utopia, the ambiguous story ironically proves to be enlightening.

Analysis of Angela Carter’s Novels

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bristow, Joseph, and Trev Lynn Broughton, eds. The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism. New York: Addison Wesley Longman Inc., 1997. Carter, Angela. Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. New York: Penguin, 1995. Easton, Alison, ed. Angela Carter: New Casebooks. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Tucker, Lindsey, ed. Critical Essays on Angela Carter. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998.

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The Company of Wolves Summary & Analysis

Angela carter's the company of wolves - analysis, characters & themes.

‘The Company of Wolves’ by Angela Carter delves into lycanthropy and consists of several mini-stories accompanied by some observations and warnings issued by the narrator, followed by the main story of the text which is a  variation of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.

‘The Company of Wolves’ is the second of the three wolf-stories in Angela Carter’s short-story collection  The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories  (1979). 

‘The Company of Wolves’ SUMMARY

The story begins with a  fearful description  of the wolf. The wolf is ‘as cunning as he is ferocious’ and he pounces upon travelers at night. The narrator then cautions about the wolfsong. In the winter, the wolves do not have much to eat and they grow lean and hungry. The narrator remarks, ‘You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are.’ However cautious the people may be, the wolves find a way in. The narrator now tells a story about a hunter who once tracked down and killed a wolf using a trap. However, as the hunter dismembered the body of the beast, it was found out that the wolf in fact was a man. 

Two more  mini–stories  follow before the main story is told. In the first one, a witch turns an ‘entire wedding party into wolves’ because the husband settles on another girl. In the second mini-story, a husband leaves his wife on their wedding night to go out and relieve himself but never returns. The wife waits for him for a long time but eventually marries another man, having two children with him. Many days later, the first husband is back again and is furious seeing that the woman has moved on. He turns into a wolf and attacks one of the children before he is killed. At this point, the narrator throws some light on the various rumors surrounding the procedure of how one gets the ability to  turn oneself into a wolf . 

The narrator now starts telling the  principal story . It is midwinter and a little girl must journey through the forest and take some food to her  granny . The little girl wears a  red shawl . She is grappling with the various physical and mental changes brought about by her recent onset of  puberty . She carries a knife for protection and is confident. On the way she comes across a  handsome hunter  and they get to chatting amiably. They decide to race to the granny’s house; if the hunter reaches there first, the girl will have to kiss him. The girl slows down her pace because she in fact wants to kiss the man.

The hunter reaches Granny’s house first. He mimics the girl’s voice and enters the house. He now  sheds his human guise  and shows himself as a wolf. He attacks and feeds on the helpless old woman, and then removes all incriminating evidence such as the woman’s body parts. The little girl reaches the house and the wolf takes on the shape of the granny. However, upon interacting, the girl immediately knows what has happened. There are many wolves surrounding the house now and they howl in a frightening unison. The little girl senses her impending doom but she does not lose her calm. She gradually strips before the wolf, and calmly approaches him. The clock strikes midnight; it is Christmas. The story ends thus: ‘See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.’

‘The Company of Wolves’ ANALYSIS

Angela Carter translated  Charles Perrault  around the time she wrote  The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories.  Perrault’s works laid the foundation for studying fairy tales. In Carter’s short-story collection, too, many  fairy tales are retold with significant twists , and this way of getting her message across shows  Perrault’s influence  on her. Also, the influence of  Marquis de Sade  on Carter’s writings in general is unmistakable since Carter herself proclaimed the same. Carter’s  open discussion of sexuality  in the stories of the collection can be traced back to Sade, and of course, Carter’s  radical feminism  is evident in the stories. In ‘The Company of Wolves also, Carter channels her feminist politics in a highly  ambiguous but significant way ; she chooses the fairy tale of  Little Red Riding Hood , and  ‘revises’  the much-popular story by  re-writing  the girl as the one having agency at the end. The stories of the collection, including ‘The Company of Wolves’, are set in an  ambiguous quasi-mythical time and space . However, they are abundant with commentaries that are ever-relevant. 

The  threats and violence against women under patriarchy  are powerful if  symbolically , presented in the story. Given Carter’s feminist politics, and the general motifs and thematic concerns of the story, it is logical to read the  wolves as representing men . And wolves, the narrator tells are, are ferocious and cunning, and hungry for human flesh. Even though people are careful, the wolves ‘have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them out.’ This description is eerily evocative of pictures of  abusive men . Tellingly,  men and wolves are connected  by significant threads in the story, the most glaring of which is the fact that some men have the ability to turn themselves into wolves. 

The  hardships suffered by women under conditions of unequal gender relations  are obvious in the story. Take, for example, the story about the woman whose husband goes into the forest on their wedding night and disappears. The reader sees at the end of that particular story that the first husband comes back and wreaks havoc on the household of his former wife seeing that she has naturally moved on with another man. The significant detail here is not only the fact that the first husband is a wolf but also the fact that the second husband, upon seeing the woman crying over the corpse of her former husband, beats her. One sees how men in the story are  potentially always a threat  to the women, be it  in their usual form or in the form of a wolf . Also to be noted is the fact that, unlike the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, the little girl here does not meet the wolf directly; the latter shows up in the guise of a man. Men are perhaps not to be trusted at any cost in the universe of this story. 

The  openly sexual tone  of the story is an interesting feature of the story and Carter uses this to highlight the  violence associated with sexual encounters under patriarchy ; women often have no say in such encounters and  the notion of consent  becomes precariously positioned in such instances. This is why the  ambiguous ending  of the story is  both powerful and perplexing . One might argue that in Carter’s version of the Red Riding Hood tale, the girl has the final and complete agency as it is she who chooses to strip before the hunter-turned-into-wolf, rather than getting eaten by him. However, one could equally argue if this decision has any room for a ‘choice’ on the little girl’s part. Let us look at the  transformation  that happens in the girl from when she is introduced in the story to when we last see her. When she starts on the journey, she is described thus:

‘She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.’

This passage is frank in revealing the  recent sexual awakening  of the girl. Her  virginity , at the end of the story, is both her key to survival (since the wolf likes ‘immaculate flesh’) as well as her cause of misery (since she naively trusts the hunter in the first place). That the girl is not in a position to express or deny consent to the impending sexual act is made evident by the narrator:

‘She closed the window on the wolves’ threnody … and, since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid … The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing … She will lay his fearful head on her lap and picked out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony. The blizzard will die down.’

The girl’s claim that she was going to be ‘nobody’s meat’ only feels like a  nervous and frail self-assurance in the face of sure sexual violation . Yes, the girl does have some agency here in walking to her doom with her head held high but this agency too ultimately throws light on how men carry out acts of assault and violence on women with impunity. Though it could be argued that the girl’s lying down in the wolf’s ‘tender’ arms at the end is a triumph of the female in ‘taming’ the male, the  circumstances that force her to do this  should not be dismissed, since this could just be the girl’s way to  evade sure death . In other words, the highly ambiguous nature of the ending  prevents a straightforward feminist reading  that female sexuality is used as a powerful weapon in the story. With this ambiguity, Carter  blurs the line between consent and helpless surrender .    

The  violence embedded in many fairy tales  is also highlighted in the story. Carter often wrote macabre retellings of popular fairy tales but it is important to note that the fact that the tales often have violence at the heart of them helps Carter’s treatment greatly. 

An  assessment of traditional gender roles  is evident in the story. The man acts and the woman is acted upon in most narratives. In this story, Carter comes  very close to subverting  that by making the girl a resourceful clever person who frankly uses her sexuality to her advantage. But as already hinted at above, this might only point towards  the impossibility of a free articulation of female sexuality and triumph  in a society with unequal gender relations. 

Also, this short story also is an  examination of masculinity  and not just of female plight. There are parts of the story that hint that  the performance of a violent sort of masculinity  weighs heavy on many men too. 

CHARACTERS IN THE STORY

The Little Girl: Carter’s version of the titular Little Red Riding Hood. She has just had sexual awakenings thanks to puberty. In the beginning, she is somewhat innocent and cheerful but at the end, she offers her body to the wolf, either voluntarily or helplessly.

The Hunter: the wolf in the guise of a charming young man. He devours the little girl’s grandmother and is ‘seduced’ by the girl at the end. 

NARRATIVE STYLE AND TECHNIQUES

The story is narrated by a  third-person omniscient narrator . The narrator  freely interacts  with the reader. When the wolf is about to devour the old woman, the narrator  starts addressing the woman directly . Also, the technique of  frame narratives  is used in order to narrate several other stories within the main story. Given that this story is a retelling of a popular fairy tale, this story is self-consciously  intertextual . Also, the technique of  free indirect discourse  is used to reveal the girl’s thought processes at the end of the story.

LITERARY DEVICES

Foreshadowing  is prominently used in the story. When the handsome hunter is seen laughing at the girl, ‘gleaming trails of spittle clung to his teeth’, readers acquainted with the fairy tale know that the hunter is actually a wolf in disguise. 

Powerful  imageries  are used to horrific ends in the text. They often highlight the  utter viciousness of the wolves and the terror  they have spread across the region. The ‘slavering jaws’, ‘lolling tongue’, ‘rime of saliva on the grizzled chops’ of the wolves are  vivid images . Many of the images are also  sexual in nature , highlighting a key thematic concern of the story.

Dramatic irony  in the story occurs when the girl asks the hunter if he is not ‘afraid of the wolves’. Also,  verbal irony  occurs at the very end of the story since the wolf’s paws are anything but ‘tender’.

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"The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter

“The Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter is a moralistic fairytale that retells the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”. It uses the wolves as a metaphor for men who would try to take a girl’s virginity. The denouement of the story is the girl finally giving in to the pressure of the wolves, but she feels empowered and in control of her actions. The structure of the story firstly shows how a woman is a victim of the wolves, then shows how Red Riding Hood could be a victim of the wolves, and finally ends up that she is in control and has the power in the relationship. This demonstrates the view that women should not accept the ways of men but should dictate how they behave themselves. During the first two parts of the story where women are victims the wolves are described as “beasts”, but in the final part of the story where the woman is in control the wolf is described as “tender” as if the female being more dominant has tamed the wild “beast”.

“A Boy Who Cried to a Wolf” is also a moralistic fairytale and uses ideas from “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” to tell the story of how a family do not trust and do not listen to their son so he gets revenge on them by striking up a friendship with a wolf. The structure of the story is that the boy goes from mild mannered and polite to deranged and overwhelmed with revenge on his family.

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The figurative language used in “The Company of Wolves” to describe the wolves or their incarnations as human men is often evil or menacing, “forest assassins” and “Carnivore incarnate,” this is saying the wolf lives solely to eat meat and is particularly vicious. Other figurative language is used to describe Red Riding Hood succumbing and losing her innocence, “The thin muslin went flaring up the chimney like a magic bird.” The muslin is a pure and natural material and its disappearing up the chimney could symbolize her abandoning her innocence. Figurative language in “The Boy Who Cried to a Wolf” is less common but when William is in his “cherished place” the adjectives used are more pleasant “hazy sunshine”.

The conventions of fairytales are that there is a happy ending, the strong male figure usually saves the day and the villain is killed or sent far away from the Heroes, this is true in “Little Red Riding Hood” where the woodcutter kills the wolf and saves Red Riding Hood. In “The Company of Wolves” the conventions have been subverted and the heroin ends up losing her innocence but has power and control over her actions. “The Boy Who Cried to a Wolf” is similarly subverted from the conventions of fairy tales where the main protagonist, William Hallwater befriends the wolf and they plot to kill William’s parents.

In “The Company of Wolves” Angela Carter uses more complex sentence types as the story is full of vivid descriptions and it portrays emotions and feelings. This is complemented well by the complex use of lexis. “The Boy Who Cried to a Wolf” also uses complex sentence types. The very nature of the story means that there are strong independent main clauses as well as subordinate clauses. The lexical choice in “The Boy Who Cried to a Wolf” is simpler than that of “The Company of Wolves” but it sticks closer to the lexical conventions of a fairytale.

“The Company of Wolves” uses the symbolism of wolves as men who hunt girls and try to take their innocence in a cunning crafty way like a wolf. Red Riding Hood taking control and having the power is a symbol of changing in women’s roles in society and shows a change from timid and obedient to dominant and equal. “The Boy Who Cried to a Wolf” uses William’s parents to symbolize everything that stops you getting on in life and arrogance. The wolf symbolizes free spirit and free will, which is what William requires.

The audience for “The Company of Wolves” would probably be older than the audience for “The Boy Who Cried to a Wolf” because although both a fairly easy to read it may be harder to pick up on some of the connotations in “The Company of Wolves”.

I originally wrote the story in first person but I found that this limited the story so I wrote it again in third person intrusive as then I could write with a less biased view of my characters behaviour. I was also going to stick closer to the original fairytale but the ending already had a sharp twist and it would have meant changing the direction of the story half way through to reach a original and moralistic denouement.

Document Details

• Word Count 806
• Page Count 2
• Level AS and A Level
• Subject English

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