User talk:Impulsiva

The Company of Wolves - Angela Carter

This short story is a very interesting retell of Little Red Riding Hood, and quite different from the original story. It begins showing us the fear wolves have caused in communities that live in the mountains close to them, and how some people became werewolves every now and then. The protagonist comes in - a girl - preparing a basket of food to give her grandmother. As in Little Red Riding Hood, she needs to cross a forest to go to her grandmother's house, and the safest way to do that is through a path already known by this girl. On her way, she meets a very interesting handsome man who offers to walk her through the forest, trying to convince her to go through a different way, but she does not accept it and they bet on who would get in the house faster. If the guy won, he would get a kiss from the girl. This is a very important detail, because with this bet, the little girl, who had never been interested in anyone from the opposite sex, feels excited, a kind of passion, for this possible kiss. When she gets to her grandmother's, the old lady is dead and the guy is a werewolf, but she already had this great interest on him and does not seem to care or fear anything. He tries to scare her, but she seems to get more excited the more violent he is, and in the end she gets off her clothes and sleeps with the "tender wolf". It seems to be a metaphor for the moment that a girl becomes a woman and start deciding for herself, not for what the family feels or thinks and maybe this is why the author used this well known children story: to show that a girl can set free and become an independent woman, other than being a little girl forever, either as a daughter or as a wife.