Howling in the Woods: Angela Carter’s Metamorphosed Little Red Riding Hoods

Abstract

This paper examines Angela Carter’s reassessments of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’: The Werewolf’, ‘The Company of Wolves’ and ‘Wolf-Alice’, the last three short stories in her collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). Carter departs from Perrault and the Brothers Grimm’s cautionary tale in order to denounce both women and non-human animals’ objectification. It is my contention that the use of metamorphosis, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism serve the purpose of deconstructing traditional gender roles present in fairy tales and putting forward a new sense of subjectivity which blurs the Western human-animal divide. By using metamorphosis as a literary device which signals liminal states and by interweaving hybrid literary genres like fairy tales or gothic narratives, Carter blurs the traditional opposition between animal and human aiming at female empowerment and at posing forward a radical conception of the self. Her Red Riding Hoods—animalistic, hybrid, liminal others—search for subject positions in their alterity. Carter’s postmodern taste agglomerates elements from folklore, Gothic literature, fairy tales and surrealism to open the path for the exploration of different possibilities of female identity and sexuality.