The Roots of Imagination Merging Realism and Fairy Tale in Angela Ca

The Roots of Imagination: Merging Realism and Fairy Tale in Angela Carter?s ?The Company of Wolves? In the story ?The Company of Wolves? Angela Carter seeks to retell the tale of Red Riding Hood and her encounter with the wolf. More important than the rehashing of the fairy tale, is the manner in which Carter seeks to blend fact and fiction to illustrate man?s ability to combine the unknown and the known within their own imaginations to gain a better understanding of the world around them. The simple facts of the wolf, as a predator and carnivore, are enhanced and dramatized with the addition of the werewolf myth and the story of Red Riding Hood to assist in illustrating how through imagination the lines between fact and fiction are distorted. The wolves? progression from animal to man, from natural predator to sexual predator, is a result of this combination of fact and fiction. The characteristics of men and wolves combined in a werewolf give man a basis for understanding the baser instincts and sometimes brutal actions that characterize the history of humanity. Subtly, juxtaposi ng the harsh realities of nature with the dramatics of myth and fairy tale, Carter shows how people utilizes imagination, the combination of reality and myth, to relate to the world around them. In the beginning of the story, Carter establishes the animal ferocity and wildness of wolves, ?The wolf is carnivore incarnate [?] once he?s had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do? (Carter 1580). Throughout the story, Carter reasserts this idea within the growing context of the wolf and the animal immediately as representative of the violence of nature. However, at this early stage of the story, the wolf though ?cunning as he is ferocious? (1580) is still just a wolf. In this way, Carter establishes that the wolf does and can exist outside of the imaginations of man but is always very different from people. Monika Fludernik notes, also, that the introduction, ?is followed by a quasi-definitional characterization of 'the wolf' and a paragraph of even more non-scientific folk-lore about wolves which provides instructions to a generic 'you' traveling through the forest at night? (226). Not only is man's imagination being represented in Carter's show of the manipulations of fact and fiction over the nature of the wolf but she is also appealing to this part of human nature and imagination in her reader. The image of the wolf, as illustrated in Carter?s description of not only the wolf but the wildness of the woods as well, shows a basic nature that is at constant conflict with the reasonable nature of man, ?of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest, ghosts, hobgoblins, ogres that grill babies upon gridirons, witches that fatten their captives in cages for cannibal tables, the wolf is the worst for he cannot listen to reason? (Carter 1580). Left unspoken in this passage, but nevertheless present, is the idea that wolves are a constant natural reality. Unlike the ogre or the cannibalistic witch, the wolf is not fictional. The wolf is a representative of nature that does not need to be assigned any special motivations for his deeds nor has the creature been created for the mere use as a lesson in morality. In demonizing the wolf, creating the wolf in Red Riding Hood?s story, man can give human attributes to the beast to better help humanity understand their own world. Carte r uses the wolf and the stories which have grown around the creature to shows the manner in which, ?social forces construct subjectivity (McGuire 129) The woods which shelter the wolves from the outside world become, in this manner, an accomplice to death, ?the shaggy branches tangle about you, trapping the unwary traveler in nets as if the vegetation itself were a plot with the wolves who live there, as though the wicked trees go fishing on behalf of their friends? (1581). As predators, wolves are in their very genetic make-up harbingers of death and in trying to make sense of this type of natural violence man has assigned them with a supernatural understanding. The seemingly senselessness of their attacks against people, rather than being explained and understood within