Postmodern Revisions
147
the ending we might want, particularly given the heroine’s investment
in a dubious love interest (even lying to her father about the prince’s
character, affirming he helped fight the queen rather than serving as her
consort, and ignoring his attempt to kill her!) yet we can still applaud
the fact that she takes an active role in her destiny, and ensures her
self-preservation. If a character long conflated
with virginal innocence
can become ruthless (keeping a dagger in her wedding dress) without
detracting from her heroism, perhaps there is a means of bypassing
the usual dichotomy of approved femininity. All that remains is to
overcome the rivalry that narratively pits women against one another,
which involves telling different stories.
It is female sexuality,
rather than rivalry, that ‘Red Riding Hood’
(ATU 333) chiefly concerns itself with, yet, as Catherine Orenstein notes
of its heroine, ‘over the years she has been cloaked according to social
and ethical fashion, in countless meanings and morals,
warnings and
winks’, often depicted either as victim or vamp (2003: 13). In Angela
Carter’s collection
The Bloody Chamber
(1979) the tale is explored via
three versions – ‘The Werewolf’, ‘Wolf-Alice’ and ‘The Company of
Wolves’ – the last of which she helped to adapt as the film,
The Company
of Wolves
(Neil Jordan, 1984). Zipes regards the result as a landmark in
cinematic treatments of ‘Red Riding Hood’, inaugurating greater experi-
mentation in the heroine’s response to her encounter with a ‘wolf’,
including ‘desire, rage and revenge’ (2011: 147). Desire is at the heart
of Carter’s original tale, which has its heroine happily succumb to the
‘wolf’, although her cinematic counterpart behaves far more coyly. With
its playful questioning of reality and illusion (framed as a dream yet
with reality bleeding through amid a collapsing set),
its variety of tales
and time periods, and its intertextual retelling of ‘Red Riding Hood’ (via
Angela Carter, with a nod to Charles Perrault), this is a quintessential
postmodern film, yet not without its flaws. Its intent to subvert expec-
tation is announced at the start, when the heroine asks, in response
to her sister’s
death in the woods, ‘why couldn’t she save herself?’ The
question sums up Carter’s feminist revisionism, calling to mind oral
forebears such as the young woman in ‘The Story of Grandmother’ who
does indeed save herself. In the same vein, the film’s closing striptease
(when the heroine arrives at granny’s cottage, realises the huntsman/
werewolf has won his wager, and starts to throw her clothes on the
fire) affirms a
confident female coming-of-age, in keeping with Carter’s
eroticised version of the tale (in which the girl makes no attempt to
escape but eagerly joins the wolf in bed). However, the film does not
go as far as Carter’s fearless heroine, who is last seen sleeping ‘sweet