The Werewolf

The story

A child is sent through the forest to take oatcakes to her sick grandmother in a bleak northern country where hardship and superstition are ordinary and the supernatural is simply another fact of the weather. On the way a wolf attacks her. She is the daughter of a hunter and knows how to use a knife, and she strikes the beast, cutting off one of its paws before it flees. She wraps the paw and carries on. At her grandmother’s house she finds the old woman feverish and raving, and when she unwraps the paw it has become a human hand, with a familiar wart, matching the wound on her grandmother’s arm. The girl cries out; the neighbours come, see the wart as the mark of a witch and stone the grandmother to death. The child then moves into the grandmother’s house and, the last line reports, prospers.

A closer look

The source tale: Red Riding Hood rewritten as survival, not seduction

Where ‘The Company of Wolves’ will draw out the sexual charge of Little Red Riding Hood, ‘The Werewolf’ deliberately drains it away. This is the tale told as folklore of the harshest kind, less concerned with desire than with staying alive. Carter reaches back past the polished Perrault version to the brutal peasant world the tale came from, where the wolf and the grandmother are one creature and the moral is not about talking to strangers but about who is left standing. The critic Bidisha reads it as a story of human meanness of spirit, noting drily that being a werewolf will not save you from sexism, because the grandmother is destroyed not as a monster but as an old woman convicted of witchcraft. The collapse of wolf into grandmother is the source tale’s buried logic made literal, and it turns a cautionary story into an indictment of the community that tells it.

Method: laconic narration, the withheld truth and the unreliable ending

The story’s power is almost entirely in its tone. Carter writes in short, blunt declaratives that refuse to be moved: the country has ‘wild beasts in the forest’ and ‘cold weather’, life is ‘harsh, brief, poor’, and children are born with ‘second sight’ as a matter of course. This flatness makes the supernatural mundane and the human cruelty routine, so that neither is given the dignity of surprise. Two touches unsettle the surface. The wolf’s retreat is granted a flicker of pathos, a ‘gulp, almost a sob’, which quietly aligns the beast with suffering rather than menace, while the grandmother is described ‘like a thing possessed’, the simile leaving it open whether she is transformed, feverish or simply old and frightened. Most importantly, the tale is told so tersely that we never see events plainly. The proof of the werewolf is a wart, hardly proof at all, and the whole account reaches us at one remove, so that the closing survival of the child reads as much like a chilling verdict as a happy ending.

The central concern: the mob, the scapegoat, and a child who prospers

Carter is interested in what a frightened community does with its fear, and the answer is that it finds a woman to punish. The neighbours need no real evidence; a wart is enough to turn a sick grandmother into a witch and license a stoning. The girl herself is no innocent victim of the older tale but a hunter’s daughter dressed in a ‘scabby coat of sheepskin’, competent, armed and hard, who ends the story by taking possession of the dead woman’s home. The last line, ‘Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered’, is one of the most quietly disturbing in the collection. It offers the form of a fairy-tale happy ending, the reward of the good child, while withholding all its warmth, because prosperity here has been bought by a grandmother’s death that the child’s own testimony helped bring about. The story leaves us morally unmoored, which is precisely its design: in this world natural justice does not prevail, only survival does.

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘wild beasts in the forest’ (The Werewolf)	Plain declarative, setting	The flat statement makes menace ordinary; the supernatural is just another hazard of a hard country.
‘harsh, brief, poor’ (The Werewolf)	Asyndetic tricolon	Three curt adjectives compress a whole way of life; the style enacts the bleakness it describes.
‘second sight’ (The Werewolf)	Matter-of-fact diction	The uncanny is reported without wonder, so witches and wolves belong to the everyday, not the marvellous.
‘gulp, almost a sob’ (The Werewolf)	Qualifying phrase, pathos	A flicker of feeling for the wounded wolf shifts sympathy towards the beast and away from the mob.
‘scabby coat of sheepskin’ (The Werewolf)	Concrete image, irony	The child is dressed as prey yet behaves as predator; her hardness, not her innocence, keeps her alive.
‘Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered’ (The Werewolf)	Terse final line, ambiguity	A happy ending in form only: survival is rewarded, but the reward is built on a killing the child abetted.