ABSTRACT
In a brief and icy tale in her collection of modern fairy stories, The Bloody Chamber (1979), Angela Carter reimagined the fate of Little Red Riding Hood. The young heroine of “The Werewolf” meets a wolf on her way to her grandmother’s house. The beast leaps at her throat, but she swipes off one of its paws with a knife and sends it yelping into the forest; she wraps the severed paw in a cloth and goes on her way. Her grandmother is in bed when she arrives. The girl unwraps the bloody parcel from the cloth to find it transformed into a crabbed and calloused human hand, and from a wart on its finger she recognises it as her grandmother’s. When she grabs the old woman in her bed and pulls back the sheet, she sees a bleeding stump where her right hand should be. Neighbours rush to the house and drive the werewolf into the snow outside, where they beat her with sticks and rocks until she dies. Her granddaughter inherits the property and thrives. 1
