Wolves

In 'The Company of Wolves', the wolves are initially described as terrifying predatory 'assassins' who desire the smell of 'meat'. Already, echo's of Carter's previous themes are present. 'Meat' has been used to describe how men view woman, objectifying them and degrading them. Also, the animalistic wolves have in common with the predatory males, such as the Marquis, possessing 'unkind' power, which foreshadowing the symbolic meaning of the wolves which will develop.

Reinforcing this link is the shape-shifting between men and wolves. A hunter kills a wolf in a trap, but as he does so the wolf turns back into "the bloody trunk of a man", which suggests Carter is highlighting the bestial nature of men. This bestiality of men is also linked to the idea of sex. If you burn a werewolves clothes, leaving the man naked, you "condemn him to wolfishness for the rest of his life". The wolf is therefore associated with a naked man, and nudity is associated with sex, clarifying the link.

The werewolf's connection to the bestial nature to man is applied when we finally reach the actual story. When the werewolf reveals himself to the Grandma, she is threatened by his "huge" genitals, conveying the idea of men using sex as a threat perhaps, or that Carter is wary of the dangers of sex.

The wolves "huge" eyes "fixed upon her" (the girl), which refers to the male-gaze; the objectification of women physically, which is Carter again conveying the predatory nature of men to claim women purely as their 'prey', a trophy or an object. However, the girl turns the situation around, and knows that she is "nobody's meat". She refuses to be objectified by the man, and seizes control of the situation by burning the werewolves clothing. As he can no longer take the shape of a man, he is no threat to her. Carter is making the point that masculinity can be more dangerous and deadly to women than any carnivore. The declaration of defiance is a model of Carter's view that women should refuse to accept the allotted passive role of victim.

In 'The Werewolf', the wolf is widely considered to be the embodiment of a preceding generation of mothers. The wolf is in fact the child's grandmother, and the discovery that the wolf's paw she cut off is in fact "a hand toughened with work and freckled with old age" shows her realising she cannot respect women of previous generation who have taken on the role created for them by men. This is shown through Carter's condemning descriptions of the "crone", "old woman" and "witch" that is the grandmother. The child's act of resistance to her grandmother shows how she resists the fate of her nature being warped by men into something which Carter considers, monstrous, into an active, independent woman who 'prospered. She does not have to be a shift-shaper like her grandma, pretending to be something she is not.