Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth: The dangers of dreaming in Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves

Sweetest Tongue Has Sharpest Tooth': The Dangers of Dreaming in Neil Jordan's

In light of Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan's inspired and acclaimed 1997 adaptation of Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (with a script co-written by McCabe and Jordan), a look at one of his earlier, and critically neglected films seems in order. When Jordan made The Company of Wolves in 1984, it was one of the rare films in the horror genre that chose a female character as its main subject, and displayed a genuine concern for a woman's problems from a decidedly feminist perspective.1The idea for the film came from British writer Angela Carter's 1979 feminist/revisionist re-telling of Little Red Riding Hood; it provided the seed from which the script for The Company of Wolves grew and expanded into an intricate narrative, interweaving storytelling and dreams, co-written by Carter and Jordan 2 The screenplay appropriates a variety of different folk-legends, fairy tales, and myths, both oral and written, and shows an intelligent awareness of the ways in which fairy tales have been a tool for the acculturation of children for their prescribed social roles. (Liberman 185)

The way in which the tale of Little Red Riding Hood (Little Red Riding Hood will henceforth be known as LRRH) has transmogrified over time is instructive when approaching the surfeit of meanings offered up by The Company of Wolves. Variations of LRRH can be found in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Native American mythologies. In its original oral incarnation, the folk tale marks the social initiation of a young woman, and celebrates her coming of age. It is also, importantly, a warning. A common story in the Middle Ages has an ". . . ogre, ogress, man-eater, wild person, werewolf, or wolf . . ." attacking a child in the forest or at home. (Zipes 18-19) The story functions socially as an admonition to deter children from talking to strangers, or allowing them access to their dwellings. In some versions of the story, when LRRH gets to Granny's house, the wolf forces her to eat the grandmother's flesh and drink her blood, in a perverted ritual of transubstantion. In all the early versions of the tale, LRRH outsmarts the wolf in a variety of clever moves, and escapes.

The story was revised, with moral purpose, by Charles Perrault, who also cleaned up any references to cannibalism. In the Perrault story, written for the court of Louis XIV, as Jack Zipes writes, "He transformed a hopeful oral tale about the initiation of a young girl into a tragic one of violence in which the girl is blamed for her own violation." (Zipes 7) In keeping with most feminist literature on the subject, Zipes equates the act of being eaten with rape, and most certainly with violation. In Perrault's version LRRH and Granny are eaten by the wolf; they don't escape; nor are they rescued, therefore depriving the characters any measure of salvation or redemption.

In the later version by the Brothers Grimm, LRRH survives, but only because of the valiant ministrations of a huntsman, a strong male. He alone can save her from own lustful desires, of which her red cloak-traditionally the color associated with violent sexualityis but an external manifestation. Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, writes about the Grimm's de-sexualization of the story as both a mirror and a response to the contemporaneous society's wish to guard against the sexualization of children. (Foucault 104)

The-wolf, both in oral and written tradition is a sexual, lustful being. It is not coincidental that in Italian, the word for male wolf is lupo, and lupa, the word for female wolf, also means vulva. Allegorically, as cited in a German text from the mid 1800s, DEx Werewolf, wolves have been the natural symbol of night, winter, death, especially bloodthirsty, swift, lusty, hardy, bold [with a] desire for blood and hunger for the flesh of corpses. (Jones 132) Ernst Jones writes in On The Nightmare that the wolf is ". . , specially suited to represent the dangerous and immoral side of nature in general and human nature in particular." (Jones 132)

But the wolf is also associated with fertility and phallic symbolism, and thus affiliated both with birth and destruction. Significantly, werewolves were not associated with evil until the end of the 15th century. In medieval times werewolves were looked on with positive feelings, and even sensations of awe, as beings capable of integrating both the wild and cultural elements, beings at the intersection of nature and civilization. This harkens back to ancient rituals in which one lived in the wilderness in order to then be returned and recuperated within the social order.

Keeping the history of the tale of LRRH and the wolf in mind, we can turn to the film, The Company of Wolves. Jordan's film begins with a framing story of a bourgeois familymother, father, and two daughters, as they arrive at their rather posh country home. We are then drawn into the scene of the imagination, of dreams, and nightmares that take place in the room of a sleeping adolescent, the youngest daughter, Rosaleen. Her dreams or conscious or unconscious imaginings form the material of the film's narrative. The setting of her dream world would seem to be contemporaneous to the time in which Perrault was writing, the end of the 17th century, the age, not incidentally, of Enlightenment. The dream time is elastic enough to allow a diabolical figure - limned by the ever-demonic Terrence Stamp -to arrive at one point in a gleaming white Rolls. Most importantly, though, it is the time of "once upon a time," the universalized time of story-telling and fantasy.