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124 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
In the cinematic adaptation of this story (which Carter co-scripted),
Rosaleen is schooled by her grandmother to mistrust men. ‘The worst
kind of wolves are hairy on the inside, and when they bite you they drag
you with them to hell’, she is told. Rosaleen’s mother, however, tells
her not to listen to her grandmother, saying that the wolves in men
meet their match in women. Certainly, the werewolf encountered by
Rosaleen is not the straightforward villain depicted by Perrault and the
Grimm brothers. Frustrated by Rosaleen’s mistrust of him and afraid of
emotional isolation, he is torn between the impulse to behave exactly
as she fears he will behave and the desire to forge a bond of mutual
trust with her. When Rosaleen finds herself alone with him at her
grandmother’s cottage, she remembers her mother’s words, and decides
to take the risk of exploring her sexuality. She throws her clothes into
the fire (as Zipes reminds us she sometimes did before Perrault took
away her autonomy 33 ) and embraces the wolf, saying ‘What big arms
you have.’ ‘All the better to hug you with’, he replies. The short story
ends with the line ‘See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed,
between the paws of the tender wolf.’ 34 The film goes a step further,
showing two wolves leaving the cottage together, implying that both
have assumed wolf form. In both versions, Rosaleen’s encounter with
the wolf in the forest is the key to her passage to sexual maturity and
further self-development.
Mercedes Lackey’s The Fire Rose (1995) rehabilitates the wolf in a
similar fashion to Carter’s story, but within a framework that is more
closely tied to the conventional romance. A sorcerer whose arrogance in
invoking a spell for lycanthropy has caused him to become permanently
endowed with the head and paws of a wolf wins the love of the woman
he hires to read aloud from the arcane books in which he hopes to
discover a cure for his condition. 35 Although, like Mr Rochester, he
remains disfigured at the end of the novel, his interior transformation
has endeared him to the heroine. As Janice Radway argues, the
formulaic representation of the romantic hero’s transformation from an
attitude of aggression or indifference to one of attentive tenderness can
be read as an expression of women’s demands that men become more
communicative and affective. According to Radway, ‘This interpreta-