Big Bad Wolf

Wolves get bad press, much worse than they deserve. Consider their much-vaunted fierceness: that of the big bad wolf that ate the first two little pigs; the dangers of a wolf in sheep's clothing; the foolishness of the boy who cried wolf; the need to keep the wolves at bay. In early versions of "The Three Little Pigs" (the first written edition of which appears in the late eighteenth century), the wolf devours the first two pigs, who built houses of straw and sticks, enabling the wolf to huff and puff and blow their houses in; the clever third pig, who built his house of bricks, outsmarts and eats the wolf. Walt Disney's little pigs might be foolish to sing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" in the immensely popular Three Little Pigs cartoon short (1933) and its sequels, yet Depression Era viewers adopted the song as their anthem, hoping to keep the wolf from the door. Despite attributions of dangerous ferocity, however, in North America at least, there have been few cases of healthy wild wolves attacking humans. (Europe and Asia are another matter, though attacks recorded there may have been by rabid or hybrid wolves.)

Then there's the wolf as sexual creature, especially as a sexual predator. Yet wolves do not in fact howl wolf whistles. Nor are they particularly rapacious: they pair off in long-term bonds and form cooperative packs that share in the care of the young. "Little Red Riding Hood," of course, promotes a rather different wolf. In different tellings, Red is simply eaten, as in Charles Perrault's cautionary version (1697); is released by a hunter from the wolf's belly, as the Grimm brothers would have it (1812); escapes her predicament through her own wits, as in the early oral versions of the story cited by Jack Zipes; or, as in Angela Carter's retelling in "The Company of Wolves" (1979), is dangerously yet deliciously complicit with the wolf, embracing sexuality. The sexual wolf—almost always male, almost always heterosexual—has been featured by artists too, from Gustave Doré to Sarah Moon.

For humans, in short, the wolf has represented embodiment, sexual and otherwise. It seemed the most humanlike of the animals with whom Europeans and North Americans came into contact, a convenient figure onto which to project needs and desires. It especially came to represent the physical body of humans, for good or ill. It could suckle Romulus and Remus and hence nurture Roman civilization. It could also represent the threats to civilization—not least as the sometimes-wolf, sometimes-human werewolf (perhaps most memorably embodied, during the twentieth century, by Lon Chaney Jr., in The Wolf Man [1941] and its sequels). More recently the wolf could represent an escape from the hyper-civilized, the freedom of running or dancing with wolves. The wolf is the physical human, whether we menace others, make love, or wolf down food: its representation raises questions about what it means to be human.

see also Fairy Tales; Little Red Riding Hood.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mech, L. David, and Luigi Boitani, eds. 2003. Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Otten, Charlotte F., ed. 1986. A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Smoodin, Eric. 1993. Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Zipes, Jack. 1993. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge.

                                                         Julia Biery

                                                  Beverly Lyon Clark