“Little Red Riding Hood” can be seen as one of the most popular and famous bedtime stories. Based on the original counterpart, Angela Carter reshapes this story by adding sexual elements through her work “The Company of Wolves”, in which the narrator describes the red of the heroine's coat, which recalls the “blood on the snow” and the “color of sacrifices." (Carter 145), is an advertisement of his sexual availability. Carter's revision also concerns the heroine's perception, as a young woman, towards her virginity and moral sexuality, as well as unconscious self-exploration. Furthermore, Carter shows his concern in exploring gender identities by telling those seemingly harmless fairy tales. He has always stated that what he has done is to dispel the myth (38), which can be considered a kind of criticism and rebellion against the patriarchal society that dominates traditional values ​​and norms. This article will, therefore, examine the heroine's actions driven by personal desire and psychosexual impulse, as well as the hidden meaning of her final triumph over the werewolf in "The Company of Wolves" from two categories: Freud's psychoanalysis and Jung's archetypal images. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay As the central figure in “The Company of Wolves,” the heroine is portrayed as “an untouched egg,” “a sealed vessel,” and “stands and moves within the invisible pentagram of her own virginity” (Carter 145). It fits perfectly with the Freudian concept of the tripartite self and represents its conflicts and solutions. According to Freud, the Superego is the moralistic and idealistic part of the personality, which resides in the preconscious level and operates according to an “ideal principle” (Freud 19). The heroine is the youngest and most beautiful child, so her family indulged and protected her from danger and harsh reality making her the gender ideal and a good girl who would never stray from the path, which helps forming the superego of the heroine, thus, leads to her disbelief in the compass and tames her desire to go to the forest when she makes a bet on the hunter (werewolf). However, as a stage of sexual awakening and sensitive to heterosexual relationship, the heroine's id, which resides at an unconscious level and acts according to the pleasure principle (Freud 21), cannot be completely repressed. He is on the verge of puberty; she just started having her period and begins her fantasy about sex. Then, pushed by her ego, which operates according to the reality principle and tries to negotiate between the id and the superego, the heroine, enticed as she is by the werewolf, accepts the kiss as the winning prize of the bet and lets him leave with his basket. He knows that he “should never leave the path through the woods,” yet he “still delays on his way to make sure the handsome gentleman wins his bet” (Carter 148). She even seems to not care whether the werewolf ate her grandmother or not, but is eager to consummate her sexual desire and relationship with the werewolf. Here, readers can see a girl with independence and strong autonomy. To further resolve conflicts between id and superego, defense mechanisms appear to be used by the ego to achieve a balance between desire and reality. Even though the heroine knows that wolves are worse in the barren months, she still insists on sending a basket of food to her sick grandmother. She is armed only with a knife for the two-hour journey but she is not afraid of it; she is "afraid of nothing" (Carter 142). Kept young by her family, the heroine unconsciously suffers the denial of defense mechanisms towards imminent dangers, and organizes herjourney both to the grandmother's house and to the mature woman with her red shawl that symbolized her sexual desire. As for her relationship with her grandmother, the heroine actually experiences projection. Afflicted by the phallic phase and the Oedipus complex, the heroine actually considers her mother as a romantic rival in her subconscious and desires her father's love. When she decides to visit her grandmother, "her mother cannot deny her" (146) without her father, Carter writes. Meanwhile, her identity is withheld by her grandmother and mother warning her and telling her to stay on the road; therefore, his envy of his mother is spontaneously transferred to his grandmother. In this case, he ignores the rattling of his grandmother's bones which can be seen as a warning or obstacle to his relationship with the werewolf, and further sees the werewolf as his father's substitute and transfers his emotions to him. The narrator repeatedly indicates that “the wolf is the incarnation of the carnivore” and they are such absolute evil that their howling is “murder in itself” (Carter 140). Yet, throughout the narrative, readers can perceive that for wolves, as for any half-being, their existence is equivalent to torment. Through the heroine's eyes, their howl contains "a certain intrinsic sadness, as if the beasts would like to be less bestial if they only knew that they never stop mourning their plight" (Carter 143), which suggests that the men also that choosing to become werewolves can be regretted due to the misery it brings them. Although defense mechanisms have alleviated conflicts between the heroine's id and superego, at the end of the story, it is ultimately the heroine's pity or guilt, caused by avoiding conscious solutions, for the werewolf and his company of wolves that pushes her to join him. them, or perhaps, become a leader and keep them company. It seems that a new matriarchal wolf society is forming. “The Company of Wolves” can also be exposed through archetypal images and mythical patterns within the collective unconscious. Analogously to the contrast between Freud's superego and id, Jung constructs the self (persona), which designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in man and expresses the unity of the personality as a whole (108), and the shadow , who represents the dark side of oneself that exists but cannot be identified, as a binary couple regarding the heroine self, was kept young because she is the most beautiful and youngest daughter in her family, and was transformed into the ideal of an innocent, protected and trusting girl. However, the heroine of the story potentially has her own darkness: she too - a sheltered girl, is armed with a large knife; when he hears the howling of a wolf, he instinctively tightens his knife, tells the werewolf, a stranger, where his grandmother lives and gives him his basket without supervision because he sees his grandmother as a barrier and wants to get rid of her in his subconscious. She is also aware of her grandmother's death, is busy interacting with the werewolf, fulfilling her desire, and does not show too much pity or sadness. In addition to the self and shadow, the animus complex, which represents women's biological expectations of men, but also refers to the masculine that occurs in women. By wearing the color red that symbolizes both her new menstrual blood and the blood she will presumably shed when she loses her virginity, she expressed underlying sexual desire. At his grandmother's house, he takes off his clothes and then proactively unbuttons the collar of the werewolf's shirts. She would never have bothered to think that she would be eaten; she “bursts out laughing; […] she laughs in his face, tears off his shirt and throws it into the fire” (Carter 152). These.