The wolf: Reenacting the Myth and Archetype In American Literature and Society

Abstract

Taking as a point of departure The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, the treatment of the wild figure of the “she” wolf and Clarisa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves, it is my aim to apply an ecocritical and ecofeminist perspective to the study of the current status of the tradition that has focused on romanticizing or demonizing the figure of the wolf in American literature. It is also my intention to call attention to the current social responses of environmental activism with multiple demonstrations against the deliberate attempt of hunters and even local governments to exterminate the species because of the repeated attacks inflicted to cattle. In Estés’ psychoanalytical study, the wolf works as a liberating figure, empowered with wildness, defying a tradition of patriarchal oppression for women, embedded in the common female unconscious as it is sanctioned in traditional literature.