Summary
The speaker begins by explaining that, as her childhood ends, a landscape of houses gives way to one of sports fields, factories, and garden plots which sit like men's mistresses awaiting their return. It is here that she first sees the wolf, who is in a clearing reading his own poetry and holding a paperback. His fur is stained with red wine and his eyes, ears, and teeth are huge. He catches sight of the speaker, a childlike sixteen-year-old. Responding to readers who might wonder why she followed the wolf, the speaker says that he seemed to offer a path to a more interesting, complex, experienced adult realm she craved. She followed the wolf into the woods, her clothes shredding on branches, like clues to a murder.
Analysis
It's clear early in this work that the poem is an extended allusion to the fairytale "Little Red Riding Hood," or, as it is called in some versions, "Little Red Cap." By using that familiar tale as a jumping-off point through which to discuss a predatory relationship, Duffy effectively accomplishes several goals. Firstly, she evokes some of the archetypal menace of a fairytale. Any trace of the modern world's mundanity is replaced by a world of dark woods and wolves. After all, many folkloric versions of the "Little Red Cap" tale are full of violence and threat. At the same time, by mentioning a story usually associated with childhood, Duffy emphasizes her speaker's young age and creates an ironic juxtaposition with the poem's gritty content.
As much as the wolf is threatening, Duffy also portrays him as faintly ridiculous. He reads his own poetry to himself, and he is stained with wine, suggesting drunkenness or at least uncleanliness. Yet the speaker goes with him, which she herself acknowledges is a surprising choice. She implicitly attributes the wolf's appeal to two related forces: his masculinity and his adulthood. Both of these states are suggested through references to the wolf's beard, his hairiness, and his size. Even his literary interests, in these contexts, appear intriguing and intelligent. Meanwhile, for the speaker, the wolf promises escape from an alienating and confusing situation. Duffy's literal scene-setting doubles as a metaphorical description of the speaker's psychological state. Having left childhood, symbolized by the now-disappeared houses, the speaker finds herself in an uninviting industrial landscape. The wolf at the very least offers an escape from the limbo of adolescence. While the landscape of factories is curiously desolate and depopulated, the wolf provides companionship and attention. Moreover, Duffy's comparison of the landscape's buildings to mistresses suggests that the speaker already lives in a world imbued with sexual conflict and gendered power dynamics. In other words, the wolf seems no worse than anything the speaker is already experiencing.
Even while we are led to empathize with rather than judge the speaker's choice, Duffy heavily foreshadows the wolf's dangerousness. She does so partly by drawing on readers' preexisting knowledge of the Little Red Riding Hood tale, as well as by emphasizing the wolf's size and strength compared to the "waif"-like speaker. Figurative language adds to this foreshadowing, most explicitly the mention of "murder clues."
