The Bloody Chamber: The Werewolf Summary & Analysis

The narrator describes a harsh Northern country, where the people living near the forest fear both wild beasts and monsters like vampires or the Devil. They are very suspicious, and stone an old woman for being followed too closely by her black cat. In this land lives a child, and her mother asks her to take some oatcakes to her grandmother, who has been sick. The grandmother lives five miles away through the forest, and the mother gives the child a knife and warns her not to leave the path. The child sets off.

The child is a mountaineer’s daughter, and is experienced with the wild beasts and harsh country. When she hears a wolf howling she takes out her knife. The huge, red-eyed wolf attacks her but the child cuts off its hand and it runs off, whimpering. The child wraps the wolf’s paw in a cloth and keeps walking, and soon reaches her grandmother’s house.

The child finds that her grandmother is sick in bed, and then she notices that the wolf’s paw has turned into a human hand. The hand has a familiar wart on it, so the child pulls back her grandmother’s sheets and sees that the grandmother’s hand has been recently cut off. The child calls for the neighbors, and together they drive the grandmother out into the woods and stone her. The child then lives in the grandmother’s house and “prospers.”