What Is a Wolf?

Scholars of children's literature are accustomed to wolves' appearances throughout numerous texts. We are, in fact, so acclimated to the beasts' integration into popular stories and illustrations that we seldom pause to ask the question that launches Mitts-Smith's research: "What is a wolf?" While at first glance this question might surprise some readers, the author uses a cross-disciplinary approach to expose the real complexities involved in understanding and representing wolves. Tracing myths, legends, fables, scientific works, and fiction from Western Europe and North America starting in the sixteenth century up to modern times, she offers a thorough overview of people constructing varied understandings of wolves as shaped by historical, cultural, and scientific knowledge. Since her primary interest is in visual representations of wolves, her research material favors subjects in which visual elements are integral components. Her argument claims that there is no static identity, or means of representation, that can fully express the wolf as either a real animal or a symbol. Thus, the author's initial question is left open ended; the identity of wolves remains impermanent and under constant construction. Her research initiates dialogues within the humanities, sciences, and social sciences to uncover how this open representation is influential in each field.

Children, of course, remain potential candidates to enter any of these fields; understanding how children's culture is directly impacted upon by wolves should therefore interest members of each discipline. This dynamic approach makes Mitts-Smith's book a worthy component of the Children's Literature and Culture series. As Jack Zipes notes in his series editor's foreword, the collection "is intended to encourage innovative research in children's literature with a focus on inter-disciplinary methodology," and it is "particularly concerned with transformations in children's culture and how they have affected the representation and socialization of children" (xiii).

Picturing the Wolf in Children's Literature stems from Mitts-Smith's long-standing interest in the species. While a graduate student at the University of Illinois, she received several awards, including the 2005 Princeton University Library research grant, to facilitate projects related to wolves. That she obtained both a master's degree and a PhD in library and information science is reflected in her organizational strategy for the book. She regards illustrations and photographs of wolves as genre "nomads" that cannot be restricted to one format. Thus, instead of organizing her book by specific chronological or genre approaches, she merges information and then references it according to the predominant conceptualization of the wolf which it produces.

In chapter one, "Wolf as Predator," Mitts-Smith presents wolves as alpha predators facing a double condemnation. The actual/real animals, due to their carnivorous diet, are depicted in traditional fables as man-menacing beasts that harm humans and steal resources from the ecosystem in order to satiate their hunger. As symbolic animals they are imbued with sinful designs: the wolf is a gluttonous, deceitful, and intentionally malicious animal. Either rendition, Mitts-Smith argues, makes wolves agents imbued with reviled characteristics normally found in humans. They become moral villains, with attributes from which children should strive to distance themselves. Predation, she suggests, is classified as bloodthirsty and insatiable. Mitts-Smith uses well-known tales and illustrations such as Perrault's "Little Red Riding Hood" (1894), Aesop's "The Wolf and the Sow" (1821), and the Grimms' "The Wolf and the Seven Kids" (1882) to exemplify this stereotyping and depicts the underlying moral: children must be saved from wolves, and only particularly clever children are capable of saving themselves. Therefore, defeating the wolf demonstrates maturity, resourcefulness, and intelligence.

But we know from Mitts-Smith's introduction that the wolf defies a single representation, and the end of chapter one details literary works and movements that began to crack the alpha predator façade. She examines works by authors who eschewed stereotyping the wolf, including Rudyard Kipling, Earnest Thompson, and Thornton Burgess. Reinterpretations of the wolf after the mid-nineteenth century were largely due, she argues, to the influx of...