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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.