She Wolf In La Lupa

The she-wolf, or she-devil, occurs in literature as the temptress who possesses an unexplainable mental or sexual power over men. This character makes appearances in stories spanning centuries, from Giovanni Verga’s La Lupa in the 19th century, to George Saunders’ Sea Oak in the 21st century. In La Lupa, Italian for “she-wolf,” the main character sets her sights on men, namely her daughter’s husband, Nanni; she sexually dominates men without care for anything other than her own desires. Saunders places a contemporary lens on the she-wolf in Sea Oak; the she-wolf in his story is Aunt Bernie, a woman who comes back from the dead and raises hell in a household full of delinquents. Verga and Saunders both use similar elements and settings to different versions of the she-wolf figure; although La Lupa and Aunt Bernie live vastly different lives in different worlds, both characters inhabit traits of the traditional trope — …show more content…
Rather than a small Italian village, Sea Oak takes place in an apartment complex in the slum of a small town. Saunders writes, “At Sea Oak there’s no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear window of the FedEx.” This area is both small and enclosed, containing low-income families who seemingly cannot escape the confines of the slum. Furthermore, Sea Oak is also dangerous: “Sea Oak’s not safe. There’s an ad hoc crack-house in the laundry room and last week Min found some brass knuckles in the kiddie pool.” On more than one occasion, gun shots resounded in the air. Saunders creates an unsafe setting for his characters, including small children, because it provides necessary motivation for what follows in the story. Once Aunt Bernie comes back, she transforms into a she-wolf character whose main objective is to aggressively act to get her family out of the slum. This setting, in its abundant danger and barrenness, allows for Bernie’s lewd manner and forceful