Maturity
The wolf catches the speaker at a particularly vulnerable time in her life: adolescence. She has been somewhat unceremoniously cast out of the security of childhood, and finds herself in a strange landscape, evoked through images of fields and factories that suggest her teenage loneliness. The wolf appears to offer her a shortcut to maturity, and therefore a way out of the unpleasantness of her teen years. However, because she is in fact not a mature adult, she lacks both the power and the knowledge to recognize the wolf as predatory and ridiculous. Only after years of maturation is she able and willing to leave him. Even so, in specific ways, the speaker is more mature and intelligent than the wolf even as a child.
Sexual Awakening
For the poem's speaker, sexual and intellectual or creative awakening are inextricably linked. The wolf seduces the speaker through a blend of physical attraction and intellectual bluster, with each one helping to legitimize and intensify the other. When they have sex, the wolf refers to it as a "lesson" and a "love poem," transmuting (or claiming to transmute) sexuality into poetry. For the speaker, though, the reverse is even more true: literature induces an almost orgasmic intensity of feeling. In part, the speaker's eventual realization that the wolf understands little about poetry also causes her to lose interest in him sexually, physically destroying him before she leaves his lair.
Feminism and Women's Creativity
Though the speaker first follows the wolf precisely because he seems to offer her independence and creative validation, it soon becomes clear that he has instead suppressed both of these qualities in her. When they are together, she is able to read poetry and pursue her own interests only while he sleeps. When she leaves him, she begins to sing, as if reclaiming a silenced voice. However, her freedom and self-actualization are tempered by a sad discovery. She finds her grandmother's bones in the wolf's stomach, hinting that many women throughout history have been silenced by patriarchy and sexism. The speaker, unlike her grandmother, is eventually able to liberate herself from the wolf.
