The Nature of the Beast

Transformations of the Werewolf from the 1970s to the Twenty-First Century

Carys Crossen

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786834584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The werewolf in popular fiction has begun to change rapidly. Literary critics have observed this development and its impact on the werewolf in fiction, with theorists arguing that the modern werewolf offers new possibilities about how we view identity and the self. Although this monograph is preoccupied with the same concerns, it represents a departure from other critical works by analysing the werewolf's subjectivity/identity as a work-in-progress, where the fixed and final form is yet to be arrived at – and may never be fully accomplished. Using the critical theories of Deleuze and Guattari and their concepts of 'multiplicities' and 'becoming', this work argues that the werewolf is in a state of constant evolution as it develops new modes of being in popular fiction. Following on from this examination of lycanthropic subjectivity, the book goes on to examine the significant developments that have resulted from the advent of the werewolf as subject, few of which have received any sustained critical attention to date.

1

‘Some Wolves Are Hairy on the Inside’: The Werewolf’s Journey Towards Subjectivity

Until the 1980s, the fictional werewolf was the devil we knew. It did not share the mutability of the mellifluous, ever-changing vampire. The vampire is a supremely adaptable metaphor that has represented everything from panic about the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s to the importance of abstinence (from both blood and sex) in the early twenty-first century. The werewolf, by contrast, was comfortingly predictable. Once a month, by the light of the full moon, he (and it was nearly always a he) would become a ravening monster, kill a few unfortunates, turn back into his guilt-stricken human self in the morning and most likely die by the end of the novel or film in which he was featured. There were a few exceptions; Marie De France’s Bisclavret for instance, in which the werewolf is allowed to survive and be rewarded by his king. Or the 1985 horror-comedy film Teen Wolf, in which the likeable lycanthrope is embraced by the small town in which he lives. But these fortunate werewolves remained aberrations. From the Victorian era onwards, the werewolf in Western culture became representative of what has been popularly termed the beast within. Chantal Bourgault Du Coudray has commented on what she terms ‘the dichotomies underpinning nineteenth-century thought’ in relation to the werewolf, observing that

The unconscious part of the mind was regularly associated with the bestial, instinctive life of the natural, material world as opposed to the rational, cultured world of the conscious mind. In this sense, the unconscious became strongly linked with the notion of a ‘beast within’.1

Hence the notion of the werewolf as representative of humanity’s beastly, savage, repressed impulses was propagated and became almost a default method of depicting lycanthropy. Sigmund Freud himself contributed to the creation of the beast within in Western culture, naming one of his most famous case studies the Wolf-Man, and observing the contrast between the Wolf-Man’s charm, his keen intelligence and his complete inability to restrain his passionate, instinctual urges.2 The Wolf-Man never believed himself to be a werewolf, nor did Freud ever diagnose him with lycanthropy. But the description of him as cultured and attractive and yet wild and unrestrained in his instinctual appetites chimes with the traditional portrayal of the werewolf in Western popular culture as the beast lurking within humanity. Though Freud did not originate this method of depicting the werewolf, his name is continually invoked when describing it. From the nineteenth century onwards, the werewolf in literature was the quintessential Freudian monster, the ‘beast within’3 who was at the mercy of his unconscious, the Id, and its dark, violent repressed desires.

The beast within has dominated cultural depictions of the werewolf since the nineteenth century. Examples of what I shall henceforth term the ‘classic’ werewolf abound in both fiction and film. There is Universal’s famous The Wolf-Man, the unfortunate protagonist of An American Werewolf in London (1981), G. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Werewolf (1847) and, more recently, the kindly Remus Lupin in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Even arguably Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a text that can be defined as a prototype werewolf novel at the very least, focusing as it does on a man transforming into a beastlier, more savage and instinct-driven version of himself. It is worth noting that Stevenson’s dualistic model of the subject is more complex than the infamous binary opposition between Jekyll and Hyde – a phrase so culturally significant that it has passed into common usage to describe someone with severe mood swings. Jekyll, in a curious foreshadowing of twentieth-century theories such as the multiplicities proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, writes ‘I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.’4 The theories of Deleuze and Guattari – and how they can be used to analyse the figure of the contemporary werewolf – will be explored in detail later in this chapter and throughout the book.

Nonetheless, the famous contrast between the upstanding Dr Jekyll and the beastly Mr Hyde is strikingly similar to the unwitting humans turning into monsters in The Wolf-Man and An American Werewolf in London. Comprehensively listing the ‘classic’ werewolves in popular culture would take far more space and time than is available here. But the popular perception of the werewolf is still that of a divided subjectivity, alternating between a ravening monster and an often conscience-stricken, despairing human. This is unsurprising given the close affinity between psychoanalysis and Gothic literature. The earliest psychologists drew upon literature for inspiration, with Freud in particular relying on fairy tales to explain psychoanalytical concepts.5 Michelle A. Massé has identified numerous similarities between psychoanalysis and the Gothic, observing that while both the literary genre and the treatment of mental illness strive to maintain the borders between fantasy and reality, the blurring of these boundaries result in a gap from which the uncanny emerges.6

The werewolf did not appear in the earliest Gothic texts produced in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is a noticeable absentee from any Gothic texts until the mid-nineteenth century. It began to appear in potboilers such as George Reynold’s Wagner the Werewolf and was fully established as a Gothic monster by the fin de siècle. The werewolf embodied the Gothic sense of enclosure in its very being: Wagner is entrapped into becoming a werewolf once a month due to a pact with the Devil, for instance. Other nineteenth-century werewolves are imprisoned by their lycanthropy, finding release only in death (Alexandre Dumas’s Thibault in the 1857 novel The Wolf-Leader or even the ill-fated Dr Jekyll) or until their curse is lifted, such as in Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 short story ‘The Mark of the Beast’, where an Indian priest is compelled to repeal the curse of lycanthropy from an Englishman after being tortured. Links to and secrets from the past manifest in the majority of werewolves tales too: Wagner’s and Thibault’s pacts with the Devil, the degenerate madness in the otherwise noble family of lycanthropes in R. L. Stevenson’s ‘Olalla’ (1885). Moreover, the werewolf conjures what might be termed a Gothic atmosphere. Its blurring of the boundaries between human and animal, its natural affinity with wild, untamed spaces, and its resurrection of a primordial, savage past by its transformation from a civilized human into an uncivilized, prehistoric wolf, mark it as a Gothic creature.

The werewolf is also a stalwart of the horror film, another genre of popular culture with close links to the Gothic. William Patrick Day has analysed what he terms the ‘striking parallels between Freud’s thought and Gothic fantasy’,7 suggesting that

For Freud, dreams are the expression of wishes unacknowledged in waking life; the Gothic fantasy is the expression of the fears and desires created, but unacknowledged, by conventional culture. Like a dream, it reveals the inner life of the individual.8

If we accept Day’s assertion that the Gothic fantasy reveals the ‘inner life’ of a person, it might offer an indication as to why the werewolf has not traditionally been included in studies of the Gothic. Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, the werewolf has seldom had an ‘inner life’ to reveal to its audience. The Gothic as a genre has always placed emphasis on subjective experience: from the competing narratives of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature to Varney the Vampire and the epistolary narrative of Dracula. The traditional werewolf, in its transformed state, is pure violence, pure bloodthirstiness and pure instinct, leaving no capacity for rational thought or reflection. In the nineteenth century, werewolves such as Clemence Housman’s beautiful White Fell and Frederick Marryat’s Christina were beasts concealed behind a veneer of womanly beauty; they had no inner life, no subjectivity.9 In the twentieth century, werewolves such as Larry Talbot, tormented by their unwilling misdeeds, were unable to reconcile their beastliness with their humanity; their inner life was sundered, divided. Other lycanthropes, such as the eponymous Ginger of the Ginger Snaps film trilogy (2000–4) embraced their new, savage wolfish sides only to be subsumed by them. It is only since the 1990s that literature featuring werewolves began to move beyond the concept of the beast within and explore new modes of subjectivity.

Accordingly, it is not the beast within that we are concerned with at present. This focus of this chapter will be on the ‘new’ werewolf that has emerged in popular culture since the 1980s, and which is steadily gaining ground against the classic, monster-once-a-month Freudian werewolf. The new method of depicting the werewolf in popular culture does not break with tradition entirely. There are still plenty of transformations brought on by the full moon, some silver allergies, and plenty of gory violence. Crucially, however, the contemporary werewolf in popular culture is no longer solely associated with the unconscious. A few decades ago, the fictional werewolf began to change, and not just at the full moon. The werewolf is in the process of attaining subjectivity.

Subjectivity, in the manner I intend to apply it to the contemporary werewolf, has several layers of meaning. The simplest meaning is that the werewolf is becoming a conscious subject. When they transform, it is no longer into a ravening monster, but into something that typically resembles the wild wolf, canis lupus. Most importantly, the werewolf, no matter what form they assume, retains their conscious mind, their rationality and their sense of self rather than temporarily being consumed by a monster. The traditional divided subjectivity is losing popularity, and the beast no longer dwells solely in the unconscious. Examples of this new, thinking, self-aware werewolf are rare prior to the 1980s, but are becoming increasingly popular in contemporary fiction. The werewolf has for decades existed as a metaphor for an identity at war with itself, made possible by its divided self. The werewolf’s eternal conflict of human vs beast could in turn be interpreted as representing civilization vs nature, rationality vs instinct, and control vs aggression.

However, in recent popular culture the werewolf is no longer invariably comprised of human and monstrous selves at war with one another. Although the werewolf often struggles with its lycanthropy and all it entails, increasingly the werewolf in literature embodies the struggle to find, or the effort involved in establishing an identity. The struggle for an identity is particularly evident with contemporary female werewolves. As June Pulliam observes, many of the werewolf’s traditional characteristics, such as furious anger and overt sexual desire, are incompatible with traditional expectations of femininity.10 Nonetheless, the female werewolf has become an increasingly prominent figure in contemporary horror, fantasy and Young Adult fiction, with their authors often exploring how the female lycanthrope reconciles her beastly, bad-tempered, wild side with society’s expectations of her – and, more importantly, with the female werewolf’s expectations of herself. Kelley Armstrong’s heroine Elena Michaels in her Women of the Otherworld series spends literally years reconciling her lycanthropy, which was inflicted on her by her werewolf lover and her eventual husband, with her own desire for a ‘normal’ life. To Elena, normality consists of a home, a human husband and human children. Carrie Vaughn’s Catherine ‘Kitty’ Norville in her Kitty Norville series (the name came first) embarks on a very different journey towards establishing her identity. When the series commences she is the lowest-ranking member of a werewolf pack in thrall to a cruel alpha/leader. Kitty’s story shows her escaping the unjust rule of the alpha, and later returning to overthrow him and assume the mantle of leadership herself. A female alpha is a rare development in contemporary werewolf fiction and one that indicates just how extraordinary Kitty is.11 These are just two examples of the character development fictional in which female werewolves are currently engaged. Both Armstrong and Vaughn have authored several books about their lycanthropes, allowing their struggle for identity and subjectivity to be played out in lengthy and vivid detail.

This development is by no means confined purely to female werewolves: male werewolves, such as Reuben Golding in Anne Rice’s Wolf Gift series and W. D. Gagliani’s hero Nick Lupo, in Wolf’s Trap (2003) and its sequels, are frequently engaged in the same process. However, it is important to remember that this evolution of lycanthropic subjectivity is definitely not a universal occurrence. The classic beast within is still prevalent in fiction, with texts such as David Wellington’s Frostbite (2009), John Farris’s High Bloods (2009) and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series all featuring werewolves who lose all sense of self when transformed. The Freudian concept of ‘the beast in the unconscious’ is still deeply entrenched in Western popular culture and is especially popular in film.12 The werewolf must overcome centuries in which it has lacked any form of subjectivity or a means of defining itself, hence its ongoing becoming.

Whereas the classic werewolf is predominantly a threat that must be neutralized or contained, usually by the death of the unfortunate lycanthrope in question, one challenge the new werewolf must confront is learning to live alongside – or even among – humans. As Barbara Creed has observed, ‘born of the modern period, monsters have embodied particularly modern fears and anxieties’.13 Werewolves, along with other monsters such as vampires and zombies, are supremely suited to representing the marginalized and socially excluded, embodying ethnic, racial, cultural and sexual difference and even disability. J. K Rowling has stated explicitly that her character Remus Lupin’s lycanthropy is a metaphor for how people react to disability and disease.14 That the new werewolf is – sometimes – permitted to survive and even thrive together with humanity is perhaps indicative of changes in Western society since the 1980s, with the other, whatever its form, becoming more accepted. The increasing acceptance of the other in popular culture has been gathering pace since the 1990s, as the monster, rather than its victims, came to be symp...