In the company of wolves

Werewolves, wolves and wild children

Sam George, Bill Hughes, Sam George, Bill Hughes

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781526129031
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526129055
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

In the company of wolves presents further research from the Open Graves, Open Minds Project. It connects together innovative research from a variety of perspectives on the cultural significance of wolves, wild children and werewolves as portrayed in different media and genres.

We begin with the wolf itself as it has been interpreted as a cultural symbol and how it figures in contemporary debates about wilderness and nature. Alongside this, we consider eighteenth-century debates about wild children ­– often thought to have been raised by wolves and other animals – and their role in key questions about the origins of language and society. The collection continues with essays on werewolves and other shapeshifters as depicted in folk tales, literature, film and TV, concluding with the transition from animal to human in contemporary art, poetry and fashion.

Part I
Cultural images of the wolf, the werewolf and the wolf-child

1
Wolves and lies: a writer's perspective

Marcus Sedgwick

From the wolf in sheep's clothing to the boy who cried wolf, from anti-Semitic propaganda to lupine hoaxes of the Holocaust itself, there has always been a connection between the wolf and untruth. What is it about the wolf that lends itself to the concept of fraudulence, and is there something more positive we also take away from the nature of this particular beast? ‘All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.’ So says Margaret Atwood, or at least, that's what she has her character Alex declare in The Blind Assassin.¹ Alex's point is that every story requires a metaphorical wolf – without a problem of some kind, a story is not a story in the truest sense. This exploration of wolves and lies is written from the point of view of a storyteller; my life is invested in stories. I have observed that we do not read books that contain only the positive: stories that recounted only a sequence of wonderful and fulfilling things happening would be, ironically, not at all fulfilling to the reader. From time to time, however, attempts have been made to cast fiction in this mode. We might consider a story such as Ernest Hemingway's ‘Big Two-hearted River’, in which the protagonist Nick Adams goes on a fishing trip and everything is more or less absolutely fine. If this story succeeds at all it's because of the reader's understanding of implicit jeopardy – themes of warfare and conflict lurk beneath the surface throughout the piece.

A more extreme attempt to write a story without dramatic incident appears within another novel. George Gissing's New Grub Street of 1891 describes the tribulations of a character called Harold Biffen who writes a novel depicting the everyday, utterly realistic life of Mr Bailey, Grocer with no dramatic incident whatsoever. The result is untenably dull and the attempt is a failure.²

Such experiments serve only to prove to us that story is not about the representation of human life – story is about the representation of the conflicts of human life. This is the sense in which Atwood's Alex declares that all stories worth repeating are about wolves, and yet, although he's speaking metaphorically, very often in the past our stories have been about real wolves.

Wolves are there from the start, and from the start are associated with deception. Of the fables associated with Aesop, around seventy-five of the 725 stories listed in the Perry Index feature wolves – no other animal features as often as the wolf does: eagles have twenty stories; donkeys, twelve; cats, twenty-one; dogs and lions each have fifty-six, for example.³ Only by combining stories about men, women and children does humankind itself merit more mentions than the wolf. The closest animal rival to the wolf is the fox, with sixty-six fables. A fox is of course a close relative of the wolf, both members of the Canidae family, and yet even in these fables, approximately two and a half thousand years old, there is a distinction. The fox is cunning and wily. The wolf shares these traits, but with a crucial addition – the wolf is often depicted as voracious, rapacious, merciless, even wantonly cruel, as in tales such as ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’.⁴

It's interesting to note that in one of the most famous of Aesop's fables, ‘The Shepherd Who Cried “Wolf!” in Jest’, deception is still part of the tale, even though the lies are now being told by the shepherd, and that, in many stories where the wolf is not depicted as extremely malicious, deceit is once again part of the mix – see ‘The Dog and the Sheep’, which features a wolf bearing false witness and winding up dead in a ditch for its trouble.⁵

Another very old story, ‘The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing’, was in the past falsely attributed to Aesop, and indeed bears Perry Index Number 451, though the story is now held to be of biblical origin. In one of his sermons, Jesus declares ‘Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves’ – now a universally popular adage in the English language, when referencing danger disguised as innocence.⁶

It's hard to date fairy tales. It's far from certain who Aesop was, or when he lived, but, if it is indeed the case that he lived between 620 and 564 BCE, we can be far less sure of when the original versions of common fairy tales were first told, and it remains impossible to know who first told them. Whilst it was long assumed that the fairy tales recounted by the likes of Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault or Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy were not vastly older than the period in which these famous fairy-tale narrators first wrote them down, recent research challenges this view. In a paper for the Royal Society, Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid J. Tehrani argue that phylogenetic dating techniques provide robust evidence that stories like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (ATU 425C, as per the Aarne-Thompson-Uther fairy-tale classification system) may be as much as four thousand years old, and other familiar fairy tales, such as the ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ family, could be even older.⁷ To return to wolves, Tehrani argued in earlier work that while ATU 333 – better known to us as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ – may be ‘only’ eleventh century in origin, a closely related tale, ATU 123 (‘The Wolf and the Kids’) is possibly much older, being evolved from an ‘Aesopic’ fable and first recorded around 400 CE.⁸ What these two tales have in common is the notion of the deceitful wolf: in the former story, the wolf disguises himself as the girl's grandmother; in the latter, as the mother goat to the kids.

It seems, therefore, that for as long as stories have been told and recorded the wolf has been penned not only as voracious but also as deceitful. What is the explanation for these connections? As to traits of supposed cruelty, certain opinions have long been held about the wolf's predation habits. One of the historical accusations made against the wolf has been its tendency to kill more than required for the provision of food. Though argument still occurs on the subject, ‘surplus killing’ by wolves (the predation of animals that are left uneaten at the time of the kill) beyond immediate need is well documented. The critical point, however, is the word ‘immediate’. Wolves, like various other species, will sometimes kill more than they can eat at one feed, returning to a kill on several other occasions, or making a cache of the excess.⁹ Note also that the leading example of a species that uses ‘surplus killing’, to considerable benefit, is humankind.

What of the latter aspect: that of deceit? To understand this, we need to consider a little further the supposed ruthless nature of the wolf. It's hard to find anything different said about the animal at first; indeed, in the oldest surviving great story we still have, The Epic of Gilgamesh, lies what must be the first mention of a wolf in all literature, and, as we might expect, it is not favourable. Tablet VI of the epic refers to Gilgamesh rejecting the Goddess Ishtar's advances, reminding her that she once turned a shepherd into a wolf, thus threatening the very flocks he should have been protected.¹⁰ From the outside, the threat of the wolf is so apparent it serves without the need for elucidation.

Moving to the Classical period, while both Greek and Roman myth saw the wolf as a predominantly evil creature – consider ‘homo homini lupus est’ (‘man is a wolf to man’) – the Romans did also see better qualities in the wolf: the legend of the very founding of their city state tells the story of Romulus and Remus, suckled by a she-wolf.¹¹

If we turn to Norse mythology, we find Fenrir, the monstrous wolf destined to devour Odin himself during Ragnarök, and tho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: from preternatural pastoral to paranormal romance
• Part I: Cultural images of the wolf, the werewolf and the wolf-child
• Part II: Innocence and experience: brute creation, wild beast or child of nature
• Part III: Reinventing the wolf: intertextual and metafictional manifestations
• Part IV: Animal selves: becoming wolf
• Bibliography
• Index