Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature

S.K. Robisch

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780874177749
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The wolf is one of the most widely distributed canid species, historically ranging throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere. For millennia, it has also been one of the most pervasive images in human mythology, art, and psychology. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature examines the wolf's importance as a figure in literature from the perspectives of both the animal's physical reality and the ways in which writers imagine and portray it. Author S. K. Robisch examines more than two hundred texts written in North America about wolves or including them as central figures. From this foundation, he demonstrates the wolf's role as an archetype in the collective unconscious, its importance in our national culture, and its ecological value. Robisch takes a multidisciplinary approach to his study, employing a broad range of sources: myths and legends from around the world; symbology; classic and popular literature; films; the work of scientists in a number of disciplines; human psychology; and field work conducted by himself and others. By combining the fundamentals of scientific study with close readings of wide-ranging literary texts, Robisch astutely analyzes the correlation between actual, living wolves and their representation on the page and in the human mind. He also considers the relationship between literary art and the natural world, and argues for a new approach to literary study, an ecocriticism that moves beyond anthropocentrism to examine the complicated relationship between humans and nature.

PART I

The Wolf Book

CHAPTER ONE

The Real, the Corporeal, and the Ghost Wolf

Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature operates according to a model that synthesizes writings on wolves and charts their connections to human consciousness and action about these animals. It provides as well some basis for analyzing human consciousness of and action toward the nonhuman world. This model could be applied to other species that have been mythified from their real-world lives, such as the bear, eagle, horse, snake, bee, spider, whale, lion, or rat—but it is specifically oriented to the wolf book and the imaginings, here particularly American ones, that have given real wolves archetypal and/or mythic composition. The model is made of the following components:

The Real Wolf. There is, indeed, such a being as a wild wolf. He is not a social construct. She is not a figment of the human imagination. Neither are they mere progenitors of the dog, nor is their collective life reducible to a selective and solipsistic riffing about whether or not wilderness, wildness, animals, or authors exist. The idolization of idealism over materialism has done them no good, idealism being no more defensible a position than materialism; in situations of ecological reference versus anthropocentric reference, materialism is almost always the more practicable philosophical mode. Although wolves have coexisted with humans throughout epochal history, they were not humanly designed. This simple fact directly confronts the anthropocentric assumptions that have driven, especially, romantic and postmodern literary criticisms.

The real wolf is both an individual and part of a species of similar individuals taxonomically recognizable in relation to their biotic and abiotic environments. This animal cannot be rendered in text but only represented to better or worse effect. When I use the term the wolf, I do not use it reductively, but as a term sufficient to the recognizable boundaries of a species, like the term human. The recognition of singular behaviors within and against categorical ones is also vital to this project. We should not use subjectivity to rebut biology or ecology; on the contrary, we must look at the connections among various kinds of writing about wolves to see how they handle both individually oriented and species-level claims. Real wolves are not texts; they are the corrective entities to the texts attempting to depict them.

The World-Wolf. This is the form that embodies all the various representations of wolves in literature. I am borrowing the name from the myth of Fenris in the Icelandic story of the end of the world and the dawn of a new humanity, as well as from the concept of the anima mundi. The World-Wolf is therefore not the real or earthly wolf, but the “wolf” of a world of our invention, a symbolic figure shaped according to our own desires—for prowess, material, nurture, conquest, or identity, our placement in the cosmos. Here is the idealist component in relation to the materialist component. In text we are codifying imagination, and symbolic language becomes part of the assemblage of our thought. This World-Wolf may be configured as the Nietzschean überwolf, the Emersonian transcendental Over-Wolf, or the Platonic form of Wolf—including their potential misuses (respectively Aryanism, metaphysical mystification, and ontological idealism). Each position becomes useful (like pragmatism itself) when we see its evidence presented in a writer's manifestation of the World-Wolf in his or her work: Jack London's dog books quite obviously show us the überwolf, Jim Harrison's Wolf: A False Memoir is an example of the Emersonian Wolf, and Catharine Feher-Elston's Wolfsong indicates the Platonic Wolf as a rubric for her choices of essay and legend.

The World-Wolf part of the model is itself made of the following components:

1. The Corporeal Wolf. This is the attempt of a writer to represent the biological, morphological, ethological, and ecological facts of wolves insofar as these may be known. Over time it revises itself through a greater accrual of fact (science's foremost self-corrective practice), through rhetorical debate (the humanities’ foremost self-corrective practice), and through changes in the environment (such as the behavior, number, ecological biomass, and other aspects of wolves). The life sciences, especially to the degree that they are able to uncover verifiable fact, are the principal source of the corporeal part of the World-Wolf, followed by nature essays that attempt verisimilitude and mimesis. Think of corporeality as the attempt of an author to “get it right.” Its pinnacle achievement is to reach the threshold of real wolves and their plausible behaviors. Semiotics teaches us that since a book can't be a wolf, the best it can provide is the codification of a thought, translatable by a reader, that may be very like a wolf. In realist fiction, this would be the mimetic wolf written according to, as William Dean Howells put it, “fidelity to experience” and “probability of motive.”

2. The Ghost Wolf. I use the term ghost as an indicator of two historical phenomena. The first is the overwhelming presence in human culture of myth and its totemic, ethereal, unconscious, and symbolic images, including the undeniable presence of imaginary animals in our mythologies; the second is the effort in both Europe and America to eradicate the wolf from the face of the earth, leaving its revenant shade in its former regions. I could call this “the imaginary wolf,” but “ghost” offers a more appropriate frisson, given what's happened to wolves in America and in its literature. A better synonym might be “the shadow wolf,” one that will have especial application in the more Jungian moments of this study.

Next to the real wolf, the ghost wolf is perhaps the most important element to our study of wolf literature. I won't always point boldly at this figure; the reader might consider reading any work in this book with the ghost wolf lens always at the ready. Metaphors using apparitional language abound in writing on wolves—from incidents of mistaken identity (such as when a hunter mistakes a wet wolf for an antelope or, more obviously, a coyote for a wolf), through a mystification of the wolf's abilities (as in Roger Caras's The Custer Wolf or Gary Svee's Spirit Wolf), to symbolic spiritualizations of the wolf (such as the figures in Lewis Owens's Wolfsong, Clarissa Pinkola Estés's Women Who Run with the Wolves, or the premodern works of a Shakespeare or a Webster, on back through the alchemists and into the Icelandic Eddas or Sumerian myths). The ghost wolf is the human imagination making of the wolf what the mind wants or needs for its own comfort, reassurance, or even recreational challenge.

The ghost wolf has its own divided nature, which manifests itself with great moral complexity in literature.

a. The Malevolent Ghost is the half of the ghost wolf that casts the animal as a demon, a scourge. What Theodore Roosevelt called “the beast of waste and desolation” and “the archtype of ravin” had been its most powerful aspect for hundreds of years in Europe. That aspect was carried to the North American continent. It dominated the collective American consciousness, to the point of affecting some purportedly scientific premises for the study and alteration of entire ecological zones, even to the point of eliminating species. It is still present in certain political and emotional traps of thought, such as agribusiness or state-level fish–and-wildlife “management” policies.

b. The Benevolent Ghost has of late won a collective psychic battle with the malevolent ghost in America. This victory, however, is akin to the noble-savage or ecotopian design, which casts the wolf as a savior, not merely oppressed but transcendent. This aspect of the ghost wolf is the mythic wolf god depicted either primarily or exclusively as nurturing, calm, sociable, intelligent, and even wise, and is responsible for its own damage to the human psyche's ability to confront reality. Think of the person who tries to pet a bison, who domesticates a lion in his New York apartment, or who follows a quasi-pagan doctrine of animal appropriation. Consider the opening of Ted Andrews's entry on the Wolf totem in Animal Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small:

Keynote: Guardianship, Ritual, Loyalty, and Spirit.
Cycle of Power: Year Round—Full Moons—Twilight. Wolves are probably the most misunderstood of the wild animals. Tales of terror and their cold-bloodedness abound. Although many stories tell otherwise, there has never been any confirmed attack and killing of a human by a healthy wolf. In spite of the negative press, wolves are almost the exact opposite of how they are portrayed. They are friendly, social, and highly intelligent. Their sense of family is strong and loyal, and they live by carefully defined rituals. (323)

As a commentary on totems, this is very useful. As a commentary on wolves, it is a risky strategy of transposing the malevolent to the benevolent for purposes of fitting the wolf ‘s rituals with our own. Here I will be explicit about the ghost language. Notice Andrews's use of “Spirit,” “Full Moons” (an icon of transformation and an invocation of the mistake that wolves howl particularly at the moon), “misunderstood” (the wolf is not the wolf we think and so is a ghost wolf), and “rituals” (the doctrinal element of the wolf's religiosity). The “press” has presented wolves from various moral perspectives over time; there is no “opposite” for this multivalence. Regarding the “rituals”: Wolves may indeed perform rituals, as we will see in chapter 6, but how carefully defined these are is questionable. And the link between wolves’ rituals and their assumed loyalty or basic nature is as impossible to prove as it is to prove that our own rituals are linked to such fundamental traits. Writers prone to mystify a physical encounter beyond what the animal in the encounter can himself or herself justify, what is often thought of as a “New Age” approach to encounters with the wild, are common, and they are dangerous.¹

One more important component of this model must be included:

3. The Lines demarking the divided nature of the World-Wolf are themselves part of the model. They are the points of collision, cooperation, and question. When a wolf of the mind meets a wolf of the world, what occurs is no less than a psychological as well as intellectual education in reconciliation. These lines of separation are therefore permeable. Any World-Wolf may tend more toward its corporeal or ghost-wolf component; there is no static balance. As the representative in a piece of writing of the totality of the wolf (corporeal and ghostly, mimetic and imaginary, persona and shadow), the World-Wolf could be a mere buoy of corporeality glimmering in an apparitional sea. A story might also emphasize the very line dividing two or more textual forms. Nordic mythology, for instance, depicts the wolf with a knotty ambivalence, a composition at least equally malevolent and benevolent, perhaps calling into question the usefulness of such a Manichean distinction. We may say that such a story simply has balanced the halves of the ghost wolf, but where such supposed balance occurs the line between the elements becomes most permeable. As a result, we are seeing less a duality that needs to be symmetrically “fair” than we are seeing a third thing, a synthesis of many parts that creates its own whole. Solidity in the line, the cause of our inability to cross it, can be indicative of breakage, imbalance, and myopia. At times the malevolent and benevolent ghosts are in a relationship less bifurcated and more in keeping with the trickster myths, the ouroboros, or the yin and yang.

We are participants with this animal and all others in the project of harmonizing one mind with all minds, and one and all minds with that which constitutes no mind (what we might call our abiotic environment). And harmony is quite obviously not always synonymous with balance. Our lack of skill at reconciling with the real is also responsible for the general frivolity of the humanities (for example, architecture, rhetoric and composition, theater, literature, communications, advertising, compartmentalized history, even sociology and psychology) regarding the nonhuman world.

It seems worthwhile to compose a list of some literary phenomena that exhibit our inability to balance the real wolf with the World-Wolf. At various moments throughout this book I will discuss each of these with greater specificity.

There is the Freudian wolf, found from depth psychology through Jung and into Hesse, in which the iconic wolf is insufficiently known in the real world to function properly as anything but a malevolent psychological symbol. Jung came closest to redemption here, with his definition of the shadow and the role a wolf might play as a critical force rather than a merely demonic one, but he still fell short because of his lack of ecological knowledge. Jung's most succinct explanation of the shadow is found in Aion (8–10), and its connection to the wolf through literature is most vividly expressed in the chapter of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious called “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales” (especially 231–37). Here he provides some of the material for my formation of the benevolent and malevolent ghost wolves, rooting them in both the realm of spirit and the phenomenological realm of history through the fairy tale, priming them for archetypal status.

There is the character a number of people who work with wolves like to call Canis lupus irregardless, the figure that offers us problems in evolutionary biology and taxonomy. That is, we have a wolf population that started the taxonomy of wolves, disappeared, and resulted in wolves variously defined by lumpers (biologists favoring a broad and simplified taxonomy) versus splitters (biologists favoring a narrow and complexified taxonomy), as well as variously erased by both lumpers and splitters whenever the taxonomy was revised toward greater accuracy.

There is the devil wolf of Puritan America transformed over three centuries to the sacred wolf of environmentalist America. We find the alpha wolf, beta wolf, and, although this term seems to have waned for wolf biologists, the omega wolf or scapegoat. These designations of pack rank, long subject to exaggeration, have revealed themselves to be a result of a “debate” remarkably like the one between evolutionary biologists and social Darwinists. The abuse of Darwin by Herbert Spencer to justify what persists as an American mythology of self-reliance, divine design, and economic apologetics is at the heart of the assumptions made about wolf ethology, especially in terms of what wolf ethology might teach us about human behavior, and vice versa.²

There are the She-Wolves: the wolf mother, the lupine whore, the woman who runs with the wolves, and all of the attendant metaphors, both sexist and progressive, that impel the gendering of the mythic wolf. Next we see the powerful epiphenomenon of the lycanthrope, the werewolf, the shape-shifter—respectively, projects of the modern psychological imagination, the cultural imagination, and the primordial imagination. I group them as a single epiphenomenon because they are all three projects of bifurcation, of twinning the human and lupine. There are the named wolves or feral hybrids such as Kiche, White Fang, Kazan, Baree. These indicate an invented primitivism, atavism, and the inclination on our part to name an animal that already has a name we do not know, one spoken through pheromone or howl or scent mark. Finally (in this list), we find the real wolves whose biographies are written (as corporeal wolves) in order to raise the human consciousness about their lives—for instance, the Custer Wolf or wolf #9 in Yellowstone.

How much material do we need, really, before we recognize the force of this animal in our art? How much do we have to learn about how to approach the reality of wolves, when we have written so much for so long about something more representative of ourselves than of them? It sometimes amazes me that scholars of literature in America have spent so little time on the raw and living world from which we originate, even as its material for story accrues under our very noses over the centuries. The biota gives writers the content of their craft.

Binary 1: Corporeal Wolf and Ghost Wolf

We apply the World-Wolf when we read a wolf story or even the mention of a wolf in a story not ostensibly about wolves, such as Willa Cather's My Ántonia. A wolf in some form triggers in us the impulse to square what we have been taught to imagine with what is a real and active wolf in the world. There might be a wolf character, usually named and fitted with four basic methods of characterization—action, speech, thought, and appearance. We may see only the mention of a wolf, not explicitly characterized but presented through exposition. Exposition might give us an idea about a wolf or wolves essentialized. The writer may not be talking about a wolf present in the story but about The Wolf as the writer sees the species (that is, the writer's World-Wolf). At the appearance of any or all of these cues, a negotiation begins between the corporeal wolf and the ghost wolf.

For instance, in My Ántonia the wolf story belongs to two immigrant laborers on the Shimerda farm, “Russian Peter” and his brother, Pavel. Pavel is sick throughout, likely with tuberculosis, and one windy night during a gathering in the kitchen, seated by the kitchen stove in order to keep warm during a bad bout, he is frightened by the clamor of coyotes. “He is scared of wolves,” Ántonia tells Jim. “In his country there are very many, and they eat men and women” (46). Jim, our focalizer, thinks of the coyotes (and, by proxy, as we will see, of wolves) as “defeated armies, retreating; or…ghosts who were trying desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on” (46). This passage is prelude to Pavel's story that Ántonia recounts to Jim after the Shimerda kitchen gathering. It is a story that Pavel has told to Mr. Shimerda:

A wedding in Russia is followed by a midnight ride of six sledges full of revelers, including the bride and groom, lighted only by the stars. Pavel drives one, with Peter seated beside him. In the flat declarative diction so recognizable in Russian novels, Ántonia intones, “The wolves were bad that winter, and everyone knew it, yet when they heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed” (48). The pack communicates and assembles using howls, and crests the hill behind the convoy as “a black drove” running “like streaks of shadow.” There are “hundreds of them” (48). The pack attacks the convoy until there are only three sledges left, the hindmost one containing the groom's father. It is overturned by the pack, and the groom considers jumping out to save his father, which gives Pavel the idea that will leave him with lifelong shame.

When only his sledge is left after the wolves attack the horses, Pavel tells the groom that they are moving too slowly and must lighten the load. He then points to the bride. The groom and Pavel struggle; he knocks the groom out of the sledge, then throws the bride out after him, to the wolves. On gothic cue co...