Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786831040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire gothique, romantique et horrifique

Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Werewolves therefore raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic.

This is the first volume concerned with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia.

6

‘Something that is either werewolf or vampire’: Interrogating the Lupine Nature of Bram Stoker’s Dracula

KAJA FRANCK

Whilst Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is considered to be the seminal novel about vampires, it remains haunted by the figure of the wolf. Indeed, Elizabeth Miller claims, ‘other than “Little Red Riding Hood,” no narrative has done more damage to the image of the wolf than Dracula’.¹ Wolves are introduced into the text, as disembodied entities, through the sound of their howls and throughout the text they are denied a fully realised existence appearing as either the demonic wraiths of Transylvania or tamed beasts in London Zoo. The portrayal of wolves in the novel is influenced by travelogues such as Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest (1888).² Stoker’s sources and the presentation of wolves in the novel encapsulate the transformation of the wolf into a creature of the Gothic. At the centre of the narrative is the eponymous Dracula, who can appear in both human and wolf form. Though Dracula usually derives his monstrosity from his vampiric identity, the novel also depicts him as a totemic (were)wolf − symbolic of Gothic ‘otherised’ nature tearing at the borders of Western civilisation. By considering how the text constructs wolves as Gothic entities and Dracula as a lupine entity, his death can be seen as an inevitable reaction to humanity’s ambivalent, and fearful, relationship to nature. The novel in turn uses the death of Dracula to re-assert the power of humanity over the wolf as Gothic creature and embodiment of nature at its most ravenous.

The presentation of the wolves in Dracula and the lycanthropic quality of the Count are part of a wider representation of nature as Gothic. The conceptualisation of nature as a threatening force to humanity, termed ‘ecophobia’, is described by Simon Estok as ‘an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world … it is about power and control; it is what makes looting and plundering of the animal and nonanimal resources possible’.³ Tom J. Hillard relates ‘ecophobia’ to the Gothic by arguing that fear rather than hatred is the defining emotional reaction to nature as a malign force.⁴ Hillard suggests that nature is presented within Gothic texts as the ‘other’; he refers to this particular construction of nature as Gothic nature: a version of nature that appears to the human observer as existing outside rational understanding and scientific knowledge. Andrew Smith and William Hughes expand upon this to suggest that the Gothic presentation of the natural world is a reaction to the Romantic conceptualisation of nature as a uniform and complete entity. Rather than offering humanity spiritual sustenance by affirming the human subject viewing the natural world, the ecoGothic or Gothic nature represents the natural world as a source of ambivalence.⁵ In Dracula, Stoker draws on Gothic tropes found in travel narratives and uses them to construct a narrative in which Gothic nature returns to Britain, from a foreign land, in the form of the wolf.⁶ Britain, and specifically England, is presented as a nation that has exorcised Gothic nature which is instead associated with the foreign Other throughout the novel. The novel uses the Gothic in its portrayal of nature to make it a complex arena that challenges and threatens the notion of the human subject. Stoker’s portrayal of the wolf, especially with regard to the presentation of Count Dracula, both builds upon the presentation of these nonhuman animals within his source material and relates to the wider representation of the wolf. Within the text, Gothic nature is preternaturally or supernaturally excessive, rupturing boundaries of human comprehension such as are set by scientific rationalism and, in the case of Dracula’s lycanthropic metamorphoses, rupturing the boundary between human and animal.

Dracula’s identity as non-British exaggerates his liminal quality and Stoker’s construction of Transylvania performs a similar function to early British Gothic novels which used European, exotic and, by extension, non-civilised Gothic spaces to reaffirm notions of British identity.⁷ Stoker’s source material was influential in how Transylvania is represented in the novel. Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest engages with Gothic tropes in its presentation of Transylvania. She describes ‘succumbing to the indolent charm … of this secluded land’.⁸ Gerard argues that ‘it is questionable whether it be wise to let such things absorb the mind to the extent of destroying all taste for wider interests’.⁹ Her language, specifically her use of the term ‘succumb’, is reminiscent of a Radcliffean heroine surrounded by wild forests which were, by this time, a common setting in Gothic novels.¹⁰ The practical affirmation that it is not sensible to be overcome by visual delights echoes concerns regarding early Gothic texts and their power to inflame the female imagination so that readers were unable to differentiate between fiction and reality.¹¹ Gerard’s work makes Transylvania a Gothic text in itself. The way it is conceptualised in the title of her work, Transylvania as ‘beyond’ the forest, makes the area feel separate even from Europe, existing in a nebulous space between the concrete and the imagination. Similarly, A. F. Crosse’s Round About the Carpathians (1878), another source used by Stoker, argues that the ‘more civilisation closes around one, the more enjoyable is an occasional “try back” into barbarism’.¹² Crosse opposes civilisation with ‘barbarism’ and thus Transylvania to Britain. Drawing on these sources in his descriptions of a Gothic Transylvanian landscape, Stoker makes nature doubly foreign, firstly by dint of being non-British, but secondly, and more significantly, by presenting nature itself as always already foreign and apart from human culture and civilisation. In constructing this oppositional relationship between nature and humanity, humans are forever the tourist in nature. This tension is at the centre of Dracula, embodied in the threat of the lupine Count who is able to transform his victims and brings the wolf back to Britain, rupturing the boundaries between the civilised and the non-civilised.

Transylvania functions as a ‘primitive’ space from which Gothic nature can return, disrupting Britain’s civilised and civilising trajectory. The descriptions of Transylvania in Dracula and Stoker’s sources make Transylvania’s otherness explicit. Within the novel Harker echoes this, describing Transylvania as ‘one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe’ (p. 151). Gerard describes Transylvania as ‘an island’ from which she returns, making her feel ‘somewhat like Robinson Crusoe restored to the world’.¹³ This simile reinforces the idea that Transylvania exists beyond the civilised world, and more as a fictional space such as Crusoe’s island rather than a real country. Gerard’s reference to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) affirms that the presence of wolves symbolises the difference between areas inhabited by Gothic nature and civilised spaces. When Crusoe returns to ‘civilisation’ and apparent safety, he is attacked by a pack of ‘monstrous’ wolves in southern France who kill and eat one of his companions.¹⁴ The incident is a peculiar note that undermines the reader’s sense of the safety of Western mainland Europe, suggesting that the only truly ‘civilised’ place is that other island, Britain. Stoker uses Gerard’s travel narrative and her evocative depiction of Transylvania to present the region as a Gothic past and potential future for Britain. But Stoker’s narrative challenges the safety of Britain by suggesting that Gothic nature will not remain foreign and apart from civilised spaces. In Dracula, nature is a Gothic force that ruptures boundaries, such as those between nations, rather than remaining a passive and attractive backdrop.

This threat to Britain is embodied in the wolf and the lupine Count Dracula. Stoker’s description of wolves and their relationship to Dracula is influenced by historical fear and hatred of this animal. The wolf is described in another of Stoker’s sources, Charles Boner’s Transylvania (1865), as having the ‘habit of tearing in pieces more animals than he can devour. He destroys for the sake of destroying, and not merely to satisfy his hunger.’¹⁵ The wolf’s preternaturally aggressive nature gives it an excessive quality. The notion of the wolf as a Gothic animal is put forth by Edmund Burke (1729−97) who argued that the wolf was defined by its ‘unmanageable fierceness’ which evoked a sensation of terror.¹⁶ Burke’s ideas regarding the relationship between the sublime and terror would heavily influence the Gothic novel. However, the image of the wolf as a malevolent entity precedes both these sources and can be found in medieval presentations of the wolf. An increase in arable farming and the need of the medieval Christian church to consolidate its power led to wolves becoming synonymous with evil and the devil during the 1400s. This mythologising of the wolf correlated with the threat wolves posed to medieval man in preying on livestock, especially sheep, with Christian symbolism that saw Jesus as both Lamb of God and shepherd, and humanity as his flock.¹⁷ By aligning the death of the wolf with religious teachings, its death served not only a practical but a moral and symbolic purpose. The wolf came to represent more than a flesh-and-blood animal, instead transformed into a satanic being. Rather than demystifying such attitudes, natural history and taxonomies expanded upon them, adding scientific authority and thereby authenticating and validating this malevolent image of the wolf. Early taxonomies had a didactic function which echoed early animal fables.¹⁸ Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707−88) described the wolf as a creature who ‘attacks women and children, and sometimes ventures even to fall upon men’.¹⁹ According to Buffon, whilst the dog can be tamed and put to use by man, a wolf-pup will return to the wilderness once grown.²⁰ Carolus Linnaeus (1707−78) asserts that wolves are untameable.²¹ This aggressive image of the wolf is consolidated in Stoker’s narrative but the inclusion of Dracula makes explicit the supernatural possibilities of nature as a Gothic force.

Like Boner’s description of the wolf, Gerard’s account of the relationship between Romanian peasants, their flocks, and wolves draws upon the negative reputation of the animal but adds a Gothic veneer of lycanthropy. She states that the winters bring ‘fresh proof of the boldness and cunning of these terrible animals, whose attacks on flocks and farms are often conducted with a skill which would do honour to a human intellect’.²² Her descriptions make the wolves preternaturally intelligent. In giving wolves human-like intelligence Gerard’s language is anthropomorphic. Yet it is also lycanthropic in that these wolves are rendered hybrid: they kill sheep like a wolf but they think like a human. Gerard goes on to describe the leader of these packs of wolves as being attributed a ‘more than animal nature’ by the Romanian peasants.²³ This ‘more than animal’ quality connects the Romanian werewolf of folklore to the supernaturally rapacious Gothic wolf. Van Helsing’s description of Dracula as ‘brute, and more than brute’ repeats Gerard’s invocation of a ‘more than animal’ wolf.²⁴ Gerard consolidates the relationship between the wolf and the werewolf by concluding that ‘as long as the fleshand-blood wolf continues to haunt the Transylvanian forests, so long will his spectre brother survive in the minds of the people’.²⁵ This line makes explicit the Gothic doubling that occurs in presentations of the wolf. By echoing the term ‘more than’ and in Stoker’s presentation of the relationship between Count Dracula and wolves, the novel enacts an urge to Gothicise nature and transform wolves into a monstrous Other.

The potential of nature to contain a Gothic element outside human comprehension, and one which could make it equal to humanity, exposes it as a greater threat than if it were simply a lower, less civilised ‘Other’. Like Gerard’s intelligent Romanian wolves, Dracula is at once more than and less than human, defying taxonomic classification. This can be seen in...