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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786831026 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2017 |
| Series: | Gothic Literary Studies |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Like Father Like Son: Wolf-Men, Paternity and the Male Gothic
HANNAH PRIEST
Introduction
In one of the earliest surviving pieces of literature, the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, there is story about a man who is transformed into a wolf. The goddess Ishtar attempts to seduce King Gilgamesh, and he rejects her by recounting a list of her former lovers and the terrible things she did to them. Among the list is a shepherd who was devoted to Ishtar; in return for this devotion, the goddess transformed the man into a wolf and had his own dogs tear him to pieces. Thus, the werewolf – the man who assumes the form of a wolf – enters literature.
As Leslie Sconduto notes, 'the shepherd in Gilgamesh is not merely the first literary werewolf, he is also the first to become a werewolf as the victim of a wicked woman'. And the shepherd is far from the last lycanthrope to be cursed to his fate by a perfidious female. In the late Middle Ages, the 'wicked woman' motif surfaced again as the dominant mode of transformation in werewolf fiction. Marie de France's twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Lai de Bisclavret, for example, tells the story of a man who regularly switches between human and wolf form, but is cursed to remain trapped in lupine form by his adulterous wife. The Old French Guillaume de Palerne, and its later Middle English adaptation William of Palerne, has a Spanish prince transformed into a werewolf by his ambitious stepmother, who wishes her own son to become heir to the throne. Other medieval narratives, including Lai de Melion, Arthur and Gorlagon and Thomas Malory's story of Sir Marrok in Le Morte d'Arthur, follow a similar pattern of presentation: the werewolf is a good man transformed into a beast by a bad woman, usually through the use of spells, charms and arcane magical knowledge.
In the nineteenth century, this use of the 'wicked woman' motif was given a further layer of complexity with the first appearance of female werewolves in written fiction. Writers such as Frederick Marryat, Gilbert Campbell and Clemence Housman recalled the victimisation of earlier male protagonists, but displaced the corporeality and animalistic savagery onto the body of the female. That is not to say that Victorian writers of werewolf fiction did not present male werewolves, or men who were the victims of other men (or themselves). George W. Reynolds's serialised novel Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf, for instance, features a man who transforms into a werewolf as the result of a (literally) Faustian pact with the devil. Bram Stoker's 'Dracula's Guest' depicts werewolves as a problem of and between men, which is based in nationalistic and ethnic, rather than gendered, tensions. Nevertheless, the popularity of female werewolf fiction during this period and the persistence of feminine magic as a catalyst for lycanthropic transformation allows us to see strong points of continuity between Victorian fiction and its medieval forbears, and encourages a reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh 's story of Ishtar and the shepherd as the 'tantalizing origin of a motif', in Sconduto's words, that would dominate Anglophone werewolf fiction until the advent of cinema in the twentieth century.
As this brief introduction to the history of werewolf fiction shows, although literary werewolves have, overwhelmingly, been more usually male than female, stories of lycanthropy have long contained a significant and recurrent image of the feminine, through which the true horror of the werewolf transformation is constructed. This chapter takes this history of werewolf fiction as a starting point and background to an examination of male werewolves in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Specifically, this chapter will explore the ways in which cinematic werewolves challenge and dismiss the 'wicked woman' trope, and will argue that significant changes to the mechanisms of transformation have shifted focus from the perfidious feminine to the grotesque, disfigured and impotent masculine.
Contagious bites
In the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London (dir. John Landis), two American students, David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) visit Yorkshire as part of a walking tour. Despite having been warned by a local man to 'stick to the roads', the two travellers stray onto the moors and are attacked by a wild creature. Jack is killed, but the intervention of local men, who shoot and kill the monster, ensures David's survival. On its death, the creature – which appeared to be a wolf as it attacked – transforms into a naked man. David falls into a coma, in which he remains for over three weeks.
As the narrative progresses, David discovers that the creature that attacked him was a werewolf; moreover, as he was bitten during the attack, he is now fated to become a werewolf himself at the next full moon. And indeed, this is exactly what happens: David's lycanthropic destiny has been sealed by the bite he received, and he proceeds to transform into a wolf and kill several people, before dying at the hands of a group of armed policemen. There are few female characters in An American Werewolf in London, and none of them are responsible for David's transformation, suffering or eventual death. The most significant female character, Alex Price (Jenny Agutter), is a nurse, who administers care to David following the initial attack and subsequently enters into a romantic and sexual relationship with the man. Alex is given the final words of the film, as she says 'I love you, David' to the lupine monster shortly before he is killed. Thus, in this film, the feminine is presented as a means through which the monstrous masculine might be redeemed, rather than as a catalyst for monstrosity.
An American Werewolf in London makes numerous implicit and explicit references to the 1941 film The Wolf Man (dir. George Waggner). Through an examination of the relationship between these two films, the paradigm shift that has occurred between pre-twentieth-century werewolf fiction and werewolf cinema can be better understood. In some respects, An American Werewolf in London retells the story of The Wolf Man, but with alterations to details of circumstance and tone. In many important respects, the films are surprisingly similar.
The Wolf Man tells the story of Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr), youngest son of Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains), who has returned home to Wales after living in America for eighteen years. Despite warnings to stay away from the gypsy camp, Larry visits a fortune-teller and, while there, is attacked by a ferocious animal. The animal is killed, and transforms back into the form of a man; Larry is bitten by the creature before it dies, and is tended by a woman with whom he is romantically involved. However, as he soon discovers, he is now destined to become a werewolf at the next full moon. This American werewolf in Llanwelly refuses to believe his fate, but does indeed change form when the moon is full. He is hunted by a group of men, and is eventually killed before he can cause further bloodshed. The central female character is given the final line of the film: Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), the woman with whom Larry has begun a relationship, looks at the man's body and says 'Larry' in a tone of disbelief, reinscribing the man's human name onto the body of the monster in the forest.
The Wolf Man, therefore, reveals two significant deviations from the dominant pattern of presentation in the literary tradition, which would be further developed and underlined forty years later in An American Werewolf in London. Firstly, the mechanism of lycanthropic transformation is a contagious bite; secondly, the role of women has shifted from malevolent predator to redemptive lover. I argue that these two changes are related.
Waggner's 1941 film is not the first text to introduce the concept of the contagious werewolf bite. Although uncommon in pre-twentieth-century werewolf fiction, dental infection begins to appear in werewolf fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. In Rudyard Kipling's 'The Mark of the Beast', for instance, an Englishman named Fleete becomes infected with lycanthropy after an encounter with a leper who 'caught Fleete round the body and dropped his head on Fleete's breast before [the other Englishmen] could wrench him away'. As in later cinematic treatments of this type of werewolf narrative, the problem is resolved at the end of the tale by a group of men who intervene to prevent further escalation of the infection.
Kipling's short story was first published in 1890, a time at which medical understandings of blood, blood-borne pathogens and contagion developed significantly. It is also possible to group 'The Mark of the Beast' with other fin-de-siècle Gothic literary texts that, in Andrew Smith's analysis, represent gender 'often in ways which echo (in transformed ways) how it is represented in certain scientific contexts'. In his study of the complex relationship between scientific understandings of disease and late Victorian Gothic fiction, Smith argues that this period also saw a 'reassessment of traditional models of masculinity', including 'the erosion of paternal authority within the middle-class home', which he associates with the changing way in which fiction engages with 'certain scientific contexts'. Given the imperial setting and the narrative focus on disease in Kipling's story – the story takes place in India and the 'Silver Man' who infects Fleete is 'a leper of some years' standing' – and the narrator's attempt to pass off lycanthropy as 'hydrophobia' after Fleete's transformation, the shift of focus from interventionist necromancy to contagious bite can be read as reflective of scientific discourses of medicine, infection and degeneration, as well as of contemporaneous constructions of 'new masculine identities' that are 'associated with Empire'. This connection has previously been made in relationship to the presentation of contagion in late Victorian vampire fiction, particularly Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, though it remains curiously understudied in relation to werewolf fiction.
For the purposes of this chapter, Kipling's text represents an important interruption in the gendering of the werewolf narrative. In its engagement with imperial anxieties and (pseudo-)scientific contagion discourse, 'The Mark of the Beast' moves the werewolf out of the domestic nexus – in which the man is imperilled by the women to whom he is related – and into a world of men. The victim remains male, as he has most usually been in the history of werewolf fiction, but now the responsibility for infection and cure lies with degenerate and normative males respectively.
Kipling's text represents the gendered nature of the contagious bite in perhaps its purest form. Cinematic representations of the (male) werewolf in the decades that followed approached the question of contagion and masculinity in different ways. To return to Waggner's The Wolf Man, the 1941 film is significant in the way it integrates the masculinised discourse of the contagious bite – Larry Talbot is infected by a 'degenerate' male gypsy and killed by a 'normative' British man – with older traditions of magic, femininity and superstition. Though Larry is infected by Bela (Bela Lugosi), it is Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya) who 'oversees' his transition. This elderly gypsy woman explains lycanthropy to Larry; she offers him a pentagram charm to help him; she incants rhymes over both Bela and Larry that name them her 'son'. Thus, despite the ostensibly masculine narrative focus, the film recalls older traditions as it places the werewolf in a pseudo-filial relationship to a necromantic woman with a name that hints at malevolence. Just as Larry himself is an uneasy mixture of heir to an ancient castle and modern American man, lycanthropic transformation in this film is a collision of medieval gynophobia and scientifically infused fin-de-siècle Gothic.
In retelling the story of the hapless wolf-man, An American Werewolf in London removes some of the conflicting gender anxieties that surface in the earlier film. In the 1981 film, the contagious bite is central and issues of magic are relegated to the realm of superstition. In a clear nod to Waggner's film, David and Jack encounter the use of a pentagram as a charm against werewolves, but it is painted on the wall of a pub – an almost exclusively masculine environment – and, while the unnamed barmaid (Lila Kaye) makes some ineffective attempts to offer assistance to the young men, she is hardly a counterpart to Maleva. Significantly, in attempting to explain his infection to his new girlfriend, David uses The Wolf Man as a way of interpreting lycanthropy. He tells Alex he is a werewolf, and when she refuses to accept this, he gives a brief summary of The Wolf Man by way of illustration. The synopsis David gives is telling: 'Bela Lugosi bites Lon Chaney Jr, and he turns into a werewolf [...] Claude Rains is Lon Chaney's father, and he ends up killing him.' An American Werewolf in London, therefore, symbolically and literally erases the role of women in the wolf-man narrative, privileging instead issues of contagion and paternity. In this respect, we can read An American Werewolf in London as more straightforwardly situating the werewolf within the traditions of the male Gothic.
Painful transformations
David's reconfiguring of The Wolf Man as a story of male transformation and murder, and his erasure of the film's female characters, subtly acknowledges a more general shift in the wolf-man narrative: female agency is marginalised, and the male body is moved to the centre. Where earlier werewolf fiction obscures or evades the corporeality of transformation, Gothic texts reveal more concern with the bodily nature of the change. Drawing on Judith Halberstam's conceptualisation of 'Gothic monstrosity', Chantal Bourgault du Coudray notes an emphasis on 'embodied horror' and the grotesque in Gothic werewolf narratives: 'Few representations of such a grotesque body can rival the werewolf's moment of metamorphosis from human into wolf, when one form melts and twists into the other.' Du Coudray cites George Reynolds's Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf (1846–7) as one of the first narratives to 'depict the dramatic horror of the transformation'. In this early Victorian tale, the werewolf's transformation begins with the man throwing himself to the ground and writhing in 'horrible convulsions', before his face 'elongates' and his 'body loses its human contours'. Reynolds's text explicitly connects this grotesque physicality to an alteration of masculine identity and status: the man begins as 'young, handsome, and splendidly attired', but his 'rich garments' soon become a 'rough, shaggy, and wiry skin', and he ends his transformation as a 'wretch' who moves 'wildly'.
While Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf is somewhat unusual in its depiction of grotesque physicality – few pre-twentieth-century literary texts offer such detailed descriptions of metamorphosis – the advent of cinema offered new possibilities for the visual presentation of the tortured and contorted lycanthropic body. Released just under a century after Reynolds published Wagner, The Wolf Man revisits the 'embodied horror' of the werewolf in ways strikingly reminiscent of the earlier text.
Larry Talbot's transformation begins with the man checking his face and arms for any sign of change. He then strips off his shirt and, though he is wearing a vest beneath, stands 'undressed' in front of a mirror. He removes his shoes and socks, revealing newly hairy feet and legs. Though Larry's face and body do not, in fact, 'lose their human contours', the discovery of his impending hirsutism causes some convulsions of anguish. Eventually, like Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, he ends the sequence altered in appearance and moving 'wildly' away from his civilised home.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Contributors ix
List of Illustrations xiii
Introduction Robert McKay John Miller 1
Social Anxieties
1 Like Father Like Son: Wolf-Men, Paternity and the Male Gothic Hannah Priest 19
2 Wicked Wolf-Women and Shaggy Suffragettes: Lycanthropic Femmes Fatales in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras Jazmina Cininas 37
3 Postcolonial Vanishings: Wolves, American Indians and Contemporary Werewolves Michelle Nicole Boyer 65
4 The Good, the Bad and the Ubernatural: The Other(ed) Werewolf in Twilight Roman Bartosch Celestine Caruso 87
5 'Becoming woman'/Becoming Wolf: Girl Power and the Monstrous Feminine in-the Ginger Snaps Trilogy Batia Boe Stolar 113
Species Troubles
6 'Something that is either werewolf or vampire': Interrogating the Lupine Nature of Bram Stoker's Dracula Kaja Franck 135
7 Saki, Nietzsche and the Superwolf John Miller 153
8 A Vegetarian Diet for the Were-Wolf Hunger of Capital: Leftist and Pro-animal Thought in Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris Robert McKay 177
9 Everybody Eats Somebody: Angela Carter's Wolfish Ecology Margot Young 203
10 'But by Blood No Wolf Am I': Language and Agency, Instinct and Essence - Transcending Antinomies in Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver Series Bill Hughes 227
11 Transforming the Big Bad Wolf: Redefining the Werewolf through Grimm and Fables Matthew Lerberg 251
Index 273