From the day you’re old enough to be read books not entirely comprised of pictures, you know about wolves. The big, bad, hungry wolf that’s going to come out from the shadows and eat you if you turn your light off at bedtime. Or so I believed… And it’s not just fairy tale like The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood in which these wolves lurk. They prowl desolate landscapes in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Tolkein’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. They run wild in The Jungle Book, hunt humans in Jack London’s White Fang, and haunt the mountains in Dracula. And whilst in Eastern cultures, the wolf is often seen as an animal to be revered, in the west, it remains an enemy, an ‘other’, a figure of cruelty and deception. But what happens when the wolf is no longer an ‘other’? What happens when it becomes part of the man?

Here we enter the realm of the werewolf. Perhaps a little trivialised by hoards of screaming teenage – dare I say it – Twilight fans, lycanthropy in literature has lost some of its bite (pun intended) in recent years. But Stephanie Meyer’s series is far from unique: you find examples of human-to-wolf transformation in literature such as Petronius’ The Satyricon (61 AD), and Marie de France’s Bisclavret (approx. 1175). Indeed, from about 1890 onwards, the werewolf has been rewritten in every form imaginable. Its characteristics vary hugely throughout this literary history: from superhuman strength, to death by silver bullets and the pillaging of freshly buried corpses in graveyards. Given such diversity, is it possible that the werewolf holds any real literary significance?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is this: among all the various interpretations of lycanthropy, there lie a few, seemingly insignificant characteristics that explain, at least in part, our enduring obsession with the werewolf. These characteristics are all a continuation of the human after transformation: curved fingernails, low-set ears and a stride not unlike a human walk. On occasion, the werewolf may even retain its human eyes (with the implication being its human soul) whilst in wolf form. The maintaining of human characteristics in the wolf is intended to blend the boundaries between the two – the human and the beastly. It is this which makes the werewolf such a fascinating subject. In a Jekyll and Hyde-esque manner, the werewolf represents the divide in human nature between the outer goodness and the inner darkness, and what happens when that dark overtakes the good. In the words of (my literary hero) Angela Carter: “the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them out.”[1]

Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves (at its basest level a rewrite of Little Red Riding Hood) takes the literary significance of the werewolf into a more specific area of interest: sexuality. It is no coincidence that, not only in The Company of Wolves, but in all her tales in The Bloody Chamber, the protagonist is a young, innocent girl on the brink of puberty and adulthood; at her most vulnerable to the temptation of ‘darkness’. On the way to her grandmother’s she meets a dashing young man who challenges her to a race to the house with the prize of a kiss if he wins. She, failing to recognise the tell tale signs (the “trails of spittle”[2] between his teeth and “a faint trace of blood on his chin”[3]), in a way that makes you want to shout at the pages ‘don’t do it, he’s a werewolf!’, accepts. He, of course, reaches the house first, in wolf form, and devours her grandmother before transforming back into the man. When the young girl arrives, she (you’ve guessed it) goes to bed with him (wait, what?!) She takes off her red cloak, symbolising simultaneously the blood of her menses and of her lost virginity, and, at his instruction, throws it onto the fire. Not only is she, in this instant, discarding her youth and innocence, she is also discarding the one thing considered to tie the werewolf to his manly form – her clothing. She leaves behind her humanity, to embrace the beast: her dark side.

The easy interpretation, then, is that the werewolf represents the struggle between the light and the dark, between innocence and sexual discovery, in all of us. What isn’t so easy, however, is to ask: is the wolf the more natural side of human nature? How strong is your ‘beast within’?

Pippa Bailey

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