Introduction: Werewolves and Wildness

Sam George, University of Hertfordshire

Bill Hughes, Open Graves, Open Minds Project,
University of Hertfordshire

Gothic texts deal with a variety of themes just as pertinent to

contemporary culture as they were to the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, when Gothic novels first achieved popularity. For Catherine
Spooner, such themes include:

the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present, the radically
provisional or divided nature of the self, the construction of peoples or
individuals as monstrous or ‘other’, the preoccupation with bodies that are
modified, grotesque or diseased.1

The werewolf is easily situated within these themes of monstrosity,

liminality and the divided self, showing it to be a decidedly Gothic crea-
ture. And yet, despite the inseparability of the two creatures in folklore
(vyrkolaka is a Greek term for either vampire or werewolf, for example),
the werewolf never quite seems to have achieved the glamour or the
paradigmatic Gothic status of the vampire. In its nineteenth-century
incarnation, Gothic fiction has some strong werewolf tales and Wagner
the Wehr-Wolf (1846–7) is a fine example of a pastiche of earlier Gothic
novels, but there are no iconic werewolf texts having the impact of
Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1871–2) or Stoker’s Dracula (1897).2 The Count’s
werewolf qualities (hairy palms, massive eyebrows and pointy ears) and
his affinity with wolves largely go uncelebrated despite Stoker’s source
material in Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book of Werewolves (1865). Hollywood
granted the creature more prestige following Werewolf of London (1935),
the more notable The Wolf Man (1941), and Universal Studios’

Gothic Studies 21.1 (2019): 1–9

Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2019.0003
© Sam George and Bill Hughes
www.euppublishing.com/gothic

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 Gothic Studies 21 (2019)

inauguration of the other classic monsters of cinematic Gothic, Dracula

(1931) and Frankenstein (1931).
However, even with the rise of Gothic studies as a disciplinary field,
there has been no critical or work or reference book on werewolves
that has had the same impact as Christopher Frayling’s Vampyres: Lord
Byron to Count Dracula (1978), Ken Gelder’s Reading the Vampire (1994)
or Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995).3 The most compre-
hensive monograph on werewolves is Chantal Bourgault du Coudray’s
The Curse of the Werewolf (2006); this has not had the impact of
Auerbach or Gelder (though through no fault of its own).4 There are a few
monographs on the literary werewolf of particular periods, a collection
of essays on the female werewolf and, of course, many popular accounts of
the werewolf (particularly those in film and TV).5 This special issue
of Gothic Studies and its companion edited collection of essays, In the
Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves, and Wild Children – Narratives
of Sociality and Animality are intended in part to address that lack.6
Both these publications emerged from the groundbreaking conference
organised by the Open Graves, Open Minds Project at the University
of Hertfordshire, 3–5 September 2015: ‘The Company of Wolves’:
Sociality, Animality, and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural
Narratives – Werewolves, Shapeshifters, and Feral Humans.7 Delegates
observed wolves at the UK Wolf Conservation Trust sanctuary in Reading
and made a pilgrimage to the eighteenth-century grave of Peter the Wild
Boy at St Mary’s Church, Northchurch, in Hertfordshire. The conference
and its outputs embraced not only the werewolf but the actual wolf, with
all its ambiguous characteristics of pack sociality and alleged savagery,
and also narratives of wild children (who are often claimed to have been
raised by wolves and thus partake of the same liminal quality as the
werewolf, hovering between humanity and animality, society and nature).
It inspired much debate about the place of the werewolf within academia
and received many accolades and acknowledgements for providing a first
for the UK academy.8
Gothic studies can be accused (with some validity) to have become
too all-encompassing; we should therefore justify our venturing into
narratives of the wild child alongside the werewolf in a journal devoted to
the Gothic.9 There is the close relationship between the werewolf and feral
children; the imputed animality they share was explored at the Company
of Wolves conference. In addition, narratives of the wild child do often
evoke horror as though they too are monsters (as both Nevárez and
Brodski show below). There is the intertextuality between the narratives
of wolves and werewolves. And many of the most significant original
narratives of wild children, closely bound up with speculations on

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 Introduction

the origins of language and society, stem from the eighteenth century,
when Gothic itself as a genre was born; wildness and the boundaries of
language are truly Gothic themes.
One of the ways Gothic as a genre has mutated in recent years has
been through its encounter with romantic fiction to create a new form,
paranormal romance, which features the sympathetic monster – vam-
pires, notably, but also subsequently other creatures, including were-
wolves. The twenty-first-century werewolf is thus more humanised,
and this assimilation of otherness, correlated with shifts in social
attitudes towards minority groups, colours contemporary werewolf
narratives. Alongside this has been a certain feminisation of the
werewolf, with women in urban fantasy and paranormal romance often
appearing as the werewolf protagonists.10 The particular essence of the
werewolf as animality irrupting into humanity makes them especially
suited to explore concerns about nature and wildness, aligning them
with the recent development of eco-Gothic as a distinct perspective
within Gothic studies.11 Our contributors each respond to these
new emphases on wildness and the werewolf in various and thought-
provoking ways.
In our first essay, Sue Chaplin discusses the monstrous lover in
paranormal romance and points to an important trope – the absence of
the father. This is especially prominent in werewolf fictions, where
the pack leader is associated with the father. Chaplin shows that, as in the
original folklore and in foundational Gothic texts such as Dracula, the
vampire of paranormal romance is never far from the werewolf, and some
of the ideas about pack society and biological determinism may apply
to both. In these narratives, the woman is often vulnerable and also
prone to self-sacrifice in order to redeem the monstrous male. Chaplin
calls upon René Girard’s theory, which ties sacrifice to marriage, to
elucidate her argument. She qualifies this, however, through the feminist
philosophy of Irigaray and through William Beers and Juliet MacCannell
and their work respectively on male bonding and the replacement of the
father’s authority by that of the brothers.
The masochistic violence in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) has
stirred up much controversy. Bella Swan acts the role of sacrificial victim.
It is commonplace to critique this as patriarchal. What Chaplin argues is
that Meyer and many other writers in this genre treat patriarchy as a
nostalgic reversion. In Twilight, the power of the father is reduced, in
Bella’s own family, but also in the werewolf pack she becomes involved
with. The werewolves are opposed to the vampire Cullen family in ways
that – as others have noted – take on racial tones. Yet Chaplin points out
how closely vampire and werewolf are aligned, too, as in the folkloric

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 Gothic Studies 21 (2019)

tradition they come from and how they become reconciled in fraternal
unity through Bella’s sacrifice.
Many paranormal romances are more radical in treating masculine
identity. Chaplin looks at Lara Adrian’s Midnight Breed (2007–18) and
J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood (2005–18) series. The vampires
here are hypermasculine heroes and, again, there is a close affinity
with the werewolf – particularly in the biologically determined nature
of their aggressive maleness and as pack animals. Yet Chaplin argues
that these novels work against the ideology of innate male violence that
rests on parallels with the wolf. They affirm the fantasy that yearns for
the protective male, yet ideologies of male sexual power are very often
challenged.
Tania Evans also addresses masculinity, this time in paranormal
romance for young adult readers. The violence and emotional repression
associated with dominant manifestations of masculinity is problematised
through the werewolf figure. Non-realist genre conventions can reinforce
or subvert these norms: Evans examines Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal
Instruments (2007–14) and Meyer’s Twilight (2005–8) series. She
approaches masculinity in these texts through Judith Butler’s theory of
gender as performance rather than innate essence.
For Clare’s werewolf Jordan, the pack can serve as a means of alleviat-
ing the violence that is generated by emotional repression. Though
lycanthropy is explained as an infection, the healing effects of social
interaction through the pack shift the discourse away from the biological
determinism which characterises many werewolf fictions towards the idea
that masculinity is performative and a social phenomenon. Likewise, with
Jacob in the Twilight series, the transformation into wolf is associated
with the release of repressed violent emotions.
Evans goes on to dissect the specific nature of masculine violence
as domestic abuse, as represented in the relationship between Clare’s
Jordan and his girlfriend, Maia. The conventions of paranormal romance,
where there are love affairs between the now-assimilated monster and a
human (usually) female, tend to legitimise the violence. Evans argues that
the particularly sympathetic treatment of Jordan in the series further
tends to erase the violence. But, in turn, this violence is de-naturalised
and Jordan shown as responsible for his violence. A similar dialectic is
observed in the Twilight books, where domestic violence is seen as a
model of masculinity and yet is challenged and rendered open to critique.
Likewise, the power relationships are laid bare as conventional and not
innate, revealing implications for human society.
Simon Marsden takes up another way in which the sympathetic
werewolf can represent and question the violence of contemporary

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 Introduction

society. Benjamin Percy’s apocalyptic Red Moon (2013) shows the monster
post-9/11 as terrorist – or, at least, the imaginary potential terrorist threat
attributed to outsider groups. Werewolves, embodying otherness in
human shape, can stand in for the Islamist terrorist, who are marked
by signifiers of cultural difference and yet can infiltrate society invisibly.
Marsden shows how Percy’s novel questions the attribution of monstrosity
to the terrorist. The actual processes of stereotyping are exposed in this
novel. Marsden employs Hannah Arendt’s moral philosophy in the
Augustinian tradition, showing how the violence of both the terrorists
and their opponents is enabled by an ideology of stereotyping.
Marsden shows how the development of extreme ‘lycan’ terrorism in the
novel evokes the growth of Islamist terrorism and the interaction of that
with such state responses as violence, surveillance, and criminalisation in
post-9/11 USA. The discourses of both lycan terrorism and anti-werewolf
populism are exposed as essentialist and as avoiding moral responsibility.
Likewise, the violence of state, terrorist, and vigilante is challenged.
In this novel there is also a strand of paranormal romance, as love
affair between lycan and human. This does not identify the novel as
predominantly of that genre. But as in paranormal romance elsewhere,
the humanising of the monster in this genre/mode allows issues of
subjectivity and agency to be explored (as the articles by Chaplin and
Evans also illustrate). Marsden argues that Augustinian ideas of evil
and of love can illuminate the novel in this personal aspect, as can Arendt,
whose view that we are ‘love-oriented’ aligns her in that tradition. The
novel ends with Clair, the lycan lover, refusing a cure and celebrating her
otherness, and with a message of hope and acceptance of the monstrous
other without annihilating it.
Gothic, from its origins, has always been involved with medievalism.
Curtis Runstedler turns to the werewolf of medieval romance, where
a rational soul is trapped in an animal’s body. This leads to a more sym-
pathetic creature than some werewolves elsewhere, whether in folklore or
in the later tradition of Gothic horror. In addition, Runstedler argues that
this creature accords well with contemporary ethological studies of wolf
behaviour. This sets up a contrast with the sharp dichotomy between
wilderness and society that characterises medieval thought elsewhere.
Runstedler reads the Middle English poem William of Palerne (c. 1350,
translated from the French romance Guillaume de Palerne (c. 1200)) in the
light of these considerations.
Runstedler looks at the classical and Christian traditions to account for
the image of the wolf and werewolf in medieval literature. Ovid, Pliny, the
Bible, and St Augustine all contributed to the idea of the wolf (and hence
werewolf) as malign creatures. But the romances of Marie de France’s

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twelfth-century Bisclavret and others depict werewolves who retain

their humanity. Alphouns, in William of Palerne and its source text, is
another benign werewolf along these lines. Runstedler uses contemporary
ecological research on the wolf to illuminate the relationship between the
social and the natural. Through a sympathetic werewolf whose wolfish
traits actually correspond with those of the real wolf as observed in the
wild by ethologists, the medieval romance effects a reconciliation between
human and animal, casting light in the metaphorical role of the werewolf
in medieval literature.
Sam George shows that the Gothic still haunts the twenty-first century
through urban myth and that the monstrous werewolf survives alongside
its more sympathetic pack members. She looks at the phenomenon of
‘Old Stinker’, the werewolf who has been spotted in Hull very recently.
In seeking to explain this current manifestation, George rejects the
familiar readings of werewolf narratives through psychoanalysis or as
representations of ‘the beast within’. Instead, she turns to Mark Fisher’s
idea of ‘the eerie’. The eerie often characterises landscapes that have a
sense of emptiness; the emptiness here is the absence of the wolf, long
extinct in Britain. George gives an account of that extinction (which
preceded the elimination of wolves in Europe by centuries) and how it
supposedly explains the lack of werewolf folklore in Britain.
The eerie is a response to cultural crises. There has been a growth in
recent years in ‘the English eerie’, a counter-cultural movement that
involves rendering the landscape as spectral. It works through film, folk
song, and other media and owes much to films like The Wicker Man
(1973), the ghost stories of M. R. James (1862–1936), and the genre of
folk horror. All this coincides with late capitalism and environmental
damage and the revival of ‘Old Stinker’ must be situated in this context.
New sightings of ‘Old Stinker’ began in 2015, reviving a story that goes
back to the eighteenth century. George sees this revival as expressing
collective guilt about the extinction of the wolf and as a symbol that
mediates the desires around rewilding and the rehabilitation of the wolf.
The twenty-first-century crises that Marsden studies in representations
of lycanthropic plague and George observes in urban myth may also draw
on another classic monster from the repertoire of Gothic horror – the
zombie. Lisa Nevárez discusses the children in fictional representations of
zombie apocalypse, looking at the comic book series Walking Dead by
Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore (2003–present) and AMC’s TV series of
the same name, based on the comics (2010–present), and at Max Brooks’s
novel World War Z (2006). She introduces the idea of feral children,
who have resisted or avoided being socialised and behave as though
motivated purely by survival instincts. Often associated with, or even

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 Introduction

raised by, animals, these stories reoccur through the ages, though many
are necessarily unverified. In many of those cases where information is
available, the children have been treated horrifically. Similar children
appear in zombie apocalypse fiction, and these narratives can inform an
analysis of social collapse and the feral children who are its victims.
Nevárez invites us to look at other figures from the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries who are associated with the feral child – the
‘noble savage’, outside of civilisation, and the children of Romantic poetry
such as Wordsworth’s. Feral children, though, are animalistic rather
than simply innocent. There are feral children in horror fiction other
than zombie apocalypse stories. Some of these, rather than straddling
the boundary between animal and human, are purely monstrous and
supernatural. In the zombie texts, few children survive, but some do, and
these are often feral.
Nevárez poses important questions drawn from the contemporary
proliferation of zombie apocalypse fictions about what separates the wild
from the social, the animal from the human. She also examines how feral
children struggle to adapt, or how they thrive outside the community
walls and can be resocialised. The essay gives us illuminating parallels
between narratives of wild children (from Amala and Kamala, and
Peter the Wild Boy, to the savage children in William Golding’s 1954
novel Lord of the Flies) and those of child survivors in the zombie
apocalypse. Repulsion gives way to empathy but the horror of the
situation remains, prompting insights into real-life cases of abandoned or
feral children.
Michael Brodski, like Nevárez, acknowledges the portrayal of wild
children as entirely monstrous figures in the history of cinematic horror.
But he then turns his focus on to more sympathetic feral children in film,
concentrating on François Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage (1970). This film
(along with a few others) is based on an actual historical case of a child
emerging from the wild and then being raised in society. Such children as
these do not feature as objects of horror. But Brodski asks what cinematic
functions are at work instead. He turns to the cultural historian James
R. Kincaid, who sees ‘the child’ as a socially constructed concept, and one
that allows a variety of meanings to be projected onto the actual child.
This is prompted by the adult’s nostalgia for their own lost infancy. In this
process, the discourses of childhood and wildness share many features.
There are elements in the film which seem to derive from Truffaut’s
own troubled childhood, and the film in general appears to have
benevolent intentions. But Brodsky suggests that there are tensions in
the original source material of Dr Itard’s journals on educating the
wild boy Victor that permeate through to the film. The wild child

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resists the disciplining process of socialisation but also challenges the

very idea of scientific knowledge. One might detect a Gothic strain in this
argument – the Gothic tradition has often reacted against Enlightenment
epistemology. And Brodski goes back to the formation of scientific
discourse in the Enlightenment, when wolf children narratives seemed
to throw light on the origins of language and society (as indeed Itard’s
journals exemplify). The Romantic reaction against this appears as
another pole which informs the film. Brodski looks at how the cinematic
gaze functions here in presenting the child as scientific object. Linked to
debates on the origins of society are debates about education, notably
whether there are innate qualities of goodness in the ‘natural’ human
or whether human beings are Lockean tabula rasa to be socialised into
virtue. All these dichotomies are played with in the film, particularly
through Truffaut’s alternation of scenes which emphasise Victor’s
educability and scenes which immerse him in nature. There is an epi-
stemic uncertainty overall – this ambiguity further opens up the wild
child as an empty screen for adult projections.
There has not yet been an issue of Gothic Studies devoted to werewolves.
In the twenty-first century, the era of late capitalism, new werewolf myths
have emerged from our cultural memory around humans and wolves.
Thus, as this new werewolf scholarship will show, to cite Kathryn Hughes,
‘in our dog-eat-dog world, it’s time for werewolves’.12

Notes
1. Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 8.
2. An excellent anthology is Alexis Easley and Shannon Scott (eds.), Terrifying
Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction (Richmond, VA:
Valancourt Books, 2013).
3. Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Gollancz,
1978); Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994); Nina Auerbach,
Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
4. Chantal Bourgault du Coudray, The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the Beast
Within (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006).
5. Leslie A. Sconduto’s Metamorphoses of the Werewolf: A Literary Study from Antiquity
through the Renaissance (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008) is, as the title indicates,
confined to works up to the Renaissance period, excluding manifestations in forms
initiated by the later Gothic novel. Adam Douglas’s The Beast Within: A History of the
Werewolf (New York: Avon Books, 1994) is much broader but its Jungian approach is
reductive and unconvincing. In 1986 Charlotte F. Otten compiled A Lycanthropy
Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture (Syracuse University Press: New York, 1986) and
Brian J. Frost has built on this, providing a comprehensive reference work in
The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2003). Kimberley McMahon-Coleman and Roslyn Weaver deal with more contempor-
ary manifestations (including Young Adult paranormal romance) in Werewolves and
Other Shapeshifters in Popular Culture: A Thematic Analysis of Recent Depictions

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 Introduction

(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012) as does Brent A. Stypczynski, The Modern Literary
Werewolf: A Critical Study of the Mutable Motif (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013).
Matthew Beresford, The White Devil: The Werewolf in European Culture (London:
Reaktion, 2013) is useful for the folkloric origins and subsequent development. There
are also the early antiquarian and folkloric studies of Sabine Baring-Gould (The Book of
Werewolves [1865]) and Montagu Summers (The Werewolf in Lore and Legend [1933]).
Hannah Priest’s edited collection on the She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female
Werewolves (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) is a welcome addition to
contemporary werewolf scholarship, together with the essays in Werewolves, Wolves and
the Gothic, edited by Robert McKay and John Miller (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
2017).
6. Sam George and Bill Hughes (eds), In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves, and
Wild Children – Narratives of Sociality and Animality (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2019).
7. Details of the conference are at: ‘Company of Wolves 2015’, Open Graves, Open Minds,
http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/company-of-wolves/ [accessed 25 July 2018].
8. The conference had a huge impact both within and outside the academy and
was widely debated in the local, UK and international press. Many feature articles
focused on the new scholarship and place of the werewolf within academia: ‘Werewolf
conference will see academics shine a light on folkloric shapeshifter’, http://www.
independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/werewolf-conference-will-see-academics-shine-
a-light-on-folkloric-shapeshifters-10477155.html [accessed 25 July 2018]; ‘University
to host international werewolf conference’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-
beds-bucks-herts-33971546 [accessed 25 July 2018]; ‘Werewolf conference: The people
seeking ‘the company of wolves’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-
herts-34144752 [accessed 25 July 2018]. Following the conference, there were reviews
in the Times Higher Education Supplement, ‘Werewolf conference billed as first for
UK academy’, https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/werewolf-conference-
billed-first-uk-academy [accessed 25 July 2018], and from Kathryn Hughes in The
Guardian, ‘In our dog-eat-dog world, it’s time for werewolves’, http://www.theguardian.
com/commentisfree/2015/aug/30/werewolves-scarcity-fear-vampires-sexual-anxiety
[accessed 25 July 2018].
9. As argued by Alexandra Warwick, in ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, Gothic Studies, 9:1 (2007),
5–15.
10. See Priest (ed.), She-Wolf.
11. See Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds), EcoGothic, International Gothic Series
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). McKay and Miller’s recent collection
of essays, Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic adopts this slant for the most part.
12. Hughes, ‘In our dog-eat-dog world’.

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