![]() Most, it seems, are merely humans in lupine clothing.Like the musical it’s based on, Into The Woods incorporates characters and story elements from several classic fairy tales like Jack And The Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella. ![]() Wolves that populate our dreams and our literature, more often than not, stand in for ourselves. When Sergei Pankejeff – a patient of the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud – spoke of his dream of ‘six or seven’ white wolves sitting on a walnut tree and looking through his bedroom window, he was – according to Freud – dealing with a decidedly human issue the trauma of having seen his parents having sex. Werewolves – like many monsters, especially those that can take our form – hold a mirror up to us, showing us our fears and desires, the parts of us that we would rather remain hidden, buried in the subconscious. Such features of myth-making are bound up in misogyny, as well as fear and ignorance surrounding mental illness. It also evokes ‘ lunacy’, temporary mental illness believed, in the Middle Ages (and to an extent, beyond), to have been related to the phases of the moon. One feature of twentieth-century werewolf lore which also relates to anxieties about women – the full moon as a stimulant for transformation – seems to suggest that human metamorphosis into a beast echoes the female hormonal cycle. They are Lycaon’s daughters, enacting mythology thousands of years older than themselves. They also seem to have a certain taste for children, upsetting the notion of innate maternal instinct, replacing it with far more animalistic ones. Beautiful, seductive, and often dressed in white fur when in human form, female werewolves are typically depicted as sirens luring strapping young heroes to their doom. Female werewolf stories, in particular, emerge across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it is no coincidence that these tales were written and published at a time when women’s rights were increasingly the subject of public debate. Of course, malicious werewolves still stalked the pages of novels and literary magazines. As such, some werewolf tales feature benign werewolves, far from the evil pig-, child-, or granny-eating wolves of children’s fairy stories. They also call to mind our longstanding relationship (and co-evolution) with the domestic dog, an inter-species bond that began, some scientists speculate, when friendly wolves approached human settlements. They are not the undead, but fellow living people trapped between human and animal states. Werewolves, however, are closer to us as living readers. Certainly, the two are connected in their supernatural abilities and appetite for human flesh. In popular culture, werewolves have been somewhat overshadowed by their cousin, the sexier (and sparklier) vampire. ![]() ![]() This is a taboo that has spanned millennia. In Silver Bullets, a collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century werewolf stories that I have recently selected for the British Library, this anxiety surrounding cannibalism is still detectable. This etymological lending was not the only feature of werewolf stories that Lycaon contributed to later narratives: in many subsequent tales, becoming a werewolf is associated specifically with the consumption of human flesh. Lycanthropy – the transformation from human to wolf – takes its name from Lycaon. To punish Lycaon for his transgressions, he transformed him into a wolf. To do so, he served Zeus the roasted flesh of his son, Nyctimus. Ovid’s Metamorphoses – his epic poem detailing over 250 myths from classical antiquity – contains the story of Lycaon, a king of Arcadia who sought to test the omniscience of the god Zeus. ![]()
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