The Monstrefact: The Werewolf, Part 5 - The She-Wolf

femininity and the wild in all their forms. I want to return to twenty seventeen's A She Wolf, A Cultural History of Female Werewolves, which features multiple chapters by different authors that examine female werewolves in myth, legend, and media, everything from century old legends to modern cartoons. As previously mentioned, the book's editor, Hannah Priest argues that European werewolf narratives revolve around the threat posed by wolves to domesticated animals,

ultimately a threat to male owned agriculture and property. When the werewolf is male, the threat comes from outside the male landowner's domain, the outlaw wolf wanderer, who might seek to tear through the defenses and kill livestock or family members. Meanwhile, female werewolves tend to emerge from within the male landowner's domain, often endangering children and serving as an overall threat to domesticity.

Of note, the first Mexican werewolf movie, Le Loba or The She Wolf, from nineteen sixty five, features both a female and a male werewolf, and they correspond to this form quite perfectly. The female werewolf the daughter of a well to do Mexican landowner and scientists, and the male werewolf pursuit her from afar. This gothic slice of Golden Age Mexican cinema, the werewolf seems to represent the wild and uncontrollable elements of someone within the family unit and

someone from beyond it. For more on La Loba, see our recent episode of Weird House Cinema on the film.

It's interesting that both the first Mexican werewolf movie and the first werewolf motion picture period a now lost nineteen thirteen short titled The Werewolf, feature female licanthropes, but the vast majority of werewolf tales lean heavily toward male, often hyper masculine visions of wolf human hybridity Likewise, while the wolf man is often presented as a lone wolf, the female wolf woman is often connected to a social group

or part of a mated pair. This is interesting in how it connects to previous discussions of what our ancestors saw of themselves in wolves and vice versa. As highly social animals, wild wolves reflect aspects of human family and society, and it's only rational for these elements to influence our

conceptions of human wolf hybridity as well. In fact, as author J. Kate mentions later on in the She Wolf book quote, aside from a brief fashion for presenting female werewolves as lonely night stalkers in Victorian literature, the dominant presentation of female wear wolves from the Middle Ages onwards has been as part of a social unit comprising other were wolves or other humans. I won't attempt to summarize

everything explored in the book. Definitely pick a copy up for yourself if you're interested in this topic as i am.

There's an entire chapter concerning females in the RPG Werewolf the Apocalypse game, for example, but it explores the various ways in which female werewolf treatments explore societal ideas concerning female connectedness to nature and societal norms related to body, hair, menstruation, sexuality, aging, and other topics, and in some cases, certainly, the female werewolf can be yet another example of the monstrous feminine, in which some aspect of female bodies or female experience

is othered from the standpoint of patriarchal anxiety. Overall, however, a good monster tale can reveal and convey much more. The werewolf stands as a nexus between the wild and the civilized, between freedom and taboo, between liberty and control, and takes on so many additional meanings when applied specifically

to women. In Daniel Ogden's excellent twenty twenty one book The Werewolf in the Ancient World, he of course highlights the difficulty in deciding what exactly constitutes a werewolf versus other modes of hybrid monsters in various cultures that had no precise word for werewolf, and this applies to both masculine werewolves and feminine werewolves. Of course, he does mention an accountant that priest singles out as the entry point of the female werewolf into literature, that is World of

Wales's twelfth century CE Topographia Hibernia. Gerald recounts a priest's travels in post Norman invasion Ireland, and specifically his encounter with natives of Ossary, who spoke of how a man and a woman of their people were picked to undergo a seven year transformation into wolf. The locals end up bringing the priest to visit the dying she wolf and give her last rites. In this moment, the male counterpart peels away the wolf's hide from her body, revealing the

form of an old woman within. It's a perplexing story, as priest points out, it's a tale told by an invader. Gerald of Wales was half Norman and half Welsh and certainly not Irish, and the story concerns the traditions and

customs of a conquered people. Furthermore, as Ogden points out, the story is all the weirder when you consider that the people of Ossary have to contend with all of this leacanthropy because they were cursed by a priest and in later tellings of the same story by Saint Patrick himself, all for the crime of being disruptive when he tried to convert them to Christianity. So driving out snakes is one thing, but cursing locals to become werewolves surely quite another.

In she Wolf, historian Merely Metsi explores Estonian werewolves, specifically accounts from the Isle of Sarema, where tales of female werewolves are more common than tales of male werewolves. Apparently, Estonia is rich in werewolf traditions, which survive in the form of various fairy tales, legends, and also some historic

accounts of witch trials. Metsiti explores the topic from a number of different angles, but the overall argument that I found most remarkable was that the predominance of female werewolf tales and Estonian traditions may connect to greater levels of ginger equality in pre Christian Estonia and a definite loss

of those rights as Christian influences permeate Estonian society. Furthermore, we may refer back to older connections between the wolf and fertility magic, traditional observations of lupine motherhood, and the link between maternity and sexuality that was subsequently eradicated under

the influence of Christian culture. In other words, while laws and top down societal norms might have subjugated women, their traditional power in Estonia was not so easily erased, and we see it remain as protest as recognition and so forth in the tales of Women with the Secret Mind of wolves. One Estonian story shared in Mesave's chapter encapsulates several of these ideas. The wife also has wolf pups.

There are different versions, but it essentially tells the story of a woman who goes into the woods to hunt and secure meat for the family, while her husband seems to stay at home at the cabin and seemingly just complain about how chilly it is, citing the fact that their child is too cold. The wife tells them that their child is better off than those who sleep in the straw behind the house, and when the husband goes out to investigate, he finds several wolf pups, which he

promptly kills. The next night, while the man lounges in the sauna, a great wolf bursts in through the door and attacks him. He manages to defend himself. He burns the.