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46 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
limbs, the face, the cry, the attitude, declared the presence of a wild beast
half-hidden, half-revealed under a human mask! 5
As the countries of continental Europe competed for regional influence,
military superiority, economic markets and colonial outposts,
as the United States grew increasingly powerful and independent,
and as power struggles in the colonies multiplied, the werewolf was
also constructed as alien through its depiction as a stranger from
a foreign country. In English literature throughout the nineteenth
century, werewolves were characterized as continental Europeans
— from France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia or Eastern Europe — in
keeping with the werewolf’s historic origins in the myth and folklore
of these regions. Baring-Gould, for example, referred to the ‘dark olive’
complexion of one lycanthrope, 6 and Clemence Housman established
the foreign origins of her werewolf by the way the character speaks:
‘Her words came a little slowly and deliberately, as though she spoke
in a scarce familiar tongue; now and then she hesitated, and stopped
in a phrase, as though for lack of some word.’ 7 In the context of imperial
expansion, such representational strategies also encompassed
notions of racial rather than ethnic difference. In a short story of 1898,
for example, H. Beaugrand constructed a hierarchy of lycanthropic
degeneracy, positioning Native American werewolves (or loups-garous,
in the French language) at the bottom of the scale.
White loups-garous are bad enough at any time … But we had to deal with
Indian renegades, who had accepted the sacraments only in mockery,
and who had never since performed any of the duties commanded by the
Church. They are the worst loups-garous that one can meet, because they
are constantly intent on capturing some misguided Christian, to drink
his blood and to eat his flesh in their horrible fricots. 8
Predictably enough, representations of the werewolf as a threat to
the social body were also frequently characterized by a focus on the
susceptibility of women to the affliction. Especially in the latter part
of the century, the emergence of the New Woman, the ‘androgyne’,
and the women’s suffrage movement incited considerable alarm about
sexuality, gender differences and reproduction. Representations of