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UPRIGHT CITIZENS ON ALL FOURS
werewolf. 16 In both of these stories, the werewolf is used as a contrast
to the woman; a werewolf is bad, but a woman is worse.
Although female werewolves were usually intent upon the seduction
and destruction of men, they were also constructed as unnatural mothers.
Marryat’s Christina savages two of her new stepchildren and later
desecrates their graves. Campbell’s Ravina shows an intense interest
in Paul’s offspring and attempts to devour the girl, who is saved at the
last moment by a faithful peasant with a crucifix. Housman made much
of White Fell’s liking for children; after befriending a little boy with
a cut hand, her face ‘lighted up with a most awful glee’ at the sight of
his blood, and some time later, the boy mysteriously disappears. 17 In
other contexts, ordinary pregnancy was connected with lycanthropy.
Baring-Gould devoted a number of pages to a discussion of the cannibalistic
and murderous cravings of pregnant women in the chapter
of his monograph entitled ‘Natural Causes of Lycanthropy’, 18 Wynter
made the same connection between lycanthropy and pregnancy in his
article:
With women, the most unaccountable motives and conditions lead to the
perpetration of murders and mutilations. It is well known that the parturient
state, for instance, often leads to the most savage fits of madness,
in which women will murder their husbands; and history has recorded
several cases in which they have partially eaten them in their frenzy. 19
In its lupine incarnation, the werewolf was depicted as so intensely
Other that it no longer even resembled a human being, embodying
instead the slavery to instinctive drives which was perceived to differentiate
the animal world from human civilization. Despite the fact
that centuries of extermination of wolves by humans had seriously
diminished their numbers in Europe and North America by the nineteenth
century, wolves were still perceived as savage and cunning
devourers of flocks and babies in the popular imagination. The series
of adjectives reserved for the wolf in a passage from C.F. Gordon
Cumming’s article ‘Wolves and Were-Wolves’ (1890), in which the
behaviour and physiognomy of the wolf are compared with those of
the dog, is indicative of the kind of reputation wolves enjoyed:
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