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56 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
with the mind. Indeed, the male werewolf’s psychic suffering frequently
guaranteed his eventual salvation, whereas the demonic female werewolf
was always destroyed. Maturin’s lycanthrope, for example, returns
to lucidity on his deathbed, and obtains forgiveness for his sins. Wagner
the Wehr-Wolf is the unfortunate and unwilling victim of a curse (he
had, in fact, brought his curse upon himself by striking a bargain with
Faust, but has the decency to regret it). He dies, but only after he has
redeemed himself in the eyes of God. Thibault, a werewolf created by
Alexandre Dumas, meets a very similar fate to Wagner; after years of
unhappiness as a result of his bargain with evil, he offers his life so
that the woman he loves may live, and his soul is saved. 39 Stenbock’s
werewolf Gabriel is rescued by a devout priest, and Rudyard Kipling’s
Fleete, although he capitulates entirely to the curse of an Indian
leper and is soon found ‘on his hands and knees under the orange
bushes’, is saved by his loyal friends, who capture the leper and force
him to remove the curse. 40 Overwhelmingly in such fiction, the man
who succumbed to atavistic urges could, with a little discipline, still
attain salvation or transcendence, while his more corporeally impeded
female counterpart was irrevocably lost to primal nature and would
be returned to the earth whence she came.
Male werewolves could also be excused on the grounds of insanity,
as in the case of Maturin’s werewolf, who declared himself to be ‘Mad,
ay! that is it: I am a mad wolf.’ 41 As Sally Shuttleworth notes, early
theorizations of mental illness had emphasized ‘the animal nature
of the insane’, 42 and an association between werewolves and insanity
can be traced to the earliest medical treatises on lycanthropy. Psychologized
representations of lycanthropy in the nineteenth century
developed out of this tradition of associations, and kept pace with a
shift in attitude towards mental illness that had been gathering force
since the Enlightenment. As belief in witchcraft or diabolical possession
subsided, symptoms that had once been associated with such
phenomena were now reinterpreted within a scientific framework as
signs of mental illness, to be treated rather than punished. 43 By the
time the Lunatic Acts of 1845 were passed, insanity was no longer
conflated with criminality. 44