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Young, for example, his condition ‘was originally caused by overindulgence
in wine’, the implication being that greater control over
such urges might have averted disaster. 55 The American novelist Frank
Norris developed a more extended interpretation of lycanthropy as a
metaphor for the male subject’s battle for psychic discipline in Vandover
and the Brute (which was completed in the 1890s but not published
until 1904). Vandover, a leisured gentleman with artistic aspirations,
experiences difficulty in setting himself the appropriate ‘intensity of
discipline’, and is increasingly unable to constrain his carnal desires.
Nor does his internal struggle remain invisible; his friend describes
the final stages of his degeneration.
He came back into the room on all fours — not on his hands and knees,
you understand, but running along the floor upon the palms of his hands
and his toes — and he pushed the door open with his head, nuzzling at
the crack like any dog … his head was hanging way down, and swinging
from side to side as he came along; it shook all his hair over his eyes. He
kept rattling his teeth together, and every now and then he would say, way
down in his throat so it sounded like growls, ‘Wolf — wolf — wolf.’ 56
Apart from modelling a troubled masculine psyche, Vandover’s
deterioration also implied an interdependent relationship between the
body and the mind. This interdependence is common in the Gothic
mode, and is the source of the conflation of sociological and psychological
categories in scholarship about the Gothic. As the example of
the werewolf can demonstrate, the sociological construction of identity
has usually proceeded from a focus on what is ‘outside’ (bodies),
while the exploration of subjectivity has tended to proceed from a
focus on the ‘inside’ (the psyche). But the Gothic, especially through
imagery that visualizes the connectivity of the mind and the body, is
also a site where sociological and psychological processes intersect.
This is explicable historically, since Gothic literature emerged at the
moment when the romantics arose to challenge the philosophers of
the Enlightenment, and when the focus shifted from community and
identity to the individual and inward experience. Gothic literature
bears the marks of both traditions, and the Gothic monster carries
the bodily and psychic scars of their antagonism.
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