The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

UPRIGHT CITIZENS ON ALL FOURS
generally larger and stronger than the ordinary wolf; he retains the intelligence
and cunning of his human form, more or less clouded or modified
by the bestial ferocity which takes possession of him at the moment of
transformation, and in which he ‘outwolves’ the very wolves themselves. …
The horror of this creature has always been more or less due to the feeling
that the wolf is implicit in the man. The man, even in his human shape,
is not felt to be like other men. He is rather a demoniac wolf in disguise,
a flimsy disguise which he may throw off at any moment. 63
By adding the imagery of a demon to their descriptions of the werewolf,
both Fiske and Smith amplified the monster’s ferocity, and exceeded the
human–wolf dualism. O’Donnell’s 1912 story about a brother and sister
being pursued through a forest in their carriage further emphasized
this trend.
There burst into view a gigantic figure — nude and luminous, a figure that
glowed like a glow-worm and bent slightly forward as it ran. It covered
the ground with long, easy, swinging strides, without any apparent effort.
In general form its body was like that of a man, saving that the limbs
were longer and covered with short hair, and the feet and hands, besides
being larger as a whole, had longer toes and fingers. Its head was partly
human, partly lupine — the skull, ears, teeth, and eyes were those of a wolf,
whilst the remaining features were those of a man. Its complexion was
devoid of colour, startlingly white; its eyes green and lurid, its expression
hellish. 64
In this description, the werewolf thoroughly surpasses the simple dualism
of man and wolf. Its body, with its ‘longer toes and fingers’ and
its complexion ‘devoid of colour’ cannot be ‘read’ in terms of simple
dualisms such as nature and culture. The category of the supernatural
— the ‘demonic’ element — overwhelms such polarities, because, as
Žižek suggests, it arises from the very inability of dualistic frameworks
to describe reality fully. In this sense, a monster such as the werewolf
supersedes oppositional discourse; it is the ‘fantasmatic appearance
of the “missing link” between nature and culture’, a response to ‘the
Enlightenment’s endeavor to find the bridge that links culture to
nature, to produce a “man/woman of culture” who would simultaneously
conserve his/her unspoiled nature’. 65
63