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

I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF
In recent fiction the werewolf is represented as an involuntary and even
unconscious departure from the human, who is shocked when he learns
the truth about himself. Whether he be the victim of a divine curse, an
agent of atavistic tendencies, or a being who thus gives vent to his real and
brutish instincts, we feel a sympathy with him. We analyze his motives
— at a safe distance — seek to understand his vagaries and to estimate
his kinship with us. 25
Scarborough’s use of the masculine pronoun was also an indication
of the werewolf’s increasing conceptualization as male. One of the
ways in which the werewolf came to be masculinized was through a
focus upon its attacks on female victims, as in Richard Bagot’s novel
of 1899, in which a lupomanaro (the Italian term for werewolf) meets
his sister-in-law.
Almost mad with terror, and conscious only of a wild desire to free herself
from the terrible creature before her, Helen darted forward in a vain
attempt to pass him … but, with a lightning-like motion, the ‘lupomanaro’
threw himself upon her, and, uttering shriek upon shriek, she sank to the
ground struggling in his clutches. She felt his hot breath upon her face,
and hands tearing at her neck and chest, and then she knew no more, for
consciousness failing her, she fainted away, and, as her head fell back in
his grasp, the ‘lupomanaro’, with a fierce snarl of rage, fixed his teeth
in her shoulder. 26
By juxtaposing the lurid, virile strength of the werewolf against the
helpless, fainting weakness of his female victim, Bagot developed an
intensely gendered interpretation of lycanthropy in which the monstrous
masculine aggressor molests a feminine victim. This narrative
pattern became widespread in the twentieth century, first within the
pages of the pulp magazines that proliferated between the world wars,
in which the vast majority of werewolf stories depicted the lycanthrope
as a manipulative and darkly charismatic male figure, seducing innocent
women into lycanthropy through the mediums of wolf skins,
magical belts, lycanthropous flowers, witches’ ointments and magical
incantations. 27
The gradual amplification of this formula over time is graphically
displayed in the contrasts between two illustrations of a werewolf and
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