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106 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
a quite sensitive human being who, one might say, disguises himself
as a dog in order to liberate his Nietzschean potential from emasculating
domesticity.’ 39 In this story, the ‘call to become-wolf’ prevails; in
the other, the ‘beast within’ is successfully tamed and subjugated. By
separating the masculine project of repressing the ‘beast within’ from
the project of ‘becoming-wolf’ in this fashion, London’s novels draw
attention to a tension that has remained deeply embedded in Western
narratives of masculinity.
The ‘call to become-wolf’ was exemplified in the twentieth century
through the Nazi cult of masculinity. As Theweleit’s survey of
the narratives and metaphors generated by and for German soldiers
demonstrates, the icon of the beast of prey (most frequently the wolf)
recurs repeatedly in the literature of the movement. The following
passage, from a Freikorps novel of 1932, is typical. Two women ‘in
heavy sheepskins’ have pretended to be Freikorps collaborators, but the
soldiers have just discovered their brethren, mutilated in the women’s
cellar.
[A] single, piercing howl erupts from the lips of the men who are standing
amid the corpses. An elemental sound from the deepest depths of nature,
its roar expunges all trace of humanity from the human body. It wakes
the beast and sets it on the blood trail. Overcome by a common resolve,
two or three men storm upstairs. The dull thudding of clubs is heard.
Both women lie dead on the floor of the room, their blood exactly the
same colour as the roses blooming in extravagant profusion outside the
window. 40
As Theweleit points out, ‘It’s important to note that the murderous
beast is presented positively. Only women, then, are not permitted
to become “animals”: man may (and should?) do so. The involuntary
nature of their deed is expressly applauded.’ 41 Certainly, the image of
the werewolf was an object of positive identification for these men,
as another Freikorps novel of 1931 entitled We Werewolves makes
perfectly clear.
While narratives such as Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute
(1904) and Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris (1934) had explored
the temptations of lycanthropy from the protagonists’ point of view,