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

5
Women who run
with the wolves
If variants on the struggle against the ‘beast within’ have dramatized
the experience of male lycanthropy, the pervasive cultural association
of femininity with nature, embodiment and biology has animated most
accounts of female lycanthropy. In contrast to the male werewolf’s resistance
to his affliction, a range of narratives from the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries which featured hedonistic female werewolves
revelling in their lycanthropic powers suggested that lycanthropy is
more ‘natural’ in women than in men. Even when female werewolves
are afflicted by a curse or some other external force, their lycanthropy
has still been represented as ‘their fault’, the consequence of a feminine
tendency towards the pleasures of the flesh.
For example, Sara de Camp-d’Avesnes of Franklin Gregory’s The
White Wolf (1941) is affected by the curse of lycanthropy which falls
upon every seventh eldest child in her family’s lineage, while Aalo,
the werewolf in Aino Kallas’s The Wolf’s Bride (1930), has red hair
and a witch mole; but, despite these predestined susceptibilities to
lycanthropy, the condition is still presented in both cases as a result of
the woman’s covert lusts. 1 Aalo, for instance, although she resists the
call of the Diabolus sylvarum (‘the spirit of the forest and the wolves’),