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

FIG. 10 Margaret
Brundage’s illustration
of Bassett Morgan’s ‘The
Wolf-Woman’, for the
cover of Weird Tales,
September 1927.
WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES
‘nevertheless ripened in the fi re of desire, like grain in the sun, for
the hour that was to come’. 2 Eventually, ‘of her own will she surrendered
her spirit, soul and body, to the dæmon, to be guided thereafter
by him’. 3 In other twentieth-century stories, women with no special
propensity for evil are still threatened by seduction into lycanthropy
by an evil infl uence, and need to be rescued by such werewolf-slaying
heroes as Seabury Quinn’s psychic detective Jules de Grandin. 4 In all
these cases of female lycanthropy, it is ‘the soul-destroying, fearful
joy of Sensuality’ inherent in women, who are ‘more approachable to
[Satan’s] wiles than men’, 5 which leads them into trouble. Such ideas
about the feminine affi nity for the dubious sensuality of forests and
wolves were perhaps most clearly articulated in the repeated pictorial
exhibition in the pages of the pulp magazines of scantily clad women
happily consorting with wolves (Figures 10–13).
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