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118 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
a priest to perform the office of the dead over her grave and the graves
of her lycanthropic parents, thereby putting them to rest. 10 Similarly,
in Captain S.P. Meek’s ‘The Curse of the Valedi’ (1935), Valeska Valedi
tells her would-be protector ‘Go, and remember, kill every wolf you
find this night. Every one!’, knowing that she herself will be among
the number killed. 11 Karen’s sacrifice in The Howling perpetuates this
tradition; after being bitten, Karen arranges for a friend to shoot her
with a silver bullet, but not before she has transformed into a werewolf
in front of newsroom television cameras in order to warn others about
the existence of werewolves. Karen’s act of martyrdom reinforces entrenched
cultural taboos against the expression of hedonistic pleasure
and desire by women, and her contrast with the sexually promiscuous
werewolf Marsha links such apprehensions to the sexual liberation of
women in the 1960s and 1970s.
A variation on the representation of the female werewolf as being
at the mercy of undeniable physical urges was explored in Arlton
Eadie’s ‘The Wolf-Girl of Josselin’ (1938), in which a Frenchwoman
afflicted by a hereditary curse of lycanthropy marries an Englishman
and bears his son. Soon, a wolf is observed on her husband’s estate
and the men give chase as it carries off the baby in its mouth. When
they discover the wolf, the narrator (the Englishman’s friend, and the
only person aware of the curse) sees immediately that ‘[m]other love,
divine and all-conquering, had triumphed over the dread, age-old
curse. The great, fierce she-wolf was actually suckling the babe it
had been condemned to destroy!’ 12 Here, notions about the biological
imperatives of maternity replace the focus on female sensuality, with
the legendary maternity of the she-wolf (via the legend of Romulus and
Remus and other stories of children raised by she-wolves) serving to
draw the connection between women and nature. Although this story
drew on entrenched ideals of maternal behaviour, its representation of
the female werewolf in a positive light marked the beginning of a shift
that would become more pronounced during the twentieth century.
In 1947, a story published in Weird Tales was the first account of
lycanthropy to portray a wolf becoming a human at the full moon
rather than the other way around. The werewolf in Manly Banister’s