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122 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
stripped cyclic imagery of its association with renewal and fertility,
representing it instead as a source of futile sterility.
The parallel between lycanthropy and menstruation has been an
obvious theme for stories about female lycanthropy, especially in the
wake of the feminist movement, which challenged the taboos on talking
and writing about such subjects. In ‘Lila the Werewolf’ (1978), Peter S.
Beagle’s story about a man who discovers his girlfriend is a werewolf,
lycanthropy is overtly compared to menstruation, as a condition which
requires understanding. As Lila explains, she has lived with the problem
for nine years, ‘Since I hit puberty. First day, cramps; the second
day, this. My introduction to womanhood.’ 25 Lila is not characterized
as dangerous or malicious; instead, Beagle presents her condition as a
slightly more extreme manifestation of every woman’s ‘condition’.
A week or so before the full moon, she would start to become nervous and
strident, and this would continue until the day preceding her transformation.
On that day, she was invariably loving, in the tender, desperate
manner of someone who is going away; but the next day would see her
silent, speaking only when she had to. 26
Thus, the bodily cycles of werewolves and women are not demonized
as a source of abject horror in Beagle’s story; rather, lycanthropy
is presented as a vaguely amusing domestic inconvenience. Beagle’s
casting of Lila’s lycanthropy as a comic and suburban matter contrasts
markedly with the widespread construction of male lycanthropy as a
‘serious’ and ‘tragic’ concern (an attitude that is underlined further
by My Mom’s a Werewolf (1988, USA), a comedy in which a neglected
housewife is featured trying to file her teeth, wax her facial hair and
shave the pelt from her legs). Nevertheless, Beagle’s story also set the
tone for a number of explorations of female lycanthropy by female writers,
who have deliberately adopted a lighter approach to the material.
Suzy McKee Charnas’s ‘Boobs’ (1989), for example, narrates the story
of Kelsey, who begins changing into a wolf when she has her first
period. She takes time to adjust to her new gift for transformation,
but by the end of the story she has metamorphosed from an awkward
adolescent into a confident young woman who no longer has to put