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WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES
up with the inconvenience of an ordinary period: ‘I don’t get periods
at all any more. I get a little crampy, and my breasts get sore, and I
break out more than usual — and then instead of bleeding, I change.
Which is fine with me.’ 27 In this sense, Kelsey achieves what Germaine
Greer wished for when she wrote that ‘[m]enstruation does not turn
us into raving maniacs or complete invalids; it is just that we would
rather do without it.’ 28
In the context of feminist reappraisals of attitudes to nature and
the body, and the Jungian recuperation of myths and symbols that has
accompanied this project, the attitude to menstruation voiced by Kelsey
and Greer has been challenged by a view that menstruation should be
embraced and celebrated as a quintessential experience of womanhood.
The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (1978) by Penelope
Shuttle (a feminist poet and novelist) and Peter Redgrove (a poet,
scientist and Jungian analyst), for example, focuses on menstruation as
a natural process which should be embraced in order to ‘enhance the
growth and powers of individual women’ rather than hidden, dreaded
or shunned. 29 Correspondingly, some parallels between lycanthropy
and menstruation have pursued this logic, showing the lives of female
werewolves to be deeply influenced by their awareness of their own
bodily cycles. In such narratives, lycanthropy is presented as a cause
for celebration or at least as the source of a richer experience of embodiment.
Pat Murphy’s lycanthropic protagonist Nadya, for instance,
is intimately aware of the moon and its effect upon her body, feeling
its ‘pull in her belly, in her groin’ as it waxes. 30
Angela Carter’s rewriting of Little Red Riding Hood in her short
story ‘The Company of Wolves’ (1979) draws a connection between
lycanthropy and the female coming of age marked by the onset of menstruation.
31 In Carter’s narration of the famous fairy tale, Rosaleen’s
red cloak ‘has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow’, and
her ‘breasts have just begun to swell … her cheeks are an emblematic
scarlet and white and she has just started her woman’s bleeding.’ 32
Virginal white is mingled with red, the colour of menstrual blood and
the harlot, stressing that Red Riding Hood’s encounter with the wolf
is a story of awakening sexuality.
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