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

WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES
tion of the romance’s meaning suggests … that the women who seek
out ideal novels in order to construct such a vision again and again
are reading not out of contentment but out of dissatisfaction, longing,
and protest.’ 36 Although Radway also acknowledges that ‘the romance
avoids questioning the institutionalized basis of patriarchal control
over women even as it serves as a locus of protest against some of its
emotional consequences’, her suggestion that the romance interrogates
and seeks to redefine masculinity situates Lackey’s ‘taming of the
wolf’ as a way of forwarding the feminist argument that men need to
transcend traditional constructions of masculinity. 37
While Lackey’s story depicts the taming of the wolf/man, other
romance narratives follow Carter’s focus on unleashing the wildness in
women through their encounters with lycanthropic lovers. The desire
for such an experience of her sexuality was literalized for a 49-year-old
woman suffering from episodes in which she believed she changed
into a wolf. In describing her feelings during the final episode, she
wrote ‘I don’t intend to give up my search for [what] I lack … in my
present marriage … my search for such a hairy creature. I will haunt
the graveyards … for a tall, dark man that I intend to find.’ 38 The dark
or Gothic romance/fantasies of Tanith Lee, Cherie Scotch, Rebecca
Flanders, Jane Toombs, Susan Krinard and Donna Boyd follow a similar
logic. Tanith Lee, however, also acknowledges the limitations of such
a model for the attainment of feminine autonomy in Heartbeast (1992).
Laura is ‘exhausted by the world, with its portents and omens, its snows
and imprisoned wolves and imprisoned women, its fairy tales.’ 39 After
marrying a man who loves her because she ‘did not have the strength
to beat him off’, she takes a lover, a werewolf. 40 The passion she feels,
however, passifies and ensnares her, rather than liberating her, and
only the deaths of both her husband and her lover enable Laura to find
herself, and to exercise autonomy.
Lee’s ‘Wolfland’ (1983), also based on Little Red Riding Hood,
explores similar territory. Lisel (of the red cloak) is a beautiful, marriageable
nineteenth-century heiress, but at 16, she is sufficiently
wilful to imagine that she might not marry. Consequently, when her
strange, frightening grandmother suggests to her that an ‘irrevocable
125