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126 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
marriage vow that binds you forever to a monster’ might not be all
that desirable, Lisel is torn — ‘she desired to learn more and dreaded
to learn it.’ 41 What she learns is that her grandfather beat and abused
her grandmother until she called upon the ‘soul of the forest’ to make
her a werewolf, enabling her to tear her husband’s throat out. 42 There
was a price: Lisel’s grandmother needs to pass the curse to another
before she dies, to ensure that she may rest in peace, and Lisel is tricked
into taking it upon herself by drinking a liqueur distilled from flowers
containing the wolf-magic. The ending suggests a number of possibilities
for Lisel. As her grandmother observes, ‘I’ve put nothing on you
that was not already yours … Don’t you love the cold forest? Doesn’t
the howl of the wolf thrill you through with fearful delight?’ 43 While
Lisel responds by trying ‘to think of her father and the ballrooms of the
city’, her transformation begins, and her last coherent thought is that
although she might now be obliged to live in the chateau in the forest,
she could still ‘visit the city, providing she was home by sunset’. 44 In
this sense, Lisel has attained a certain freedom of choice by the story’s
end, but the cost is a severance from the world of normality (the world
of her father); a conclusion that echoes feminist deliberations about the
difficulties and costs for women of attaining subjective agency.
Other accounts of female werewolves’ journey to selfhood have
drawn more strongly on a Jungian notion of individuation, which
presents self-development as a process by which the warring aspects
of the psyche are integrated into a harmonious whole. Pat Murphy’s
Nadya (1996), for example, also traces the maturation of a young
female werewolf. Nadya celebrates her first Change as an adolescent,
when her parents take her running beneath the full moon. Later, after
killing a youth who shot her parents, she flees her home disguised as
a man, and as she moves across the plains of the Midwest and then up
into the wilderness of Oregon she pushes back the boundaries of her
identity. She is initially secretive about her lycanthropy, and forms an
ill-fated relationship with a woman who lacks the courage to pursue
their love. During this period, she experiences her wolfish nature and
human nature as conflicted and separate. But as Nadya matures, and
develops a relationship with a man who knows of and accepts her gift