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

A MANIFESTO FOR WEREWOLVES
these subsequent narratives, the wolf is a sympathetic character whose
dogged devotion to her lover in spite of her altered form eventually
enables them to be reunited.
Quinn’s stories are notable for their sympathetic focus on a feminine
experience of lycanthropy, and draw on the structure and thematics of
the fairy tale, a genre that Marina Warner has argued carries ‘a whiff of
femininity’. 32 This shift towards the feminine in the generating texts of
modern fantasy lends some support to Charlotte Spivack’s speculation
that fantasy is a ‘feminine’ form. 33 Certainly, while by no means all
explorations of the werewolf in fantasy are written by women or are
explicitly feminist, a high proportion of fantasy narratives focused on
lycanthropy explore themes which have been a consistent feature of
feminist critical thought, and many trace a specifically female experience
of lycanthropy. Indeed, the development of the female werewolf in
twentieth-century culture has been inseparable from the development
of the genre of fantasy.
Quinn’s characterizations of benevolent, loyal wolves also diverged
from the traditions of Gothic horror, and presaged the rehabilitation
of the wolf within environmentalism. Don D. Elgin argues that
environmentalist perspectives are central to fantasy when he argues
that fantasy is a form related to comedy (as opposed to tragedy) and
therefore exhibits a profound appreciation of ecology. Using ‘ecology’
to refer to the symbiotic relationships between humanity, other forms
of life, and the earth, Elgin suggests that our current ecological crisis
is rooted in Western literary and philosophical traditions that have
privileged tragic art. The human-centred logic of tragedy, argues
Elgin, has assumed ‘that nature is made for human kind; that human
morality transcends natural limits; and that the individual human
personality is supremely important’ — assumptions that have brought
environmental disaster upon us. 34 But if tragedy neglects ecological
concerns, comedy positions humanity ‘as but one part of a system to
which it must accommodate itself and whose survival must be a primary
concern if it hopes to continue to exist’. 35 Having established this
framework of analysis, Elgin goes on to demonstrate that the principles
of comic philosophy are central to the fantasy novel. He argues that
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