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142 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
also a werewolf, guides him through these difficulties, sharing with
him her own experiences. ‘[W]hen I first began, I killed people, too’,
she tells him. 44
But then it changed. As the nights went by, I did not want to kill. I wanted
to run, and nothing more. And when I had to move, and to keep moving,
because there was always someone beginning to discover me, I was not
running away from what I had done. I was surviving, and learning the
sort of creature I was really meant to be. 45
By the end of the novel, Benjamin is no longer the man with ‘a safe
and an office’ he once was. 46 He reflects that ‘I was not a man, now,
and I was not a wolf. I was one of those other creatures, the beings of
legend, who arrive with the amazing, miraculous news, and vanish.’ 47
Having confronted his Shadow, Benjamin has moved on to develop a
more harmonized and enlightened subjectivity that transcends both
man and wolf.
Somtow’s Moon Dance also adopts a Jungian approach, through
its characterization of a young werewolf with a multiple personality
disorder. By prioritizing the psychic conflict between the boy and wolf,
it draws from the dualistic representations of the werewolf associated
with the genre of horror; but the novel also develops a narrative about
the boy’s individuation (or the unification of his disjointed parts in the
role of Saviour) more typical of fantasy. Following a Jungian logic, the
boy’s psyche is visualized as consisting of many components: ‘I am a
single body with many souls. There are evil men and good men within
me, young and old, male and female and even winkte, man–woman.’ 48
The novel also emphasizes that such subjective experience is inevitably
situated within the broader parameters of nature — an emphasis that is
given full expression in the novel’s finale, when the werewolf Messiah
undertakes the mystical Moon Dance.
The light swirled about the boy’s head. It seemed … that he was growing in
stature, making up for the years he had been trapped in the body of a little
boy … now he seemed on the brink of adolescence … now it was summer
and the grass rustled and his golden hair was flung back as the hot wind
raced over the plain and now it was autumn and the wind stripped the
leaves from the oaks and roared and the grass was matted with rain. 49