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14 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
In the nineteenth century, new accounts of lycanthropy were
developed by antiquarians, folklorists, mythologists, historians and
other social commentators. As David Punter has argued, the resurrection
of such subject matter was linked with the emergence of
modernity; ‘vampires are the most obvious case in point: the legendry
itself is age-old, and even in British literature there are plenty of
preromantic allusions, but only in the early nineteenth century was
vampirism brought into alignment with more modern anxieties.’ 9 Like
the vampire, the werewolf was re-created as a modern monster in
nineteenth-century texts. Interest in lycanthropy was reignited early
in the century, in the context of romanticism, when the backlash
against Enlightenment principles was well under way and the Gothic
novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis
had already proved popular.
In contrast to the philosophers of the Enlightenment who had sought
to eradicate superstition, the romantics embraced it as a source of
poetic inspiration. The development of the Gothic mode during the
romantic period is one of the more obvious indications of this tendency.
Tobin Siebers accounts for the difference between Enlightenment and
romantic attitudes to superstition historically, writing that the Enlightenment
philosophers’ ‘aversion to superstition came from [their]
exposure to it’, whereas ‘[t]he Romantics associated superstition and
poetry because their distance from magical thought allowed them to
transform it into an aesthetic formula.’ 10 A passage in Charles Maturin’s
Gothic novel The Albigenses (1824) — in which the werewolf made
its first appearance in the nineteenth century — supports Siebers’s
point. A knight is incarcerated in a dungeon with a lycanthrope as
his cell-mate.
It was evidently a man in the most horrid paroxysm of lycanthropy, a
distemper now unknown, but well authenticated to have existed at a far
later period than that of our tale. ‘Examine me,’ said the unhappy wretch;
‘I tell thee I am a wolf. Trust not my human skin — the hairs grow inward,*
and I am a wolf within — a man outward only’.
* This declaration was actually made by an unhappy wretch in the most rabid, but still
conscious stage of the disease. 11