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This book explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. It focuses on folkloric records of the island of Saaremaa, Estonia, a territory in which, unusually, there are more folktales of female werewolves than male. The book also explores tropes and strategies of feminisation evident in Werewolf: The Apocalypse to reveal an almost unique disavowal of the masculine werewolf in favour of traditions of presenting the female werewolf. The examination of Honoré Beaugrand's 'The Werewolves' offers fruitful discussion of the female werewolf's integration into colonial discourse and narrative. In the nineteenth century, at the fin de siècle, female authors began to produce fiction about the female werewolf. Two of the most interesting examples of this, which have been curiously neglected by critics, are Clemence Housman's novella The Werewolf and Rosamund Marriott Watson's poem 'A Ballad of the Were-wolf', written under the pseudonym Graham R. Tomson and published in 1891. Then, the book examines twenty-first-century young adult paranormal romance texts, considering the ways in which such texts associate lycanthropy with contemporary idealisations and constructions of the post-adolescent female. It explores presentations of body-centred violence in film, drawing parallels between female werewolves and other violent females in horror cinema. Finally, the book also examines cinematic representations of the femme animale with an exploration of how this conceptualisation of the feminine might inform a reading of Ginger Snaps.
siècle , female authors at last began to produce fiction about the female werewolf. Two of the most interesting examples of this, which have been curiously neglected by critics, are Clemence Housman’s novella The Werewolf (1896) and Rosamund Marriott Watson’s poem ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’, which was written under the pseudonym Graham R. Tomson and published in 1891. Both these works are of
in Chapter 7 , female writers of the late nineteenth century employed this trope in their presentation of female werewolves. In Rosamund Marriott Watson’s ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’ this threat is not just an escape from the home and into the wild, but a confrontation with her husband and the implied murder of her children. This suggestion of lycanthropic infanticide parallels the first piece of
’ (‘the history of matter and life, beyond the present and the past’). The painting he witnessed was Vespertilia , an oil composition based, presumably, on the poem of the same title published in 1895 by Rosamund Marriott Watson (under the pseudonym Graham R. Tomson), which recounts a fateful meeting with a mysterious, veiled, living-dead woman: ‘Her fair face glimmering like a white wood-flower / That gleams through withered leaves’. 47 In his avid account of Fini's painterly process, Brauner describes how the figural