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, instead they are the ‘wolfish’ and unintelligible ‘renegades’ of the early eighteenth century fighting French settlers and soldiers. Linotte is similarly viewed as a ‘renegade’ for her lapsed Catholicism; she is not granted the full agency or transgressive power of a female werewolf who shape-shifts to exact revenge on a cruel and fickle husband. Although Linotte ‘had been
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.
Beyond the curse Does it always have to come down to the curse, the curse of blood, the curse of biology? Certainly there is something to be said for the idea that being a werewolf entails inevitable surrender to the natural, primal or beastly. Indeed this way of thinking might seem especially apt for the figure of the female werewolf. As
Introduction The nineteenth century was a significant one in terms of the figure of the female werewolf. The history of the werewolf in fiction was by this point nearly 5,000 years old, 1 and although the female werewolf had appeared in chronicles and treatises on witchcraft prior to 1800, such as Henri Boguet’s Discours execrable des
woman, leech woman, ape woman, femme fatale , spider woman, mother alien, and female werewolf. In a number of these narratives, the femme animale appears not just as a terrifying monster who must be destroyed, but also as creature who deliberately sets out to undermine the dominant norms of an anthropocentric and phallocentric symbolic order. With her question (‘What goes on four legs?’) the
exclude the female werewolf in much the same way as the mythic narrative of the primal hunter. Indeed, this is potentially evidenced by counterpoints produced by cultures with different economic traditions. As Merili Metsvahi’s Chapter 2 attests, the island of Saaremaa, an area of Estonia with matrilineal property inheritance and female land ownership throughout the late Middle Ages and into early
-shifter. The werewolf is so rich in symbolic value because it potentially allows artists, theorists and philosophers to explore the outer limits and blurred boundaries of a number of dichotomies, frequently bringing into focus the less culturally dominant side of the binary, i.e. body (mind), nature (culture), animal (human) and woman (man). The female werewolf serves to complicate these categories further and
-inflected female adolescence as its primary narrative focus: the film offers a relationship between hormonally-driven bodily change, developing sexual identity and a ‘heroine’s bestial side’ that is both naturalised and universalised in such a way as to make it the metaphor for teenage female lycanthropy – at least in some examinations of the female werewolf. This chapter considers
figure and distinguish her from the landscape even as her whiteness suggests that she is part of it (see Figure 14.1 ). 14.1 Ralph Lauren Autumn/Winter 2015 campaign, Sanne Vloet with dogs The sequence of images featured in the advertisement brings together many of the signifiers that characterise female werewolf stories
portrayed as a violator of social and biological boundaries. This chapter provides an overview of the relationship between the hairy woman and the female werewolf figure and the ongoing complexities of the social attitudes towards fur/body hair and the feminine. Hairy Marys and well-heeled furry femmes The hirsute femme has not universally been depicted in a negative light