The Monstrefact: The Werewolf, Part 5 - The She-Wolf

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert continues his series on the werewolf of myth, legend and media with a look at the female werewolves…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
As we continue our look at the werewolf in myth,

(00:28):
legend and media, we now turn to the female werewolf,
a gendered take on the monster that might, at first glance,
seem to be mere titillation, but the roots of the
concept weave their way through a variety of contemplations about
femininity and the wild in all their forms. I want
to return to twenty seventeen's A She Wolf, A Cultural

(00:50):
History of Female Werewolves, which features multiple chapters by different
authors that examine female werewolves in myth, legend, and media,
everything from century old legends to modern cartoons. As previously mentioned,
the book's editor, Hannah Priest argues that European werewolf narratives
revolve around the threat posed by wolves to domesticated animals,

(01:13):
ultimately a threat to male owned agriculture and property. When
the werewolf is male, the threat comes from outside the
male landowner's domain, the outlaw wolf wanderer, who might seek
to tear through the defenses and kill livestock or family members. Meanwhile,
female werewolves tend to emerge from within the male landowner's domain,

(01:33):
often endangering children and serving as an overall threat to domesticity.
Of note, the first Mexican werewolf movie, Le Loba or
The She Wolf, from nineteen sixty five, features both a
female and a male werewolf, and they correspond to this
form quite perfectly. The female werewolf the daughter of a

(01:54):
well to do Mexican landowner and scientists, and the male
werewolf pursuit her from afar. This gothic slice of Golden
Age Mexican cinema, the werewolf seems to represent the wild
and uncontrollable elements of someone within the family unit and
someone from beyond it. For more on La Loba, see
our recent episode of Weird House Cinema on the film.

(02:17):
It's interesting that both the first Mexican werewolf movie and
the first werewolf motion picture period a now lost nineteen
thirteen short titled The Werewolf, feature female licanthropes, but the
vast majority of werewolf tales lean heavily toward male, often
hyper masculine visions of wolf human hybridity Likewise, while the

(02:38):
wolf man is often presented as a lone wolf, the
female wolf woman is often connected to a social group
or part of a mated pair. This is interesting in
how it connects to previous discussions of what our ancestors
saw of themselves in wolves and vice versa. As highly
social animals, wild wolves reflect aspects of human family and society,

(03:01):
and it's only rational for these elements to influence our
conceptions of human wolf hybridity as well. In fact, as
author J. Kate mentions later on in the She Wolf
book quote, aside from a brief fashion for presenting female
werewolves as lonely night stalkers in Victorian literature, the dominant
presentation of female wear wolves from the Middle Ages onwards

(03:24):
has been as part of a social unit comprising other
were wolves or other humans. I won't attempt to summarize
everything explored in the book. Definitely pick a copy up
for yourself if you're interested in this topic as i am.
There's an entire chapter concerning females in the RPG Werewolf
the Apocalypse game, for example, but it explores the various

(03:46):
ways in which female werewolf treatments explore societal ideas concerning
female connectedness to nature and societal norms related to body, hair, menstruation, sexuality, aging,
and other topics, and in some cases, certainly, the female
werewolf can be yet another example of the monstrous feminine,

(04:07):
in which some aspect of female bodies or female experience
is othered from the standpoint of patriarchal anxiety. Overall, however,
a good monster tale can reveal and convey much more.
The werewolf stands as a nexus between the wild and
the civilized, between freedom and taboo, between liberty and control,

(04:27):
and takes on so many additional meanings when applied specifically
to women. In Daniel Ogden's excellent twenty twenty one book
The Werewolf in the Ancient World, he of course highlights
the difficulty in deciding what exactly constitutes a werewolf versus
other modes of hybrid monsters in various cultures that had
no precise word for werewolf, and this applies to both

(04:48):
masculine werewolves and feminine werewolves. Of course, he does mention
an accountant that priest singles out as the entry point
of the female werewolf into literature, that is World of
Wales's twelfth century CE Topographia Hibernia. Gerald recounts a priest's
travels in post Norman invasion Ireland, and specifically his encounter

(05:11):
with natives of Ossary, who spoke of how a man
and a woman of their people were picked to undergo
a seven year transformation into wolf. The locals end up
bringing the priest to visit the dying she wolf and
give her last rites. In this moment, the male counterpart
peels away the wolf's hide from her body, revealing the

(05:31):
form of an old woman within. It's a perplexing story,
as priest points out, it's a tale told by an invader.
Gerald of Wales was half Norman and half Welsh and
certainly not Irish, and the story concerns the traditions and
customs of a conquered people. Furthermore, as Ogden points out,
the story is all the weirder when you consider that

(05:52):
the people of Ossary have to contend with all of
this leacanthropy because they were cursed by a priest and
in later tellings of the same story by Saint Patrick himself,
all for the crime of being disruptive when he tried
to convert them to Christianity. So driving out snakes is
one thing, but cursing locals to become werewolves surely quite another.

(06:14):
In she Wolf, historian Merely Metsi explores Estonian werewolves, specifically
accounts from the Isle of Sarema, where tales of female
werewolves are more common than tales of male werewolves. Apparently,
Estonia is rich in werewolf traditions, which survive in the
form of various fairy tales, legends, and also some historic

(06:36):
accounts of witch trials. Metsiti explores the topic from a
number of different angles, but the overall argument that I
found most remarkable was that the predominance of female werewolf
tales and Estonian traditions may connect to greater levels of
ginger equality in pre Christian Estonia and a definite loss

(06:56):
of those rights as Christian influences permeate Estonian society. Furthermore,
we may refer back to older connections between the wolf
and fertility magic, traditional observations of lupine motherhood, and the
link between maternity and sexuality that was subsequently eradicated under
the influence of Christian culture. In other words, while laws

(07:19):
and top down societal norms might have subjugated women, their
traditional power in Estonia was not so easily erased, and
we see it remain as protest as recognition and so
forth in the tales of Women with the Secret Mind
of wolves. One Estonian story shared in Mesave's chapter encapsulates
several of these ideas. The wife also has wolf pups.

(07:43):
There are different versions, but it essentially tells the story
of a woman who goes into the woods to hunt
and secure meat for the family, while her husband seems
to stay at home at the cabin and seemingly just
complain about how chilly it is, citing the fact that
their child is too cold. The wife tells them that
their child is better off than those who sleep in
the straw behind the house, and when the husband goes

(08:06):
out to investigate, he finds several wolf pups, which he
promptly kills. The next night, while the man lounges in
the sauna, a great wolf bursts in through the door
and attacks him. He manages to defend himself. He burns the.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
Wolf with a pair of tongs, scaring the creature off,
and later via the old identifying wound trope, he learns
that the wolf was in fact his own wife, seeking
vengeance for his killing of her.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Wild wolf children.

Speaker 3 (08:36):
Female werewolf stories continue to entertain us while also retaining
their ability to intentionally or unintentionally reveal much about the
times and places they emerge from, revealing both negative societal
ideas about women as well as more celebratory and even
subversive ideas about feminine power. Tune in for additional episodes

(08:59):
of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Animalius to Pendium
each week. As always, you can email us at contact
at stuffdo Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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