The human wolf becomes a wolf because he cannot help it. The recurring features of a human wolf that pervade our cultural tropes are insatiable hunger and lack of control. There’s probably a new hot wolf guy making his debut as I write this. Boys become men, men become wolves, and we get a new crop of Remus Lupins and Jacob Blacks and Ethan Chandlers and, and, and. Our fascination with wolves and men and men who are wolves has remained with us into the present.
If the vampire is monstrous urbanity and sexuality, the human wolf is monstrous inhuman appetite. His execution in 1589 was particularly brutal. Peter Stumpp, the Werewolf of Bedburg, confessed under torture to cannibalism, including children and pregnant women, as well as to incest and black magic. (Bisclavret is one of the rare werewolves of literature who is portrayed as in control of himself and morally correct.) In the early modern era, there were werewolf witch trials primarily in German- and French-speaking countries. In the Lais of Marie de France, Bisclavret is a werewolf who bites off his cheating wife’s nose after she traps him in wolf form. The werewolf appears in medieval romances. Harald Fairhair of Norway had a company of fighting men called the Úlfhednar, or wolf-coated, men who wore wolf skins and were like Berserkers in battle. What does it mean that the concept of human wolves has been with us so long? Men change into wolves in Ancient Greek literature. Like Sheila, they know they are human beings, but spiritually, they are wolves. Although the term is more closely associated with fiction and literal transformation today, lycanthropy is still a psychological diagnosis, and people still occasionally suffer the delusion of caninity. The word “werewolf” appears once in Old English, in a text from around 1000 CE, and by the sixteenth century, there was “lycanthropy,” a medical condition in which human beings thought themselves to be a wolf or dog. The human/wolf boundary has long been porous. We associate predators with hunger, and hunger is only allowable in men. As the sloppiest of erotic novels would have it, he’s hungry-but not for food. He is carnal appetite and his urge is to devour. He looks almost civilized, until he sees a pretty woman and his eyes bulge out like orbital erections.
Although his head is shaped like that of a canid, he has a tiny, carefully-groomed mustache in place of whiskers. The creature wears a double-breasted blazer, red carnation in the buttonhole, and a bow tie. One controlling image of the wolf is a Tex Avery drawing of a human body with a wolf-like head. Wolves in particular are men, so much so that the same word that describes a species in which only a bonded alpha pair will typically mate also describes a predatory ladies’ man. In our stilted patriarchal shorthand, all dogs are boys and all cats are girls, and even more so, all wild predators are men. Perhaps it is surprising that there should be such a thing as a Wolf Girl at all. They are the subject of stares, but their own stare is controlling. They are fiercely loyal when their loyalty is earned, but it takes time to earn their trust, to avoid their snapping teeth and narrowed gaze. Wolves, though unsolitary creatures, are shy around humans, and human wolves are similarly ill at ease in human company. Wolf Girls love wolves because they are predators. You suspect they might bite, figuratively and literally. They keep a lot of comics in their backpack, but not superhero comics. You’ve never seen them with a boy, but you also suspect they see a lot of boys, or girls, or whoever-or at least that they’d know exactly what to do with a boy or a girl or whoever, though it might not be anything you’ve heard about in school. The Wolf Girls are named Diana or Abigail-not-Abbie or Alizon (who used to be Alison), and they are the deeply weird girls whose stare makes others uncomfortable, the girls painting their nails and their purple Jansport backpacks with whiteout, girls with jagged edges and hair dyed to unsettle, the girls who can smell what you’ve got in your lunch, and maybe they want some. The Wolf Girl somehow isn’t a cultural archetype, not the way Horse Girls are, and yet you knew what one was the moment you saw the words “Wolf Girl.” The Horse Girls are named Vanessa and have long shiny hair and square teeth and practice writing bubble letters and imagine themselves handing an apple to the gentle lips of a beautiful horse named Star (for the star on her forehead). Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.