Sleeping with the Lights On by Jones Darryl

Author:Jones, Darryl
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192561060
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2018-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

You will notice that Pliny’s primary method of taxonomy here is dietary; beast-men are monstrous because they violate food taboos.

Baring-Gould also recognized that lycanthropy was a psychological as well as a moral and geopolitical category. Lycanthropes, he speculated, ‘may still prowl in Abyssinian forests, range still over Asiatic steppes, and be found howling dismally in some padded room of a Hanwell or a Bedlam.’ The ‘zoophagous’ R. N. Renfield in Dracula was one such lunatic. Another was a patient of Sigmund Freud, Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man. Pankejeff suffered from a variety of physical and psychological conditions, and under analysis recounted to Freud a particularly terrifying childhood dream of white wolves sitting in the walnut tree outside his bedroom. Freud interprets this as a displaced rendition of a traumatic episode in which the infant Pankejeff, sleeping in a cot in his parents’ bedroom, witnesses a ‘Primal Scene’, an act of ‘coitus a tergo, more ferrarum’ (‘sex from behind, like the animals’), allowing him simultaneously to see both parents’ genitals, and to interpret his mother’s vagina as lack, a castrated bleeding wound. Pankejeff grew into a ‘savage’ child; for the Wolf Man, Freud concludes, ‘the sexual aim could only be cannibalism—devouring’.

The anxious relationship between humanity and wolves is also a recurring trope in folklore, and particularly in the European fairy tale, in which the Big Bad Wolf is a recurring figure. The tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is especially ripe for interpretation and adaptation. One of the most widely circulated folktales, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ has direct analogues and antecedents that can be traced back to medieval Europe, and was collected by both Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers. The tale, with its pubescent heroine and her grandmother, its red cloak, and its rapacious antagonist, is ripe with psychoanalytic suggestion. For the Freudian theorist Bruno Bettelheim in his influential study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, the wolf is ‘the male seducer’, who ‘represents all the asocial, animalistic tendencies within ourselves’. The devouring wolf-grandmother (‘What big teeth you have!’) who lives in a cottage in the woods has clear links to the cannibalistic witch of the related tale of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (also collected by the Grimms). In her feminist study of fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner draws together the wolf, the grandmother, and the adolescent girl, as figures linked by their liminality:

The wolf is kin to the forest-dwelling witch, or crone; he offers us a male counterpart, a werewolf, who swallows up grandmother and then granddaughter. In the witch-hunting fantasies of early modern Europe they are the kind of beings associated with marginal knowledge, who possess pagan secrets and are in turn possessed by them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.