Werewolf

Werewolf: a human who transforms into a wolf. Also called a lycanthrope. The werewolf is a myth, a type of fictional character, a popular fantasy and/or horror monster. There are werewolf legends, and countless werewolf stories.

A typical example of the werewolf myth is the human who is bitten by a wolf or a werewolf, and who transforms into a wolf on the full moon, then back again into a human. Sometimes the transformation happens at will, or in connection with powerful emotions. Werewolves are often protagonists, who must struggle against their nature as such, or monsters and villains, typically killed by silver bullets, but the werewolf myth is so popular that it has no fixed rules. Movies and literature offer hundreds of examples.

The werewolf is nearly as popular as the vampire, and both myths share certain similarities: the biting, the transmission of the werewolf or vampire condition via bodily fluids, the use of stereotypical charms of protection (silver), and the transformation of humans into monsters. In cinema and television, the vampire's greater popularity might be explained by the cheaper makeup and/or special effects required to create the monster.

Werewolves and Gender, Werewolves and Sex

Most werewolf stories are about men, and the transformation of man into beast, or emergence of the beast within men. One would guess that the assimilation of women to animals and to nature renders the idea of a female werewolf redundant within patriarchal ideology.

Etymologically, the first part of "werewolf" likely derives from the Old English wer (or were), a word which refers to male humans. The corresponding word for a female human, wif or wife, is not generally used for female lycanthropes (which is a word of greek origin: lycan for wolf, and -thrope from the root for the human race, rather than only the male human). This can perhaps partly be attributed the the disharmonious fricative alliteration of "wifwolf" or "wifewolf", although the disuse of "wife" as a general term for a human female in the English language and its specialisation as a term for a woman married to a man, a female spouse, would also contraindicate the feminisation of the word "werewolf" into "wifewolf".

Instead, the prefix "were-" has been extended to apply to any human who transforms into an animal. This is an example of the sexist practice of using male-specific word forms interchangeably with generic word forms for humans, and even for females. (See WereWomen.)

Stories about women and wolves often tend to fall under the "Little Red Riding Hood" format, instead, in which the victims are females, who are attacked and rescued by male predators and male heroes.

Nevertheless, there are stories about female werewolves, and feminist explorations of the werewolf theme. The Ginger Snaps movie trilogy, for instance.

Biology

While some werewolf stories attribute the transformation of a human into a wolf to a curse brought on to the werewolf by its actions as a human, or in a metaphorical way, many stories use lycanthropy in a transmissible form, as supernatural contamination, sometimes even as a fantastic type of infectious condition. Hybridisation of humans and animals can also be the cause, for such sub-types of werewolves as those that take on an intermediate form, of the human halfway transformed into an animal.

In real life, conditions such as rabies, hypertrichosis and porphyria have been linked to the werewolf myth.

The werewolf's lunar transformation cycle can be linked to the menstrual cycle (menses, the latin plural for "month", comes from the same root as "moon").

External Links

• Werewolf entry at Wikipedia