Where Are the Werewolves in Gothic Literature?

If we’re being terribly honest, I have a love-hate relationship with werewolves. I want to love them, but sometimes I don’t. I pick up werewolf movies and am usually disappointed. Not always, but usually. They tend to come across as cheesy, awkward, and one-sided. Unlike vampires, who’ve cornered the market on cool, werewolves are pretty much left out of the game.

And werewolves are rarely featured in any literature, especially Gothic writing, probably for that very reason. As writers, we don’t want our characters to be so unsexy. But I don’t think they have to be. (That’s the love part of my love-hate relationship speaking.) I think werewolves could be really, really cool. So much so that I have a werewolf trilogy (and so much more) in the planning stage right now.

Which got me thinking about what’s wrong with the standard werewolf portrayal and what could be done about it to make werewolves an important character trope in Gothic writing.

Werewolves in Literature

It may surprise you to hear that there are werewolves in adult Gothic literature.

English writer, Colin Wilson argued that Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) was really a werewolf story at a subtextual level. In addition, Alexander Dumas wrote a fantasy story, The Wolf Leader. The tale is about a mistreated shoe-keeper who makes a deal with a werewolf who promises him vengeance at a cost to himself. Guy Endore wrote The Werewolf of Paris (1933) about a sadistic man – the child of a rape – who flees his past and takes up with the Franco-Prussian war where he finds love. But of course, he can’t outrun who he really is.

There have also been medieval stories about werewolves who were under the spell of some dark magic, and numerous werewolf short stories or tales such as some of the Weird Tales in pulp magazines in the mid-twentieth century.

In recent years, werewolves played central roles in young-adult fiction such as the Twilight series and The Vampire Diaries. There was also a recent book, The Wolfman by Nicholas Pekearo [not to be confused with the movie or the screenplay by Curt Siodmak] about a dishonorably discharged Vietnam veteran turned vigilante werewolf. And last but certainly not least, Anne Rice wrote The Wolf Gift about a young man who’s bitten and then discovers both a hidden society of those like himself and a life that shows him a richer, fuller path than he had previously known.

The Hidden Wolf

But aside from movies and the two young adult examples above, it seems like werewolf literature is both rare and largely unknown. However, there are numerous examples of man-wolf relationships in literature that have been widely and wildly popular. But their nature has been veiled. They may be werewolves of a sort, but the truth of the matter is generally not overtly stated.

The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb is a wonderful example. If you like Fantasy, especially Fantasy of the darker sort (although not that much so by today’s standards), you’ll want to read this trilogy and the subsequent books. In The Farseer Trilogy, the protagonist, Fitzchivalry, takes up with a wolf as a young boy. The two become inseparable and form something of a soul-bond. Over time, Fitz learns how to enter the mind/soul of his wolf and travel with him as he hunts in the night. Though he’s not presented as a werewolf and they don’t hunt people, we could easily argue that Fitz is a werewolf.

A similar case could be made for Bran Stark in Game of Thrones. He and his direwolf, Summer, are so close that he is able to enter into her mind and run with her through the mountains and forests – a great relief for him after he is left paralzyed.

How about Wolverine? He’s obviously not a werewolf, or even a wolf for that matter, but the X-Men character bears a striking resemblance to werewolf characters. We could easily swap out his wolverine name and he could have been written as a wolf.

And then there’s the classic fairytale, Little Red Riding Hood. The original book leaves the wolf at face value. But the 2011 film by Catherine Hardwicke played on the subtext in the fairytale, making the wolf a man who walks as a wolf by the full moon.

None of these examples use the explicit term, werewolf, but it’s hardly a stretch to see the wolf/ man for what he is. And all of these are immensely successful. Which should cause us to stop and ask why it is that the popularity of the werewolf is so great in these cases and not in others. It can’t be that merely the omission of the word werewolf results in the success. Rather I think it’s something else entirely.

How To Write a Successful Werewolf

In each of these successful cases, particularly the first two, which give us more content to analyze than simply a two-hour movie would provide, the werewolf is a man first and a wolf second.

It sounds simple, basic even, but a werewolf has a relatively limited capacity to do anything but run through the wild and hunt. He can’t blend into and participate in society as a vampire can. He’s a wolf. He can’t even appear to be normal while actually being an outsider. He’s distinctly other.

Many werewolf stories and movies that I’ve seen focus so much on the man (or woman) in the werewolf state that the story grows stale. A couple of runs through the forest and the wolf’s adventures are no longer interesting. It’s a character’s interactions with others and his pursuit of his goals (other than the next rabbit) that makes him interesting.

Stephenie Meyer handled this fairly well in the Twilight series. Jacob Black and the other Quillayute tribe wolves have a distinct community, with conflict and alternate storylines. They’re interesting. Notice also that they aren’t in their wolf state terribly often. More so than Bran’s warg abilities or Fitz’s wolf travels, but still not to enough to dominant the character’s actions. Jacob’s primary interactions are with Bella and his love for her, or with his family and his conflicted loyalty to them.

That’s lesson #1 – make sure that the werewolf part of your character’s identity is less, if not significantly less, dominant than the rest of his doings. He (or she) needs to be a person in relationships, trying to accomplish his goals first, and a werewolf second.

I can see one other distinct difference between the successful and the unsuccessful werewolf character: complexity. We say that often as writers, but for some reason when it comes to werewolves, writers seem to fall back on the clichéd standards. By that I mean that they use the werewolf as a symbol for anger or overly aggressive masculinity. And that’s it.

That’s certainly the case in The Vampire Diaries. Tyler is prone to anger, as was his father. And both of them are werewolves. We didn’t get to see as much of his character as we do of the others. Even though it was a television show about vampires, we saw plenty of Bonnie Bennett and other supernatural characters in the show. But Tyler’s character grew stale relatively quickly. Because he was just angry. He didn’t have enough complexity to give him a more central role.

Consider again our successful examples from above.

• Fitz isn’t angry at all – not as a general rule. Rather, he’s a very curious and somewhat introspective young boy (and later, man) who’s caught between his royal relatives and his own status as a bastard (a threat to the throne). Thus, it’s not surprising that the throne quickly puts him to use as a royal assassin, sent out to dispose of their enemies. He’s in love with a young girl. He’s loyal to his mentor and later to his close friend, The Fool.
• Bran is an adventurous young boy who’s in the wrong place at the wrong place and is left paralyzed as a result. He has something like prophetic abilities as a greenseer and can see the past, present and future. He’s brave and strong, not bitter or vengeful.
• Wolverine is the most stereotypical of our wolf-like examples. He majors in extreme masculinity, embracing danger and thrills with no fear. And he certainly does have a hard edge about him; something of a core of anger.
• In Red Riding Hood (the movie), the village werewolf – after his reveal – has sympathizable reasons for his actions. He has a complex family situation. His killings make sense to the viewer. And the young character who’s turned into a wolf at the end is actually very sensitive and kind. (S)he makes for a more interesting wolf than the stereotype.
• And, lastly, Jacob Black is anything but angry. Compared to the the other characters, he has a boy-like nature. He’s open, forgiving and thoughtful. He wants to do right by everyone else. Sure, he has his moments of anger, but his character is anything but what we’d expect in a werewolf.

That’s lesson #2 – don’t write your werewolf character as simply an angry, overly masculine man. If anything, try to stay away from that stereotype as much as possible. It’ll make for a much more interesting character!

Conclusion

When I set out to study the werewolf character, I wasn’t sure what I would find. In fact, my expectations weren’t terribly high. However, I came away with some wonderful insights into what makes the werewolf character work and what doesn’t. Hopefully that’ll also encourage you and other writers to build more werewolf characters in the future!

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