BESTIALITY, SEXUALITY, AGGRESSION: THE TRACK OF THE WEREWOLF IN FRENCH LITERATURE Open Access
Pyle, Andrew Scott (2012)
Published
Abstract
Abstract
BESTIALITY, SEXUALITY, AGGRESSION:
THE TRACK OF THE WEREWOLF IN FRENCH LITERATURE
"Bisclavret", the fourth of Marie de France's twelfth-century
Lais and one of the
earliest extant texts in French literature, is the story of a
werewolf. In giving such a
prominent position to a lycanthrope, she was making use of a figure
with an already
potent established value as a symbol of, and repository for, the
fears of savagery,
deviance and otherness that haunted the culture in which she lived
and wrote. At the time
the werewolf was not merely a frightening creature in the realm of
fiction, but a real
scapegoat for the most heinous violence wrought by humans. This
dissertation examines
the combined qualities of violence and carnality intrinsic to the
figure of the werewolf,
and follows this shapeshifting monster's literary tracks from its
appearance at the roots of
the French canon to its survival in the literature of
nineteenth-century France, where it
will adapt to a changed set of social and sexual concerns by
adopting different animalistic
guises and behaviors.
The trail begins with "Bisclavret", in which Marie de France
depicts a werewolf,
who is in all other respects a model citizen, revealing his secret
to his curious wife, who
swiftly uses it betray him and become involved with another man.
This dissertation
argues that Marie de France structures her werewolf story after the
manner of the
medieval bestiaries, ecclesiastical texts which used accounts of
animal life to impart
moral lessons to audiences, but that she does so in a surprising
way. "Bisclavret" opens
with a detailed description of the werewolf as a brutal masculine
figure, but in the
ensuing story, the cruelty and savagery attributed to him are
realized in his wife, setting
up the lycanthrope as a worker of violence through subversion of
sexual, societal and
gender norms. Successive chapters of the dissertation move to the
nineteenth century and
consider the transformative, animalizing effects of passion in
Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Le
Bonheur dans le crime", with reference to Hélène Cixous;
the Freudian nightmare of the
primal scene in Mérimée's "Lokis"; and the boundless
therianthropic cruelty of
Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
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Introduction - Dusting for Prints
1
Chapter One - Monstres Sacrés: "Bisclavret" and the Medieval
Bestiary
11
Chapter Two - The Feral Feminine: Cixous, Cat Women and Les
Diaboliques
53
Chapter Three - The Beast in the Bridal Suite: Mérimée's
Conjugal Nightmares
92
Chapter Four - Swimming With Sharks: The Glaucous Mass of
Maldoror
127
Conclusion - Taming the Beast
158
Bibliography
163
Film and Television References
172
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