Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Not only was Welty adept at portraying realistic horror, as in the evocation of the civil rights era in “The Demonstrators,” but she effectively wrote fantastic fairy tale horror more reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm as well. Her first novella, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), is frequently analyzed for its use of dark fantasy. Studies by Eunice Glenn, Sally McMillan, Rosella Orzo, and Richard Gray explore Welty’s morbid use of fairy tales and the manipulation or “conjuring” of what Glenn once called “scenes of horror” tinctured by Poe and Kafka (Glenn 1947, 81, 90). Sometimes dubbed a “Southern fried fairy tale,” Welty’s novella merges the Grimms’ original fairy tales with American folklore. A unique blend of realistic and fantastic, The Robber Bridegroom depicts bloody violence, torture, and death in a Southern setting (the Natchez Trace) populated by legendary and savage outlaws. The violation of an unnamed native girl in the novella shocks the reader out of fairy tale mode, and through legend ties it to brutal realistic events. In her 1975 essay “Fairy Tales of the Natchez Trace,” Welty describes how she embedded horror in her reimagining of “The Robber Bridegroom.” But she contended that Grimm’s horror exceeds even her own. Her use of these dark stories harkens back to their primary function as horror tales that shock and moralize through fable.

  On her own admission, Welty led a sheltered life. Yet within her many macabre and fantastic fictional worlds, there is an undeniable magnitude and depth. Welty was radical and fearless in her exploration of genre, and this extended to her use of horror motifs. In 1969, Joyce Carol Oates extolled the beauty and brutality of what she deemed Welty’s “unintended” horror fiction (54). However, Welty was well versed in horror literature, and her appreciation for and interest in classic horror is evident in reviews such as “Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Jumbees” (1944), where she examines “[g]ood, dependable horror conjurers” like M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, August Derleth, John Collier, and H. P. Lovecraft, differentiating between “comfort horror” and weird tales (5).

  Welty’s strange fantasies and distorted realities have had a far-reaching impact. In a 2006 New York Times interview, Stephen King cites Welty as a new literary influence for his novel Lisey’s Story. Michael McDowell’s fiction has been shaped by the stylistic extravagance of Welty, through her use of Southern Gothic and horror. Her innovations, created by mixing genre conventions, garnered her much acclaim. Welty received a Pulitzer Prize in 1972, thirty-nine honorary degrees, eight O. Henry Awards, the Medal of Freedom, and numerous other prestigious accolades.

  By the time Welty died in 2001 of cardiopulmonary failure, she had already cast a mythic shadow over the literary landscape. In recent years, scholarship on the Weird South, the Gothic South, and the Fantastic South has increased for a variety of complex reasons related to the institutionalization of Gothic studies in the American canon and changing notions of genre. As a result, there is renewed interest in the darker aspects of Welty’s fiction.

  Naomi Simone Borwein

  See also: Dark Fantasy; Faulkner, William; The Grotesque; McDowell, Michael; Surrealism.

  Further Reading

  Fonseca, Anthony J., and June Michele Pulliam. 1999. Hooked on Horror: A Guide to Reading Interests in Horror Fiction. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

  Frye, Mitch. 2013. “Astonishing Stories: Eudora Welty and the Weird Tale.” Eudora Welty Review 5: 75–93.

  Glenn, Eunice. 1947. “Fantasy in the Fiction of Eudora Welty.” In A Southern Vanguard, edited by Allan Tate, 78–91. New York: Prentice-Hall.

  Marrs, Suzanne. 2005. “Introduction.” In Eudora Welty: A Biography, ix–xix. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

  Oates, Joyce Carol. 1969. “The Art of Eudora Welty.” Shenandoah 20 (Spring): 54–57.

  Trilling, Diana. 1943. “Fiction in Review.” Nation CLVII, October 2: 386–387.

  Welty, Eudora. 1944. “Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Jumbees.” New York Times Book Review, September 24: 5, 21.

  Welty, Eudora. 1978. “Fairy Tales of the Natchez Trace.” In The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, 306. New York: Vintage Books.

  Welty, Eudora. 1998. Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays & Memoir. New York: Library of America.

  Weston, Ruth D. 1994. Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press.

  THE WEREWOLF OF PARIS

  The Werewolf of Paris is a historical horror novel written by Guy Endore and published in 1933. The book is narrated by an unnamed American who travels to Paris to complete his PhD and discovers a testimony written in 1871 by Aymar Galliez in defense of a man called Sergeant Bertrand. Galliez’s testimony tells the story of Bertrand Caillet, the werewolf of the title, and the various crimes this man has committed. It follows Bertrand into the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War, ending with his capture and incarceration during the Paris Commune of 1870–1871.

  The lycanthropic Bertrand was born to a servant in the employment of Galliez’s aunt. The book’s title leaves little mystery as to the nature of this young man, and so the early chapters are concerned with Galliez’s attempts to come to terms with the “monster” who resides under his roof. Prior to the introduction of the main characters, the reader is told a family history from the Middle Ages. When Jehan Pitamont murdered two members of the rival noble Pitaval family, he was consigned to an oubliette (a small dungeon accessible only from a hatch in the ceiling), fed only on chunks of meat thrown into his prison, and gradually became little more than a wild animal. Centuries later, a descendant of Jehan Pitamont, a priest, raped a teenaged servant girl called Josephine, leaving her pregnant (Bertrand’s mother). Lycanthropy in this novel is treated as a congenital condition—indeed, in a later chapter of the novel, a doctor misreads some of Bertrand’s symptoms as those of “hereditary syphilis,” before consigning him to a cell in an asylum that serves as a modern version of the oubliette.

  The suggestion that lycanthropy is the product of the degenerate aristocracy fits with the setting of the Paris Commune. Particularly in the novel’s early chapters, there is implicit criticism of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie. However, this is combined with a rather unsympathetic portrait of the communards and their cause, with Galliez coming to believe that the revolutionaries are themselves a race of werewolves. The book is characterized by brutality and violence, including sexual violence enacted toward women, and Bertrand ends up in a relationship with a masochistic young woman named Sophie whose relationship to the Commune is ambiguous. Nevertheless, the storytelling style, in which Galliez’s matter-of-fact tone is mediated through the detached narration of the unnamed American, encourages the reader to view these acts with distaste and horror.

  The Werewolf of Paris reached number 1 on the New York Times best-seller list when it was first published, and it remains a cult classic. It was adapted for the screen as The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), though the setting was altered and the political content removed.

  Hannah Priest

  See also: Monsters; Werewolves.

  Further Reading

  Martin, Carl Grey. 2014. “Guy Endore’s Dialectical Werewolf.” Le Monde diplomatique, September 15. http://mondediplo.com/outsidein/guy-endore-s-dialectical-werewolf.

  Stableford, Brian. 1983. “The Werewolf of Paris.” In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, vol. 5, edited by Frank N. Magill, 2102–2106. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

  WEREWOLVES

  The werewolf has been a popular and ubiquitous presence in folklore, mythology, and literature for centuries, almost always taking the form of a human capable of shape-shifting into a wolf or wolf-like hybrid under certain conditions. Half-human and half-animal, the werewolf has long been a powerful and versatile symbol; a liminal figure (that is, one existing on the boundary or threshold between two distinct realms) representing the eruption of the wild into civilization, the beast within the human soul, the werewolf is unable to be fully reconciled with the human or the animal. It is, as such, an endlessly m
alleable symbol, appearing time and again in popular culture when chaos threatens to disturb an established order.

  Some Notable Werewolf Fictions

  Literary:

  1896

  The Were-Wolf by Clemence Housman

  1933

  The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore

  1944

  Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson

  1977

  The Howling by Gary Brandner

  1978

  The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber

  1979

  The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (featuring “Wolf-Alice,” “The Company of Wolves,” and “The Werewolf”)

  Cinematic:

  1935

  Werewolf of London

  1941

  The Wolf Man

  1961

  Curse of the Werewolf (adapted from The Werewolf of Paris)

  1981

  The Howling (adapted from Guy Brandner’s novel); An American Werewolf in London

  1984

  The Company of Wolves (based on Angela Carter’s story)

  1994

  Wolf

  2000

  Ginger Snaps

  Matt Cardin

  The modern-day werewolf has its roots in ancient folklore, such as the Greek myth of Lycaon and the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 BCE), and also in ancient legends from the early Christian era (ca. first century CE), which portray the werewolf as a savage, bloodthirsty beast, afflicted with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Roman works, such as Petronius’s Satyricon (ca. late first century CE), later used the werewolf to comedic effect, depicting mysterious men who transform into wolves under the light of the moon. Some medieval romances, by contrast, viewed the werewolf in a benevolent light: several French lais, including “Bisclavret” by Marie de France and the anonymous “Melion” (ca. 1200) and “Guillame de Palerme” (ca. 1200), for instance, portrayed the werewolf as a dignified creature, a pathetic victim of circumstance.

  In the sixteenth century, the bloodthirsty werewolf of antiquity was revived in legends circulated across the European countryside, which influenced later depictions of the werewolf in nineteenth-century Gothic novels such as Sutherland Menzies’s Hugue the Wer-Wolf (1838), an early example of a psychological study of lycanthropy, and G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1847), in which a lonely man makes a deal with the devil, becoming a werewolf in exchange for wealth and eternal youth. Though Wagner regrets his decision, he is condemned to prey upon the human species for eighteen months. Other nineteenth-century texts also drew on legends of the werewolf as a bloodthirsty, violent creature: the were-protagonist of Prosper Mérimée’s novella “Lokis” (1869), for instance, murders his wife with a bite to the throat, while Arthur Conan Doyle’s werewolf in “A Pastoral Horror” (1890) commits a string of bloody murders while in his wolf-like state. Female werewolves in nineteenth-century Gothic literature proved to be as savage as their male counterparts, often using their sexually enticing human forms as lures for potential male victims. In Clemence Housman’s acclaimed Gothic novel The Were-Wolf (1896), the rapacious female werewolf can only be killed by one whose blood is as pure as Christ’s.

  The bloodthirsty werewolf of antiquity and of nineteenth-century Gothic literature continued to inform depictions of the werewolf in American and British literature of the first half of the twentieth century, despite the rise of the tragic, sympathetic werewolf in popular American horror films such as Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London (1935) and George Waggner’s The Wolf Man (1941). In the first decades of the twentieth century, Algernon Blackwood published a number of werewolf and similar shape-shifter stories, such as “The Camp of the Dog” (1908), “The Wendigo” (1910), and “Running Wolf” (1921), while Weird Tales contributed to the figure’s increasing popularity with works like H. Warner Munn’s The Werewolf of Ponkert (1925) and “The Werewolf’s Daughter” (1928) and Robert E. Howard’s “Wolfshead” (1926).

  The savage werewolf was memorably depicted in Guy Endore’s critically acclaimed The Werewolf of Paris (1933), arguably the most important werewolf novel ever published and widely considered by many to have done for the werewolf what Dracula did for the vampire. Endore’s werewolf Bertrand is a violent, sadistic beast, a product of the cursed Pitamont clan who were doomed to lycanthropy as punishment for a long-standing feud with a neighboring clan. Bertrand commits impulsive, violent acts against the backdrop of a chaotic Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, leading some critics to view the novel as an allegory. The murderous werewolf—albeit this time depicted in a more complicated manner—also appears in Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think (1944), a noir-influenced dark fantasy in which humans and werewolves have been involved in an eternal war for control of the planet.

  Though the murderous werewolf continued to make appearances in the latter half of the twentieth century in horror novels such as Gary Brandner’s The Howling (1977), postmodern and contemporary werewolf texts have often taken a more complicated view of the figure, especially in light of the widespread and increasing popularity of environmental movements. Whitley Strieber’s well-received novels The Wolfen (1978) and The Wild (1991), for instance, depict wolf-like creatures and werewolves as means through which humans can reconcile with nature. In The Wolfen, the eponymous lupine beings prey upon humans as a natural check to the human population, and in The Wild, the werewolf functions as a conduit for reintroducing humans to nature. Twentieth-century werewolf literature has also long recognized the werewolf’s potent charge as a symbol of puberty and dawning sexuality. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) features a number of werewolf stories that invoke this theme to great effect, offering new takes on girlhood and puberty with “Wolf-Alice” and powerful, feminist inversions of the Little Red Riding Hood myth in “The Company of Wolves” and “The Werewolf.”

  The werewolf’s perennial presence in mythology, folklore, literature, and cinema has contributed to its versatility in the horror genre as an enduring and ever-changing symbol of spiritual, sexual, and psychological transformation. Forced to stand at the boundary between human and animal, the werewolf’s liminal status renders it forever ambiguous, forever mutable, and forever intriguing.

  Brittany Roberts

  See also: Carter, Angela; Monsters; Transformation and Metamorphosis; Weird Tales; The Werewolf of Paris.

  Further Reading

  Jones, Stephen, ed. 2009. The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men. Philadelphia: Running Press.

  Lowder, James, ed. 2010. Curse of the Full Moon: A Werewolf Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press.

  Otten, Charlotte F., ed. 2002. The Literary Werewolf: An Anthology. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

  Stypczynski, Brent. A. 2013. The Modern Literary Werewolf: A Critical Study of the Mutable Motif. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  WHARTON, EDITH (1862–1937)

  Edith Wharton, née Edith Newbold Jones, was born in New York, and her most famous works explore the city’s haute society in intricate novels of manners like The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), which have critical, naturalist, and anthropological bents, despite her vexed relations with literary naturalism. But the supernatural was also a literary avocation for her; she published about a dozen supernatural short stories. These stories almost all first appeared in lucrative, prestigious magazines, and a few are in her short story collections. Shortly after her death, the nigh-complete collection Ghosts (1937) appeared.

  Two major interpretations of Wharton’s supernatural oeuvre compete. The first interpretation concerns the violence and stultifications of domestic life in the stories. In “Kerfol” (1916), a ghost dog pack avenges a French aristocrat’s brutal treatment of them and their mistress. The second interpretation discerns the stories’ anxiety over class division, servants’ roles, and concepts of money, inheritance, and property. “The Looking Glass” (1935) overlays messages from the dead with Wharton’s interest in con artists and business swindlers (fro
m texts like “A Cup of Cold Water,” 1899). Ghostly epistles also factor in “Pomegranate Seed” (1931); a wife intercepts a letter from her husband’s dead first wife and, in an unnerving anticlimax, finds the writing too faint to discern. Sexual and economic anxieties intertwine in “The Eyes” (1910) as a haunted Henry James– or Dorian Gray–esque narrator is unveiled, to his audience’s horror, as a sterile, exploitative parasite.

  “Afterward”: A Classic Tale of Greed and Ghostly Retribution

  The status of Wharton’s “Afterward” (1910) as one of the great ghost stories in American literature is implied by its appearance in the 1996 collection American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. It is still taught at universities as paradigmatic of a ghost story standard: the return of an apparition who comes to claim a symbolic (in this case financial) debt.

  One way to account for the unsettling effect of “Afterward” is to explore its intriguing time register. The story’s plot is straightforward, but Wharton’s conceptualization of the “afterward” remains intriguing. Mary and Edward (Ned) Boyne, newly rich Americans, emigrate to a rural mansion, Lyng, in Dorsetshire, England. After her husband is taken away by a visitor to Lyng, Mary, the central consciousness of the tale, comes to realize the visitant was the ghost of a dead man named Elwell whom Ned had secretly ruined in business.