In this post, I’d like to respond to a question Dr. Janzen posed about the Gothic tropes of of Housman’s The Were-Wolf. Namely, the tropes brought into question were the gothic double, the hunter-hunted, and the setting. These tropes have fairly conventional forms in the Gothic genre. The double is usually a twin or a narrative foil. It’s also fairly common that a character be a double of some long-passed ancestor. The relationship of the hunter and the hunted usually manifests as the male Gothic villain (hunter) chasing the Gothic heroine, which in turn is closely related to our third trope, setting, as the chase occurs in labyrinthine and claustrophobic settings.

In Housman’s The Were-Wolf, these conventions are subverted. Firstly, while Christian and Sweyn are twins, they do not seem to narratively serve as each others double. Rather, Christian and White Fell are paired together and the entire action of the story is dedicated to their struggle wherein they are equals in strength and tied together by their fate. This doubling also subverts the hunter-hunted relationships as they both assume the hunter position at one point in the narrative—indeed, even as Christian hunts down White Fell, the wolves that flank him for a time suggest that he is simultaneously the hunter and the hunted. This convention is further challenged because Christian and White Fell do not neatly fit the role of Gothic Villain and Heroine respectively. Finally, that the setting of The Were-Wolf’s action is not labyrinthine or closed but rather wide open and in nature represents that there is space within the narrative for play within seemingly narrow binary categories. That is, in contrast to the confined space of conventional Gothic settings, the choice of open space signals a sort of freedom of direction that allows for the blurred binaries that fill this story. In combination with each other, these three tropes work to destabilize the binaries of male/female, human/inhuman, villain/hero, etc.