El lobo es incogniscible (Cormac Mc Carthy, The Crossing).
Abstract
Focusing on Little Red Riding Hood my article examines the cultural and biopolitical links between the absent mother and her evil doppelgänger/counterpart, the wolf. As a figure that was demonised from the middle ages on and referred to undesirables abandoned by the community, specifically in the Germanic context, the wolf is caught between fruition and perdition, between nurturing and devouring, reflecting the dual archetype of the mother, the good one and the bad one. Drawing on the homo sacer as the individual cursed and expelled by the community (Agamben), the essay discusses what the initiation rite in the folktale has to do with the early medieval expulsion of culprits known in Germanic Northern Europe as the vargr as both ‘wolf’ and ‘outlaw’. What are the structural and metaphorical links between the three women and the wolf, and can we detect the mother’s untold story in this constellation?
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Notes
Tricksters are traditionally found on thresholds in many cultures, in liminal spaces between two terrains, the domestic and the uncivilized in this case. The wolf and the witch (the hagazussa, woman on the hedge between the domestic and the wild space) belong together under this archetype of the trickster.
Giorgio Agamben has identified the Germanic vargr as a variant of the Roman homo sacer. Cf. G. Agamben 1995, 104–111.
Cf. Baschwitz 1963, 139ff, “Der Krieg gegen die alten Frauen.” As Baschwitz has argued in his seminal book on the witches and witch trials, the war against the devil was primarily a war against old women, against women driven by desire for murder (“von Mordlust getriebene alte Weiber”).
Jung (2015, 102) too mentions the witch as a nefarious mother archetype together with the devouring animal: "nefast die Hexe, der Drache (jedes verschlingende und umschlingende Tier ... )”.
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Arnds, P. Absent Mother and the Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood . Neophilologus 101, 175–185 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-017-9518-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-017-9518-8