Man is a Wolf to Man: Human and Nonhuman Animality in Twilight’s Werewolves

The Twilight Saga novels (2005-2010) by Stephenie Meyer have rejuvenated the popularity and interest in the modern day vampire and have also ensured a certain renaissance for his werewolf counterpart. As a result, the werewolf characters of this multi-volume, multi-format vampire story have become as wellknown and as popular as their revenant rivals. It is for this reason that this paper will concentrate on the dual figure of the werewolf as represented in the Twilight series of Young Adult novels using Michael Lundblad’s discourse of the jungle from his book The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture (2013). Lundblad’s theoretical methodology is based in animality studies and uses Freudian-Darwinism from the turn of the century to interpret representations of animals and animality as featured in literary texts. He pays particular attention to the figure of the wolf and his readings of this creature both as a “real” animal and as a metaphor for human masculinity will be used in this paper to shed light upon the pack of werewolves in the Twilight Saga. In a discussion of the animalised traits of the wolf-men in human form and the humanity in the wolves in animal form, this paper will seek to question the blurring of the beast/human divide of these post-humans and to investigate Meyerist hyper masculinity in this gendered teen body