The Lupine Anxieties of ‘Wolfish’

It is 1910 in Vienna and, lying prone on Sigmund Freud’s couch, Russian emigré and psychoanalytic patient Sergei Pankejeff—better known to literary posterity as, simply, “The Wolf Man”—describes a troubling nightmare. In the dream, Sergei is sleeping when he suddenly wakes to see six or seven white wolves perched in the fir tree opposite his bedroom window. “The wolves were quite white, and had big tails and had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something,” he narrates. “In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed, and woke up.”

Freud sets to work decoding the dream logic, stitching together a suite of wolf and wolf-adjacent content from his patient’s past: a favorite illustrated book of Red Riding Hood; his grandfather’s affectionate habit of threatening to “gobble him up” like a wolf; the childhood experience of watching two dogs copulate. Finally, Freud emerges triumphant: “The form taken by the [patient’s] anxiety, the fear of ‘being eaten by the wolf,’” he concludes in his usual unflappable style, was but the “transposition of the wish to be copulated with by his father.” In the culturally overdetermined figure of a ravenous wolf, Sergei’s unconscious had lighted upon the perfect symbol to condense his contradictory desire for and fear of sexual ravishment.

Erica Berry’s new book Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear put me in mind of Freud’s infamous Wolf Man, not least because, like Freud, she sees in the wolf a hyper-charged emblem of cultural ambivalence, ripe for interpretation. “I was compelled by the wolf,” Berry confesses, “because I was intrigued by the investigation of a body that could be both feared and feared for, sometimes both simultaneously.” Hunted to near-extinction in the early part of the twentieth century, by the 1990s the American grey wolf had become the focus of government-backed conservation efforts to restore its population in Idaho and adjacent states. Berry’s narrative follows these repopulation efforts, literally tracing the steps of a number of satellite-monitored individual wolves throughout the book, as well as the revelatory way these animals interact with the human communities that, sooner or later, they butt up against.

But the book is also a coming-of-age tale, narrating Berry’s own fears of living in a (young, female) body vulnerable to predation, as well as a sweeping cultural exploration of the murky “shadow-body,” as Berry calls it, of myth that millennia of human imaginings have grafted onto the flesh-and-blood wolf. In weaving together strands of personal narrative, reportage, and cultural criticism, Wolfish delivers a portrait of the American cultural unconscious—and its intersections with sex, race, and the environment—that reveals it to be every bit as complex and convoluted as the fretful dreams recounted on Freud’s couch.

In a book dedicated to unpacking American narratives around fear, it is fitting that some of Berry’s chapters mimic, in both pace and tone, a whodunnit murder mystery, complete with mounting anxiety, a sprinkling of false leads, and the occasional jump scare. The first chapter, “Adventure v. Wolf,” is a braided narrative following two classic “road trip” arcs. The first is that of B-45, a female gray wolf who, having split off from her origin-pack in Idaho and crossed over into Berry’s native Oregon in search of a mate in 1999, is being tracked by the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife. The second is that of Berry herself, hopping an Amtrak from Minneapolis to Oregon, on her way to a remote wilderness writing residency after her first year of graduate school. Berry takes as her guiding trope for the chapter a colloquial French expression for the twilight hour when fading light plays tricks on our vision: entre chien et loup, or “between dog and wolf.” When we are in the grip of fear, Berry argues, how can we be sure what we are looking at? How can we tell if what we see is friend or foe?

By the early 2000s, sightings of wolves who had crossed over into Oregon from Idaho were on the rise. They became the object of intense cultural controversy, pitting conservationists and animal rights supporters, keen to see the state’s wolf population thrive, against farmers and ranchers, keen to protect their flocks against wolf predation. “Wolves: Government-Sponsored Terrorists,” reads one bumper sticker Berry catches sight of during the height of the wolf debates; and indeed, anti-wolf sentiment frequently mapped onto a whole cluster of other social and political attitudes, including pro-gun, anti-government, and even anti-immigrant sentiment. Catching sight of a shape-shadow gliding across the landscape, how one reads the sign—whether as boon or threat—depends on where they locate themselves in a complex web of local and national stories about safety, courage, stewardship, wilderness, individualism, and land ownership. As Berry masterfully shows, a wolf, in the Pacific Northwest, is never just a wolf.

Side by side with B-45’s unfolding drama, and drawing on the long history of the wolf as figure for sexual predation, Berry describes the usual acts of prophylactic self-preservation that, as a single woman traveling alone, she undertakes in order to protect herself from unwanted male attention on her travels west. Still, when a large hulk of a middle-aged man, clutching a suspiciously bulging briefcase to his chest, lurches down the Amtrak aisle and asks if the seat next to her is taken, we already know the set of narrative calculations Berry will have to run in her head: What am I looking at? Chien ou loup, dog or wolf? What follows is a classic cat-and-mouse tale as Berry cross-cuts the two narratives, dropping clues that leave the reader guessing at the fate of both protagonists—B-45 and her fellow lupine border-crossers, vulnerable to the predations of hunters and farmers; and Berry herself, vulnerable to the predations of sketchy men on the open road—as narrative tension builds throughout the chapter.

Each of the book’s six hefty chapters centers on a specific wolf-human opposition plotted as a predator-prey or savior-villain narrative: “Girl v. Wolf,” “Town v. Wolf,” and so forth. Yet the larger arc of the book is more teleological: with each case-study, it is as if Berry moves closer to understanding both her own habits of fear and projection, as well the limits of any worldview that grounds itself in the binary predator-prey narrative. By the end of the book, in the chapter “Mother v. Wolf,” Berry has not only learned to rewire (in part) her own fearful nervous system, but to question the larger anthropomorphic framework through which we imagine safety and danger, the wild and the domestic. Following these animals’ trajectories, she writes, “had not just made me care more about wolves; it had made me care about the long-lashed cows and the people who tended them, and especially the ecosystem we shared.” Her perspective had irrevocably shifted. “I had seen the slippage between us and them; predator and prey; history and current day,” she concludes. “There was no binary between farm and forest; everything was habitat.”