Metaphors of monstrosity: The werewolf as disability and illness in Harry Potter and Jatta

While vampires are proliferating in children’s and young adult literature, the increasingly popular werewolf figure also deserves attention, particularly given the intriguing links that particular authors draw between the werewolf and disability. These links are seen in not only the two works I discuss in this paper, but others as well (for example, in Howl’s Moving Castle, a man cursed into the form of a dog is said to have a ‘terrible disability’ [Jones 1986, pp. 119-20]). Readers might assume the authors are creating these associations with worthy intentions, but might also question if a werewolf, a monster, is indeed an appropriate metaphor for disability and illness. In this discussion, metaphor is understood in line with Fogelin’s (1994) definition where ‘both similes and metaphors express figurative comparisons: similes explicitly, metaphors implicitly’ (p. 23). This paper explores the werewolf as metaphor for disability and illness in the Harry Potter series (Rowling 1999, 2003, 2005, 2007) and Jatta (Hale 2009).