Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933

Abstract

Reviewed by: Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933 Thomas W. Kniesche Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933. By Erik Butler. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2010. ix + 225 pages. $75.00. The purpose of Erik Butler's book is to provide "a coherent, historically informed theory of the vampire" and "to account for the logic underlying the vampire's many and conflicting forms" (vii). At first glance, this seems to be a lofty goal for such a relatively slim volume, but the author is able to cover a lot of ground. Literary and non-literary texts by English, French, and German authors and films from the Weimar period are used to shed light on the figure of the vampire. The last chapter adds Hollywood movies, the TV show Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, the novels of Anne Rice, and [End Page 112] other monsters, such as cyborgs and zombies, to the mix. The historical framework indicated in the subtitle hints at his major thesis. According to Butler, the vampire is an eminently modern phenomenon: it owes its far-reaching impact and ongoing fascination to processes of change and transformation, to the crises that are constantly generated by modernization and the uncertainties and upheavals in its wake. Butler dismisses the countless pre-modern examples of vampire stories and myths of similar beings that are a staple of many diverse cultures and maintains that "real" vampires did not exist before the 1700s (5). In his introduction, Butler calls his methodological approach to the topic of vampirism a "[c]ultural teratology" (1) and defines the term as "the science of phenomena that contravene the rules of regularity and stability [ . . . ]" (8). He lists Carlo Ginzburg, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and René Girard as his sources of inspiration (8-9). He also freely admits his "debt to psychoanalysis" and states that "in large part, the study reads works as imaginary projections" (viii). His readings are indeed informed by Freudian and, to a limited extent, Lacanian concepts, but the study does not provide any in-depth discussion of psychoanalytic thinking. Referring to Foucault's Madness and Civilization, Butler argues that monstrosity is that against which man defines himself and his normalcy. He then goes on to claim that the vampire is a different kind of monster: by shape-shifting all the time, the vampire does not provide a steady monstrosity that would allow "us" to define ourselves. "Instead of giving us a stable enemy, the vampire belongs to multiple worlds, including our own. It therefore reflects an anxiety that we, perhaps, do not know at all who 'we' are" (9). The first of three parts of the book is devoted to the beginning of the modern discourse on vampires in the early 18th century and to the image of the vampire in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Chapter One discusses early reports of vampirism in Eastern Europe and shows that vampirism was invented as a scholarly discourse during a time of crisis and confusion, brought about by secularization and metaphysical uncertainty. Butler also stresses the political dimension of the belief in vampires and claims that "Serbian vampirism suggested the vulnerability of the House of Habsburg" (36). The second chapter highlights the vampire as a means of political satire. According to this line of reasoning, in the late 18th and early 19th century, the vampire was "a uniquely dynamic allegory for the depersonalizing aspects of modernization" (54). The Romantic vampire—in the works of Shelley, Baudelaire, Brentano, and Heine—is, according to Butler, an extension of the writer's "sense of dislocation and alienation resulting from political transformations" (63). The second part of the study, entitled "England and France," looks at the 19th century vampire and features Polidori's vampire Lord Ruthven and Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. What is new about these two vampires, according to Butler, is that they represent the fluidity of modern class relations. Although Lord Ruthven may have been modeled after Lord Byron (88), the former also bears traits of a "factory owner" (92). Butler notes that Bram Stoker's Dracula establishes himself in London via "property deeds...