Re-masculating the Vampire: Conceptions of Sexuality and the Undead from Rossetti's Proserpine to Meyer's Cullen

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between sexuality and the undead from Victorian England to present day vampire narratives. Specifically, I examine the shift in the vampire narrative from the frightening Dracula to the extremely sexualized nature of vampires in the early twenty-first century. My results are concerned with the nature and exchange of fluids between vampire bodies and their victims (or lovers) and the power associated with that exchange. My conclusion implies that re-masculating the vampire is a return to a patriarchal dominant discourse promulgates the heteronormative status quo, unlike their early predecessors, which tend to undermine heteronormative sexuality. “Those Victorians always coupled sex with death,” writes Margaret Atwood in a recent short story published in The New Yorker. This particular comment comes at the conclusion of the story, after an elderly woman exacts fatal revenge on her childhood rapist, whom she encounters on a booze cruise for seniors. As Atwood notes, the Victorians were always coupling sex and death, and they had good reason: sex was scary. Without modern medicine, childbirth was risky and infant mortality was high. Further, diseases like syphilis and other venereal diseases posed an additional threat that could be fatal. The Victorian vampire is a spot-on literary manifestation of these fears. Penetration by the vampire could leave the victim dead. But the Victorian vampire is not solely a manifestation of sex and death. By disrupting the normative sexual discourse, it also reveals a fear of a lack of heteronormative sexuality. Examining the vampiric sexual bodies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, J. Sheridan La Fanu’s “Carmilla,” and three modern interpretations of the vampire: Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, the television show True Blood, and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, reveals a shift in the nature of the vampire narrative. The Victorians are not the only ones who are always coupling sex with death. The recent Twilight phenomena, shows (and books) like True Blood, and even modern horror movies like Friday the 13th (in which a young woman is staked through the breasts post-coitus by a set of deer antlers) seem to demonstrate that over 100 years later we are still coupling sex and death. One of the oldest couplings of sex and death, and one of literature’s first undead, is Persephone. Ovid appropriately titles it “The Rape of Proserpine.” Hades “swept her away, so impatient in passion. In panic, Proserpina desperately cried for her mother and friends [...] her dress had been torn at the top” (Ovid 5.395-400). Hades then takes her to the underworld where she eats the six pomegranate seeds that destine her to return every year to the underworld. This functional narrative explains that Ceres/Demeter (her mother) is so upset by the yearly loss of her daughter 1 Schuck: Conceptions of Sexuality and the Undead from Rossetti's Proserpine to Meyer's Cullen