Vampire Narratives Research Articles

Sullied Blood, Semen and Skin: Vampires and the Spectre of Miscegenation

This article explores the trend in contemporary vampire media to highlight racially-charged issues, demonstrating a consciousness of the way the vampire has been used in conjunction with racial stigmatisation. While the traditional figure of the vampire spoke strongly to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white American fears of miscegenation, I argue that some contemporary vampire narratives, such as Blade (1998), Underworld (2003), and True Blood (2008-), rewrite the figure in order to question and/or undo the link between ‘monstrosity' and racial otherness. Central to this task is not only the repositioning and characterisation of the vampire, but also considering that the female body was once perceived as the locus for racial purity that of the heroine.

Lovely Apparitions and Spiritualized Corpses Consumption, Medical Discourse, and Edgar Allan Poe's Female Vampire

Abstract This essay examines the associations of consumption with the disease of tuberculosis and vampirism, as well as the ways nineteenth-century medical discourse and vampire narratives facilitated the creation of a pathologized female body. Early nineteenth-century medical discourse and literature on consumption exalted the materiality of the consuming female body by transforming suffering into something beautiful, pure and spiritual, or even sexual. Poe's consuming brides, however, embodied the horrifying reality of the decomposing body that remains alive. In particular, Poe's “Ligeia” (1838) is an eloquent example of this tension between idealism and materiality. By reading Poe's vampire tales through the context of antebellum metaphysics and discourses on consumption, I argue that his unique treatment of female vampires simultaneously responds to, and deviates from, these topics. Influenced by Schelling's philosophy, Poe's vampire tales are shuddering examples of woman's materialized spirit. Following his own thread of gothic materialism, and moving away from American Transcendentalists, Poe offers ghastly visions of an absolutism that is at once distinctly feminine and horrific.

DRACULA'S BRAM STOKER: “THE WRONGS OF GROSVENOR SQUARE,” “BENGAL ROSES,” AND OTHER LOST PERIODICAL WRITINGS

Presented here for the first time since their publication over a century ago are two previously unknown, undocumented periodical writings by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). To be sure, this discovery underscores Richard Dalby's assertion, shared too by his co-author, William Hughes, in Bram Stoker: A Bibliography (2004), that “more of [Stoker's] ephemeral stories and articles may still be awaiting discovery in obscure newspapers and magazines” (“Quest for Bram Stoker” 12). But more still, for one like Stoker whose shorter literary works, outside of “Dracula's Guest” (1913), lie on the periphery of a legacy that for many offers little distinction from the world's greatest of vampire narratives, the necessity to examine his periodical writings is twofold. For one, it will aid in the task of elucidating Stoker-as-writer; but more critically, it will allow us to engage in dialogue with scholars like Richard Dalby, William Hughes, and others who call into question our insistent tunnel view of Dracula as Stoker's only legacy worthy of consideration.

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

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

From blood bonds to brand loyalties: Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls and Alan Ball’s True Blood

This article reads two contemporary vampire narratives, Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls and Alan Ball’s TV series True Blood (2009–2011), in terms of René Girard’s theory of mimetic violence and sacrificial crisis. Through complex representations of violence, bloodletting and, in the case of True Blood, the commoditization of blood and blood consumption, these works depict communities on the verge of sacrificial crisis, while also gesturing towards alternative economies of blood through nuanced ‘queerings’ of the vampire community.

“What Kept You So Long?”: Bullying’s Gray Zone and The Vampire’s Transgressive Justice in Let the Right One In

School bullying has been recognized only relatively recently by policy-makers, media and the courts as a serious and widespread social problem. But despite this recent notice, there has been no evidence that techniques adopted to stop bullying have led to anything more than modest success, implying that we need to do more work to unpack and theorize the nature of bullying. In this article, we consider a recent vampire narrative as a story about bullying. We offer an interpretation of this story via the theories of Claudia Card and Jacques Derrida, arguing that together this archive provides a more nuanced understanding of the kinds of damage inflicted by bullying than has been provided by realist or sociological accounts. In particular, it illuminates damage to the morality of the victim, to their soul, which is a kind of damage that has previously not been given great attention. It also highlights the ways in which practices of judgment can become very tangled when trying to resolve bullying situations, making these experiences resistant to the achievement of justice.

A Latter Day Eve: Reading Twilight through Paradise Lost

Abstract: Critics have demonstrated how Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga reinforces the notion that the appropriate roles for women are those of wife and mother. Viewed from a literary historical perspective, however, the Twilight saga can also be seen as reinterpretation of the Genesis story, told from a female point of view as a vampire narrative. Meyer's “New Eve” is part of a literary tradition that springs from Paradise Lost. Meyer's portrayal of the concept of free will and her connected depiction of the redemptive power of motherhood emphasizes elements in the Latter Day Saints tradition that present a more positive view of Eve, and by extension of “Woman,” than is common in traditional portrayals of Genesis.

<em>Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732––1933</em>, by Erik Butler

Reviewed by: Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933 David Punter (bio) Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933, by Erik Butler; pp. ix + 225. Rochester and Suffolk: Camden House, 2010, $75.00, £40.00. The last thirty years have seen a colossal amount of academic work on the vampire, ranging from revisionary writings about the classic vampire texts, including nineteenth-century ones, to book after book seeking to demonstrate the vampire's ongoing cultural force. Vampires, we are told, are all around us. This is evidenced by the plethora of new [End Page 756] fiction, film, and television centered on the vampire, from Anne Rice onward. The reasons advanced for this are many. Some say that an increase in the visibility of the predatory and eventually terminal processes of capitalism has given the motif of the vampire a new lease on life. Others argue that a fuller set of cultural identifications with the life and fate of the outlaw has provided us with new perspectives on a figure that, by definition, operates outside the conventional assumptions of a life otherwise based on the primacy of social and familial norms. Others side with William Wordsworth in his castigation of the taste for sensational thrills evidenced, for him, by the early gothic novel. Still others say that the processes of vampirism are nothing more than a real, if caricatured, version of the prevailing relations between the genders—and in the case of this argument, vampire fiction provides for more genders than the usual two. One of the crucial matters here concerns the relationship between vampires and history. This is a long-contested issue. In anthropological terms (and what science could be more vampiric than anthropology?), it is said that the underlying issue of rejuvenation through blood can be traced back through a number of ancient civilisations. The blood is indeed the life; if the ancient Egyptians had an imperfect understanding of the importance of the brain (a messy and largely indescribable piece of matter to be extracted after death through the nose), they certainly understood blood, albeit largely as a hindrance to mummification; practices of halal and kosher butchery reflect late adaptations of the anxiety of contamination which always accompanies what we have now come to call blood products. Has this to do with the haemophilia that has historically attended the need to conserve the purity of the so-called bloodline? A rather primitive medical approach to vampirism would say that it all has to do with the need to prevent clotting; more sophisticated ones have dealt with the question of blood in terms of menstruation, disease, and the timing of the cessation of bodily processes at the point of death. And as yet we have said nothing about the concept of aristocracy, of the perception that incest is allowable if it permits so-called purer blood. Think of the notion of royal blood, which one might fairly suspect would be a rather anaemic substance if ever discovered. And so to this book, and the questions that need to be answered: first, what of (bodily) substance does it add to our repertoire of explanations; and second, how does it increase or improve our sense of the cultural development of representations of vampirism through the ages, specifically in the period quaintly known as Victorian but perhaps better thought of as the long nineteenth century? What Erik Butler brings to the feast is a rare cross-cultural perspective. Beginning from an interestingly contentious search for vampiric origins in early eighteenth-century Serbia, he moves with ease among a range of European sources, principally British, French, and German. He also, and very convincingly, calls attention to the instability of genre that haunts vampire narratives: some of them, of course, fall more or less neatly within the conventional rubric of the tale of terror, but the vampire has also been used for a variety of specific and chiefly satirical ends. All these connect—or perhaps coagulate—in the vampire's relation to the representation of the state in a condition of corruption: as the state (and here the most compelling example...

"Between Memory and History": The Nineteenth Century in Jewelle Gomez's Vampire Novel <i>The Gilda Stories</i> and the TV Series <i>True Blood</i>

This article examines two American vampire narratives that depict the perspective and memories of a main character who is turned into a vampire in the US in the nineteenth century: Jewelle Gomez’s ...

The Aesthetic Afterlives of Mr. W. P.: Reanimating Pater in Twenty-First Century Fiction

The Vampire narrative is perhaps the most prevalent of all neo-Victorian modes in contemporary culture, presenting us with an uncanny image of historical reanimation and rebirth. As an immortal fig...

Dracula and the Eastern question: British and French vampire narratives of the nineteenth-century Near East

List of Maps Acknowledgements Note on Translations Introduction Polidori's The Vampyre and the Dangers of Philhellenism to Italian Liberation J.Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla and the Austro-Hungarian 'Ausgleich' (1878) Bram Stoker's Dracula and the Treaty of Berlin (1878) Bram Stoker's The Lady of the Shroud and the Bosnia Crisis (1908-9) The Vampires of Illyria: Nodier, Merimee and the French Occupation of the Dalmation Coast Jules Verne's Le Chateau des Carpathes (1892) and the Romans of Transylvania Conclusion Appendix: Translations from Merimee's La Guzla Notes Short Chronology of Relevant Events Bibiliography Index