Brigitte Boudreau: Sexing the Book: The Paratexts of Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Journal of Cuneiform Studies 13 (2011)

[Brigitte Boudreau is a Ph.D. candidate in the département d’études anglaises at l’Université de Montréal, where she is examining  representations of gender and sexuality in Bram Stoker’s works. She has previously contributed to this journal (2009) and has also published in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (2008) and Ol3Media (2010).]

“In the . . . years since he [Dracula] was created, and especially in recent time, I 

 think that he has been kinkisized.”

(Frank Langella)

In the recent past, Dracula, the classic vampire opus by Bram Stoker, has experienced a literary revival. Long ignored by literary scholars after it hit the silver screen at the start of the twentieth century, this work of ‘great gusto’[1] is slowly creeping its way into the hearts of mainstream audiences with an undying appeal. The renewed interest in the figure of the vampire is evidenced by pop culture’s unquenchable thirst for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga and Alan Ball’s True Blood television series, to name a couple. The awakening interest in this iconic monster has in turn led the father of the modern vampire—the little known Bram Stoker¾to be given new consideration, ceaselessly intriguing academics and aficionados alike. In contemporary examinations of Stoker’s eponymous text, much has been discussed, yet there remains many areas of interest that have yet to ‘come out of the coffin’,[2] so to speak. One such area is a paratextual analysis of Stoker’s Dracula, an exploration of which leads to a more stereoscopic perspective of this fin de siècle Gothic masterpiece. Indeed, a paratextual understanding of Stoker’s Dracula is an intriguing yet understudied facet of Dracula Studies, revealing how the subversive sensuality of the undead Count has paralleled the equality sexualized representations of his Anglo-Irish creator. Gérald Genette’s concept of paratexts as ‘thresholds of interpretation’ provides a helpful theoretical lens through which to examine this late Victorian work. In particular, an analysis of the spatial paratexts, that is the peritexts and epitexts of Stoker’s vampire tale, reveal interesting findings. Through a paratextual exploration of Dracula, this paper displays how every facet of Stoker’s creation¾including all that comes before the text and all that emerges thereafter¾has ultimately come to be understood as reflective upon the libidinal life of Bram Stoker himself.

Jennifer Miles: Healing or Horrifying? Portrayals of Victorian Medicine in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Journal of Dracula Studies 14 (2012)

[Jennifer Miles recently received her M.A. in English from the University of Louisville. She hopes to continue researching the role of medical experimentation and women’s rights in vampire literature, particularly Victorian fiction.]

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has been analyzed from multiple perspectives, with the role of science in the novel receiving a good deal of attention, especially the issue of evolution and fears about degeneration.  For instance, Victorian studies scholar Carol Senf has examined the theme of scientific control in Dracula, arguing that fears about scientific classification and evolution echo throughout the text[1].  Scholars have also examined the emphasis Stoker places upon scientific technology, shown through the characters’ use of then cutting-edge tools like blood transfusions[2].  However, scholars have rarely touched upon the medical issues Dracula raises.  Perhaps one of the most interesting underlying themes in the novel concerns animal research in the late nineteenth century.  This article aims to show how Dracula depicts the dark side of animal vivisection, first illustrating how the characters of Dr. Seward and Dr. Van Helsing resemble typical nineteenth-century vivisection researchers, then reading these characters’ staking of Lucy Westenra as analogous to a vivisection.  Through the characterization and staking, one may see the novel taking an anti-vivisectionist stance, depicting the cruelty the practice inflicted upon animals and warning that animal research may start society down a slippery slope toward medical experimentation on humans.

Beginning in the 1870s, a sharp rise in the number of animal vivisections performed in Britain touched off debates about ethical practices in physiological research (Bodice 216).  As medical historian Stewart Richards notes, at this time vivisection was “a term widely used to describe almost any procedure involving breach of an animal’s skin … but which might with greater justification be restricted to experiments involving discrete dissection for the purpose of interfering with the function of underlying structure” (39).  In other words, individuals involved in the debate about vivisection most often used the word to describe invasive surgical procedures that caused serious injury or death to the animal.  The publication of a Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory (1873), a well-known textbook for beginning research students, revealed that many vivisections had been carried out without anesthesia (Richards 33, 41).  These procedures included exposing the nerves of frogs and rabbits and electrically shocking them to stimulate reflexes, gradually boiling live frogs to observe reflex actions (the authors note the container employed should be covered with netting, as the frog “makes violent attempts to escape”), and slowly suffocating dogs to observe respiration (Burdon-Sanderson et al. 252-255, 411, 330-331).  As a result of experiments like these, anti-vivisectionists began to clamor for more humane treatment for the animal test subjects (Richards 35), while experimental researchers attempted to justify procedures on the grounds that the experiments could result in medical breakthroughs for human diseases (Mayer 400; Richards 50-51).

Jorg Waltje: Filming Dracula: Vampires, Genre, and Cinematography

Journal of Dracula Studies 2 (2000)

[Jörg Waltje PhD is Director of the Language Resource Center at Ohio University. His academic interests also include instructional technologies and Computer-Assisted Language Learning.]

On a Tuesday morning Katje discovered that Dr. Weyland was a vampire, like the one in the movie she had seen last week. (Charnas 3-4, emphasis added)

Films that belong to the same genre are like the links of a chain, yet any generic type of film will also mark its difference from its predecessors.  These films remain aware of their heritage and draw on earlier examples by modifying and reinterpreting certain aspects that are generically coded, with differing results. Accordingly, Ken Gelder points out:

Each new vampire film engages in a process of familiarisation and defamiliarisation, both interpellating viewers who already “know” about vampires from the movies (and elsewhere), and providing enough points of difference (in the narrative, in the “look” of the vampire, and so on) for newness to maintain itself. (86)

                        As I intend to work out in this article, films of a particular genre have the ability to do more than merely propagate received motifs and structures.  They also comment on the art form of film itself, and how it has changed over a period of time. An analysis of stylistic and technical devices entails information not only about the progress of cinematography, but also about the self-awareness of film as a medium that makes use of a certain apparatus – an apparatus of which the audience is generally kept unaware in other filmic genres.^[1] I will look closely at three vampire films, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and in an analysis of their filmic techniques work out how the two earlier films constituted what was then to become a genre, and how the structure of genre is closely related to the parameters of myth. My thesis can be summarized as follows: Stylistic/formal features that were developed in Nosferatu and Dracula with their combined influence molded the vampire films to come and found a preliminary culmination point in Coppola’s treatment of the Dracula subject. I will focus on the depiction of the vampire through gestures and make-up, lighting and editing techniques as well as special effects and framing. Lastly, I will point out how vampire films and fictions, like myths, mirror the structure underlying our psychic apparatus.  The fact that Dracula is a prototype of myth as well as an ideal representative of genre is responsible for our conscious and unconscious attraction to the figure of the vampire.

BULGARIAN VAMPIRE PROBABLY WAS A PIRATE

According to Bulgarian archaeologists and historians, the skeleton found at Sozopol most likely belonged to a noble named Krivich who lived in the 14th century. The skeleton was found buried with an iron spike thrust into his chest.

http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=140315

David F Hallett - J Robin Martin: Overlooked Pearls: The Blue Öyster Cult and the Vampire in Popular Music

Journal of Dracula Studies 1 (1999)

[David F Hallett is currently a Doctoral candidate in English at the University of Ottawa. J Robin Martin, a Canadian TSD member, writes regularly about film. Both took undergraduate degrees at Memorial University of Newfoundland.]

“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below.”

— John Dryden, All for Love (prologue)

      Perhaps the most dominant gothic literary motif is that of the vampire.  Emerging in the 19th century, the vampire, or the Undead, has survived to saturate all media of popular culture in the 20th century. The Undead, in an evolving mythology, continue to stalk the pages of contemporary fiction and the screens of our cinemas, even materializing like Stoker’s Dracula as “specks floating in the rays” (90) on the pixels of our televisions. Rock music too, as much a creation of the 20th century as the literary vampire was of the 19th, has been bitten by the lure and lore of the Undead, not only adding its own variations to the mythos but also reflecting the perception of the vampire in other forms of mass media, both critiquing and drawing inspiration from it. 

      The Blue Öyster Cult is conspicuous by its absence from the existing surveys of images of the vampire in rock music. Amongst its large oeuvre, the Blue Öyster Cult has a number of vampire-related songs -- some explicit, many more oblique. The band has, over a career nearing thirty years, consistently explored in their lyrics what comparative literature specialist Roger Shattuck calls forbidden knowledge. Their songs of the Undead form part of a larger canvas that demonstrates humanity’s capacity for darkness. Their literary antecedents include the foundations of the Gothic, with direct allusions to Shelley’s Frankenstein, and contemporary speculative fiction, including actual collaboration with writers such as Michael Moorcock, Eric Von Lustbader, John Shirley and Jim Carroll. Songs from the band’s canon have found their way to the screen in such horror films as Halloween (1978), Heavy Metal (1981), Stephen King’s The Stand (1994), The Frighteners (1995)  and the 1992 feature Bad Channels—for which the band wrote the original score.  In addition to writing for the movies, the band has also frequently written about them, displaying a fascination with pop culture and the way in which human attitudes are affected and reflected by our chosen entertainment.

Lindsay Dearinger: Playing Vampire Games: Rules and Play in Varney the Vampire and Dracula

Journal of Dracula Studies 14 (2012)

[Lindsay Dearinger received her M.A. in English in 2011 and is currently an Adjunct Instructor at the University of Central Oklahoma. Her research interests include Anglo-Jewish authors of the nineteenth century, as well as representations of vampires and animals in literature. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in English.]

  “Great Scott! Is this a game?”

“It is.”[1]

In most vampire narratives, vampires must engage in play to distract, divert, or mislead humans for the purposes of self-preservation. Vampire stories also incorporate play as it relates to games and rules. Vampires and humans alike must play by sets of rules, and the rules depend upon the game being played. To analyze the use of play in vampire narratives, I look to the earliest English language vampire-as-genre stories: Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood, the prototype for vampire stories since its appearance in the 1840s, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, perhaps the most famous vampire narrative.[2] Relying on Derrida’s conceptualization of play, this essay examines play as it relates to the structure of the texts and the characters’ relationships to the rules of the vampire game in order to determine subversion of the “serious vampire” archetype.

Derrida’s Concept of Play and Decentralization

My analysis of play in Dracula and Varney requires an explication of Derrida’s notion of play and the decentralization of conceptuality. In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida relates the history of the concept of structure; he considers structure in terms of before and after a rupture, or the interruption of classical thought with the onset of structuralism. Derrida explains that, before the rupture, structure has been “neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin” (278). The center, which “grounds” the structure, limits play.

Katherine Ramsland: Vampire Crime

Journal of Dracula Stufies 2 (2000)

[Dr. Katherine Ramsland has published fifteen books, including a biography of Anne Rice, The Vampire Companion, and Piercing the Darkness (a journalistic expose of the vampire subculture).]

While most of the vampire subculture these days is a benign form of role-playing, there have been cases of people who were inspired by the predatory image to kill. To their minds, the vampire mythos provides a framework that inspires and even licenses certain types of violent behaviors.  Although this bloodthirsty impulse reaches back centuries and crosses cultures, I want to examine the mythology’s influence on three cases in recent American culture: Roderick Ferrell, James Riva, and Richard Trenton Chase. I will take one case at a time and then discuss how they attach to the vampire frame.

     

A Brief History of the Vampire and Crime

     

Since primitive time, humans have been known to drink blood, often in religious rituals. However, some sanguinary acts had nothing to do with ceremony. In 300 B. C. a Buddhist monk drank the blood of swine to cure an illness said to be incurable -- and it worked. Warriors of many cultures drank the blood of their enemies to affirm their conquest and enhance their power.  Some even did it as a communion of friendship with their victim. In contrast, the compulsion to drink blood is generally part of a sexual perversion called hematomania. For example, Peter Kurten, “the Vampire of Dusseldorf,” felt the buildup of erotic tension before he attacked a victim and achieved release only after violence. It seems that blood is a complex symbol that inspires both healing and destruction.

                        A quick list of some who drank blood in a pathological manner includes Gilles de Rais, Sergeant François Bertrand, Fritz Haarmann, and the aforementioned Peter Kurten. There are many lesser known “vampires” as well, both male and female.^[1] Some merely kidnap or drug someone to get a taste of blood, others murder.

Jörg Waltje: Filming Dracula: Vampires, Genre, and Cinematography

Journal of Dracula Studies 2 (2000)

[Jörg Waltje PhD is Director of the Language Resource Center at Ohio University. His academic interests also include instructional technologies and Computer-Assisted Language Learning.]

On a Tuesday morning Katje discovered that Dr. Weyland was a vampire, like the one in the movie she had seen last week. (Charnas 3-4, emphasis added)

Films that belong to the same genre are like the links of a chain, yet any generic type of film will also mark its difference from its predecessors.  These films remain aware of their heritage and draw on earlier examples by modifying and reinterpreting certain aspects that are generically coded, with differing results. Accordingly, Ken Gelder points out:

Each new vampire film engages in a process of familiarisation and defamiliarisation, both interpellating viewers who already “know” about vampires from the movies (and elsewhere), and providing enough points of difference (in the narrative, in the “look” of the vampire, and so on) for newness to maintain itself. (86)

                        As I intend to work out in this article, films of a particular genre have the ability to do more than merely propagate received motifs and structures.  They also comment on the art form of film itself, and how it has changed over a period of time. An analysis of stylistic and technical devices entails information not only about the progress of cinematography, but also about the self-awareness of film as a medium that makes use of a certain apparatus – an apparatus of which the audience is generally kept unaware in other filmic genres.^[1] I will look closely at three vampire films, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and in an analysis of their filmic techniques work out how the two earlier films constituted what was then to become a genre, and how the structure of genre is closely related to the parameters of myth. My thesis can be summarized as follows: Stylistic/formal features that were developed in Nosferatu and Dracula with their combined influence molded the vampire films to come and found a preliminary culmination point in Coppola’s treatment of the Dracula subject. I will focus on the depiction of the vampire through gestures and make-up, lighting and editing techniques as well as special effects and framing. Lastly, I will point out how vampire films and fictions, like myths, mirror the structure underlying our psychic apparatus.  The fact that Dracula is a prototype of myth as well as an ideal representative of genre is responsible for our conscious and unconscious attraction to the figure of the vampire.

Nancy F. Rosenberg: Desire and Loathing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

 

[Nancy Rosenberg earned a B.A. in Journalism from Radford University in Virginia. She is presently completing her M.A. in Humanities at Marymount University, Arlington VA.]

 

In addition to being a Victorian Gothic masterpiece, Bram Stoker’s Dracula mirrors the gender and sexual anxieties as well as the cultural fears of the late nineteenth century. Conflicting gender roles present in the novel include the fear of male penetration and extreme male bonding, the mothering instinct and the New Woman, and the logical versus the hysterical male. The novel’s sexual anxiety is revealed through three primary scenes of sexual suppression and release. The character of Dracula not only represents the cultural fear of a foreign threat to British shores, but also serves as the novel’s catalyst of sexual desire. While Dracula can be read merely as an excellent adventure tale of good versus evil, the novel has as many layers as its author. A discussion of the role of gender in Dracula commonly brings up the question of whether or not Irish author and Lyceum Theatre manager Bram Stoker was a misogynist. His biographer Barbara Belford aptly equates him with matryoshki, the Russian nesting dolls comprising layers which, in Stoker’s case, she says lead to an amorphous center (xi).

      Dracula is at its core a story of male bonding. As Mina (Murray) Harker writes in her journal: “the world seems full of good men – even if there are monsters in it” (198). The good men that she refers to are the novel’s gang of five vampire killers: Professor Abraham Van Helsing, Dr. John Seward, Quincey Morris, Arthur Holmwood (Lord Godalming) and Jonathan Harker. Dr. Seward’s mentor, Prof. Van Helsing, is the leader of this merry band of hunters. Dracula is the clear monster of the novel, but Mina’s use of the plural form suggests the additional meaning of the “monsters” of the late nineteenth century, among them the emerging New Woman, homosexuality, immigration, syphilis, the theory of evolution, and the perception of an overall decay of traditional Victorian values. In terms of Sigmund Freud’s version of the original male‑bonding experience (presented in Totem and Taboo), Dracula is the primal father of the novel, and the five male characters are the brothers. The good men of Dracula become comrades against evil, and consistently refer to one another as “friend.” Van Helsing is Seward’s mentor and Arthur becomes like a son to the professor as well. Van Helsing says to Arthur: “I have grown to love you -‑ yes, dear boy, to love you” (153).

      Mina and her friend Lucy Westenra are the women of Dracula upon whom the men project the ideals of Victorian womanhood. Upon meeting Mina, Van Helsing is inspired to say that she has “given me hope ... that there are good women still left to make life happy – good women, whose lives and whose truths may make good lesson for the children that are to be” (166). Analogous to Wendy and the lost boys of J. M. Barrie’s early twentieth century Peter Pan, Dracula’s Mina is expected to use her mothering instinct to guide the men. The lost boys cry “O Wendy lady, be our mother” (73) and then immediately proceed to build her a house, while Mina similarly states as she comforts Arthur that “We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above the smaller matters when the mother‑spirit is invoked” (203). (The 1987 vampire movie, The Lost Boys, also correlates the immortality of the vampire to Peter Pan and the lost boys’ desire to never grow up.)  In the same vein, British social critic and Stoker contemporary John Ruskin writes of woman’s influence in Sesame and Lilies that “it is a guiding, not a determining function” (86). We see this acted out in Dracula because, like Lucy, Mina is susceptible to Dracula’s corruption and it is the good brave men of the novel who set out to save her. Further, in desiring Mina, Dracula is doubly evil: he attempts to defile the designated mother of the novel, the one who must guide with her moral hand.

R J Frost: “A Race of Devils”: Frankenstein, Dracula, and Science Fiction

Journal of Dracula Studies3 (2001)

[Dr Robert James Frost studied at the Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham University, England. Since 1986 he has worked as a Lecturer in a London College where he has taught modules on Frankenstein and Dracula.]

Victor Frankenstein has hidden himself away on one of the remote Orkney Islands, off the northeast coast of Scotland, where he is on the verge of creating a second monster – a She-creature. He has been working on the project for some time since he made his promise to the Creature to make him a mate, but now he is having second thoughts:

Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. (160)

An interesting idea for a Science Fiction sequel perhaps. But Mary Shelley’s novel takes a different direction when Victor destroys the unfinished She-creature and prepares himself instead to face the Creature’s wrath.

Many of the motifs in Frankenstein (1818) resonate not only in Dracula, the most significant monster novel of the late nineteenth century, but also in the fin-de-siècle classic SF tale, H G Wells’s The War of The Worlds (1898). But first we need to examine how Mary Shelley deals with scientific ideas in Frankenstein and establishes the general outline that helps shape the later texts.

In terms of genre, Frankenstein is generally considered a Gothic Horror novel. Indeed, it clearly owes much to the Gothic literary tradition of the eighteenth century  dating back to Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). But to pigeon-hole Shelley’s novel in this way is to understate how it anticipates  Science Fiction. In Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss argues the case for Mary Shelley as the first writer of SF. Now whether we agree that Shelley was the first, and not Swift for instance, is irrelevant here. Later SF writers such as Wells clearly exploited the model of Frankenstein, including the horror elements, in their own work. 

Candence Malhiet Robillard: Hopelessly Devoted: What Twilight Reveals about Love and Obsession

Electronic Journal VirginiaTech, vol. 37, num.1 (2009)

 

Candence Malhiet Robillard is a doctoral student in the department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Practice at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Her research interests include the intersection of popular culture and schooling and the ways in which students navigate successfully through both worlds. She has taught high school English for the last 13 years.

 

In the fall semester of 2007, I was living every English teacher’s dream. My best students, my worst students, my serious students, my most flighty students were absorbed, engrossed, virtually inhaling thick, grown-up-looking books. Every day during our silent reading time, they would turn page after page. When silent reading time ended, I allowed five more minutes, let them linger over that last paragraph while I waited patiently at the front of the class to begin our day’s lesson. In one of my honors classes, I counted seven students reading the books that had become a phenomenon. They had intriguing titles: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse (Meyer). Their covers were slick, glossy invitations designed in starkly contrasting black and white and red. One of them even featured nearly glowing hands cradling an apple, just begging a would-be reader to take a bite. I bit.

The Twilight Phenomenon

Twilight follows a predictable pattern. A female protagonist, Bella, moves to a new town, Forks, Washington, to live with her father and becomes instantly smitten with the most handsome and most mysterious boy in her new school, Edward. The twist? Edward and his equally beautiful siblings are vampires. When she is alone with Edward for the first time in the sunlight, Bella sees him in his sunlit, glittering glory. At the same time, he reveals his struggle against the primal desire to kill her, as well as the superhuman speed and strength that would allow him to do so. “Common sense [tells her she] should be terrified,” but Bella finds herself “relieved to finally understand” the cause of Edward’s mysterious, often aloof behavior toward her (Meyer, Twilight 272).

Later in the same chapter, Bella and Edward “declare” themselves to each other (Meyer, Twilight 274), and Bella decides that she will give up her humanity to live in Edward’s world. Forever. Surprisingly, she never wavers after making this decision. Not only does she refuse to consider any other boy who falls for her (and they all do), but she also withdraws from her father and her new friends in favor of Edward’s company. Moreover, Bella doesn’t consider the beautiful parts of being human long enough to absorb how gruesome and dark and lonely Edward’s existence is.

Nicole Rabin: True Blood: The Vampire as a Multiracial Critique on Post-Race Ideology

Journal of Dracula Studies12 (2010)

[Nicole Myoshi Rabin is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.  She received her M.A. from Clark University in Worcester, MA.  Her research interests include popular culture, multiracial/mixed-race studies, and contemporary ethnic literature of the U.S. ]

            In the Western consciousness there has been a long tradition of the associations between race and evil.  According to Celia R. Daileader, in her Introduction to Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee, “Before black men were lynched for alleged sex with white women, white women were burned alive for alleged sex with a devil described as black” (1).  Daileader calls attention to the historical relationship between blackness, sex, and evil that predates the literal transmission of this discourse into “race relations.” Over time this relationship has found its way into many racist fantasies, particularly those manifested within the stories of the horror genre—including vampire tales.  Although race has only begun to be theorized in relation to Dracula, one of the most well known vampire novels published in 1897, there has been some important recent work theorizing the Count within Homi Bhabha’s category of the “not quite/not white” (Daileader 97).  As John Allen Stevenson notes, “the novel [Dracula] insistently—indeed, obsessively—defines the vampire not as a monstrous father but as a foreigner, as someone who threatens and terrifies precisely because he is an outsider” (139).  Dracula, the Romanian Count, is seen in opposition to the rest of the British characters—including the main object of his desire, Mina.  The predatory sexual threat of Dracula is a common racist fantasy where racialized men exude “predatory sexual desire” that “endangers white womanhood and consequently threatens the racial purity of white [American] society” (Hamako).  In most instances, this threat to racial purity manifests itself in the fear of clear racial miscegenation and a necessary drive to eradicate the one attempting to perform this racial contamination—the vampire. 

            Over the past two years there has been a resurgence of vampire stories in U.S. popular culture. These new vampire stories conveyed on-screen —True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and Twilight—promote specific ideologies about race, class, and gender that are specific to our cultural moment. In “Color Blindness: An Obstacle to Racial Justice?” Charles A. Gallagher states that: “since the mid-1990s there has been a change in the way race, race relations, and racial hierarchy have been depicted in the mass media…the media now provides Americans with an almost endless supply of overt and coded depictions of a multiracial, multicultural society that has finally transcended the problem of race” (109).  As examples of contemporary media, these new vampire shows also promote a society “beyond” race; so, with the historical tradition between race and vampires, what happens when the victims of vampires—in these new vampire tales—are no longer racially homogenous?  Can the vampire still be read as racially other?  I argue that the vampire of these contemporary stories actually becomes a symbol of multiracial identity as it is seen within the multicultural discourse that pervades American popular consciousness.  For the purpose of this paper, I will be focusing specifically on issues of race and sexuality (only as they are concerned with racial purity) in the first season of HBO’s series True Blood—encapsulated within the first two episodes, “Strange Love” and “The First Taste.”  While the series deals with a greater range of issues—gay rights, American slavery, terrorism, war, religion, etc.—these issues remain outside the scope of this particular paper.  I hope that these issues will be theorized in subsequent work on the series, but for this paper I will have to limit my consideration to the ways in which these beginning episodes of True Blood portrays a multicultural society on screen that undercuts the reality of still pervasive racist currents in our own society; how the show creates a multiracial identity that is at once feared and championed within the American society; and, how the show while depicting multiculturalism actually works to subtly critique this ideology.

Montague Summers: THE VAMPIRE'S KITH AND KIN

Amongst the elaborate demonology of Babylonia and Assyria the vampire had a prominent place. From the earliest times Eastern races have held the belief in the existence of dark and malignant powers which is, we cannot doubt, naturally implanted in the heart of man; and which it remains for the ignorance and agnosticism of a later day to deny. The first inhabitants of Babylonia, the Sumerians, recognized three distinct classes of evil spirits, any one of whom was always ready to attack those who by accident or negligence laid themselves open to these invasions. In particular was a man who had wandered far from his fellows into some haunted spot liable to these onsets.

Of the Babylonian evil spirits the first class were those ghosts who were unable to rest in their graves and so perpetually walked up and down the face of the earth; the second was composed of those entities who were half human and half demon; whilst the third class were the devils, pure spirits of the same nature as the gods, fiends who bestrode the whirlwind and the sand-storm, who afflicted mankind with plagues and pestilence. There were many subdivisions, and in fact there are few evil hierarchies so detailed as the Assyrian cosmorama of the spiritual world.

The evil spirit known as Utukku was a phantom or ghost, generally but perhaps not invariably of a wicked and malevolent kind since it was he whom the necromancers raised from the dead. In an ancient Epic when the hero, Gilgamesh, prays to the god Nergal to restore his friend Ea-bani the request is granted, for the ground gapes open and the Utukku of Ea-Bani appears "like the wind"; that is, a transparent spectre in the human shape of Ea-bani, who converses with Gilgamesh.

The Ekimmu, or Departed Spirit, was the soul of a dead person which for some reason could find no rest, and wandered over the earth lying in wait to seize upon man. Especially did it lurk in deserted and ill-omened places. It is difficult to say exactly in what respect the Ekimmu differed from the Utukku, but it is interesting to inquire into the causes owing to which a person became an Ekimmu. Here we shall find many parallels with the old Greek beliefs concerning those duties to the dead that are paramount, and for which a man must risk his life and more.

Margaret L Carter: Revampings of Dracula in Contemporary Fiction

Journal of Dracula Studies3 (2001)

[Margaret L Carter, author of The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography and editor of Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, has recently published Different Blood: The Vampire as Alien (www.xlibris.com/DifferentBlood.html).]

Although Count Dracula is slain in the final pages of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, throughout the subsequent century he has enjoyed innumerable resurrections in film and literature. Many of these incarnations might be unrecognizable to Stoker as the character he created. Fictional treatments of Dracula, especially those that have appeared within the past thirty years, reflect changes in attitudes toward vampires in general. In contrast to the characterization of vampires in Stoker’s own fiction and that of his contemporaries, in recent decades various authors have rendered these “monsters” sympathetically.

                        Earlier nineteenth-century works do contain a few hints of sympathy for their vampire characters.  They inspire sympathy or attraction, however, despite their inhuman nature rather than because of it. They still must be destroyed. The eponymous monster in Varney the Vampyre (1847) displays remorse for his bloodthirsty past and finally commits suicide by leaping into a volcano.  Carmilla, in J Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella (1872), presents herself initially as victim rather than predator, and the narrator, Laura, finds her attractive, yet Carmilla’s existence nevertheless ends in violent destruction. Nina Auerbach characterizes pre-Stoker vampires as “not demon lovers or snarling aliens ... but singular friends” in a literary period when “it was a privilege to walk with a vampire” (13). This “sinister, superior sharer” enjoys an “intimate intercourse with mortals,” even though a “dangerously close” one (13). 

                        Auerbach views Stoker’s novel as introducing a new quality of alienation into the portrayal of the undead; his vampires “blend with mortals only at intervals” and display a “soullessness” that “bars them from human space” (105). The text of Dracula strongly implies that the soulless, bloodsucking revenant is a different individual from the dead person who was put into the grave.  Dr Seward emphatically refuses to identify the night-prowling Lucy with the woman he loved. “Is this really Lucy’s body,” he asks, “or only a demon in her shape?” and he labels the revenant “the foul Thing which had taken Lucy’s shape without her soul” (260).  Both Lucy and Dracula himself, after their destruction, take on a peaceful expression that seems to indicate the return of the “true” soul after the expulsion of an invading vampiric demon.  Mina anticipates the “joy” Dracula will experience “when he, too, is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality” (367).

                        Some of the very traits that made vampires monstrous to readers of the 1890s, oddly, account for their appeal to the mindset of the late twentieth century. Many critics have noted the revulsion with which Stoker’s male characters regard the blatant sexuality of the vampirized Lucy. This “voluptuous” quality (to use one of Stoker’s favorite words), shared by Dracula’s brides, does not extend to the Count himself. Instead, he exemplifies blasphemous defiance of religion (having studied, according to Van Helsing, at the Scholomance, the Devil’s school) and ruthless exercise of power. Carol Senf points out, in the vampire fiction of the post-1970 period, an “increasing emphasis on the positive aspects of the vampire’s eroticism and on his or her right to rebel against the stultifying constraints of society” (163).  Combined with the frequent appearance of literary vampires who “are less bloodthirsty than ordinary human beings” (6), this stress on the “positive” dimension of traits considered negative by nineteenth-century authors and readers produces attractive, even admirable bloodsuckers. One of the earliest illustrations of this trend appeared in the television series Dark Shadows (1966-71) with Barnabas Collins, who began life (or undeath) as a Gothic villain and grew into a popular and sympathetic character. Portrayal of Dracula as a character in popular fiction has shifted focus along with these changes in writers’ and audiences’ perception of vampirism.

Jenna Harris: A View from the Classroom: Why Dracula no longer frightens us

Journal of Dracula Studies3 (2001)

[Jenna Harris is completing a B.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is currently working on her first fantasy novel, In the Semblance of Truth. We offer this as an undergraduate student’s commentary on Stoker’s novel and invite responses.]

“What I saw appalled me.  I felt my hair rise like bristles on the back of my neck, and my heart seemed to stand still.” (Dracula 246)        

I tremble at horror stories as much as the next person, but as a twenty-first century reader, I did not have this reaction to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This classic horror novel fell completely flat on me, the moments of suspense or horror seeming infrequent and insignificant. How could this have happened?

            That which causes horror, the feeling of the uncanny, has not changed. Sigmund Freud maintains that uncanny experiences occur “when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (244). This happens “either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (249). In other words, we get scared when something threatening that we didn’t think possible occurs in our everyday life. The threatening object usually involves something that we repressed as children or else a superstition in which we no longer believe. Applying this to literature, Freud notes that when “the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality, ... he accepts as well all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story” (250). This is why Stoker’s novel was able to frighten his contemporaries more than it does modern readers. The causes of horror have not changed; time has merely diminished the verisimilitude of the original novel, and thus lessened its uncanny effect. For evidence of this, let us consider the narrative format, setting, contemporary allusions and cultural anxieties embedded in the text.

            In 1897, Dracula’s realistic format enhanced the horror of the uncanny. Stoker presents a series of journal entries and newspaper clippings “placed in sequence” where “all needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact” (5). Victorian legal courts used such journal entries and newspaper clippings as evidence in their trials. To Victorian readers, the novel was similar to a real case file in which they could examine the evidence like detectives searching for a murderer. The world of the text seemed to adhere to the rules that governed their reality.

Lisa Lampert-Weissig: Mormon Female Gothic: Blood, Birth, and the Twilight Saga

Journal of Dracula Studies13 (2011)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

[Lisa Lampert-Weissig is Professor of Literature at UCSD, where she teaches a course on vampire narrative. Her publications include Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (2004) and Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2010). She is currently at work on a new book: “Dracula’s Pulse: Vampires, Science and the Rise of Medievalism.”]

Among the many critiques of the Twilight saga is the complaint that its vampires and their exploits are too sanitized: “Real Vampires Don’t Sparkle” is a catchphrase across the web.[1]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Stephenie Meyer’s vampires, with their beautiful appearance, sweet smell, and “vegetarian” tendencies are, indeed, a far cry from Stoker’s Count Dracula and many other literary vampires.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              To find blood spilling freely in the Twilight saga, one must read Breaking Dawn. In this fourth and final novel, Meyer provides birth scenes grisly enough that their inclusion in the novel’s film adaptation has been subject to much scrutiny and debate (Crowther).

This essay will turn to that moment in the Twilight saga where the blood flows, examining the importance of birth and motherhood in Breaking Dawn through the lens of Ellen Moers’ influential term, the Female Gothic. A key source text for Moers is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frankenstein, like Meyer’s Twilight saga, presents what Moers calls a “birth myth.” Both Meyer and Shelley explore the relationship between creating life and creating art, the moral implications of creating new life, the horrors that can be found in this creation, and the potential monstrosity of offspring.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

But what in Shelley’s novel is a dark exploration of these elements becomes in Meyer’s a portrayal of creation as redemption. Shelley’s novel presents a world cruelly ungoverned, where a creator abandons his creation, which then goes on to murder the innocent. Meyer’s imaginative frame is in keeping with the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which she has publically acknowledged as a major influence in her life and thinking. We could call this Mormon Female Gothic.  

In Ellen Moers’ original formulation of the term, the Female Gothic can be “easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic” (90). Moers admits that the Gothic itself is difficult to define, “except that it has to do with fear” (90). “Female Gothic” has been important to literary examinations of the Gothic form since Moers first coined the term in the late 1970s. It has also been extensively nuanced and critiqued, notably on the grounds that it builds upon an essentialist model of the Female.[2]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Perry Lake: Dracula in the Comics

Journal of Dracula Studies 5 (2003)

[Perry Lake not only reads comic books, he writes and illustrates them for adult comics such as Demi the Demoness and Sex Squad, sometimes featuring his Cassiopeia the Witch character.]

Dracula Lives! Is this a defiant declaration of the immortality of the most evil fiend the world has ever known? Or is it the pitiful admission that humanity’s greatest undead threat will never be defeated? Neither. It is the title of a comic book. In magazine format, Dracula Lives! ran from 1973 to 1975, and was published by Marvel Comics. But it was by no means the only appearance of the King Vampire in graphic format.

When Dracula fell into public domain, Bram Stoker’s vampire lord appeared in other novels, short stories, scores of motion pictures, a couple of television series, Halloween costumes, computer games, and even on a brand of breakfast cereal. But while there has been much discussion and analysis of these versions of Dracula, less attention has been given to the amazing number of appearances by Dracula in the field of comic books. Not only have a variety of comic book writers and artists dealt with the character Dracula, but so have different publishers. The most famous of these comic books is Marvel Comics’ The Tomb of Dracula, which ran for seventy issues from 1971 to 1979. Though best known, they are not alone. Oddly enough, even though there is the potential for a wide interpretation of the character,  the majority of the comics seem to conform to a particular pattern.

Let me present what I consider to be the Ten Best Dracula comics ever published. The list is given in chronological order, based on the events of the story.

1. Dracula: Vlad the Impaler #1-3 (Topps Comics, 1993). Here we are given a traditional origin for Dracula. The storyline by Roy Thomas largely recounts the biography of Vlad as McNally and Florescu give it in their book In Search of Dracula, yet still there are interesting insights into Vlad’s motivation.  After all, Vlad is the narrator, so we see everything from his point of view. In his mind, all his acts are justified, and that might be a little hard for some readers to take. Estaban Maroto provides some exquisite art. Thomas’s theory of how the historical Vlad is transformed into the demonic vampire lord is probably the best ever presented, despite its departure from Stoker. This excellent trilogy is one of the best Dracula stories ever seen in the entire field of comics.

                       

Carlen Lavigne: Sex, Blood and (Un)Death: The Queer Vampire and HIV

Journal of Dracula Studies 6 (2004)

“The taste of blood has grown foul in recent years.”

- Sons of Darkness, Introduction

           

            Geraldine never had to ask if Christabel had been tested. Dracula was not concerned about Lucy’s transfusions. Even Louis and Lestat in the 1970s did not worry about the viruses they might be picking up from their victims. Nevertheless, the association between vampires and disease is not new. Nicola Nixon, for example, observes that “vampirism, with its connotative yoking of sexuality and contagion, has a long history of being linked to the horrors of venereal diseases – syphilis in particular” (118), while James Twitchell goes into more depth:

Two centuries ago many diseases were misdiagnosed as being the result of vampire activity: pernicious anemia, a blood disorder where the victim shrivels up, needing new red blood cells to survive; porphyria, in which the photophobic patient’s teeth and hair take on a fluorescent glow; tuberculosis, where the early symptoms are weight loss and the later coughing of blood; cholera, in which whole populations are slowly decimated; and, of course, the one still with us today, cancer. The most horrendous of all human decimations was the plague ... The cause was simply unknown then, and although we now know that the plague was carried to humans from rats via fleas, it was certainly more “logical” to use the time-tested explanation that had satisfied previous generations: the city was a victim of a vampire attack. (19)

The pale wasting of the vampiric victim was compared to any number of ailments.  However, prior to the 1980s, any clear literary link between vampirism and disease was traditionally, if not subtle, at least somewhat subdued.

            One might say the same for the link between the vampire and the queer (and by “queer” I mean gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgendered, and all permutations thereof). From Geraldine and Christabel sharing a bed, to Dracula indirectly sucking the blood of almost every man in the book (Holmes 82), the queer has always been present in the vampire of English literature, where the act of feeding is typically portrayed as replacing or heightening sexual experience. Christopher Craft observes, “Luring at first with an inviting orifice, a promise of red softness, but delivering instead a piercing bone, the vampire mouth fuses and confuses ... the gender-based categories of the penetrating and the receptive” (169). Clearly this sort of sexual confusion and the themes it entails lends itself easily to queer explorations. Indeed, Raven Kaldera’s Predator sports a lesbian vampire whose fangs emerge “as easily as a cock from its foreskin” (78).

Ashley Craig Lancaster: Demonizing the Emerging Woman: Misrepresented Morality in Dracula and God’s Little Acre

Journal of Dracula Studies 6 (2004)

 

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, vampirism and southern literature converge at the relationship between the nineteenth-century New Woman and the poor-white southern woman. Stoker reveals a pattern of male aversion towards women attempting to assert themselves both in the home and in the workplace. Just as Stoker presents self-sufficient women as parasitical and immoral, Caldwell also attempts to diminish the identity and the necessity of poor-white women in southern society. The negative versions of these women make them seem like the objectified source of society’s decay in each of their respective time periods. Furthermore, the failure of both texts to recognize these women as positive contributors to their communities becomes clear through the women’s interaction with other characters and with the impressions that they leave with others. As a representative of the New Woman, Mina Murray does “shock” the male vampire hunters “with [her] appetite” for knowledge (Stoker 118), and Ty Ty, Caldwell’s dominant male figure, cannot help but admit, as his sons continue to die before him, that “[t]he good Lord blessed” him with girls he “[doesn’t] deserve” (Caldwell 207). Although Stoker and Caldwell overwhelmingly present their female characters’ weaknesses and cruelty, the women’s strengths and importance in the community override the intended negative impact that these characterizations should impose.

            Stoker’s examination of the New Woman’s role through his female characters acts as a response to the historical impact that women were beginning to have during the late-nineteenth century. The New Woman helped to change the idea of the feminine roles in the workplace, in the home, and in male-female relationships. The New Woman desired a more valuable role in society’s workforce. Sally Ledger in “The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism” comments that “[a] substantial number of women were indeed actively involved in the labour movement of the late nineteenth century” (39). These ambitious women wanted to become active because they no longer could continue existing as men’s possessions. Although critics of the New Woman did not support this surge of women in the workplace, they had more disturbing problems to deal with as a result of the sexual freedom that also came with this movement. Some female writers such as Millicent Garrett Fawcett denied the sexual revolution occurring during this time (Ledger 33); however, the New Woman’s sexual ideology did seem to concur with the “Wildean […] sexual candor” (25). Regardless of whether these women became noted as sexually pure or sexually free, the general notion of the New Woman had become that she would destroy the race and, in turn, become “breeders of ‘monsters’” (30-31). The belief that the moral decay of society was being led by the New Woman developed because English society began to realize that these women no longer focused solely on motherhood. Her thoughts had now divided between work, sexuality, and the home life to which she formerly devoted herself completely. English society had to deal with the change in its female population and had to deal with how this change affected the dominant gender roles and the future of their society.