Richelle Mead on the mythology of Vampire Academy

Richelle Mead explains:

“I took a class at the University of Michigan on Slavic folklore and mythology. One of the units we studied was on vampires, and we had the opportunity to read some really great stories and examine a lot of the symbolism behind those old tales. Years later, when I decided to write a vampire novel, I decided I wanted to base my series out of that same region. So I went searching through eastern European mythology again and eventually found a reference to Mori and Strigoi that I thought could really make a great foundation for a vampire society. Dhampirs are a little widespread in pop culture, and I’d heard of them before, though they, too, come from this same region. What’s funny is that I decided early on that my kick-ass heroine would be a dhampir, simply because I liked the mix of human and vampire traits. Later, I learned that in a lot of eastern European myths, dhampirs have a reputation for being great vampire hunters. There were those who believed that if an evil vampire was causing trouble, you needed to recruit a dhampir to come get rid of him or her. So, without even realizing it, I’d cast Rose in a traditional warrior role!” (p.31)

Ref: (emphases in bold mine) Brandon T. Snider (2013) Vampire Academy: The Official Illustrated Movie Companion. Razorbill, Penguin: New York

Vampires lend themselves to unstable desire

“Vampires lend themselves to unstable desire: part of the exciting potential of any vampire text is the way in which it overturns notions of what sexual act is being represented in the bite.” (p.203)

Ref: Sara Wasson (2012) “Coven of the Articulate”: Orality and Community in Anne Rice’s Vampire Fiction The Journal of Popular Culture, 45(1) February, pp.197-213

Gift-giving in Interview with the Vampire; oral and textual promiscuity

Sara Wasson adopts the theory of gift-giving to analyse Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire – and presents an interesting discussion as a result. She writes:

“Between 1976 and 2003 Anne Rice wrote twelve sprawling, interconnected vampire “autobiographies” which continue to be hugely influential for vampire fiction and other artifacts of popular culture. Rice’s vampires come together to set up house, produce offspring, tour the world, and form passionate attachments. Two tropes structure and enable the vampire communities throughout the twelve texts. Both are gifts: the “Dark Gift” of blood to be swallowed, and the gift of autobiography to be shared. Originally a field of anthropological inquiry, gift theory emerged as scholars sought to articulate how gift exchange creates and maintains communities, and gift scholarship is a fruitful tool for analyzing the way exchange functions in Rice’s texts. Rice’s vampires create communities by exchanging gifts of blood and gifts of words, joining mouths that swallow and mouths that speak.” (p.197)

“From the nineteenth century through to the 1970s, a majority of popular fictions assumed that vampiric transformation was effected by a vampire biting a human. This approach shifted in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) became a bestseller. In Rice’s influential mythology, one [-p.198] cannot become a vampire merely by being bitten; one must be drained of blood and then swallow vampire blood. In her second vampire novel, The Vampire Lestat (1985), Rice coins the term the “Dark Gift” for this creation process (234, 246), and the language of gift returns throughout the subsequent ten books that comprise her Vampire Chronicles and the New Tales of the Vampires. Under Rice’s influence, other vampires have become increasingly inclined to procreate by giving in this way, and other authors similarly posit communities developing around the process.” (pp.197-198)

Wasson describes some of the history behind this shift in vampire creation – and discusses the authors who have adopted it since, then writes: “These vampires, then, are created by receiving a gift, and their vampiric communities are founded on gift-exchange. As such, their gift exchange invites comparison with gift theory that examines how gifts create and maintain community. Anthropological gift theory was pioneered in 1950 with Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, an anthropological investigation of the way gifts functioned in the society of Trobriand islanders.” (p.198)

“This painfully yielded, inalienable gift does create community— but a far from Utopic one. Rice’s vampires are profoundly ambivalent about the value of community, simultaneously yearning for and rejecting it. The mere idea of vampires having any kind of fellowship [-p.201] with each other takes Lestat by surprise at first. After he becomes vampire, he muses: [‘]Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, “Ah. You are my friend, how I love you” …? ….Well, now I know, whether I believe in hell or not, that vampires can love each other, that in being dedicated to evil, one does not cease to love.[‘] (Lestat 114)” (pp.200-201)

“…vampire ambivalence over community is reflected in the two political implications which Rice’s “Dark Gift” model has for the way her vampire communities are organized: on the one hand, the gift condemns the recipient to a kind of slavery, a brutal power relation; on the other hand, the gift frees the recipient into radically unconventional sensuality. In both cases, a focus on the gift brings fruitful attention to that which passes between.” (p.201)

“Post-structuralist distrust of the gift is echoed in the emotional choreographies that follow the Dark Gift in Rice’s novels. The cozy family of Lestat, Louis and Claudia, a child whom they jointly transform into a vampire, lasts for 60 years, but the domestic bliss is deceptive. Both Louis and Claudia experience Lestat’s control as implacable and cruel. Lestat himself tells Louis that the only relationship possible between vampires is slavery: “If you find one or more of them together it will be for safety only, and one will be the slave of the other, the way you are of me” (Interview 83), and he adds “That’s how vampires increase … through slavery. How else?” (Interview 84). Claudia ultimately slaughters Lestat and, with Louis’s help, dumps him in a Louisiana swamp. A similarly bleak disintegration befalls the family Lestat tries to form in later years with Louis and two other vampires (Merrick and David Talbot)….” (p.202)

“Rice’s Dark Gift affects intimate relationships in another way, too: the second consequence of the blood gift in Rice’s texts is that it frees the receiver into transgressive sensuality, into unstable, radical, [-p.203] forms of sensual desire.” (pp.202-203)

“Rice’s vampire family has been extensively discussed in critical literature, with every critic noticing its dark mockery of a conventional bourgeois pairing (e.g., Keller 17, Gelder 113, Benefiel 263–64, 266–67), and Benefiel notes that Rice’s vampire family has influenced other vampire fiction since (264–66).” (p.204) [NB Wasson seems to take a slightly different approach to the way families are presented in Interview than Benefiel does]

“Because vampires eroticize blood, they inevitably eroticise veins and skin surfaces. As such, they invite the reader to contemplate an erotics of the in-between: of skin surfaces and contacts.” (p.205) “[Elizabeth] Grosz and [Alphonso] Lingis see such attention to the surfaces of desire as a valuable alternative to the traditional psychodynamic approaches to sexuality, which define desire in terms of psychological interiority. Furthermore, when blood becomes the fulcrum of desire, it can begin to represent other intensities, other sexual delights: it draws the eye out to the limits of the human body, the place of connections. The characters in the vampiric encounter need not map onto neat identities in order for us to appreciate the suggestiveness of the blood that passes between them. Concentrating on the transactive gift, rather than the transgressive body offering the gift, moves beyond the essentializing idea that disruption is endemic within certain bodies.” (p.205)

“Ever since Dracula, vampire fiction has been fascinated by multiple, fragmented text, and Rice’s vampire characters themselves share this fascination: her vampires write, speak, and film their stories compulsively.” (p.207)

Wasson explains that the vampire autobiographies that constitute Rice’s Chronicles, “themselves create community. They are filial texts and competitive texts: each narrator challenges and elaborates the tales of the previous, until the books themselves circulate as communication between the characters and as symbol of their relationships. Rice’s community of hunger is one of relentless words, and to enter the coven of their kinship, one must not merely accept the gift of blood, but must make a gift of text.” (p.208)

“Like exchanging blood, writing is both transgressive and sensual. The act of writing anything about vampire existence flagrantly breaches the fifth “Rule of Darkness” which decrees that “No vampire must ever reveal his true nature to a mortal and allow that mortal to live…. No vampire must commit to writing the history of the vampires or any true knowledge of vampires lest such a history be found by mortals and believed” (Lestat 329). By definition the Articulate Coven defy the mores of the wider vampire community around them. As well as being transgressive, writing itself is a sensuous act for the Coven; each member relishes the materiality of writing. Armand, for example, relishes writing on “startlingly white paper scored with fine green lines” (Armand 31)….” (p.208)

“Rice wrote her vampire novels over 27 years, and her use of the Dark Gift does change over time. The language of gift accretes more positive meanings as Rice’s novels progress. The Coven of the Articulate begin referring to vampiric supernatural powers as gifts: the Fire Gift (incinerating others by the power of mind), Spell Gift (entrancing others), Mind Gift (telepathy), Cloud Gift (flying), and the Spirit Gift (astral projection). This litany of gift dilutes the ‘darkness’ of the Dark Gift by emphasizing what the vampire state adds to the receiver, rather than how the Dark Gift constrains her. In addition, the novels become a little more optimistic about the possibility of quality.” (p.210)

Ref: (italics in original; emphases in blue bold, mine) Sara Wasson (2012) “Coven of the Articulate”: Orality and Community in Anne Rice’s Vampire Fiction The Journal of Popular Culture, 45(1) February, pp.197-213

Reference is to: Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. 1950. Trans. W. D. Halls. New York: Norton, 1990. Print.

The need for family in vampire fiction – Benefiel

Back in 2004, Candace R. Benefiel wrote; “In the vast, dark landscape of Gothic fiction in late twentieth-century America, the seminal figure of the vampire wanders in ever-increasing numbers. Much as the Gothic has seen a flowering in the past twenty-five years, the vampire has risen from the uneasy sleep of the earlier part of the century and experienced his own dark renaissance. Prior to 1976, in film and fiction, the vampire was portrayed in the mold into which he had been cast by Bram Stoker in the greatest of the nineteenth-century vampire novels, Dracula – an essentially solitary predator whose presence was the stimulus for an intrepid group of vampire hunters to form and bay in his pursuit, and whose time on center stage was limited to brief, menacing appearances and capped with a spectacular death scene. The vampire was, to borrow a term from film, a McGuffin – a device to drive the plot and give the vampire hunters something to pursue.
In 1976, this changed […when] Anne Rice published her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, and turned the vampire paradigm on its head. This breakthrough novel focused not on vampire hunters, but on the vampires themselves – and what a different breed they were.” (p.261) [Note that I think  Bruce A. McClelland (in Slayers and Their Vampires : A Cultural History of Killing the Dead (2006)) might have something to say about Benefiel’s approach to the slayer and their vampire)]

“After Rice, and even in her subsequent novels in the ‘Vampire Chronicles series, the vampire was used to provide a vehicle for social commentary, and vampirism itself became a convincing metaphor for such varied topics as drug addiction, homosexuality, AIDS, and the general selfishness and narcissism of the baby boomer generation. Vampire literature in itself has become a vast and varied body, and one whose many facets cannot be contained in one model. The figure of the vampire, so varying and adaptable in the hands of many authors, became a liminal, transgressive figure, a stage upon whom the fears and secret desires of society could be acted.” (p.262)

“Despite the general perception, particularly in vampire film, of the vampire as a solitary predator, many texts have sought to portray the vampire as a part of a family grouping.” (p263)

“Oddly, [Rice’s] vampire family is so close to the norm as to constitute a parody.” (p.264)

“The vampire family is a key topic in Interview with the Vampire. Throughout the novel, images of kinship abound….” (p.266)

Benefiel concludes her study of ‘the family’ in Interview with the Vampire, by writing: “‘A gothic text positions its reader in a potential space where the psyche’s repressed desires and the society’s foreclosed issues can be engaged and thus where healing can occur’ (Veeder 32). The family group of Interview with the Vampire, as well as subsequent iterations of the vampire family, allows the reader to explore issues of alternative family structures and incestuous attraction within the family, and to play out the consequences for good or ill of these imagined scenarios. The vampire, aloof from human considerations, nonetheless stands in for the reader. Whether the nuclear family, either in its distorted but disturbingly realistic portrayal in Interview with the Vampire or in a more prosaic setting, remains a viable mode of existence at the turn of the twenty-first century is a question that readers and viewers must answer for themselves. Anne Rice’s creation, the vampire Louis de Pont du Lac, loses his mortal family, and later, his immortal family, when Claudia and Madelaine are killed in Paris in a replay of that ancient trauma. After that, he loses what had remained of his humanity, what might be termed his soul. The need for family, in whatever configuration, remains constant.” (p.270)

Ref: Candace R. Benefiel (2004) Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of the Nuclear Family in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. The Journal of Popular Culture 38(2), pp.261-273

The vampire genre reveals a great deal about our questions and fears

“It is wise to scan popular culture to seek hints of spirituality. There we can discern currents and movements in the collective psyche. The vampire genre, and how it is currently being treated, reveals a great deal about our questions and fears.” (p.204)

Bearing in mind the date of this article’s publication (i.e., 2000 – and so, pre-half-of-the-vampire-literature-currently-on-the-market), Kevin O’Donnell considers the changes in vampire fiction in recent times (and from a theological perspective). He states that vampire fictions “are written or filmed to entertain, first and foremost, and the chill and thrill of being scared and horrified is what makes people pick them up. It’s rather like a roller-coaster ride – it’s exciting to feel something unpleasant, briefly, in hyper-reality. It’s a cheap, superficial brush with the nasty side of life, a ‘time-out’ session that would be worrying if people became obsessed and infatuated with it.
The stories tend to be sexist as well as bloodthirsty, with Dracula’s brides, or Hammer film blonde-haired virgins. There has always been a strong sexuality about the genre, and even Anne Rice’s novels, though written by a woman, have women, usually as the victims, except for the age-old vampire, Maharet, who is cold and calculating. Seduction and the vampiric bite are all of a piece, and the blood drinking is orgasmic for the Undead. A parallel with AIDS has also [-p.205] been made in recent times, an infection through the blood. Vampire tales might seem shallow, nasty, rather tacky, and out of place in a discussion of serious theology, but there are deep issues to be drawn out in modern examples. The tired, old cliches of the genre have given way to new directions and energetic characterization.” (pp.204-205)

“This particular genre of gothic horror has never ceased to enthral since Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897. He reworked simpler, cheaper, gothic tales of vampyres and wraiths into a classic. The timing was cruciaL A. N. Wilson, in his introduction to the Oxford University
Press edition, says:
Since Dracula was written, history has been a catalogue of evils which no amount of hitting with a shovel can obliterate. Stoker, an amusing old rogue who was merely doing his best to write a yarn which would make your hair stand on end, in fact did something much more. He reflects the very bewildered sense, still potent in a world which was (even in 1897) preparing to do without religion, that mysteries can only be fought by mysteries, and that the power of evil in human life is too strong to be defeated by repression, violence, or good behaviour. Virtue avails the characters in Dracula nothing. It is the old magic – wood, garlic, and a crucifix – which are the only effective weapons against the Count’s appalling power.’
Wilson touches on two important themes. First, in the vampire genre, evil is portrayed in the raw. It is condensed, frightening and personaL More than this, it is an apotheosis of virtue, an utterly corrupted individual who treats others as objects in its struggle for survival. This is a projection, a symbol, and provides something of a catharsis for the viewer/reader. It helps us face the darkness of life at a safe distance. It is a deflection, too, for by looking at a fictional evil, totally out there, we avoid what is here and now, around us. Western society does not like talking about evil too much, but we know how real it is within us….” (p.205)

“Wilson’s second point is that the vampire tale delves into the depths of mythology, and this primal, unconscious side of our lives sits uneasily with a modem, liberal consciousness. Postmodernism is struck with it, spun round in a dance, and does not know how to take the lead. Vampires are about ancient magic, and the struggle of light and darkness. There is the final fight, as daylight streams into the chamber and a cross robs the vampire of its power. This gives a numinous quality to the genre, as we find, also, with the Gospels. While these are superficially about a holy man set against religious and secular tyrannies in the first century, there is a deeper struggle between light and dark, God and the devil.” (p.206)

“Stoker’s Dracula was a rather two-dimensional character […]. The Count was a creepy gothic horror with little charm, depth or personality. He was little more than a spook, a shadow, which took over people’s lives. This was played out in the feature film versions, and despite the power of Lugosi’s stare, and the energy of Christopher Lee, they were not real characters. This was overturned in a new breed of vampire writing with the novels of Anne Rice, ‘The Vampire Chronicles‘, about the vampire Lestat and his associates.” (p.206)

“Rice humanized her monsters, giving them feelings, personal agonies, and longings. They feel repulsion and guilt….” (p.207)

Ref: Kevin O’Donnell Fall, Redemption and Immortality in the Vampire Mythos. Theology 2000 103: 204

Using the vampire as a metaphor to understand nationalism

The title of this book caught my eye, and although Karakasidou’s review didn’t really clarify for me what Longinovic is arguing in Vampire Nation, Karakasidou does assert that:

“Vampire Nation [is] a thoughtful and distinctive study of Serbian identity and the cultural “vampire.” The book can be described as a different and unique ethnographic study of violence in the former Yugoslavia. The author’s ideas of cultural imaginary and the ways that people adopt counterintuitive traits such as violence, are of interest to anthropologists. We know that the history of the Balkans is not truly a history of nations: it is a history of a variety of peoples living global lives and global politics. One can question whether we should give primacy to Freudian impulses or Marxist necessities as the origins of violent confrontations; however, Vampire Nation gives us fuel to engage with all of these theoretical and historical themes.” (p.1302)

“The recent violence in the Balkans has perplexed foreign analysts. The mainstream interpretation conjured images of the violent Balkan man and blamed atrocities on inherent national maladies. A few historical constructivist voices contextualized the violent events in world politics and emphasized how the peoples of the Balkans lived within or on the margins of empires. They consumed the images of aggression and brutality assigned to them by the West. Struggles to create a sense of collective identity outside of that domineering framework have been futile. Vampire Nation joins these constructivist voices, but offers a unique deconstruction of Serbian nationalism through a detailed textual analysis of the “vampire” metaphor.”” (p.1299)

“The author is well-known from his previous writings on the metaphorical image of the vampire, but Vampire Nation is the first of his works that takes the leap into nationalism and stands as a critique of Serbian violence.” (p.1299)

I did think it interesting that, in discussing the writing of Serbian history, Karakasidou declares: “Anthropologists fought battles in academic settings against nationalist interpretations of history, but the meta-histories and self-reflexive ethnographies of post-modernity have not been well equipped to effectively interpret such a violent reality.” (p.1301)

Ref Anastasia Karakasidou (2012) Book Review:  Tomislav Longinovic, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 224 pp. Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4, p. 1299–1302,

A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend – Mathias Clasen

I am interested in how bioliterary criticism is applied, so this article caught my eye…. I am also interested in the narrative treatment of fear, so… Mathias Clasen writes:

“Richard Matheson seeded several weird fish in the deep and dark waters of the American myth pool, not least as a prominent screenwriter for the legendary 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. I Am Legend, a post-apocalyptic science fiction/horror novel, published in
1954 and set in 1976, remains one of his best known works. It shows up persistently on “Best of Horror” lists and is generally regarded as a milestone in modern Gothic fiction. What is it about this novel that has invested it with canonical status? It tells a surpassingly bleak story, one that seems to encode very specific and largely outdated cultural anxieties. And as prophecy, it falls rather flat: Matheson depicts a vampire holocaust, and the seventies came and went with no noticeable increase in the population of vampires, except perhaps on television. So why should anyone want to read this novel?
The historian David J. Skal rightly observes that “very little about the underlying structure of horror images really changes” over time. I Am Legend is the product of a troubled man in troubled times, at once intensely personal and highly dependent on local, sociohistorical anxieties. Yet, the story retains its power to engage and to disturb in contexts far removed from that of its production. I think an evolutionary perspective offers the best explanation for the underlying continuity in horror fiction. It also offers the best way to get at the continued fascination Matheson’s novel exercises on readers. Using an analytic scheme put into play by Joseph Carroll, Brian Boyd, and other evolutionary critics, I get a fix on the novel by triangulating between universal human fears, local cultural conditions, and peculiarities of individual identity.” (p.313)

“One striking and presumably unique aspect of human mental architecture is decoupled cognition, our capacity for mentally producing and hosting elaborate imagined worlds. Decoupled cognition gives rise to a [-p.315] range of imaginative behaviors, from pretend play in young children to futuristic science fiction stories. It is perhaps unsurprising that natural selection has favored an ability to construct imaginative scenarios, but an ability to go from imaginations of future food sources and hunting strategies to imaginations of life on Mars and zombie invasions is more striking.
However, not each and every single one of the literally endless imaginative scenarios that could be produced by the human mind would have the power to fascinate a substantial number of persons: the what if’s that interest people are severely limited, and so is the possibility space of viable speculative narratives. As Brett Cooke observes, since science fiction “so readily outruns human experience, it typically probes the limits of human interest.” In turn, human interest is circumscribed by our evolutionary heritage. I Am Legend offers a speculative account of what happens when basic human needs are suppressed. Matheson portrays the struggles of a man completely cut off from fellow human beings and trapped in a severely threatening environment. In this way, Matheson taps into an intuitive understanding of human nature—an evolved folk psychology—to make his tale believable and interesting.” (pp.314-315)

Apparently, Richard Matheson “has pointed out, “the leitmotif of all my work . . . is as follows: The individual isolated in a threatening world, attempting to survive”” (p.316) and it is from this perspective that Clasen approaches I Am Legend:

“Fear is probably the key word in Matheson’s work, and the defining affective feature of horror fiction. It is a striking fact of human anxiety that the things we fear are non-randomly distributed: humans acquire fear not just of any old thing, but of things dangerous in our evolutionary past. That does not mean that we are born pre-programmed with a completely inflexible fear system. Like so many other human capacities (such as language), the innate fear system depends on interaction with the environment for its development and optimal functioning. This [-p.317] makes sense in an evolutionary perspective, since our environments have been changing rapidly and frequently during the last several tens of thousands of years, especially due to human migration. Thus, while certain dangers have remained constant in various environments, others have changed. The threat from snakes, spiders and other people—so often the objects of phobias—probably constituted a constant selective pressure, whereas a variety of large mammals have preyed on humans during our evolutionary history. Hence, fierce predators with sharp teeth and claws play a prominent role in modern horror fiction, even as they are now, in industrialized civilization, relegated to zoo cages and televised nature programming.

“The abstract fear of death can be fleshed out in locally specific, context-dependent ways. In one context it’s the fear of a large carnivore attacking at night; in another, the fear of bombings. The adaptive fear response is largely generalized, and the physiological fear response is triggered by a range of diverse threats, from thunderstorms to predators, from darkness to social separation.” (pp.316-317)

“…we should not lose sight of the vampire’s literal presence: the vampire is, first and foremost, a predator….” (p.318) “Predation is the central theme in horror fiction. Being threatened by powerful forces, whether ghosts, chainsaw-wielding maniacs, or vampires, is a powerful motif, probably because the selection pressure from predation has been a ubiquitous fact of human existence for millennia. However, I Am Legend is slightly atypical as a horror story in that the horror of the monster is pushed somewhat to the rear. The vampires prowl relentlessly in the periphery, craving Neville’s blood, but the reader is not treated to lengthy descriptions of the bloodsuckers.” (p.318)

“For members of a social species such as ours, the horror of isolation is very real and very rational. Solitary isolation in the criminal justice system is considered an especially severe form of punishment. […] Other people have for millions of years been a crucial component of our species’ ecological niche; we are highly adapted to social life and depend on culture for our mental development. Sociality is and has been crucial to human ontogenetic and phylogenetic development. We depend on other people not just for reproduction and survival, but for psychological and emotional growth and fulfillment. This is the common-sense observation that is conveyed by I Am Legend….” (p.320)

“It is reasonable to regard sub- or para-human horror monsters as meditations on the human: zombies and body-snatchers, for example, offer apt metaphors for the masses and mindless humanity, whereas the vampire—a vastly overdetermined figure—has somewhat different connotations. The horror critic Mark Jancovich identifies a group of 1950s horror texts, I Am Legend included, that are characterized by a “preoccupation with the figure of the outsider, and their experience of alienation, estrangement and powerlessness.” As he notes, the concept of conformity in 1950s USA was not just highly prevalent in social discourse, but highly ambivalent. The paradoxical motif of being alone among others is one that finds currency in a paranoid Cold War cultural climate.” (p.321)

(While he is perhaps oversimplifying the traditional role and reception of folklore,) Clasen also comments on the figure of the vampire: “As the historian Paul Barber has convincingly argued, the modern vampire has its origin as a pre-scientific explanation for infectious disease. Before the germ theory of disease, a vampire was as good an explanation for the outbreak of lethal disease (such as tuberculosis) as any….” (p.323)

“The contagious aspect of vampirism remains an essential characteristic of the archetype.” (p.323)

“In fact, one of the most disturbing and dramatically effective qualities of several traditional horror monsters—vampires, werewolves, and zombies—is their contagiousness. Characters battle not just ferocious beasts, but monstrous germs, as well.” (p.324)

“The vampire has adapted cunningly and with panache to ever-changing cultural ecologies over the centuries, yet never losing its essential predatory nature and its defining violation of biology, its undeadness.” (p.324)

Ref: (italics in original, emphases in blue bold, mine) Mathias Clasen (2010) Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.  Philosophy and Literature 34(2)October, pp. 313-328

Twilight is not a vampire story

“Twilight is not a vampire story per se but a romance—and a very well marketed romance at that.” (p.268)

I’m taking this statement out of context, but it struck me as such an interesting one… can you not read Twilight (and its literary fellows) in multiple genres at once…? What is ‘a vampire story’ then? I really liked Mercer’s article, but this statement kind of intrigued me.

Mercer does clarify her approach to ‘classifying’ this text, writing that “I identify Meyer’s books within the genre of teen romance fiction. Milly Williamson’s (2005) study of vampire fiction suggests, however, that the more appropriate genre for making sense of books like Twilight (her work pre-dates Meyer’s), given the existential- and self-reflective turn of contemporary vampires, may be melodrama. Williamson notes the literary appearance of what she terms the “sympathetic vampire” with whom female reader-fans identify rather than fear: “[the vampire’s] entire unwanted ontological status is his flaw, and thus his flaw is excessive and taken to the extremes appropriate to melodrama. His unwelcome vampirism is not a sign of evil, but of victimhood. . . .[F]emale fans do not identity with the vampire’s female victims, but rather, empathize with the sympathetic vampire figure itself”” (p.268)

On this note, (and in the same part of her discussion), Mercer also quotes one of the girls she interviewed (14 yrs) as saying: “I guess she [Meyer] could have written it with some other kind of creatures but having vampires makes it more focused on their bodies.” (p.268) … which is also an interesting statement on its own – and one she consequently  affirms in a more academic fashion, noting that “the character of the vampire becomes a literary device for attention to bodies, playing directly to a young female readership’s culturally encouraged (over) focus upon their own bodies.” (p.269) Still, in context of the above statement, I find this acknowledgement of the importance of the vampire to this text curiouser and curiouser.

Ref: Joyce Ann Mercer (2011)  Vampires, Desire, Girls and God: Twilight and the Spiritualities of Adolescent Girls Pastoral Psychol. 60:263–278

Twilight’s fandoms and critically interactive readerships

Some really great critical material came out of the phenomenon that was ‘Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga’. One of those pieces, by Rachel Hendershot Parkin (2010), looks at the way the Twilight Saga evidences a particular kind of relationship between author and reader – a particularly critical, interactive readership. Here are a couple of the points Hendershot Parkin makes:

“The Twilight saga’s enormous popularity is closely tied to its author’s tense relationship with her fans. Meyer’s frequent interaction with fans via online media disrupts their expectations and leads to competing interpretations.” (p.61)

“I would suggest that, […] the more fans interact with and read the books, the more the constructed world of the texts becomes collectively defined and anticipated. When the fandom’s collective vision of the textual world is undermined, fans personally feel deceived and misled and resist the altered structure. The fandom then turns to the most accessible outlet for its frustrations—the Internet—which gives a united voice to its displeasure and a venue for its action against author and text.” (p.61)

“The constant scuffling and ensuing stalemate between Meyer and the Twilight fandom encourages us to consider the Twilight saga as a model for thinking about how online media has changed horizons of expectation and equalized textual ownership. In Textual Poachers, Jenkins argues that “fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness” (26) and that, in inhabiting such a weak position, “fans are peasants, not proprietors” (27). In his more recent study, Convergence Culture, he admits that fandoms have grown into a more participatory culture, rather than remaining in a culture of isolation. While he certainly captures the essence of online fandoms with the term “participatory culture,” he still fails to recognize the real power to influence ownership that fandoms have garnered through co-operative Internet use. The Twilighters certainly do not exist as “peasants.” Full-fledged “participants,” they enact a constant tug-of-war with Stephenie Meyer for proprietorship of the Twilight saga.” (p.81)

feminist criticism and the discussions between author and fans over how to interpret the texts…

“The friction between Meyer and the Twilight fandom appears most visibly in feminist responses, which are in turn complicated by a connection to the romance genre, and in disagreements over what is “canon” in the series. Online communities and conversations, then, develop a sense of ownership in fandoms by creating a more shared horizon of expectation that is centred on its fans. As Meyer shows us, the result is that, by engaging with fans, authors actually empower their fandoms in a way that tips the balance of power and the ownership of text toward the reader.” (p.62)

“In an interview with MTV, Meyer admitted to enjoying questions about Bella and feminism because they give her the opportunity to set the record straight by explaining her version, an indication of the level of control Meyer likes to retain over her creation.” (p.67)

remaining faithful to the internal canon of the series – fans’ reactions to the pregnancy and what it shows about the author-text-reader relationship

“…a large body of the fan reaction to Breaking Dawn was […] acerbic and accusatory, indicating the personal level at which the fans felt betrayed by Meyer’s alleged departure from her canon. The Twilighters’ horizon of expectation had grown so concrete and was so disturbed by the last book that they rebelled against it. […] As Bella’s pregnancy is confirmed and her attachment to the unborn child grows, the fandom’s attachment seemed to sever. Instead of leaving the fan community and the books behind to move on to more satisfying reading, however, many Twilighters continue to participate in the fandom by expressing their disappointment and by focusing on their love of the first three books in the saga.” (p.71)

“An overwhelming fan consensus on Renesmee’s birth suggests that Meyer’s failure to prepare fans for the possibility of Bella’s pregnancy, coupled with her insistence that the vampire-fathered child fits into the established Twilight canon, created a sense of betrayal. Between accusations of stealing from fan fiction, physiological problem solving, and comparisons with other vampire media, Meyer emerges from the Breaking Dawn release not as a celebrated author of the final instalment of a saga with a cult-like following, but rather an author accused of unfaithfulness to her own canon—accusations, it should be pointed out, made possible and even forcible through massive online agreement in forums, blogs, reviews, and other such discussions.” (p.73)

choice, free will and Bella’s easy out – how this evidences fans unique relationship with the series…

“The first three books of the Twilight series revolve around choice, namely Bella’s life-altering choices such as pursuing a relationship with Jacob or Edward, getting married, and changing into a vampire, suggesting a privileging of free will in the series’ canon.” (p.74)  “…in the first three books, autonomous choice plays an integral role in plot development and establishes itself as an important canonical feature of the Twilight saga.” (p.75)

“There is a strong feeling in the Twilight fandom that besides taking the final choices away from her [Bella], Meyer rendered her previous choices less meaningful by the happy ending to the saga, in which she gets everything and everyone she wants.” (p.75)

“Summing up these common fan responses, K. Bray writes that “Breaking Dawn betrays the story of Eclipse and makes Bella’s struggles and difficult choice almost meaningless—she doesn’t have to sacrifice anything after all.” While online discussions offer a multitude of different views on how the saga should have ended and what exactly Bella should have been forced to give up, the common thread that ties them together is the feeling that she should have given up at least something. All these reactions in their many and varied forms, from respectful to flaming and biological to comparative, show how closely fans adhere to canonical precedent and the horizon of expectation and how such adherence fuels ownership claims throughout the fandom.” (p.76)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold, mine) Rachel Hendershot Parkin (2010) ‘Breaking Faith: Disrupted Expectations and Ownership in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, Volume 2, Issue 2, Winter, pp. 61-85

Some of the critics she refers to (and which sounded interesting) include: Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

fears and ‘a calling’ to labour in Dracula

Eric Kwan-Wai Yu points out that

“The “’anxieties of empire’” expressed in Dracula, Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel, have attracted a great deal of critical attention lately.” (p.145) However, he continues: “I shall not dwell on the various sources of the late-Victorian cultural anxieties concerned. Reading the major periodicals of this period, Samir Elbarbary finds a discourse of “’primitivism and degeneracy,’” which undermines dominant evolutionism and scientific progressivism (113). In addition to the fears of atavism, miscegenation, and reverse colonization, some critics find obvious anti-Semitic connotations in the descriptions of Count Dracula’’s hoarding of money and sanguinary parasitism (Halberstam, 337–41; Gelder, 14–15). To this list one might add [-p.146] the fears of the ‘“lumpenproletariat,’” of the Irish rebellion, of the “’New Woman,’” of sexual transgressions, especially homosexuality perceived as gross indecency” in the wake of Oscar Wilde’s trial, or, of ‘“sexual anarchy,’ ” to borrow Elaine Showalter’s catchy book title. Reacting to Dracula scholarship in the past two decades, which has dealt with various kinds of anxieties, Nicholas Daly reminds us of the phenomenal growth of the British Empire between 1870 and 1900. This period also witnessed much tighter government control, including the encroachment on the private sphere and the free market (182–83). The discourse of crisis, paradoxically, did not lead to actual collapse: “’Fears there may well have been of the decline of Englishness within England, as well as assaults from without, but these fears had the effect of buttressing —not enfeebling —the power of the state”’ (Daly, 183). Furthermore, these fears ‘“established a mission for a new group of professionals in human management’” (183). Seeing the vampire fighters in the novel as a team of male experts, Daly relates them to the rise of professionalism in the late nineteenth century. He further claims that Dracula ‘“uses anxiety to produce as both necessary and natural a particular form of professional, male, homosocial combination’” (181).

This paper is an attempt to substantially revise and further develop Daly’’s intriguing ‘“productive fear”’ thesis to arrive at an entirely different end. Drawing on Max Weber’’s study of the Protestant work ethic, I turn to the often neglected problematics of labor in the novel, highlighting the quasi-religious sense of high duty and ascetic hard work in the vampire fighters, the so-called “’Crew of Light.’” The main thrust of my argument is that fear aroused by the paranoiac perception of sexual perversity begets a curious kind of work ethic in the imperial subject, reaffirming Enlightenment reason and scientific progressivism while, at the same time, betraying the very unreason in reason and the profound anxieties underneath the confidence in progress and empire. Contrary to Daly’s reading, which overemphasizes the power of the team of male professionals to “manage” fear successfully, I side with Troy Boone and other “’anxiety theorists’” in stressing that the ambivalent text ‘“retains an ironic stance relative to . . . scientific [progressivism]’” (Boone, 80) and offers ample room for deconstruction.” (pp.145-146)

“Whatever shapes of fear vampirism might evoke elsewhere, in this novel the dominant form has to do with sexual menace or the dreadful perception of sexual perversity.” (p.147)

“It is regrettable that few critics, with the notable exceptions of Franco Moretti and Carol Senf, have paid much attention to labor in Dracula, despite the pervasiveness of the theme in the text.” (p.149)

“…no one, to my knowledge, has explored the curious interrelations of labor, sexuality, and fear in the novel. Having linked up fear and sexuality, in what follows, I attempt to relate them to labor, or more specifically, the unique work ethic in the Crew of Light, characterized by industry, asceticism, rationalism, and a solemn sense of duty. Unlike Moretti, I want to take labor much more literally. I argue that fear, often aroused by the perception of sexual anarchy, demonic uncleanliness, or disfiguring excess, is productive rather than paralyzing. It arouses in the bourgeois imperial subject a quasireligious sense of “calling,” an imperative to work assiduously together [-p.150] to exterminate the demonic Other; in so doing, an uncanny kind of ascetic hard work accompanied by extreme rationalism manifests itself. This is not to claim that, before the vampire-hunters come into contact with vampirism, we cannot detect in them such traits as industry, frugality, punctuality, honesty, and rationality, so famously discussed in Weber’s classic study of the Protestant ethic. Like Stoker himself, Van Helsing, Seward, Harker, and even Mina are all bourgeois working people.” (pp.149-150)

“To better explain the peculiarities of ‘“calling”’ in the bourgeois characters of the novel, allow me to take a detour. Turning to Weber’’s pioneering study, I will discuss the Protestant notion of ‘“calling’” and its subsequent development into a secular work ethic, characterized by the obsession with endless acquisition through hard labor, ‘“combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life’” (Weber, 53). A “calling” is not only ‘“a task set by God,’” but ‘“a life task, a definite field in which to work’” (79), accompanied by the conviction that “’the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs [is] the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume’” (80). According to Weber, this conception is a product of the Reformation. Though Luther is the first to popularize the idea of calling through his biblical translation, it is in Calvinism and related sects of ascetic Protestantism that we find the development of religious calling into a vigorous work ethic.” (p.151)

““Good works” become, Lessnoff argues, “not a means to salvation, but the means of getting rid of the fear of damnation” (6). With a strong belief in predestination, it is ‘“as if the Calvinist subject were driven by an anxious premonition that, after all, the unavoidable might not happen,’” as ŽZizžek puts it (70). The Protestant ethic, in this perspective, is based on a profound, primordial fear. From this heritage of ascetic Protestantism, Weber announces, ‘“[o]ne of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism, and not only of that but of all modern culture: rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born’” (Weber, 180). In the course of secularization, eventually, ‘“the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs”’ (182), but the obsession, in worldly asceticism, with ceaseless work to maximize profit as an end in itself might not have entirely died out in later stages of capitalism, even with the rise of consumerism, predicated on insatiable expenditure rather than ascetic restraint.” (p.151)

“In many ways labor depicted in this novel is an idealization of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. We can detect in the Crew of Light the strongest disavowal of the darker side of labor under capitalism: instead of insatiable acquisitive desire and individualist concerns, we have voluntary work for a “good cause,” authored by God and benefiting all; instead of solitary or alienated labor, we have hard work based on robust, trusting, and selfless friendship and a true team spirit transcending sexual rivalry and even national, class, and gender difference.” (p.157)

Ref: (italics in original, emphases in blue bold mine) Yu, Eric Kwan-Wai (2006) Productive Fear: Labor, Sexuality,and Mimicry in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Volume 48, Number 2, Summer, pp. 145-170