War Gothic in Literature and Culture

Steffen Hantke, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Steffen Hantke, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138938212
• eBook ISBN: 9781317383239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Literature

In the context of the current explosion of interest in Gothic literature and popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores for the first time the rich and long-standing relationship between war and the Gothic. Critics have described the global Seven Year's War as the "crucible" from which the Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Since then, the Gothic has been a privileged mode for representing violence and extreme emotions and situations. Covering the period from the American Civil War to the War on Terror, this collection examines how the Gothic has provided writers an indispensable toolbox for narrating, critiquing, and representing real and fictional wars. The book also sheds light on the overlap and complicity between Gothic aesthetics and certain aspects of military experience, including the bodily violation and mental dissolution of combat, the dehumanization of "others, " psychic numbing, masculinity in crisis, and the subjective experience of trauma and memory. Engaging with popular forms such as young adult literature, gaming, and comic books, as well as literature, film, and visual art, War Gothic provides an important and timely overview of war-themed Gothic art and narrative by respected experts in the field of Gothic Studies. This book makes important contributions to the fields of Gothic Literature, War Literature, Popular Culture, American Studies, and Film, Television & Media.

Part I

Literature

1 “The Red Thirst is on this Nation”

Vampiric Hauntings and the American Civil War

Leigh M. McLennon

Introduction: Gothic Civil War

Vampire literature today is often analysed as a speculative literature that refracts specific and unique socio-historical anxieties back in monstrous form.¹ In her seminal Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach argues that vampires adapt to “personif[y] the fears” of subsequent generations (4). Auerbach’s oft-quoted maxim that “every age embraces the vampire it needs” has been widely adopted in an historicising critical trend (145). This trend reads how the vampire may be used to interrogate the anxieties specific to the historical age by which it is produced. In vampire literature of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, these “anxieties” often centre on historically specific iterations of social Otherness, rather than the threat of spiritual damnation found at the centre of much precedent vampire literature.² In The Gothic, Punter and Byron outline how the vampire has become “humanised” from the later twentieth century onward, suggesting that in this way the contemporary vampire “increasingly serves to facilitate social commentary on the human world” (270). Zanger argues in “Metaphor into Metonymy” that vampire literature since the later twentieth century has been concerned with reframing Otherness as social, not supernatural: “the new vampire has become, in our concerned awareness for multiculturalism, merely ethnic” (19). This contemporary vampire also offers a means of engaging with numerous other forms of social Otherness. As Judith Halberstam writes in Skin Shows, the vampire is a monstrous “meaning machine” (21, 26): it can “represent gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality in one body” (21–22). The vampire, then, is often understood as a monster that engages with and is shaped by the anxieties of its time.

Yet despite this current critical emphasis on reading the vampire through the frame of its contemporary socio-historical context, the vampire is always a creature outside of time. The vampire is immortal and ageless. In order to comment on the present, it comes out of the past. As Stacey Abbott notes in Celluloid Vampires, “vampires have traditionally been associated with the past through their perceived relationship with primitive desires, folklore, or Gothic fiction” (1). As a Gothic monster, the vampire embodies what McAvoy and Spooner call “the returning past” (1), and Fred Botting calls “the disturbing return of pasts upon presents” (1). The vampire is not only a monster for the age that embraces it: it is a monster that endures and even embraces multiple ages. Thus, while vampires undeniably refract contemporary socio-historical anxieties, they also explore how those anxieties are shaped by the past. This is not a simple question of how the Gothic past returns to haunt the present. Rather, vampire fictions may be used to mediate the relationship between the past and the present. Often set in the historical past, or otherwise revisiting the past through the memories of a long-lived vampire, vampire literature can foreground how our contemporary fears are shaped by historical events. More than this, vampire literature often suggests that the past is constructed from the cultural paradigms of the present. Our present, and its anxieties, are haunted by our past; but our understanding of the past is also haunted by current anxieties in the present.

This interplay between the past and the present is especially clear in vampire literature that engages speculatively with the American Civil War. The Civil War remains a definitive and traumatic event in the national history of the United States. It is thus unsurprising that, in seeking to give the Americanised vampire its own history, a number of vampire texts in the later-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries draw upon the national history of the Civil War. In this sense, these vampire texts are often historically revisionist, or counterfactual. Counterfactual narratives construct an alternative, speculative vision of the past that destabilises the concept of historical “truth.” Counterfactuals thus force the reader to re-examine the relationship between the past and the present, and the processes by which history is constructed.³ In “The Way It Wasn’t,” Barney Warf explicitly connects history with fiction, asserting that “both history and fiction are the ideologically laden narrative mediators of meaning … both are actively constructed through interpretation” (32). Counterfactuals highlight that, as with meaning in fictional narratives, meaning in historical narratives is always constructed. Finally, counterfactual narratives are often written as an attempt to articulate the past national traumas that continue to haunt the present.⁴ Accordingly, counterfactuals often focus on military engagements and war more generally. Counterfactual narratives about the American Civil War are especially common in both history and fiction.⁵ As with any counterfactual narrative on the Civil War, historically revisionist vampire texts serve as a means of interrogating and exploring the Civil War as a national trauma in American history.

Vampire texts that rewrite the history of the Civil War suggest that the human evils of the historical past are just as horrifying as those in our monster fictions. This essay situates historically revisionist vampire narratives of the Civil War in the tradition of the Southern Gothic. It begins with a brief analysis of the way that these texts utilise the trope that war makes monsters of men, drawing on examples from television series True Blood (created by Alan Ball, 2008–2014) and Stephenie Meyer’s third Twilight novel, Eclipse (2007). Next, the essay performs an extended analysis that reads how vampire literature engages with the Civil War in a very different way in George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream (1982). As this analysis will show, Martin uses the vampire to explore both historical and contemporary anxieties surrounding race, colonisation and imperialism in the United States. These texts demonstrate that vampire literature that engages with the historical event of the Civil War is inflected by discourses of war at work in contemporary American culture.

Southern (War) Gothic

Perhaps nowhere in the United States is the vampire more at home than in the haunted histories of the American South. In Gothic America, Teresa Goddu argues for a reading of American Gothic literature that emphasises specific American geographic and cultural elements. Goddu argues that the fraught colonial history of the United States defines the American Gothic: “American Gothic literature criticizes America’s national myth of new-world innocence by voicing the cultural contradictions that undermine the nation’s claim to purity and equality” (10). One nexus of these cultural contradictions is the American Civil War. The history of the Civil War is often framed through narratives that posit binaries about slavery versus freedom, the North versus the South and, correspondingly, good versus evil. Vampire literature may either challenge or reify these binaries by rewriting Civil War as a battlefield for human good and supernatural evil.

Louisiana is a key site for these supernatural battles. As Goddu writes, “the American South serves as the nation’s ‘other,’ becoming the repository for everything from which the nation wants to disassociate itself” (3–4). In American Gothic, Charles L. Crow writes of a specific “Louisiana Gothic” with its own aesthetic (89). Despite the binarising narratives that are mobilised in American Gothic, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the American South was a region of intense linguistic and cultural diversity. Louisiana in particular was a disputed territory, colonised and fought over by France, Spain and Great Britain in the eighteenth century, then purchased by the fledgling United States. European settlement displaced Native American inhabitants and brought in slaves from Africa, often by way of the Caribbean. The Mississippi was also an important colonial trade route both within the United States and as a route for the export of goods to Europe. This multidirectional flow of peoples, goods and commerce made nineteenth century Louisiana home to a rich yet unequal mix of cultures, languages, religions and superstitions.

New Orleans is a primary site for this cultural mixing. Crow suggests that the Louisiana’s “historical cultural centre, New Orleans, has some claim to be the capital of American Gothic, and … continues in this role to the present” (89). In New Orleans, the vampire often becomes merely another entity in a complex socio-cultural, political and supernatural milieu. The vampire has a long, local history in this city. Contributing to this history are a number of factors including localised folkloric superstitions (of vampires, but also of ghosts and voodoo); the city’s above-ground burial practices; the very real eighteenth and nineteenth century fear of the plague breeding in the city’s humid, swampy territory; and urban legends about violent crimes in the city. In 1976, Anne Rice drew on this local vampire history to utilise New Orleans as a key setting in her novel Interview with the Vampire. Since the publication of Rice’s landmark novel, New Orleans and Louisiana have become popularly associated with vampires in literature and film. For example, New Orleans and Louisiana have also been utilised as settings in the 1989 television movie “Carmilla” (directed by Gabrielle Beaumont); Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls (1992); the film Dracula 2000 (directed by Patrick Lussier); Faith Hunter’s urban fantasy series of Jane Yellowrock novels (2009–); and, of course, HBO’s television series True Blood.

Moreover, a number of recent vampire novels draw on the Gothic history of New Orleans and the South in order to rewrite the history of the Civil War to include vampires. These historically revisionist vampire narratives rewrite American history, using the vampire to emphasise the horrors of the Civil War as truly Gothic horrors. For example, Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2010) offers a counterfactual narrative of the Civil War in which vampires are the driving force behind slavery. In the 2012 film adaptation of this text (directed by Timur Bekmambetov), Lincoln’s vampire-hunting mentor explains, “when the Europeans arrived with their slaves, the dead saw a sinister opportunity. They built an empire in the South.” The counterfactual history of the novel and the film thus displaces the responsibility for slavery onto supernatural evil. Moreover, the representation in these texts of a righteous, valiant president crusading against evil also engages with the cultural context of the post-9/11 period, in which terrorism is framed as a contemporary form of evil.⁶

A key trope in vampire texts that engage with the Civil War is the suggestion that this war (and, by extension, war in general) quite literally makes monsters of men. This trope is found in David Wellington’s novel 99 Coffins (2007), HBO’s True Blood and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novel Eclipse (2007). True Blood in particular performs a complex and extended engagement with the Civil War (and, indeed, with the War on Terror and the Iraq War) throughout its series.⁷ In the early episodes of True Blood, vampire Bill Compton attempts to integrate into the human population of Bon Temps, a fictional small town in Northern Louisiana. Bill has a tense relationship with the townsfolk, many of whom have never before seen a vampire. In season one, episode five (“Sparks Fly Out”), Bill attempts to ingratiate himself by speaking at the local Descendants of the Glorious Dead meeting, a fictional historical society dedicated to local Civil War history. At the meeting, Bill shares the memories of his experience as a former Confederate soldier. In doing so, he proves that he and the humans of Bon Temps have a shared history in the history of the Civil War.

It is as a human solider in the Civil War that Bill first comes to terms with the meaning of death, before he dies and becomes a vampire himself. As Bill tells the townsfolk, “I served in the 28^th Louisiana infantry … It was there that we learned the value of human life, and the ease with which it can be extinguished.” The memory that Bill next shares at the meeting, of the death of one of his comrades, sparks his memory of his own death and his transformation into a vampire. The ensuing, quick succession of these memories, which continue to be shown in flashback sequences throughout the episode, suggests that for Bill, his transformation into a vampire is inextricably linked to the broader trauma he has undergone during the Civil War. In remembering the war, he remembers not only the general loss of life, but the loss of his own life – and, more crucially, the loss of his humanity.

For Bill, the true trauma of the Civil War is that, literally and metaphorically, he can never return home again: he is forever changed by what he has experienced. Bill is transformed into a vampire after the South has surrendered. This transformation into a vampire represents the physical manifestation of a monstrous internal trauma, a trauma that has transformed Bill’s understanding of “the value of life.” Attempting to return home at the end of the War, the exhausted Bill seeks help from a cabin in the woods. The woman inside (whose name, Lorena, is confirmed in a later episode) first assists Bill, feeding him and washing the blood from his face. However, when Bill rejects her sexual advances, Lorena reveals she is a vampire, attacking Bill. A jump cut highlights Bill’s disorientation as he wakes on her bed. When Bill sees that the room is filled with the corpses of the vampire’s previous victims, she explains, “They all presented themselves as gentlemen. You can blame the war if you like. But they proved to be no more than savages once I let them into my home.” Lorena here implies that, unlike Bill, the soldiers who formerly sought her help had unsuccessfully attempted to rape her. The narrative here is clear: war transforms men into monsters, whether they are honourable men who literally become vampires, or men who simply become “savages” who no longer honour the sanctity of other human beings.

True Blood moreover suggests that this trope recurs in present-day Bon Temps. Hearing of Bill’s long, immortal life at the meeting for the Descendants of the Glorious Dead, the local sheriff exclaims, “That son of a buck’s been killing since the 1860s!” Bill’s first acts of killing were perpetrated as a solider in during the Civil War in the 1860s. The sheriff here seems to make no distinction between killing in war-time and the monstrous killings that Bill perpetrates after he is transformed into a vampire. Fellow police officer Andy Bellefleur challenges this failure to distinguish between kinds of killing. Andy responds, “That doesn’t prove anything. My cousin Terry killed 20 Iraqis in Fallujah. You sayin’ we should lock him up?” Andy here suggests that killing during war is not a crime. Curiously, the sherrif’s retort is “Your cousin Terry should be locked up!” Terry, an Iraq War veteran, suffers from debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder, and the sheriff takes his example as evidence that the act of killing another man is a damaging act, an act that makes one monstrous, even in a supposedly lawful act of war. True Blood suggests that just as Bill’s transformation into a vampire is linked to his psychologically damaging experiences during the Civil War, Terry’s experiences during the Iraq War have similarly rendered him a dangerous outsider who can no longer function successfully within everyday society.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga also engages with the trope that the trauma of war monstrously dehumanises its human actors. In the saga’s third novel, Eclipse, Meyer expands on the history of Jasper Hale, one of the vampires in her human-friendly Cullen family. Like Bill, Jasper is “turned” while serving as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War. A major in the Confederate Army of Texas, Jasper is selected to become a vampire specifically for his military skills, recruited into a vampire war for territory concurrent with the Civil War. In this way, a vampire war is conflated with the Civil War in Jasper’s history. As a vampire, Jasper’s mission is to train and command other newborn vampires who, in Meyer’s series, possess extraordinary strength. Eventually, Jasper must also kill those newborns when they are no longer useful. Like Bill Compton, Jasper is no less transformed by his experiences at war than by the supernatural processes that make him a vampire: “In so many years of slaughter and carnage, I’d lost nearly all of my humanity. I was undeniably a nightmare, a monster of the grisliest kind” (266). Meyer thus suggests that war more generally dehumanizes through violence, and that this violence ultimately amounts to no more than a senseless “slaughter.”

Jasper feels the trauma of war even more keenly due to his supernatural powers. Jasper’s special ability as a vampire is empathy: he can feel and manipulate the emotions of others. As the character explains, this also means he feels “the horror and fear” of the humans he feeds upon (267). Worse, each feeding reminds Jasper of his own moment of transformation: “Yet each time I found another human victim, I would feel a faint prick of remembrance for that other life. … It was stronger for me – this borrowed memory – than it was for anyone else, because ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Ghosts from the Battlefields: A Short Historical Introduction to the War Gothic
• PART I Literature
• PART II Visual Culture
• PART III Cinema
• PART IV Gaming
• PART V Young Adult Culture
• List of Contributors
• Index