Open graves, open minds

Representations of vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the present day

Sam George, Bill Hughes

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526102164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Law

This collection of interconnected essays relates the Undead in literature, art and other media to questions concerning gender, race, genre, technology, consumption and social change. A coherent narrative follows Enlightenment studies of the vampire's origins in folklore and folk panics, the sources of vampire fiction, through Romantic incarnations in Byron and Polidori to Le Fanu's Carmilla. Further essays discuss the Undead in the context of Dracula, fin-de-siècle decadence, Nazi Germany and early cinematic treatments. The rise of the sympathetic vampire is charted from Coppola's film, Bram Stoker's Dracula, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight. More recent manifestations in novels, TV, Goth subculture, young adult fiction and cinema are dealt with in discussions of True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and much more. Featuring distinguished contributors, including a prominent novelist, and aimed at interdisciplinary scholars or postgraduate students, it will also appeal to aficionados of creative writing and Undead enthusiasts.www.opengravesopenminds.com

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Introduction

Sam George and Bill Hughes

‘EACH AGE embraces the vampire it needs’, says Nina Auerbach, famously.¹ Nowadays, those embraces are often very intimate; contemporary dark romances abound with couplings between vampire and human. No one can be unaware of the ubiquity of the undead in twenty-first-century culture – particularly, of course, since Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books and the film adaptations, with their fervid entwinings of human and sparkly vampire. Given the decade in which this volume has been produced, the shadowy presence of Twilight is inescapable. Many of the chapters below engage with Twilight, as book and film, or with affiliated Young Adult fictions; the humanised incarnation of the once-monstrous (such as Meyer’s Cullen family) provides one of the themes that unifies this book. The vampire has long been fascinating, though, and many studies have appeared that have laid the foundations for this one. The narrative that emerges here, post-Twilight and in Bram Stoker’s centenary year, takes vampire studies in a new direction for the twenty-first century whilst acknowledging its debt to the many scholars who first made the vampire an object of academic textual study.

Sir Christopher Frayling, in his introductory essay to Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1978), initiated the critical study of vampire texts and invited the undead into the academy. Frayling pays particular attention to the eighteenth-century origins of the literary vampire – an attention which we share. We are also indebted to his identifying the dominant archetypal vampires as they emerge in fiction: the Byronic vampire (or ‘Satanic Lord’), the Fatal Woman, the Unseen Force, the Folkloric Vampire, the ‘camp’ vampire and vampire as creative force.² When we asked him recently if another strand had since emerged, he made reference to the vampire with a conscience. We are fortunate in being the first book-length study to analyse and comment on this new strand of sympathetic vampire as it appears in the twenty-first century.

Another work, Ken Gelder’s Reading the Vampire, is seminal in its decipherment of the vampire in its cultural context from a range of theoretical perspectives (appropriately open-minded for such an elusive creature), but it appeared in 1994, necessarily excluding recent avatars of the humanised vampire in paranormal romance and Young Adult fiction. Equally seminal and much cited is Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires Ourselves (1995). Auerbach charts the progress of vampires through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as far as the 1980s, focusing on US culture during the Reagan years. These two monographs pave the way for our publication, which continues to document the interest in vampires within academic circles; however, we are in the position to respond to more recent developments.

James Twitchell’s The Living Dead (1981) shares our text-based approach and survey of different genres. Twitchell traces the vampire through its manifestations in Romantic-period literature and nineteenth-century works of a post-Romantic sensibility, notably identifying Wilde’s Dorian Gray as vampiric. Written over fifteen years ago, these studies leave ample scope for expansion and new directions; we (that is, ourselves and our contributors) cover more recent manifestations of the undead and aim to trace a narrative of how they mediate contemporary political and epistemological concerns. We also revisit earlier, more familiar texts (‘Carmilla’ and Dracula, for instance) via this new perspective. Our approach is dominated by the figure of the undead as political metaphor in the realm of identity and difference, the trope of reflection and the sympathetic vampire. The chapters below reveal in various ways the persistence of Enlightenment concerns with knowledge and doubt and with transformations of genre. The emergence of Young Adult undead fictions forms a crucial part of this story.

Existing collections of essays on the vampire include Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by John Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (1997) and Draculas, Vampires and Other Undead Forms, edited by John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan Picart (2009). The first of these has some excellent essays but was published too early to offer analyses of recent texts such as Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and My Swordhand Is Singing. The second of these is a recent text which, while offering a useful transnational perspective, concentrates on cinema and revolves around the figure of Dracula. There are also important anthologies of key vampire texts, often with an ethnological bent.³ Our volume supplements film and TV studies with a literary and cultural critique that engages with but is not restricted to ethnology. It is also unlike other collections of essays as it has a strong connecting narrative (which yields the incidental virtue that the book can be used as a course text), one which builds upon but in some ways moves away from the now conventional ‘Gothic studies’ approach in that the vampire, following Frayling, Gelder and Auerbach, forms its own tradition and discipline.⁴ In addition, this book has developed from an innovative and highly successful collaborative research project, one that has inspired attention worldwide and generated over forty media stories, and which has become far more than the conference that launched it.

Since the millennium, Erik Butler’s Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film (2010) gives special prominence to French and German texts produced between 1732 and 1933. Unavoidably, this must treat other cultures, notably that of the United States, with some brevity; our book discusses European and transatlantic texts and continues debates around vampirism beyond the 1930s, covering the mid- to late twentieth-century and the twenty-first century too. Butler invokes the Enlightenment and vampires with great theoretical depth – an approach which informs our narrative. Milly Williamson’s The Lure of the Vampire (2005) and Susannah Clements The Vampire Defanged (2011) both attempt to account for the appeal of the vampire in different ways. Williamson does this through an analysis of gender and fandom, of vampires and vampire fans; Clements looks at the temptations of the sympathetic vampire through Christian values and symbolism, addressing a committed Christian readership. Williamson concludes with Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; we have covered more recent texts, contextualising them in a variety of ways. Clements’s study begins with Dracula whereas we look back to Enlightenment thought and belief systems around vampires prior to Dracula.

Perhaps the most significant feature of these studies has been their focus on the development of the humanised vampire in fiction. It is here, of course, that we return to the vampire romance of Twilight; the prominence of this text in late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century narratives of the undead partially triggered our project and is an important concern of many of our chapters. Gordon and Hollinger’s collection, and Auerbach’s book in particular, explore the first stirrings of the sympathetic vampire in their analyses of a handful of significant texts from the 1970s onwards which lay claim to inaugurating the sympathetic revenant and the vampire as lover.⁵ Of crucial interest are Fred Saberhagen’s Dracula series, beginning with The Dracula Tape (1975); Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Hôtel Transylvania (1978) and its sequels; and Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry (1980). In The Dracula Tape, Dracula’s self-justifying (and perhaps highly unreliable) retelling of Stoker’s narrative voices his yearning to assimilate to human society, raising doubts about narrative evidence along the way. In Hôtel Transylvania, Saint-Germain is not only a sympathetic vampire, a lover and an agent of righteousness and of female emancipation, he is an Enlightenment rationalist (drawn with a convincing attention to his eighteenth-century context). Wayland in The Vampire Tapestry is still a predator, but the reader gains intimate acquaintance with his complex subjectivity. Charnas shows us not a humanised vampire but a vampire being tempted into becoming human; we see the domestication of the monster in process. A less recognised precursor is in a different medium – the Marvel comic, Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan’s The Tomb of Dracula (1972–1979), which shows Dracula in love, married and smitten by tragedy.⁶ It has often been remarked that Stoker’s Dracula has mainly been denied a voice;⁷ these vampires are different: the narrative is focalised through them, sometimes autodiegetically (as with Saberhagen).⁸ It may be more than coincidence that, as the vampire gains a voice, it often gains a reflection too. Thus, the trope of the vampire in the mirror which the chapters explore gains new significance with the focus on the subjectivity of the undead. Many of our contributors seek to explore the various ways in which the undead have become sympathetic or even tamed in later texts, taking Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) as starting points, though we acknowledge those highly significant literary precursors of the 1970s.

As the studies above are inevitably exclusive, we too must be selective, and adopt some rationale for the creatures, texts and genres that are covered. Definitions are troublesome; especially so with the vampire, where much of the appeal for both reader and writer lies in its multifarious nature and the variety of forms it can take. On the other hand, in our choice of undead figures, we do not want to succumb to the flaw of over-inclusivity. Accordingly, we have avoided mythical archetypes and confined ourselves to vampires consciously created as artistic productions and who originate in that eighteenth-century European moment of fictionalising folklore.

Provisionally, let us restrict the term ‘vampire’ to those who return from death in palpable form to sap the life of others and who can trace their ancestry through literary transformations to those blood-sucking creatures originally designated vampyr. But our title talks of the Undead, too, though space allows us only a passing glance at other revenants and it is predominantly vampires who inspire the most fascination. So we have chosen creatures who show an affinity with, or allow a constructive comparison with, the vampire of Eastern Europe as absorbed by literary texts. Marcus Sedgwick tackles the problem of definition from the point of view of its challenges to a writer of fiction, consciously defining his vampires against the domesticated Cullens and returning to their East European ancestors from the early eighteenth-century. Sedgwick wittily verifies or demolishes the received conventions of what characterises the vampire, such as their lack of reflection, casting no shadow, aversion to garlic and holy emblems, and their inability to cross a threshold uninvited. In turn, our contributors examine the significance of these motifs and how vampire fictions transform them in order to probe the unsettled definition of the vampire.

The second criterion is one of restriction rather than definition; the vampire has had many incarnations and, inevitably, not every significant text could be covered in depth. We have chosen avatars of the undead who aptly illustrate our themes of reflection, political metaphor, identity and difference, and the transformations of genre and knowledge. Thus, following Twitchell, we have included the parasitical and ageless Dorian Gray, who is involved in aesthetic arguments over reflection and representation that link to the trope of non-reflection in vampire narratives.⁹ We also considered that Viereck’s psychic vampire, Le Fanu’s leech-like parasitic lodger and Daniel Waters’s sympathetic undead teens were significant figures that illustrated well our themes.

Similarly, there is no vampire fiction genre as such; vampire narratives too are infected by these metamorphoses, and mutate and cross-br...