Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture

What Becomes a Legend Most

William Patrick Day

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813153940
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Folklore et mythologie

While vampire stories have been part of popular culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been in recent decades that they have become a central part of American culture. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture looks at how vampire stories—from Bram Stoker's Dracula to Blacula, from Bela Lugosi's films to Love at First Bite —have become part of our ongoing debate about what it means to be human.

William Patrick Day looks at how writers and filmmakers as diverse as Anne Rice and Andy Warhol present the vampire as an archetype of human identity, as well as how many post-modern vampire stories reflect our fear and attraction to stories of addiction and violence. He argues that contemporary stories use the character of Dracula to explore modern values, and that stories of vampire slayers, such as the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, integrate current feminist ideas and the image of the Vietnam veteran into a new heroic version of the vampire story.

1

VAMPIRE HISTORY

Since this is a book about vampire stories at the end of the twentieth century rather than the meaning of older vampire stories for their original audiences, one might wonder why it is necessary to address the history of the vampire story at all. My argument is not that there is a kind of vampire story DNA manifested in continuous line of recombinant descent from the vampires of folklore to Buffy Summers’s battles with the undead every Tuesday on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The vampire is not a monolithic archetype repeated through the ages. In fact, the history of the vampire story has been quite discontinuous. Until recently there was little concern with the vampire story as a tradition among writers and even less among readers; thus there has been no accretion of significance that builds to our current bumper crop of vampire tales. But the very fact that we might expect a history as the basis for understanding contemporary vampire stories is virtually the answer to this issue, for it reflects our assumption that if something is meaningful in the present, part of that meaning lies in the past. History, as always, begins in the present and finally ends there as well.

We are now so conscious of the vampire story that it needs a past to be part of our present, a need that has motivated us to return to older stories to create a history for our own. Our current vampire stories provide the lens that allows us to see earlier stories as meaningful to us, and our awareness of these older tales in turn becomes part of the way in which we imagine the vampire legend. This impulse to know the vampire as part of history is evident in the amassing of vampire encyclopedias, the republication of older vampire stories, the circulation of older vampire movies, and in the sustained popularity of “history of the vampire” books throughout the last thirty years.¹ For this reason, contemporary vampire stories are often set in the past, which was not the practice in the nineteenth century. It is why we grapple with Stoker’s Dracula through revising, rewriting, and retelling, when earlier in the century plays and movies were content to simply take the name and a few details, forgetting the novel itself.

The process of creating meaning in the present is in part imagining links to the past; it is as such a link, for instance, that Dracula has come to our attention again. Contemporary vampire stories now not only have a past but represent the past to us, both the world of folklore and myth and the romantic and Victorian heritage of the nineteenth century. Through our reconstructions of the vampire, explicit or implicit, as a romantic Byronic figure and as an image of Victorian moralism, we give structure to our own use of the vampire as a romantic transgressor and a protagonist in the struggle for freedom from repression. We find in the vampire an image of the history of gender and sexuality because these issues concern us today. I don’t disagree with these reconstructions, as they seem to me rooted in facts about the earlier versions of the vampire story, but we have emphasized them because they enable us to see our vampires more clearly. Thus, although contemporary vampire stories are essentially tales of our future, they are also tales of our past, for to move into the future means recreating our relation to the past. Virtually all vampire stories now carry the burden of the past as part of their significance, a burden that reflects our conflicting responses of rebellion and nostalgia toward tradition.

The fact that the vampire, unlike Frankenstein’s creature, has a folk-loric existence outside popular fiction, though, has helped earn it its special status as the unreal real; even the most skeptical rationalists recognize that folklore is real, whatever they think of vampires. The vampire of European folklore primarily served to provide an explanation for the spread of fatal illness among a family or group of neighbors in an era in which the mechanisms of contagion were unknown. Thus, from the beginning, vampires were a metaphor, though people didn’t realize it, giving human shape to viruses and bacteria. The vampires of folklore are diverse but were relatively circumscribed in their time, however deadly, operating locally and restricted by a wide variety of rules, more even than the ones Stoker introduced into popular culture, such as the inability to cross running water and the fear of garlic, the wild rose, and, of course, the cross. While vampire legends appear in India, China, and Tibet, the modern popular culture vampire has its folklore roots in Eastern Europe. The dissipation of vampire folklore in Western European countries is one reason why English writers borrowed a German word for the undead.²

The advent of vampire stories in modern popular culture has its roots both in the recovery of traditional folklore, which began in the eighteenth century, and, paradoxically, in the rise of scientific investigation of strange phenomenon. From the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, interest in reports of real vampires led to an inquiry into their existence in Germany that is sometimes called “The Great Vampire Debate.” The men engaged in this debate, typically priests and professors, became, in effect, real-life vampire hunters, scientists testing whether the tales of the undead that circulated in the peasant culture had any substance.³ They opened graves and found bodies that, seemingly undecayed, appeared to be vampires, though some argued that this was simply a matter of natural processes. Evidence of premature burial was also often cited to verify the existence of vampires.⁴ Despite the fact that any serious scientific investigation of vampires was bound to reduce such reports to mere superstition, the debate and the reports of vampire attacks gave vampire tales a new life in urban middle-class culture. The vampire of folklore also enables one of the central tropes of vampire fiction, the “Stoker got his sources wrong” motif, used explicitly or implicitly, to introduce new elements into the vampire legend.

The contemporary vampire story gives us a perspective through which to examine the folklore, while the folklore paradoxically provides both an air of authenticity and an air of myth for the contemporary stories. Interest in the folklore of the vampire is also an expression of our increasing contemporary fascination with the supernatural. The scientific investigation of vampires has turned into the recovery of the historical Dracula (in the books by MacNally and Florescu) and the late-seventeenth-century “Blood Countess,” Elizabeth Bathory, as well as the psychology and sociology surrounding such “real” vampires. Noreen Dresser’s thoughtful American Vampires doesn’t take the undead seriously but does explore the habits of people who drink blood and live as if they are vampires.⁵

Though vampires appear in Germany with the 1748 poem “Der Vampyre,” followed by Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth” in 1797, the modern line of vampire stories is really inaugurated with John Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre,” published in 1819.⁶ The process of assimilating folklore to popular culture meant moving from poetry to prose and adapting the vampire to plots, conventions, and genres with which people were already familiar. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven is an aristocratic seducer; “The Vampyre” has its roots every bit as much in novels such as Clarissa as in the folklore of the undead. It was as a story of the dangerous, charismatic, often aristocratic seducer that the vampire story existed for most of its life. Polidori’s story is clumsy at best but survived for many years as a footnote to the story of Byron and the Shelleys, for “The Vampyre” was Polidori’s contribution to the competition at the Villa Diodati that led to Frankenstein.

When “The Vampyre” was published, many people assumed that Polidori, who was Byron’s doctor, was simply lending his name to a story by his famous patient or alternately that Byron, one of the first modern celebrities, was the model for Ruthven.⁷ (There was little that early-nineteenth-century readers wouldn’t have believed about Byron, with some justification.) A general resemblance between Ruthven and the notorious poet certainly sparked much of the story’s success, though by now few readers, particularly in the American population, will likely recognize the author of “Childe Harold” and “The Giaour” as an origin of the vampire. (This may change: Tom Holland’s 1995 novel Lord of the Dead is about Byron as vampire. It was published in England, where they have a better recollection of Byron, under the title The Vampyre.⁸) Byronism is in fact one of the few pieces of the vampire story that might justly be called its DNA. While this link was kept alive in the history of romanticism rather than as an explicit vampire story tradition, it has made its way through Lugosi and Lee into the present as the vampire protagonist, the transgressive hero, beyond the rules and customs of middle-class society, beyond even Nature and God. The contemporary line of dark, brooding, and decadent vampires of a thousand vices and (maybe) one virtue—a roster of the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, the melancholy wanderers and tormented outcasts—extends from Barnabas Collins of Dark Shadows though Anne Rice’s Lestat, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain, S.P Somtow’s Timmy Valentine, and Forever Knight’s Nick Knight and Lucian La Croix.

Despite the success of Polidori’s story, vampires did not really catch on fast; from 1820 to 1960, sixty-five published vampire novels, mostly in English, though there are also German and French works. The vampire’s existence in the nineteenth century is real but fitful, and insofar as it remained in our awareness it did so as a footnote to the larger, mainstream literary history. Keats’s “Lamia” and Southy’s Thalabba the Destroyer mix vampires with Orientalism, while Coleridge’s “Christabel” is literally a fragmentary version of the vampire. Charlotte Bronte mentions vampires in Jane Eyre, but only in passing, as the “foul Germanic specters”; the vampire also appears in the poetry of Baudelaire and in Walter Pater’s famous description of the Mona Lisa in The Renaissance, but these are not part of a larger narrative centered on the vampire; such uses of the vampire never became part of a major cultural theme and remained limited to the exotic, thrilling image or metaphor.⁹

While “The Vampyre” inspired popular theatrical versions, Polidori’s most successful commercial successor was the long-running newspaper serial “Varney the Vampire,” by James Malcom Rymer, published in England in the 1840s. Sir Francis Varney is a late Byronic figure with his own sense of honor even if he is one of the undead, a state he often laments. What is striking about “Varney the Vampire” is not simply its development of the Byronic vampire into a tale of pathos, but its reappearance in the early 1970s when the process of building the vampire tradition really began, after having been not only out of print but virtually unknown for decades; for some time it was not even clear who the author was. The Dover edition of Varney the Vampire was an antiquarian facsimile of the newspaper serial, over eight hundred double-colummed pages in excruciatingly small type. In this read-until-you-go-blind edition, Varney became important because he had disappeared, filling in a gap between Polidori at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Le Fanu and Stoker at the end.¹⁰ Varney’s republication is a sign of the popularity of Dark Shadows, the vampire serial of the later twentieth century, and indicates the tentative stirrings of academic interest in horror and gothic literature.

While Dracula is clearly the most important vampire novel of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the greatest vampire story of the nineteenth century is Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1871). A brilliantly written story, very scary and unsettling, the popularity of the vampire in the late twentieth century led to its recovery. While “Carmilla” follows the seducer story pattern set by Polidori, Le Fanu’s gives us the victim Laura’s first-person account of her encounter with Carmilla. This technique, which today we have learned to read as inescapably open to irony and ambiguity, gives the story a very modern quality. While she is frank in conveying that not everything about Carmilla pleased her and never expresses any desire to become a vampire upon learning that her friend is one, her final words have an eerie nostalgia about Carmilla—particularly as we know from the introduction that the author of the manuscript has since died. “It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door.” The thinly veiled lesbian subtext within “Carmilla” is today less startling than Le Fanu’s declining to overtly moralize the story. There is no question that Carmilla’s love is deadly, but there is also no question that Laura is deeply attracted to her and that even the sight of “the writhing fiend” has not completely extinguished her feelings for the beautiful girl. Her shock that Carmilla is a vampire is remarkably dispassionate and her relief at having been saved, though real, is curiously muted.

Of course, in 1871 Le Fanu could count on an audience that would bring to the story the whole range of Victorian attitudes about sexuality and morality, but the story is striking even today for the frank exploration of how attraction and desire transcend not only conventional morality but our instinct for self-preservation. “Carmilla” first returned to public consciousness as the basis for movies that exploited a voyeuristic interest in lesbians, the cautionary tale transformed into a spectacle of sexual experimentation. Since then, it has slowly become one version of the female vampire story in response to the interests and concerns of contemporary feminism, often as a coded tale of repressed sexuality.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is a complex and ambitious work as well as a piece of lurid sensationalism that provided the name by which we know the vampire today.¹¹ By the 1990s it had become the classic vampire story, a status most honored not by reading the novel but by endless revising. While we now think of Dracula as Stoker’s Undead Express, flattening all other vampire stories in its path, for a long time Dracula the novel was far less important than Dracula the Count, who was in many ways simply a good, scary name with an artificial historical basis. Indeed, among the many reproductions of Dracula, it is not until the mid-1970s with Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975) that there is the slightest attempt to engage Stoker seriously Dracula’s durability certainly didn’t lead to Dracula being taken seriously as literature until quite recently and then primarily as the involuntary twitching of cultural trends. Dracula has returned as a circulating novel because it has become the work against which new vampire stories, both revisions of Stoker’s novel and vampire stories that have nothing to do with Dracula, can be written. Stoker’s Dracula now serves as a synthesis of romantic, Victorian, and Christian values, ideals, and fears, allowing us to take it apart and create informing structures for our vampire stories.

The element of Dracula that has made it important for us today is that Stoker made the vampire a figure in the drama of history;...