Vampire Lit as a Challenge to Cultural Assumptions
I like vampire lit for much the same reason I like science fiction: both change the premises of our life experience and, thus, challenge our usual cultural and psychological assumptions. Vampire lit, in particular, lends itself to upending commonplaces about gender and family structure. It's often been noted that vampire reproduction is inherently incestuous: vampires typically make new vampires through some sort of blood exchange that reads as both a parenting act and a sexual act, so parents and children are, almost by default, also lovers. By the same token, vampire lit can, in one fell swoop, eliminate all physically based power differential between the sexes: in many tales, males and females have identical reproductive biologies and no sex-linked difference in physical strength (or if they do, it is much overshadowed by other differences, like age or "strength" of their blood, etc.). Add in functional immortality and the politics of relating to humans as people and foodsource, and all this makes for fascinating reinventions of culture for those stories that choose to exploit this potential. Some examples...
Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles
When I first started reading The Vampire Chronicles c. 1990, they were the first works of contemporary literature I had ever encountered that simply ignored sexual orientation language as if the concepts of "gay" and "straight" didn't exist. Even today, when I am much better read and gay rights discourse far more advanced, this post- (or pre-)sexual orientation stance is sadly rare outside fan fiction. At the time, I found this stance immensely liberating, and I still do. I loved, for example, that Lestat and Louis could love each other in ways that sometimes read as sexualized and sometimes not, that they could both be Claudia's fathers, and no one bothered to bring up whether they were homosexual or bisexual or whether gay adoption should be legal; these things simply were.
In-universe, there are two explanations for this: one is historicity--Lestat and Louis both come from an era before "homosexuality" as a category existed. However, they certainly came from an era in which it was unacceptable for men to be erotically partnered with men, and the acceptability of their partnership comes directly from vampire nature. In TVC, vampires do not experience sexual arousal; their desire is based mainly on the need for blood, and men and women have equally attractive blood, so one of the first things becoming a vampire does is to break down any strong predisposition for attraction to one sex or the other. While vampires do not strongly desire each other's blood, this non-differentiation of types carries over into their relations with each other. With heightened senses, they are strongly aesthetically motivated, and either sex can be beautiful (regardless of one's innate orientation), and their experience of pan-desire for mortals makes it easy to bond with each other romantically irrespective of gender.
Equally as fascinating for me is the emphasis Rice places on the problems of immortality, specifically of becoming unmoored from one's native historical time and place. While she may not be Umberto Eco in her historical versimilitude, Rice clearly loves the periods she writes about and studies them considerably, and a sense of cultural otherness comes through consistently and powerfully in her depictions these men and women whose origins lie 200, 2000, or 5000 years ago. The interminglings of modernity and historical origin create a cast of characters who, by their very existence, put a different perspective on contemporary Western society. The lack of concern with sexual orientation language is one example. Another is predilection for fancy dress among men in a 20th century in which masculinity is generally linked to dressing conservatively.
Blood+
I've written elsewhere about the vampire species in the anime Blood+, but I'll briefly recapitulate here. This series posits that vampires ("chiropterans") are a separate species whose main unit in each generation consists of two "queens," twin sisters of immense powers, who turn a select set of humans (only men?) into vampires called "chevaliers," whose primary biological function is to serve and protect the queen whose blood created them and to mate with her sister. Here we have the basis for several fascinating social realities that overturn our usual narratives:
1) Females are the dominant sex. The presumption seems to be that they are physically stronger, though I'm not sure I actually see hard evidence of this in the series. Might this be a cultural construction rooted in observations of other types of power?
2) The default family structure appears polyandrous. It seems unproblematic for a queen to have more than one chevalier (they refer to each other as "brothers"). There is no necessary assumption of jealousy in this structure, though different individuals respond differently, just as in any social structure.
3) The reproductive unit is not the primary love unit. Chevaliers are clearly tied by a powerful instinct to love and typically stay close to the queen who created them and who is, by definition, not the person they would ever produce offspring with. The default social structure, thus, seems to call for the men to act as father figures to another man's children, and this appears accepted as natural.
All this, of course, is complicated by individual personalities, by memories of human lives and values, and (crucially) by the disruption of any established "vampire culture" in the current generation due to the deaths of predecessors and manipulations by human scientists. So assumptions about normative chiropteran behavior must be tentative, but this makes the series all the more fascinating.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
One of the reasons it took me years to give Buffy a try was that its vampires looked boring, and let's face it, as a race of beings, they are. They hearken back to an older "Dracula" model of vampire defined by being "evil, soulless things," who prey on humans and delight in nastiness. The series manages to be brilliant in spite of this because it's not about the vampires; it's about the Slayer.
However, it has some notable vampire characters, mainly Angel and Spike and, by extension, Darla and Drusilla. As a typically incestuous vampire family (see the hilarious "I'm My Own Grandpa" vid), their dynamics accomplish some of the usual questioning of human social roles. Perhaps the most interesting psychological question to emerge out of Buffy's vampires, however, is the relationship between personality and morality. When someone becomes a vampire they lose their "soul" (i.e. their conscience/drive toward good) but otherwise retain their native personality. Thus, soulless Angelus is the "Scourge of Europe," a strong, driven leader with a penchant for careful planning, and soul-having Angel is the "Champion of the People," a strong driven leader with a penchant for careful planning. Soulless Spike, on the other hand, is mainly driven by interpersonal love, while souled Spike is mainly driven by interpersonal love.
The effect is eerie and calls into question the nature of selfhood. The early Buffy seasons argue that when a person is vamped, a demon moves in and the original person is gone. Later seasons, older Buffy herself, give up on this comforting fairytale. Rather, it seems, the person remains... but evil. That we could have our goodness stripped from us and yet, in some sense, still be ourselves--that our goodness is not essential--is a frightening thought, with real-world applications to brain injury, for example. This unsettling exploration of self and morality is Buffy's greatest contribution to vampire lore.
Twilight
I have neither read nor seen Twilight and know only what I have picked up from a good amount of reading about it and from various film clips, etc., so my thoughts should be taken with a large grain of salt: I may be unaware of hidden depths. But I find the main thrust of Twilight annoying because it seems to do exactly the opposite of what good vampire literature is best at: challenging cultural assumptions.
Instead, its central narrative seems intent on reinforcing the most dominant of dominant narratives our culture has produced: girl meets boy; boy is sexy and dangerous; girl is in danger; sexy, dangerous boy protects girl; drama ensues, and they end up falling in love, getting married, having a baby, and living happily ever after. I'm not sure what the point of this is. Or to be more precise, I'm not sure if there is any redeeming social value to this. If anyone cares to comment, I am always glad to learn more about it.
I don't believe that vampire lit is an exhausted field by any means; it simply requires creativity to keep reinventing itself. And while I don't read vampire lit just for the sake of reading vampire lit, I am always open to being swept up in the next thought-provoking reinvention.
(Thanks to meganinhiding, whose vampire musings spurred me to stop putting off writing this post.)
Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles
When I first started reading The Vampire Chronicles c. 1990, they were the first works of contemporary literature I had ever encountered that simply ignored sexual orientation language as if the concepts of "gay" and "straight" didn't exist. Even today, when I am much better read and gay rights discourse far more advanced, this post- (or pre-)sexual orientation stance is sadly rare outside fan fiction. At the time, I found this stance immensely liberating, and I still do. I loved, for example, that Lestat and Louis could love each other in ways that sometimes read as sexualized and sometimes not, that they could both be Claudia's fathers, and no one bothered to bring up whether they were homosexual or bisexual or whether gay adoption should be legal; these things simply were.
In-universe, there are two explanations for this: one is historicity--Lestat and Louis both come from an era before "homosexuality" as a category existed. However, they certainly came from an era in which it was unacceptable for men to be erotically partnered with men, and the acceptability of their partnership comes directly from vampire nature. In TVC, vampires do not experience sexual arousal; their desire is based mainly on the need for blood, and men and women have equally attractive blood, so one of the first things becoming a vampire does is to break down any strong predisposition for attraction to one sex or the other. While vampires do not strongly desire each other's blood, this non-differentiation of types carries over into their relations with each other. With heightened senses, they are strongly aesthetically motivated, and either sex can be beautiful (regardless of one's innate orientation), and their experience of pan-desire for mortals makes it easy to bond with each other romantically irrespective of gender.
Equally as fascinating for me is the emphasis Rice places on the problems of immortality, specifically of becoming unmoored from one's native historical time and place. While she may not be Umberto Eco in her historical versimilitude, Rice clearly loves the periods she writes about and studies them considerably, and a sense of cultural otherness comes through consistently and powerfully in her depictions these men and women whose origins lie 200, 2000, or 5000 years ago. The interminglings of modernity and historical origin create a cast of characters who, by their very existence, put a different perspective on contemporary Western society. The lack of concern with sexual orientation language is one example. Another is predilection for fancy dress among men in a 20th century in which masculinity is generally linked to dressing conservatively.
Blood+
I've written elsewhere about the vampire species in the anime Blood+, but I'll briefly recapitulate here. This series posits that vampires ("chiropterans") are a separate species whose main unit in each generation consists of two "queens," twin sisters of immense powers, who turn a select set of humans (only men?) into vampires called "chevaliers," whose primary biological function is to serve and protect the queen whose blood created them and to mate with her sister. Here we have the basis for several fascinating social realities that overturn our usual narratives:
1) Females are the dominant sex. The presumption seems to be that they are physically stronger, though I'm not sure I actually see hard evidence of this in the series. Might this be a cultural construction rooted in observations of other types of power?
2) The default family structure appears polyandrous. It seems unproblematic for a queen to have more than one chevalier (they refer to each other as "brothers"). There is no necessary assumption of jealousy in this structure, though different individuals respond differently, just as in any social structure.
3) The reproductive unit is not the primary love unit. Chevaliers are clearly tied by a powerful instinct to love and typically stay close to the queen who created them and who is, by definition, not the person they would ever produce offspring with. The default social structure, thus, seems to call for the men to act as father figures to another man's children, and this appears accepted as natural.
All this, of course, is complicated by individual personalities, by memories of human lives and values, and (crucially) by the disruption of any established "vampire culture" in the current generation due to the deaths of predecessors and manipulations by human scientists. So assumptions about normative chiropteran behavior must be tentative, but this makes the series all the more fascinating.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
One of the reasons it took me years to give Buffy a try was that its vampires looked boring, and let's face it, as a race of beings, they are. They hearken back to an older "Dracula" model of vampire defined by being "evil, soulless things," who prey on humans and delight in nastiness. The series manages to be brilliant in spite of this because it's not about the vampires; it's about the Slayer.
However, it has some notable vampire characters, mainly Angel and Spike and, by extension, Darla and Drusilla. As a typically incestuous vampire family (see the hilarious "I'm My Own Grandpa" vid), their dynamics accomplish some of the usual questioning of human social roles. Perhaps the most interesting psychological question to emerge out of Buffy's vampires, however, is the relationship between personality and morality. When someone becomes a vampire they lose their "soul" (i.e. their conscience/drive toward good) but otherwise retain their native personality. Thus, soulless Angelus is the "Scourge of Europe," a strong, driven leader with a penchant for careful planning, and soul-having Angel is the "Champion of the People," a strong driven leader with a penchant for careful planning. Soulless Spike, on the other hand, is mainly driven by interpersonal love, while souled Spike is mainly driven by interpersonal love.
The effect is eerie and calls into question the nature of selfhood. The early Buffy seasons argue that when a person is vamped, a demon moves in and the original person is gone. Later seasons, older Buffy herself, give up on this comforting fairytale. Rather, it seems, the person remains... but evil. That we could have our goodness stripped from us and yet, in some sense, still be ourselves--that our goodness is not essential--is a frightening thought, with real-world applications to brain injury, for example. This unsettling exploration of self and morality is Buffy's greatest contribution to vampire lore.
Twilight
I have neither read nor seen Twilight and know only what I have picked up from a good amount of reading about it and from various film clips, etc., so my thoughts should be taken with a large grain of salt: I may be unaware of hidden depths. But I find the main thrust of Twilight annoying because it seems to do exactly the opposite of what good vampire literature is best at: challenging cultural assumptions.
Instead, its central narrative seems intent on reinforcing the most dominant of dominant narratives our culture has produced: girl meets boy; boy is sexy and dangerous; girl is in danger; sexy, dangerous boy protects girl; drama ensues, and they end up falling in love, getting married, having a baby, and living happily ever after. I'm not sure what the point of this is. Or to be more precise, I'm not sure if there is any redeeming social value to this. If anyone cares to comment, I am always glad to learn more about it.
I don't believe that vampire lit is an exhausted field by any means; it simply requires creativity to keep reinventing itself. And while I don't read vampire lit just for the sake of reading vampire lit, I am always open to being swept up in the next thought-provoking reinvention.
(Thanks to meganinhiding, whose vampire musings spurred me to stop putting off writing this post.)