You Were Such a Good Girl When You Were Human”
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RHONDA NICOL 10. “YOU WERE SUCH A GOOD GIRL WHEN YOU WERE HUMAN” Gender and Subversion in The Vampire Diaries No doubt due in large part to the phenomenal success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, L. J. Smith’s beloved series of novels from the 1990s, The Vampire Diaries, was adapted for television by Kevin Williamson, previously best known for his writer-producer work on both the Scream film franchise and the television show Dawson’s Creek. Williamson knows both horror and teen angst, and the two come together in The Vampire Diaries television show, which had its broadcast premier on the CW in September 2009 and has, as of this writing, recently completed its fifth season. Although the television series obviously owes its existence at least in part to the Twilight Saga, it is also clearly influenced not only by its source material (Smith’s books) but also by the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS), which set the standard for the vampires-in-high-school television show. In both the Twilight Saga and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the focus on the male vampire and his human female paramour serves to make the particular monstrousness of the vampire primarily masculine in nature. In The Vampire Diaries, the association is certainly not reversed, but it is mitigated, largely by interrogating cultural conceptions of “acceptable” female gender performance via its female characters’ shifting subject positions, primarily from human to vampire. As the series has developed, it has steadily increased its interrogation of the figure of the monstrous feminine, first by introducing Katherine (Nina Dobrev), Stefan’s (Paul Wesley) and Damon’s (Ian Somerhalder) progenitor and Elena’s doppelgänger (also played by Nina Dobrev), as a nemesis and then by chronicling Elena’s own transition from human to vampire and its effects upon her relationship to and with Katherine. Additionally, the series has explored Caroline Forbes’s (Candice Accola) journey from Elena’s vain, selfish sidekick into a fledgling vampire whose physical transformation occasions her emotional evolution. Sharon Marie Ross and Louisa Ellen Stein suggest that one of the defining characteristics of what they call “Teen TV” is “its recurring engagement with questions A. Hobson & U. M. Anyiwo (Eds.), Gender in the Vampire Narrative, 145–160. © 2016 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. R. Nicol of identity and self-discovery” (2008) and certainly The Vampire Diaries is typical of a program on the CW network in that regard. By examining Caroline, Elena, and Katherine’s character arcs, we can observe how the series as a whole explores and confronts cultural anxieties for young women regarding identity development generally as well as gender performance specifically, providing a space in the popular media landscape for complex and nuanced depictions of gender. In the early days of the series, it was apparent that the production team understood fully that comparisons between their show and Twilight were inevitable, and it’s clear that they sought to declare their independence very early on. In the fourth episode of the series, Damon, the bad-boy vamp and foil to the more generally noble Stefan (in BtVS terms, Damon is Spike and Stefan is Angel) is flipping through Caroline’s copy of Twilight and mutters, “What’s so special about this Bella girl? Everyone’s so whipped. Oh, I miss Anne Rice. She was so on it” (Kriesberg & Young, 2009). When Caroline asks, “How come you don’t sparkle?” Damon snarls, “Because I live in the real world where vampires burn in the sun” (Kriesberg & Young, 2009). In the series’ pilot episode, Damon also grouses, “I couldn’t take another day of the ’90s” (Williamson & Plec, 2009b), and although in context he’s ostensibly talking about grunge, it might also be interpreted as an effort to distance this show from the original Vampire Diaries book series and/ or BtVS, both ’90s artefacts. Additionally, in an early episode, when Elena and Stefan are on the outs because she can sense that he’s keeping secrets from her, Elena tells Aunt Jenna, “I’m not going to be one of those pathetic girls whose world stops spinning because of some guy” (Reycraft & Stanton, 2009), which seems like a fairly obvious repudiation of the entire plot of New Moon, the second book in the Twilight Saga, during which Bella spends most of the novel moping and pining for Edward, who has left her. Elena Gilbert, our heroine, is like Buffy and Bella before her, indisputably a heroine in the “good girl” mould. However, the series is fairly transgressive, even in its early seasons, by suggesting that this in a world where good girls do have sex, and teenage sexual activity is frequently treated as value- neutral, which is probably due largely to its inclusion on the CW, a network which is known for its somewhat racy fare and frank depictions of teenage sexuality. Very quickly in its run, the series reflects changing the stakes for women’s sexuality—no longer is there a simple dividing line between the “good girl” who doesn’t have sex outside of a committed (implicitly eternal) relationship and the “bad girl” who does. Although both Buffy’s and Bella’s chastity and the “loss” thereof are fairly major plot points in their respective 146.