Our Evolving Fears Joshua Dewar Old Dominion University

RUNNING HEAD: OUR EVOLVING FEARS Our Evolving Fears Joshua Dewar Old Dominion University OUR EVOLVING FEARS Dewar 1 Joshua Dewar December 3rd, 2018 Eng 333 Our Evolving Fears Stephen King’s ‘Salems Lot has been an incredibly successful novel. The homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula can attribute its popularity to King’s masterful ability to find the pressure points of today’s anxieties and fears and emphasize them in his work. Stoker similarly provoked his audience to address the “elephants in the room” of his era. By analyzing what each of these author’s chooses to focus on, the realities that frighten and confuse their audience, one can draw conclusions about the nature of that audience’s psychological insecurities. This can be an incredibly valuable tool for authors and literary critics within the genre for considering how the horror genre allows audiences to engage in acknowledging and coping with their fears by daring them to take a peek from under the blanket. Fear and anxiety derived from societal pressure and repression is presented in Dracula as emphatically sexual; as King explains in Danse Macabre, “In a way it was the mores of Stoker’s day which dictated that the Count’s evil should come from outside, because much of the evil embodied in the Count is a perverse sexual evil”(67). Scenes like Harker’s close encounter with Dracula’s harpies in which he describes their behavior as “deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive” embody the contradictory forces of passion(sexual freedom) and purity(sexual conformity) that collide on the page. Lucy’s transformation is illustrated more as a descent into sexual depravity rather than death, “from a self described flirt to a voluptuous and sexually aggressive vampire, a Gothic exaggeration of a New Woman. Her little-girl ‘purity’ OUR EVOLVING FEARS Dewar 2 becomes ‘unclean’ ‘wantonness,’ her arms hungering for Arthur while ‘her eyes’ blaze “with unholy light”(Brennan 52). The Count himself only appears in short bursts, usually at night with his teeth in a helplessly enrapt woman. The short time he spends on the page is overwhelmed by the space he occupies in the minds of the team of vampire slayers. “Stoker creates his fearsome, immortal monster much the way a child can create the shadow of a giant rabbit on the wall simply by wiggling his fingers in front of a light”(Danse 66). The Count is kept front and center in the minds of his victims by virtue of his absence, in this way he embodies the obsession of repressed desires that characterizes the fantasies of his victims. The emphasis on this type of fear makes sense when we look at the risk of ostracization and condemnation as a result of deviating from sexual norms in Victorian era England; this was a really powerful deterrent, shaping behavior and undoubtedly enlarging the shadow selves of some of Stoker’s readers. In the scene with the female vampires lusting for his blood, the horror of being helpless encapsulates Harker’s desire like a shield -- allowing him to engage in and admit desire while presenting him as a victim. As King puts it, “Harker is about to orally raped and he doesn’t mind a bit. And it’s all right, because he is not responsible. In matters of sex, a highly moralistic society can find a psychological escape value in the concept of outside evil; this thing is bigger than both of us, baby”(Danse, 67). Regardless of the permissibility of this desire, it’s expression is deeply consequential; Jonathan’s encounter with this “dreamy fear”(Stoker 37) leads to what I have described as the “peaking of Jonathan’s psychological trauma that nearly decenters (his) consciousness”(Bolton 3). Much like Harker’s ego, a societal worldview that demands conformity to support ideas of morality is inherently unstable. The OUR EVOLVING FEARS Dewar 3 conflict between a muted yet comfortable status quo and the yearning for wholeness is reflected in Dracula through sexual tensions, terrifying the repressed with the tantalizing vision of what’s lurking in their shadow. Both Stoker and King provide healthy and fruitful ways for the reader’s of their era to explore the other that haunts them, but different societies have different fears(even if their nightmare’s seem similar). The danger of seeing the perverse in oneself is less of a pressure point today in today’s society due to the sexual liberation movements of recent decades. Simply put, with sexuality out in the open, there’s not much left to fear. For this reason King focuses on other topics as he explains, “When I wrote my own vampire novel, ‘Salem’s Lot, I decided to largely jettison the sexual angle, feeling that in a society where homosexuality, group sex, oral sex . have become matters of public discussion . the sexual engine that powers Stoker’s book might have run out of gas”(Danse, 70). Outside of the noteworthy tension between the author Ben Mears and the more conservative members of the community concerning his sexually explicit novel Conway’s Daughter, sexual controversy is mostly absent from the novel. King’s ability to read the tensions of his time surely attribute to his position of influence in the genre; for horror writers to find success in the genre they must address the needs of their audience.In an analysis of King’s work titled Closure and Power in Salem’s Lot, this need is identified as a“desire among consumers of horror fiction for the ability to manipulate and conquer the same fears which horror brings to light”(Sanders 146). Therefore, addressing the modern anxieties of today’s audience requires an inquiry into what the current cultural consensually demonizes. Who do we most vilify? What do we most fear? Questions like these are powerful; they serve as a hub from which a thousand spokes expand -- each propelled toward OUR EVOLVING FEARS Dewar 4 a unique evil. At the end of all these avenues of inquiry line awaits the discomfort, unsolvable problems and unkind truths that those who avoid the genre would rather hide from. Three that prove to be especially lasting are surprisingly less monstrous than the devils and monsters of our ancestors; the evil within us and the ways we deny complexities through the painful partitioning of self. The monsters we make reflect aspects of ourselves, “Monstrosity is the touchstone. Monstrosity reminds us that there are clear lines, and on this side of that line resides normalcy, but on the other side is scrawled, ‘Here be monsters’”(Sanders 147). While the tradition of otherworldly evil incarnations is alive and well in ‘Salems Lot, the weaknesses and moral blind spots of the town’s all too human population is what allows vampirism to thrive. Nosy neighbors and jealous ex-boyfriends, lustful creeps and an overbearing mother all serve the king vampire Barlow through their self interest. Even ‘Salem’s Lot’s catholic priest Father Callahan is eventually overwhelmed and forced to flee from Barlow when his shadow self is brought to light. The plight of Calloway is a product of the confusion one faces when addressing the new evil with the traditional externalized idea of evil more prominent in Stoker’s era, when thinking about the state of the churches ongoing war with the devil he concedes, "there were no battles . .only skirmishes of vague resolution. And EVIL did not wear one face but many . In fact, he was being forced to the conclusion that there was no EVIL in the world at all but only evil?or perhaps (evil)" (Lot 150). This new “(evil)” is uninteresting to him, he views this fight as beyond the devil and thereby outside of the church’s control; Mustazza summarizes the Father’s reasoning, ”If all evil is attributable not to Satan but to psychological and social disturbance, his reasoning goes, and if OUR EVOLVING FEARS Dewar 5 the solutions to these problems lie not with metaphysicians but with psychiatrists and social reformers, then of what use is religion? Indeed, if there is no Satan, then there very likely is no God either”(Mustazza 110). Jerusalem’s Lot is flooded with secrets, by taking advantage of the inhabitants worst aspects and their refusal to acknowledge the monsters within them, Barlow creates a hell on earth. The town falls quietly and rather quickly, seeming to await it’s demise with the same fear and eagerness that Harker awaited the harpie’s bite. The town’s willful ignorance of its own demise, the willingness of neighbors to turn a blind eye to a shrinking population each day while vampires fed and multiplied each night is a choice, surrender to death is easier -- sweeter -- than acknowledging their shadow. “There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, it’s coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knew the evil was coming and the shape it would take”(Lot 324). The splitting of self, of the shadow from our conscious has blossomed in the age of social media. The muffled trauma of normalizing the two-facedness of conflicting public and private selves is often reflected in writers in King’s works; the man who writes and the pages he creates rarely stand for the same thing. Our protagonist Ben Mears is no exception to King’s tendency to use the author to reflect what Sander’s calls an “obvious popularizing of Freud's notion of the contest between superego and id (exemplified by) Ben Mears' typewriter standing sentinel in his upstairs room while a vampire sleeps in the basement”(Sanders 147) Ben is intensely sensitive about revealing any information concerning his manuscript, his secretive working life is something modern readers can relate to in their pursuit of hiding any and all imperfections from public scrutiny.

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