Re-Reading the Vampire from John Polidon to Anne Rice: Structures of lmpossibility Among Three Narrative Variations in the Vampinc Tradition

PETER LEONARD PAOLUCCI

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by PETER LEONARD PAOLUCCI

a dissertation subrnitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

O 2000 Permission has been granted to the LIBRARY OF YORK UNIVERSITY to lend or set1 copies of this dissertation. to the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA to microfilm this dissertation and to lend or sel1 copies of the film, and to UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS to publish an abstract of this dissertation. The author reserves other publication rights. and neither the dissertation nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's written permission. This dissertation offers a new paradigm to assist in the interpretation of the

vampiric tradition in the English language from its origins (John Polidori) to

contemporary examples (Anne Rice). The study posits a three-part taxonomy of

vampiric narratives: vilifcation, heroic and sublime. Each of these variations can

be applied to fiction drama, and film. Vilification narratives constnict the vampire

as essentially monstrous and repulsive whereas heroic narratives vaiorize the

vampire and encourage reader or audience sympathy. Sublime narratives,

however, tend to resist the more polarized moral and aesthetic judgments about the vampire, though not always successfully. In sublime narratives, judgement is suspended because the narrative focus remains enthralled by the vampire's inherent contradictions, and by the psychological paradoxes of its interiority.

Sublime narratives anxiously cunstruct the vampire as lover-predator, alive-dead, fascinating-temfying, natural-supernatural, human-demonic, attractive-ugIy, good- evil and, in short, as a contradictory experience that ernbraces opposing sensations and sentiments. All sublime narratives attempt to resolve these tensions; some are successful others are not-

Al1 three narrative types descrÏbe events, incidents, or states of being that may be unexpected, inwngruous, or difficult to accept for the characters, and by implication, for audiences and readers; such events, incidents or states constitute examples of the impossible. The most frequently recumng and deeply rooted v ÏmpossibiMy in the vampiric tradition is supematuralism and the consequent

debate over whether or not vampires actually exist. All three vampiric narratives

are engaged in this controversy. It is the sublime narrative in particuiar, however, that is always caught in the balance, always tom between recognizing the vampire as an intrusion of malevolent supematural agencies into human affairs and on a more rational and scientific level, always attempting to explain away supematural phenornena merely as misunderstood events in nature or in the human world. Impossibility in the vampiric tradition is further conflated with metaphors for other kinds of impossibilities, especially queemess. deviant sexual practices, and those particular configurations of romantic love triangles that are at once alluring and forbidden. Over time, al1 these variations of impossibility have mutated and recombined to produce the content of vilification, heroic and sublime narratives, but the most compelling shifts have occurred within sublime narratives. This dissertation rnaps out those shifts over tirne.

Works discussed are Polidori's The Vampyre (18 19). Planché's The

Vampyre, or the Bride of the lsles (1820). Rymer's Vamey the Vampyre (1847),

Le Fanu's Carmilla (1 872), Sto ker's Dracula (1897), Murnau's Nosferatu (1922),

Balderston and Deane's Dracula: (1 927). Browning's Dracula (1 932). King's

Salem's Lot (1975). Rice's interview With the Vampire, the 1976 novel and the

1994 film, and Coppola's Bram Stokefs Dr-acula (1992). The early nineteenth century (Polidori to Rymer) is dominated by vilifying and heroic narratives that vi combine the îrnpossibilify of supematuralism with the conventionalities of forbidden and romantic iove. Queemess and the deconstruction of masculinity are oniy latent. The transfonning power in the later nineteenth century (Le Fanu and Stoker) is evident in the emergence of sublime narratives that combine sexual and gender queerness with the supematural while subordinating conventional romance. Finally, the twentieth century shows the evolution of only two distinct narratives instead of three. Vilification narratives (Murnau and King) continue to develop, but perhaps more importantly, there emerges a newfy mutated variety of sublime narrative in which the supematural, queerness and the deconstruction of gender, are integrated with wnventional romance. This line of narrative evolution is illustrated in Coppola and Rice and, to a lesser extent, their predecessors, Balderston/Deane and Browning. vii Acknowledgments

I remain deeply indebted to Professors Christopher lnnes and Maurice

Elliott, who found me by the Rvers of Babylon- Their carhg encouragement and

generosity of spirit were essential to the success of this project. Professor David

Latharn was meticulous and insightful, and always a thought-provoking reader. 1 found the spirit of this cornmittee always to be uplifting as well as enriching and I am grateful.

My colleagues at Stong College were also wonderfuIly supportive, especially my predecessor as Academic Advisor, Professor Greg Malszecki and acting Master, Professor Frances Flint. Both seem to have had an uncanny sense of knowing when I needed cheerleading and when I needed solitude. My long-time fnend and once fellow-student, Dr. John Radcliffe, was an inspiration too. And to my former students in ASlSC 1990 "The Gothic Tradition," frorn 1983 to 1996, thank you, each, and every one, for teaching me so much and for perennially rejuvenating this material for me.

To my beautiful and most patient wife, Sari, who has been without her husband for so long, thank you for al1 your personal sacrifice, and your undying love and support. To my most precious daughter Stephanie, thank you for teaching me the value of play, the joy of iaughter and the importance of balance in life. I love you both, always. viii Table of Contents ln traduction ...... ~...... 1 Chapter One: Theorizing the Impossible ...... 21

Chapter Two Vilifying and Heroicizing Narratives of the Eariy Nineteenth Century: Masculinity in Cnsis ...... 8 1 Chapter Three Narratives of the Sublime In the Late Nineteenth Century: Gender Crisis ...... ~..~...... 121

Chapfer Four Narratives of the Twentieth Century lmpossibility in the VilificafionNarrative

Chapter Five Narratives of the Twentieth Century The TMphof Romance: ...... 199

Conclusion ...... 25 1

AppendixA ...... 257

Appendix B ...... 263

Appendix C ...... ~...... ~...... 270

Works Cited ...... 276 List of lltustrations

Appendix A Figure 1 : Fuseli, The Nighfmare (frorn Nicholas powell, 19) Figure 2: Anonymous, The Nightmare (from NicholaS Powelll 14) Figure 3: Anonyrnous, The Nightmare (frorn Nicholas Powell. 58) Figure 4: N. Abildgaard. A Nightmare (from NicholaS Powell, 89) Figure 5: W. Raddon, The Nightmare (from NiCholas Powell, 99)

Appendix B Figure 6: J.E. Millais, The Rescue (frorn Herbert SusSman, 145 ) Figure 7: J.E. Millais, The Knight Errant (frorn Herbert Sussmanl 147) Figure 8: D. H. Fiston, Millarca Affacking ber Vidim (hem Kendfick, 164) Figure 9: Herzog's Nosferatu (from Hutchinson & ~ickard.11) Figure 10: Lee and Blair (from Silver and Ursini, 27) Figure 1 1: Ryder and Oldham (from Sifver and ursini, 142)

Appendix C Figure 12: Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu (frorn David SkaL 53) Figure 13: Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu (from David Skal, 62) Figure 14: Gary Oldham as Coppola's Dracula from Francis Ford Coppola and Eiko Ishioka, 20) Figure 15: Philip Burne-Jones, The Vampire, 1897 (from Skal, 29) Figure 16: Van Helsing and Mina frorn Coppola's ~racula(from Francis Ford Coppola and James Hart, 152) 1

Introduction:

The words impossible and impossibility are used interchangeably in this dissertation and they share a very specific meaning that is distinct front ordinary usage. Although 1 use impossible to mean that which "cannot exist or come in to being" (OED), my particular meaning also refers to a phenornenon that is not yet known, and for which there is not yet a word or expression. The impossible is viscerai, but not rational; intuited, but not articulated; felt, but not thought; sensed, but not understood; it is unexpected, startling, and taboo, but only comprehended as such after it has been somewhat pleasantly experienced. Finally, the impossible is at once familiar and exotically mysterious. Al1 these contradictions produce anxiety, and the intensity of this anxiety in tutn, corresponds directly to the extent to which our society has taught us nof to believe in the impossible-

The impossible is manifested through the vampire in two main ways.

Firstly, the vampire represents an intrusion of malevolent supematural agents into hurnan affairs, and as such, it defies the scientific and theological laws of mortaIity. Secondly, the vampire is simultaneously masculine and feminine (this is not the same as alternately being masculine and feminine). When humans encounter the vampire, they also encounter these symbolic manifestations of impossîbrïify in one being. Thus, the vampire mediates between the rationality, certainty, and routine habits of modem life, and the nightmarish dream world of supematural, pseudo-sexual predators- The vampire narrative is about the awakening of anxiety. Sometimes, we observe from a distance as characters struggle with the impossible, and at other times, we Iive the impossible along with them. lmpossibilify can function like an archetype, but this study does not fully rnake that daim, since the scope of this work is neither cross-cultural nor cross-temporal enough to substantiate it. The impossibility that is so inherent in the vampire also anticipates postrnodemism, but the anxieties caused by the inwngruities of the impossible are visceral, intuitive, and rarely intellectual or rational.

There are two other words used in a specialized way. The first is romance, by which 1 simply mean the social conventions and patterns of heterosexual courtship, and the resulting marriage or promise of marriage. This lower-case romance is distinct from any reference to Iiterary genre, mythology, chivalry, or sustained heroic adventure. Finally, the words, supernatural and supernaturalisrn are distinct from one another. The former refers strictly to the intruding supematural agent or the occurrence itself, whereas the latter refers to whole system of arguments for and against belief in the existence of the su pematural.

There is a whesive and substantial large body of narratives that takes as its main preoccupation, the malevolent intrusion of supernatural agents into human affairs.' These narratives cross fiction, drarna, and film. They have been 3

named The Gothic Tradition or just the ~upematural.~This so-called tradition is

broadly subdivided into four main categories, based on the nature of the particular

intniding agent: vampires, lycanthropes (werewolf stories), poltergeists (ghost stories), or witches (stories of witchcraft). Montague Surnrnen, in his anthology entitled, The Penguin Supernatuml omnibus3, makes even further distiinctions, including narratives of zombies. ghouls, voodoo, satanism, diabolism, demonic possession, but these do not irnmediately concem us here.

The first narratives of vampiric supematural intrusion appeared in the early part of the nineteenth century and they took the form of fiction (Polidari) and drama (Planché). They were fed from three converging streams of influence: the literary, the historical and the folkloric. The early literary ernergence of the vampire was set against a rnid-eighteenth-century European mass hysteria about vampires. This widespread hysteria had its roots in folklore, but the folklore in tum was rooted in a history that reached back to the days of Prince Vlad the lmpaler in the fourteenth century.

There were also literary antecedents that were generally relatedi to the idea of the supernatural, but not to the very specific vampiric manifestatioin of the supernatural. These Iiterary antecedents include: the invited satanic intrusion of

Mephistophilis in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (c. 1588 -1SS2), the appearance of the ghost whose nature is initially ambiguous in William

Shakespeare's Hamlet (1600-1 6Ol), and the sinister witches in Macbeth (1606) 4 who seem to preside over and contribute to the hero's demise. Another example, and arguably, the greatest expression of supernaturai intrusion into human affain, is Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost (1658-1 665, printed 1667). While immersed in themes of the supernatural, however, none of these literary antecedents takes the vampiric supematural as its main subject, and for this reason one might argue that the vampiric tradition was never fully articulated until this theme was explicitly foregrounded by John Poiidori in 1819.

It is ironic, but not accidental, that the large, so-called Gothic Tradition and one of its subsets called vampiric supematuralism, each emerged at times when some of the major literary trends were running in precisely the opposite direction.

In a sense, al1 supematural narratives engage the impossible because they also challenge and oppose realism. By the mid-eighteenth century, the rise of the novel marked an increasingly popular preference for an ordinariness of language and the uncornmon comrnonality of character. in The Rise of the Novel lan Watt describes this preference as a "convention" of "formal realism" in which the

"details" and "circumstances" of setting and character are recmited into the service of creating a "total authenticity" (35). Works such as Daniel Defoe's Mol1

Fianders (1722)and Robinson Crusoe (c. 1719 - 1720) illustrate the trend, with their rneticulous attention to the circurnstantial minutiae of common people caught in the exciting adventure of extraordinary circumstances. It is as much againsf this literary aesthetic of realism as with it, that all supernatural narratives mutated. 5

Incredible characters such as real ghosts appear with centra! roles, and the improbability of plot becornes excessive, thus undermining and creating a dissonance with the aesthetic of authenticity. The supematural and wild improbability flourished in William Beckford's Vafhek (1786) and Matthew Lewis'

The Monk (1796),both of which unabashedfy embraced the most outrageous of plots and characters as the stapie of their narrative styles. Both Beckford and

Lewis set their stories exotically with little attention to authenticity through the recognizable minutiae of details of setting.

Even the debunkers of supernaturalisrn such as Mrs. Radcliffe (The

Mysteries of Udol'ho, 1794) and Jane Austen (Nomanger Abbey, published

1818) seasoned their satire of the supematural with romance and realism. In spite of tongue-in-cheek warnings against the dangers of reading too many horror romances, a burgeoning interest in the supernatural led directly to the emergence of the vampire narrative in the early part of the nineteenth century, as evidenced in the popular works of John Polidori (181 9) and James Planché (1820).

Polidori and Planché are a watershed in the history of the vampire narrative. The eighteenth-century diafectic between supernaturalism and realism was continued in the fom of a slightly revised diaiectic between vampinc supematuralism and nineteenth-century realism. It was because of Polidori and

Planché that the nineteenth century becarne a spawning ground for vampinc supernaturalism and it did sol ironically, alongside an opposing literary fascination 6

with the circumstantial and empirical details of this world, not the excesses and

rnystical qualities of the other, and in step with an increasing fascination with

supernaturalism in general. The popularity of nineteenth-century short stories of

general supematuralism increased steadily alongside Newgate novels and Penny

Dreadfuls. Ghost stories in particular abounded4 and the first Werewolf stories

also began to appear as early as 1820.~Moreover, the late nineteenth-century

publication of the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould's A Book of Folklore (n-d.) and The

Book of Werewolves (circa 1888 - 1890) seerns to confirm the hypothesis that a

sustained mainstream interest in the supematural was present in the nineteenth

century. Bram Stoker used Baring-Gould's widely known work as a source for

Dracula, but Stoker also had a number of indigenous vampiric literary precedents

from which to draw, including Vamey and Carmilla.

The very idea of the supetnaturai seems at first glance to be inimical to a world dorninated by the realism of industry, empiricisrn, and science. In an age

driven by a Baconian cornmitment to the observation of minutiae and the cautious

construction of laws and first principles, skepticism about the supematural was a

logical corollary. And yet paradoxically, science itself, as well as many farnous

Victonans, were extremely curious about supematural phenornena. It is the very

incompafibilify of the supematural amidst al1 this skepticism and rationalisrn that

makes the vampire such a powerful psychological and cultural attraction, and such an interesting literary, dramatic and (later a cinematic) phenornenon- My idea of the impossible emerges from this very incongruity. Paul Roach has

observed that

Phrenology and mesmerism sprang from the minds of Viennese doctors while spiritualism was imported from America. The way in which English Victorians adopted these "sciences" into their culture was unique .... There is evidence of Queen Victoria attendhg seances and using a medium ... Charles Dickens practiced mesmerism on his own wife .... [and] in 1838 approximately 170 of the 1,000 memben of the newly formed phrenological societies were physicians and surgeons ...6

The supematural is one instance of the impossible, but other instances of

impossibilrty and incongruity were also confiated with the supematural, the most

notable of which were the oppositions inherent in gender definition, gender

identity and sexual preference. In the sarne way that these newly emerging

phrenologiml societies tenuously bridged the gap between the mutually exclusive opposites of science and supematuralism, so too does vampiric supematuralism

atternpt to bridge the gap between gender orthodoxy and deviancy.

The supematuralism of the vampire originates in rnyth, history and folklore,

but it also cornes from a place of so-called "primitive" religion and superstitions.

Just as an adult abandons the ways of childhood, so western civilization has abandoned its primitive beliefs about the supematural in favor of the explicable and the empirical. Out of modemity's conviction about its superiority to primitive cultures, emerges the imaginative need to encounter that which has been dismissed as non-existent and impossible. The vampire is a noctumal predator, a gnm and symbolic reninder that anything long-dead and buried - literally and 8 rnetaphorically - can be resuscitated at those moments when we are least prepared for the experienœ. The resonances that surround the Iiterary expression of anxïety and surprise at having encountered the unexpected are cultural, social, religious and psycholugical, and they stimulate our collective and individual fears about the repressed, the hidden and the unknown. The psychological and cultural need to confront and to escape from these anxieties simultaneously provides the ernotional, visceral and intellectual intensity to sustain the popularity of this genre. Ail supernaturalism in general, and vampiric impossibility in particular, offer an opportunity to deconstruct much of what has been comfortably assumed as certain in our Iives, and where ideologically appropriate, we are also offered opportunities to re-assemble those deconstructions into palpable resolutions.

The dialectic of burgeoning supernaturalism and mysticism amidst the skepticism of modemity is further elucidated by the long and intricate relationship between literature of the supernatural and its two sister genres, the detective novel and science fiction. Al1 three genres are concerned ~Aththe diswvery, confrontation and resolution of an ominous threat ta the community, but there are some revealing differences too. The supematural narrative is cosmic in scale, and shudders at mystical prima1 forces that threaten humanity, whereas the detective story explores the horror of a criminal (hurnan) threat to cornmunity.

While the supematural narrative reveals the power of belief in the mystical and the supernatural, the detective story tends to be more secular, placing its faith in 9

the rational and deductive powen of human beings (usually men) to ward off the

threat through the intellect. Both detective fiction and supematuralism were of

great interest to Wilkie Coliins, author of a dozen or so supematural horror

stones7 and who also wrote The Moonstone (1868) that perhaps was the first

detective novel in English.

Both vampirk and detective genres are dialectically conflated in Arthur

Conan Doyle's The Sussex Vampire (1896) in which Sherlock Holmes ultimately finds a rational explanation for the apparent presence of a vampire. There are also other non-vampiric examples of conflated supematuralism and the detective story, most notably perhaps in Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton's A Strange Stow or, the Haunted and the Haunters (London: Routledge, 1862) in which the apparent presence of a ghost is ultimately discovered to be a deftly employed magnetic field in the basement of a "haunted" house,

Science fiction often explores the intrusion of criminal men of science (and the products of their work) into the moral righteousnesç of the cornmunity, but the threat is often solved by the very mechanisms that created the threats in the first instance- It is Victor Frankenstein's own creature who tums on him, and in

Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) it is the chernical process of transformation itself that leads to Jekyll's destruction. Science fiction and supematuralism also share a similar origin because Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein (1816) and John Polidori's The Vampyre (181 9) were both the result 10 of the wnting experirnents conducted simu~taneousiyby the intimately connected

Diodati Circle while they were in Geneva- One common intent of both genres

(science fiction and the supematural) is to instill horror in the reader and to assault any sensibility that is grounded in the everyday banality of realisrn.

The fact still remains, however, that in spite of its widespread populanty, al1 supernaturalism remained on the periphery of Victorian intellectual respectability and legitirnacy. When Vamey was finally bound into a single book in 1853, the result was well over a thousand pages of double wlumn, smalt pflnt.

The signifîcance of the longevity of Vamey - and of its omission from the conventional nineteenth-century literary canon - is a reminder that vampiric literature has, frorn its earliest days, been treated as tainted and as a lower art form even though its popularity has always remained high. The problem of legitimacy remains to this day and with it cornes the problem of how to make sense of the supematural in general.

Many prirnary sources have yet to be published by dominant academic publishing houses; publication has been left to much smaller presses or to popular presses. Even if the implicit mainstream literary judgernent is nght about the paucity of ment in these works as Iiterary artifacts, the mass popularity of supernaturalisrn has never been in doubt. And often, the ment of these literary works lies more in their content, ideas and themes, rather than in any excellence of artistic craftsmanship. The real value of these works lies in their cultural 11

potency and their ability to invoke and deconstmd the impossibiIity in our lives

and in our culture. In this sense, their therapeutic functionality can outweigh

artistic shortcomings.

Chapter One of this dissertation discusses five transfomative stages in the development of the vampire as a subject initially, from historically real vampires (Vlad Tepes and others) to continental folklore; secondly from continental folklore to widespread popularity because of the vampire hysteria across Europe in the early eighteenth century; thirdly from European notoriety to early nineteenth-century English fiction and drama via the Romantics; fourthly from nineteenth-century English literature to twentieth-century Arnerican and

British film; and finally and briefly, from twentieth-century mass media to the

Intemet. These stages register the impact of a massive shift from primitive, oral cultures immersed in mysticism and religious belief, to modem industrialized cultures driven by utilitarian principles ernbedded in science, empificism and systematic knowledge.

Chapter One also defines the impossible as a function of supematuralism and as a function of queemess, or the breakdown of gender identity and sexual practice. This chapter further theorizes the impossible in the context of four conceptual cornerstones of vampiric criticism: Tzvetan Todorov's notion of the

Fantastic, the paradox of fear, the neo-Freudian notion of the uncanny, and the sublime. Finally, this chapter postulates a taxunomy of three varieties of vampiric 12 narratives: vilification, heroic and sublime narratives. Heroic and vilification narratives contain a rhetoiic that morally judges the vampire favorably or disparagingly, respectively. By contrast, sublime narratives suspend judgment for or against the vampire, and stand hesitatingly on the border between compassion and condernnation, preferring instead to explore the vampire neither as a monster nor a hero, but as a cun'ous object of study that we are invited to admire and condemn simultaneously.

Chapter Two interprets three eariy, seminal nineteenth-century vam piric narratives: John Polidori's The Vampye (1819), James Robinson Planches The

Vampire, or, the Bride of the Mes (1820) and James Ryrner's Vamey the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood (1845-1 847). The purpose is to demonstrate that the heroic and the vilifjing are informed by the rhetoric of acceptanœ of supematural

Ïmpossibiiity and heterosexuality. In spite of the occasional moment of self- deconstruction, al1 three are very conventionally preoccupied with romance

(forbidden love, courtship, mamage and fernale submissiveness to the ideals of family) as the backdrop against which these impmsibiliÏes are played out. Of these three early works, Polidori's is the most complex and sophisticated in its deconstniction of gender and sexual orientation, and Planché's is the Ieast These particular vampires are solitary, self-gratifying, socially alienated and predatory. All are males and al1 are cads because their power, sexual appetite and lack of self- restraint permit them to take ungentlemanly advantage of helpless virginal females. 13

These are vampires that threaten the institution of mamage, the hierarchical power structure of the patriarchal family, and consequently, the psychological mmfort of other local males. These vampiric predators syrnbolize an impossibility in masculine behavior; they are ideologically unimaginabte males who ruthlessly manipulate their victims and who must choose, woo and then destroy their women @vives). The pattern is a wonderfully inadvertent deconstruction of the most sinister aspects of patriarchal marnage in bourgeois culture.

Chapter three argues that Sheridan Le Fanu's Cannilla (1872) and Bram

Stoker's Dacula (1 897) mark the most significant watenhed (one is ternpted to say btoodshed) in the vampiric tradition. Both sublime narratives are characterized by a powerful sub-textual fascination with (and repulsion to) vampiric supematuralism, queemess and hurnan polysexuality. Both works background, and yet still manage to deconstruct the conventionally romantic thernes previously established by PoIidori,

Planché and Rymer. Carmilla is seductive, conventionally ferninine and motheriy in her attacks on young Laura. Dracula is polyphagous and by implication, polygamous and polysexuat because of his attacks on Harker, Renfield, Mina and Lucy, and because of his ability to shape-change into a varieiy of animals such as wolves and rats. He becornes, through his bite, their bridegroom, their bride and their parent (he creates them as vampires). The vampirisrn of Dracula and Carmilla is not only supematurally impossible but also manifestly queer. Cannilla, Lucy and Dracula are sacrificed (staked), but only ailer their atrocities have been de-bed in great detail, 14 and thereby vican'ously enjoyed as well. Aithough vestigial bourgeois values of mamage and heterosexuality remain frorn eariier nineteenth-century narratives, these same values are deconstructeci and then ultimately re-affirmed by staking, revealing that these stories are at once radical and conservative.

Chapter Four traces the development of the vilification narratives in the twentieth œntury as manifest in F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Stephen

King's Salem's Lof (1975). Heroic narratives essentially disappear in the hiventieth century and therefore are not dealt with here. In the vilification nanatives the vampires are (not surprisingly) morally and physically repulsive; these namiives have rnutated from the pattern established by Polidori in which romantic impossibilify was so predominant; here, romance has ken essentially eliminated. In Murnau, however, the conventionalities of gender are challenged; and in King our assumptions about the innocence of chiidren are undermined.

In the twenüeth century, vilification nanatives which engage rornantic impossibilify have atrophieci whereas by contrast, sublime narratives, which once eschewed conventions of romance in favor of sexual devianœ and queerness, have now wholehearted!~ernbraced these conventions of romance and integrated them with alternative gender identification, sexual devianœ and the sublime. Chapter

Five, therefore, ernphasizes the debt of twentieth-century vampiric narratives to the nineteenth-century legacy of romantic impossribifity in the sublime narrative style.

This chapter explores ways in which supematuralisrn, romance and queemess have 15

mutated, particularly in the following works: John Balderston and Hamilton Deane's

Dracula (1 9Z), Tod Browning's Dracula (1931)' Anne Rice's Interview with the

Vampire (1976) and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stokefs Dracula (1992). Sublime

narratives in our own aintemporary age appear to have unshackled thernselves

from the constraints of earlier, more consewative affirmations of heterosexual

gender paradigms, and yet the reliance on romantic conventions seerns,

paradoxically, to have intensified. The late twentieth century, therefore, both

reverses and retains its nineteenth-œntury legacy, but in so doing also demonstrates

a far greater diversity, complexity and heterogeneity of fom.

In assigning John Polidori's The Varnpyre (1819) as the wellsprÏng of the varnpiric tradition, I have followed Chnstopher Frayling, Nina ~uerbach,~Ken

Gelder and most others whose focus is pnmaiîly literary and extends over the 180

(or so) years between Polidori's work and Our present time. Given that Polidori is the Iiterary starting point, the subçequent choices for the nineteenth century are clear cut: James Robinson Planché's play, The Vampire or, the Briàe of the /$/es:

A Romantic Melodrama (18ZO), James Malcolm Ryrner's Vamey the Varnpyre, or, the Feast of ~looc? (1847), Sheridan Le Fanu's Camilla (1872) and Bram

Stoker's Dracula (1897). Lesser luminaries who wrote the literal vampire stones in the nineteenth century are rarely treated and other miscellaneous poems and plays neither detract from nor add to rny argument.'' 16

Like Nina Auerbach, Ken Gelder, Walter Kendrick and James Jwitchell, my study argues for an identifiable vampiric "line" or 'tradition," beginning with

John Polidori and culminating with Anne Rice. There is clear continuity in this Iine even though the medium has mutated from Iiterary and theatrical media to the cinematic. Nevertheless, rny choices for the twentieth-century segment of the

Iine also have a strong basis in text because I have included the screenplays for the Tod Browning and Francis Ford Coppola films in my discussions. Anne

Rice's Interview with the Vampire has the novel as its basis and the added good fortune that Anne Rice herself directly oversaw the screenplay, thereby ensuring that the integrity of authonal intention was more likely to be preserved in the transition from text to screen.

The explosion of vampire narratives makes any comprehensive study of the twentieth century a most difficult task. There is no satisfactory taxonomy or map of its complexity.'' in her 1995 book, Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina

Auerbach admits that she has been 'forced to ignore crucial distinctionsof genren

(8) when discussing the twentieth century, because the material is so amorphous.

There are three critical film studies that provided a rationale for my unematic choices: James B Twitchell's Dreadful Pleasures, Robin Wood's 1983 article,

"Burying the Undead: The Use and Obsolescence of Count Dracula" and Alain

Silver's & James Ursini's study. The Vampire Film: From Nosferatu to Bram

Stoker's Dracula. Twitchell traces two Iines of vampiric cinema, one emerging 17 from Stoker's Dracula, and the other frorn Le Fanu 's Carmiilla, or what he calls

'the distaff side of the vampire family shnib" (141). For Twitchell, the most important films in both Iines are F. W. Mumau's Nosferatu (1922), Tod

Browning's Dracula (1 932), Terence Fisher's Dracula (the famaus Hammer studios production with Chnstopher Lee, released in 1958) and Werner Herzog's

1979 remake of Murnau's Nosferatu- Twitchell's daims are fairly oonsistent with those in Robin Wood's "Burying the Undead: The Use and Obsolesce of Count

Dracula" which suggests that 'there are only five major vampire films in the twentieth century: Murnau (1922), Browning (1931). Fisher (1958), Herzog

(1 979),"and, for reasons that are obscure, John Badham's Dracula Cl979) (Wood

175-87).

Silver's and Ursini's findings are consistent with Twitchell's imsofar as they identify a male and a fernale vampire tradition in cinema. This dissertation, however, argues that the explicit treatrnent of queerness and heterosexuality in the films shows modemity's contribution to the tradition. Although Silver and

Urçini are much more cornprehensive than Wood or Twitchell. they also attribute great merit to Murnau's Nosferatu, which they insist 'rernains to this day the most imagistically unusuai and expressionist of ail the adaptationsn (62) - Murnau is undoubtedly seminal to the cinematic tradition, but the Browning film is also important because of its single-handed transformation of Dracula into a cultural icon through Bela Lugosi's European and chivalric exotic appeal. The Browning 18 film was also the first version of Dracda with sound and so it added a new dimension of horror to the tradition. For Silver and Ursini, the Hammer Dracula is important because it is "the only incarnation of the Dracula figure on film to have appeared in more productions or to survive more intervening years than Lugosi"

(79). Finally, Silver and Ursini conclude that "Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation has literally taken Stoker's material to new heights and single-handedly revitalized the vampire film" (155). Stephen King's Salem's Lot and Anne Rice's Interview wifh the Vampire have had a sirnilar impact. Endnotes for the introduction

1 There are also several instances of benevolent intrusion, perhaps the most well- known of which are the ghost in Horace Walpole's The Casfle of Otranto and Marley in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

* See Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. See also, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, SupernafuralHomr ln Literafure- New York: Dover Publications, 1973.

3 See The Penguin Supematural Omnibus. Ed. Montague Summers. London: Penguin, 1976, rpt. 1984. This anthology was first published by Victor Gollanu in 1931, then published in two volumes by Penguin in 1976, and finally printed in a single volume by Penguin in 1984.

4 Many of these stories have been anthologized. See: Michel Parry, ed., Reign of Tenor The Second Corgi Book of Great Victorian Homr Stonés (Ealing: London: 1977), G. Richard Thompson, Ed. Romantic Gothic Tales: 7790 - 1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), Montague Surnmers, Ed. The Supematural Omnibus, being a collection of stories of Apparitions, Witchcraft, Werewolves, Diabolism, Necromancy, Safanism, Divrnafion, Sorcery, Goety, Voodoo, Possession, Occult, Doom and Destiny vols I and II (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1976). Everett F. Bleiler, Ed. A Treasuv of Victorian Ghost Stones (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981, rpt. 1983) and J.A. Cuddon, Ed. The Penguin Book of Ghosf Stones (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984).

5 See Peter Haining, The Shilling Shockem: Stones of Terror from the Gothic Bluebook (London: Victor Gollancz, 1W8), which includes the anonymously written The Severed Am, Or, the Wehr-wolf (sic) of Limousin (1820). There was also Hugues, The-Wehr-Wolf by the American writer, Sutherland Menzies (1838).

6 Paul Roach, Wandeniig Between Two Worlds: Viciohn England's Search for Meaning. http://~~~.gober.netIvictonanlreports/~lAccessed December 29, 1999.

7 See Wilkie Collins, Tales of Teror and the Supernafural. Ed. Herbert Van Thal (New York: Dover Publications, 1972).

Nina Auerbach regrets that "national boundaries forcedn her to ignore cross- cultural aspects of vampirism from "France. China, Russia, Spain and Scandinavia-" See Nina Auerbach, Our Vamplies, Oucselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8.

9 The author rnay perhaps have been Thomas Prest, another Victorian hack wrÎter. However, as E- F. Bleiler notes in his introduction to the 1972 facsirnile edition, comparative stylistic analyses of other known works by Prest and Rymer, especially with regard to lexis, make it most convincing that it was Rymer who wrote Vamey.

10 For example, the obscure drarnatist, H. Young, wrote a stage version of Vamey in the late 1840s, but nothing about it appears in mainstream vampiric criticism.

11 James Twitchell does offer an overview of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and some film in Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modem Honor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 142-3, but at approximately fifty items, he has used only the broadest strokes of the brush. Chapter One: Theorking the impossible

The vampire lies at the crossmads in more ways than one. First and foremost the vampire is a creature that is at once dead and alive, hence the terni

"undead." Secondly, the vampire is often queer in its gender orientation and in Ïts

(sublimated) sexual pradices, so it also occupies the crossroads of masculinity and femininity, and so it challenges gender orthodoxy. The vampire is also the product of folk superstitions and religious beliefs, and yet it has become a well-known, albeit innocuous icon in industrial cultures as well, appearing on television (Butfy fhe

Vampire SlayeO and on children's shows CThe Countn on Sesame Street). Finally, the vampire also occupies the crossroads of popular culture and so-called "highef art foms because it has become an object of study by scholars, while it continues to be a recurring icon in mass culture.

The vampire has been radically transformed at least five tirnes in its evolution.

The first transformation was from the biographically and historically real vampires like

Vlad the lmpaler and Elizabeth of Bathory, into the tales and wstoms (for example, apotropaics such as garlic and poppy seeds) of European folkloric traditions. Such a transformation basically rnythologized the historically real vampire. The second transformation was from these folkloric traditions into the consciousness of popular culture via the widespread vampire hysteria in continental Europe during the eighteenth œntury. Such a shift populanzed the vampire so that knowiedge about 22

its nature and habits becarne familiar to larger, urbanized, predominantly literate,

heterogenous masses of people. The third transformation was from the popular

culture of continental Europe into English fiction and theatre, beginning with John

Polidori in 181 9 and James R. Planché in 1820. This very sign'rficant transformation

marked a transfomation tom oral into literate culture, fiom Catholic to Protestant

culture, and from supeistitious peasant culture to secularized industrial culture. In

part, this transformation was effeded by some of the sensibilities in English

Romanticisrn. The fourth transformation was from the nineteenth-century vampire of

theater and fiction into the twentieth-century cinematic vampire, beginning with F. W.

Murnau in 1922, and Tod Browning in 1931- This particular shift also permitted

greater emphasis on the physicality of the vampire because cinerna is such an explicitly visuat medium. The fifth transformation was from the fertile cross-media

pollination of the twentieth œntury (fiction, theater and film) to the Intemet where the vampire continues to live in freshly mutating cultural variants. Much of this new wfure of vampinsm is found in synchronous interactive games and in chat rooms which (re)define newfy evolving varnpiric mythologies, but this last stage is beyond the sape of this study and belongs more properiy to the field of sociology, social psychology or cultural studies.

Throughout the history of these vanous transformations, the polemic of skepticism versus belief with regard to the supernatural, is always a seminal issue in 23 the nanatives though not necessarily an issue in the folklore. The religious and superstitious European peasant had little difficulty in conœiving a malevolent revenant - a creature corne back from the grave to disturb life in the village. But from the perspective of the civilized. industrialized and ostensibly more rational mind, such a conception was a staggenngly large leap of faith and reason. In Arthur

Conan Doyle's The Sussex vampire,' Sherlock Holmes is presented with circumstantial evidenœ implying that the Pemvian wife (Dolores) of an Englishman

(Mr. Ferguson) is a vampire because a wÏtnesshas reported seeing her rise up from her newborn son's crib with blood on her Iips. When asked to take on the case,

Holrnes' initial response is to cal1 the very premise of the case "rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It's pure lunacy" (463). Suspicions about vampires prove unfounded Men Holrnes uncovers a hidden. but logical explanation for al[ of

Dolores' eccentnc behaviors. Mr. Ferguson's son (Jacky) frorn a former mamage had taken a poison arrow tip and tried to murder his new stepbrother. Dolores is not a vampire but in fact was trying to save the baby's life by sucking the poison out of the child's neck. The story is framed by an introductory, rational assertion that vampires do not exist and then this principle is 'discovered" at the end; never are we pemitted to feel fear that this vampire may be real. Such a story is firmly anchored in the kind of rationalisrn to which supematuralism is so vehernently opposed. 24

Not surprisingly, the first literary vampirk narratives emerged in ~urope~

where the folklore and the cultural memory of Vlad's and Elizabeth's violence was

more geographically immediate than in Britain. The English were at several

removes from the immediacy of the European vampire because of geographic,

linguistic, religious and cultural differences and therefore, at several removes also from the iikelihood of believing in the supernatural aspects of vampire lore. The

British seemed more generally inelined to resist the superstitions of the continent, or so they thought. This distancing is substantiated by the relatively late appearance of the word "vampiren in written English; it occurs in European languages much earlier, but as late as 1734~in English.

Stoker was also keenly mare of this British distancing phenornenon; when

Harker leaves the cities of Buda-Pesh (a gateway between the rationality of

England and the unknown interiority of the continent) he is given a rosary for protection by a local peasant woman. He remarks in his diary that '1 have been taught to regard such things as in some rneasure idolatrousn (9),4 and he labels peasant fears about vampires as "ridiculousn (8). In Stoker's fiction, this British distancing is articulated very clearly; Englishmen like Dr Seward find the very idea of vampires impossible to accepti5 it is only the continental Van Helsing who believes without needing proof. Van Helsing is a man who is cornfortable in 25

England and in Europe; he is a man of science and a man of religion and superstition.

However difficult it may be to believe in vampires, the historical genesis of vampiric lore is equaliy dificult to accept because the nature and extent of the atrocities of biographically real vampires are so horrendous that they challenge human rationality. The Iife and military career of Vlad the Impaler or Pnnœ Viad

Tepes (1431?-1476) seems, inherently, to hold a very intense power to fascinate.

Vlad's biography has been thoroughly researched by several twentieth-century scho~ars,~but even when he was alive his life was frequently documented by his contemporaries; there were chronicles in German, Slavonic and Romanian. As rnight be expected in any biography, the chronicles agree on certain pieces of information and disagree on others7 Viad committed rnost of his infamous atrocities between 1459 and 1461, causing his victims to be irnpaled in such a way that when their legs were pulled by horses they were anally impaled on a long stake. After a victory against the Turks in 1465, this was the fate of 20,000

Turks who were verticaliy impaled to rot over 2 square miles. The spectacle was witnessed outside Tirgoviste (Vlad's capital) by the invading Mohammed II, who promptly turned around his troops and retreated home in spite of his military advantage in outnumbering Vlad's amy. Vlad rarely buried his victims, preferring instead to leave them ta rot- He sometimes collected their blood in bowls and 26 drank it hilethey were dying. AI1 of these practices influenced vampiric folklore, especially with regard to the vampire's need for blood, how they are undead (Le-: not really buried), how they need to sleep under the earth of their own homeland, and how they are vulnerable to very few things except staking.

Although Vlad was a brutal and violent man, he also iived in brutal and violent times. War was muent, and in Translyvania it was almost continu ou^.^

Soldiers were pientiful and life was cheap. However, it was Vlad's admittedly unusual preoccupation with public spectacles of violence on a very large scaleg that had a profound impact on those who knew him, and of him, notwithstanding the fact that these were also tintes in which executions were public and the witnessing of death was cornmonplace. Local folklore apotheosized Vlad aImost irnmediately after his death. Persistent stones about him in Europe were fuelled by rumors that his grave and his body could not be found.I0 Many local folk reported nocturnal sightings of him and the phenornenon of these first-hand witness accounts" is quite understandable if read as a deep-rooted and justified fear that a repetition of this kind of horrendous violence might be imminent. The magnitude and spectacle of his atrocities pmvided a ready and powerful symbol for the impossible made reai. Many of Vlad's biographical details were adapted very adroitly by Bram Stoker and later, in a very sustained way by Francis Ford

Coppola in his 1992 film, Bram Stokefs Dracula. History can be more incredible 27

and dramatic than fantasy and in the case of Vlad, history has proved to be a

vety fertile weflsprïng of ideas for the literary and cinematic imagination-

Elizabeth of ~athoryl*was an historically real fernale vampire. Born in

Hungary in 1560, she appears to have Iived a very solitary life since her husband,

Count Ferenc Nadasdy, was almost always away from home as a soldier.

Apparently, his absence provided Elizabeth with ample time for her fascination

with the blood of young peasant girls who lived near her homes in Beckov and

Cachtice and later in her castle in Majorova. By her own admission, as well as

by other testimony and other forms of evidence, she bled these young women to

death and bathed in their blood, believing that human blood made her skin more

supple and youthful. Oddly enough, she was also a distant cousin to Vlad.

Stoker May well have known of her because she is mentioned in Sabine Baring-

Gould's The Book of Werewolves (1865). a volume that Stoker knew well. She

may also be the Countess Doligen of Gratz in Stoker's discarded fragment originally intended as the first chapter of Dracula, but now a short story entitled

Dracula 's Guest.

According to an allegedly authentic statement in her own handwriting,

Elizabeth killed over 650 young women in order to drink and bathe in their blood.

She was brought to trial in 1611, found guiky and sentenced to solitary confinement for Iife. She died on August 21, 1614 (Melton 33). For unknown 28 reasons, the details of her Iife did not capture the imagination of too many Iiterary minds in the same way that Vlad's life did, except perhaps for a recent novel by

Andrei Codrescu enMled The Blood ~ounfess.'~Several films have been based on her life, most of which were made in the early 1970's: Counfess Dracula,

(1970) and Daughters of Darkness (1971). There are other films in which she appears merely as a caricature rather than as the centrai figure: Legend of Bbod

Castle (1 972), Cwse of the Devil (1973) and lmrnorfal Tales (1974). She also re- appears episodically as a character in some french and Italian films (Silver and

Ursini IOiff) and seems to have captured the continental imagination more than the English or American.

There are many other examples of biographically real vampires who drank human blood habitually. J. Gordon Melton catalogues more than twenty-four of them under a heading "vampific crimen (131), including the infamous French general, Gilles de Rais (1404-1440). De Rais fought alongside Joan of Arc and was a national hero until it was discovered that he was a homosexual pedophile who received sexual gratification frorn murdering his victims. He was also thought to have been vampiric. Other vampires include Fritz Haaman (1879-

1924), Martin Dumolfard of France (1861) and the famous case of John George

Haigh who, in the late 1940's in England, killed his victims, drained their blood and destroyed the bodies in sulfunc acid. The list includes several examples 29

from the earfy 1990'~~one recent one being Deborah Joan Finch who, in 1992,

stabbed her victim 27 times and drank the fiowing blood.

The remarkable popularization of vampires that swept through the

countryside of Europe, especially in Serbia, between 1727 and 1731 is a striking

instance of the power of mass hysteria. The events were a significant watenhed

in the history of the vampire, marking the transition of the vampire from the world

of peasant folklore into the mainstrearn consciousness of continental Europe, and

eventually from there, into English literature. The panic began when a peasant

named Peter Plogojowitz in the village of Kisolova, Serbia, allegedly began to

make some post mortem appearances and "causedn the death of nine other

villagers. The body was exhumed by town officiais and found to be remarkably

Iife-tike. The ostensible syrnptorns of Iife that the corpse displayed can now be

fuily explained by modem patho~ogy,'~but of course, the country folk of those

times had no knowledge of such science. Only a pre-conscious paranoia among

the European peasantry could explain the resulting hysteria which became so

pewasive (and persuasive) that the vampire-hunter, or so-called dhampir [sic]15

as the gypsies called him, became very popular. The hystena apparently even

attracted a number of entrepreneurial and unemployed people into the vampire-

hunting profession. The dhampir was thought to be the illegitimate offspring of a vampire and a human. It is here in this eighteenth-century context that we find 30 the historical origin of the Van Helsing figure. The OED dues not list the first use of "vampire hunter" but it does state that "vampirkm" as "collective facts or ideas associated with the supposed existence and habits of vampires" occurred first in

7794-6 and then cites Polidori in 1819.'~

There were other outbreaks of vampire-related hysteria as well. Emest

Jones, in his book, On the Nightmare (122), describes cases in Chios (1708).

Hungary (1726), Meduegya and Belgrade (1725) and again in Hungary (1732).

The phenornenon has also been treated in detail by Christopher Frayling (19-36) and in considerably more detail throughout Montague Summers' The Vampire:

His Kith and Kin. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of ail is the general willingness of a whole population to be overcome by belief in the supernatural. It is also apparent that the skepticism about the vampire is an English intellectual reaction against this sweeping tide of continental ideas and emotions as expressed in popular culture.

The literary and theatrical emergence of the vampire in England (1819 and

1820 re~pe~vely)coincided with the convergence of certain currents of thought in the imaginative sensibilities of the ~omantics,'~perhaps most noticeably in

Coleridge's recognition of the supernatural as a powerful literary device. Coleridge suggested that as long as the "Believing Narrator of a Supematural Incident,

AppaAion or Cham" told a story, the supematural wuld "obtain a mastery over the 31

Imagination and feelings [and would] infect the reader."18 Coleridge had begun

sorne literary expwirnents with the supernatural and even with varnpirisrn by the time

he was working on Chrisfabel (q 797 -1 800, pub. 181 6) and The Rime of the Ancienf

Mariner (1 797-98).l9

While he may have wmted to exploit the Iiterary potential of the supernatural

for the sake of producing a very specific psychological effed and with the apparent

intention of captivating "the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as

would naturally accompany such [supernatural] situations, supposing them real," he

also had a rationally skeptical side, and seemed to suggest that belief in the

supematural emerged "from ignorance and weakness of mind" (Inquinng Spi& 191).

Coleridge's contribution rnay well lie in his recognition that the most imaginatively

powerful literary works could emerge from a tension ktween the impossibility of the supematural (Mat Coleridge links to a "Beiieving Narratoi") and the skepüc's explanaüon for supematural phenornena (what Colendge called "fumishing ... the

Naturalist .. with the Means of explaining it as a possible fact") (Inquiring Spi& 191).

In such an aesthetic there would be a sense in which "every hurnan kingwho, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supematural agency" would be enthralled by the literary experience (Biographia Merana, 11, 6).20

This arnbiguity of this expenence is what I shall Iater argue is the essence of the sublime narrative. 32

ln his February 1797 review of The Monk (Matttiew Lewis), Coleridge also said that he adrnired the kind of literary aesthetic that surpasses "the niœ boundanes, beyond which temr and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions, [and] to reach those Iimits, yet never to pas them, hÏc labor, hic opus est''

(lnquin'ng Spi& 192). The balance for Coleridge, is an aesthetic that seerns to lie between the ability to "shock the imagination" without lapsing into the sentimental and the moral (192). For Coleridge, the supernatural seemed to hold the power to seize the imagination and overpower it

Henry Fuseli's original work, The Nightmare (178 1-1782), and the history of its imitators illustrate how the physically repulsive can be reconstituted to produce an iconography that looks both new and familiar at once, and that is sirnuftaneously fearful, fascinating and capable of evoking "sympathy-" Fuseli

(bom Johann Heinrich Füssli in 1741 in Switzerland) was mentored by the famous

Joshua Reynolds and The Nightmare made him famous after it was shown at the

Royal Academy in 1872. By exploring briefly the history of this piece and its imitators, it is possible to understand that the kinds of ambivalence and tensions

Coleridge contemplated in Iiterature were also being worked out in art.

Fuseli's original painting (Appendix A, Figure 1) voyeuristically explores a homfic scene in which a visiting inwbus hovers over an inert woman. However, the woman is also portrayed sa languorously and sensuously that the overall 33

effect is to render the scene at once tantalizingly erotic and ominously horrifie.

The woman's body position is quite unnatural, suggesting perhaps that she is a

stylized figure of passive femininity who, either because of sleep, stupor or death,

is oblivious to her surroundings and her predicament. If the attack is sexual, she

is appropriately postured for patriarchal noms of female sexual receptivity. The

"opusnor 'laborIn to use Coleridge's terms, is in the many ambiguous nuances of the image.

The bat-like creature on her chest and the white horse vicarÏously peering in through the window have rnany generalized symbolic connotations, but few in particular. Ernest Jones' On the Nightmare discusses a similar phenornenon that he calls an angst attack. Angst is characterized by "agonizing dread", a physical

'sense of oppression or weight at the chest which alarmingly interferes with respiration," and leads to 'conviction of helpless paralysisn (20). J. E. ~irlot~' suggests that the general symbolic meaning of a horse is extensive and ambiguous and includes prima1 forces, an omen of death (especially a white horse in a dream), the unconscious, the deliverer of claiwoyant wamings, war, the mother, and the magic or intuitive understanding inside us (144-145). The ambiguity of meanings is afso increased in the painting because many very specific interpretations are intimated but not stated: 1s the attack about to happen? Has it already happened? Does the horse intempt the attack, or is it a 34 voyeuristic spectator? Is the woman dead? Fainted? Asleep? Was her experieme exhausting? Painful? Orgasmic? What is in the vials on the nightstand? Are these creatures hallucinations that are chernically induced or are they real? Is this an image of pleasure or pain? 1s this an atrocity that speaks to the victimization of women or is it an erotic and seductive fantasy?

The relationships between the elements in this painting are also important contributors to the painting's nchness of meaning: the principles of passivity (the woman), activity (the bat-like creature) and oversight (the horse) are at once erotic and rnorbid. The conventional figures of the incubuslsuccubus as they are visualized in Fuseli's wotk and its imitators, are the kind of graphic representations that Arthur Clayborough might cal1 "grotesque" because they are a "'distortion of nature'" (6) and they are '"unnatural'" (8). The Nightmare and its imitators also contain something of Ciayboroughls notion of the "ridiculous, distorted and unnatural'" (6) and of his notion of the grotesque, namely, that which is 'not congruous with ordinary experiencen(12).

The creatures inhabiting The Mghtmare are at once animal and human and they are also grotesque deformations of the human and the bestial, pointing to bleak moral and physical impossibilites. The impossible in this nightmare lies in its forced violation of physical nomality, the dream-like ambience that 35 underscores human vulnerability as expressed conventionally in the feminine, and the collocation of elements very unlikely related to each other.

The number of imitations and variations spawned by Fuseli's work is remarkable (Appendix A, figures 2, 3, 4 and 5), but even more remarkable is the consistency with which certain elements of vision are repeated in an uncanny manner. Each of these repetitions of The Nighfmare was at once familiar and new, homfying and attractive. In Figure 2, the rame three elements are present but the woman is in a slightly more natural, though stilI styiized and erotic position. In this instance, however, the creature on her chest is much more hideous and menacing and the intimacy of the scene is heightened because the viewer's position in the space is rnuch closer to the action. Other details such as the medication of the night table and the drapes in the background remain consistent. Figure 3 ornits the horse and the medication but adds the woman's shoes on the floor. The voyeuristic horse is now absent and the scene seems more sinister. Figure 4 omits the horse but replaces it with the creature's shadow while the creature faces away from the woman's head and seems to cast his shadow over her lower abdomen and groin. Only Figure 5 makes it clear that the horse is protective and the creature on top of the woman is uncornfortable with the horse staring at it. 36

AI1 these variations resonate with a remarkable similarity in structure and ambience to the illustration of Carmilla (Millarca) attacking her victirn (Appendix 8,

Figure 8). D. H. Friston's sketch familiarizes that which had already been made familiar by Fuseli and others even though the work does not ostensibly manifest itself as a variation. Figure 8 is at once newly unprecedented and also déjà vu.

Laura is Iike the inert woman, Milarca assumes the role of the threatening noctumal visitor, and Carmilla's father occupies the place. and perhaps even the function, of the horse. The pattern has many other associations that are uncanny: Talia Schaffer observes that Dracula is built on a peculiar "triangle of penetrator, passive receptor, and aroused spectator" (417) and the sarne tnad is evident in The Nightmare.

Apart from Coleridge, it was the more general line of the horror tradition in

English fiction2* that helped give birth to the ernergence of the varnpiric narrative in

English fiction and theater. The whole Gothic Tradition had already been evolving steadily in prose fiction since Walpole's The Casfle of Ofranto (1764)' even though the supematural agent here is a benevolent one. Otnnto is also important because of its indebtedness to the artifices of ~ornanceand because it wrnbined supematurâl horror with romance. This particular combinaiion would later be inherited by Polidon and Planché. By the last 15 years of the eighteenth century, many of the conventions of Gothic horror had evolved (sorne said degraded) into 37

the socalled "~chauer-~ornantik"~~tale which relied heavily on stylized conventions

of wild exaggeration and brutal cn'minality, decadence, flamboyant characters, exotic

settings, characterirations and story Iines, and plenty of blood and gore. Works like

Matthew Lewis' The Monk (1796) with its ghosts, and William Beckford's Vathek

(1786) with its zombies and ghouls. extended what was begun with Otmnto and

must have had sorne influence on Polidori. The wildly improbable seemed tu be the

order of the day. Monk Lewis hirnseff visited the Diodati Cirde in on August 14,

1816, just one month before Polidori was himself dismissed from Byron's employ.

There are also a number of peripherally vampiric works that appeared

contemporaneously with, or just before Poiidori's The Vampyre. Robert

Southey's epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), for instance. makes an

episodic reference to a vampire in Book VI1 where Thalaba encounters Oneiza, his cherished bride who died on their wedding night. He impales her on his lance and moves on (with her implicit blessing) in Aeneas fashian to complete his quest. A peripheral English sub-genre of the vampire that emerged roughly conternporaneously with Polidori's work, is psychic vampirism. The line began quite early in the nineteenth century. These vampires are energy-suckers, not literal blood-suckers. The sub-genre includes Keats' Lamia (1 819) and La Belle

Dame Sans Merci (181 9), Coleridge's Chtistabel (1797, 1800. pub. 1816) and later, Browning's Porphyria's Lover (1836, 1842). Psychic vampinsm is more 38 metaphoric than literal. Though potentially more subtle than its literal cousin,25 this sub-genre is also rïghtly omitted by most vampire surveys because it lacks a wmrnitrnent to supernaturalisrn as a central theme.

ln his book, The Philosophy of Homr or, Paradoxes of the Fear, Noel

Carroll observes that the burgeoning new cultural attraction to horror was well underway by the 1820's~~and that horror stories of every variety made their way into al1 of the arts, even including the ballet (5). There were several irnmediate drarnatic adaptations of Polidori's story, and evidenœ suggests that a widespread interest in the vampiric was established very quickly." Waiter Kendrick, on the other hand. a-ates al1 interest in vampires with nasœnt popular culture itself, complete with

"maudlin" and "blatant appeals to the reader's feelings" (57). Other critics have also been harsh in their assessrnent of the negative impact of popular cufture on the vampire narrative. Ronald E. McFarland has argued that in the iheater at least, the vampire began to take prominence because the crowds who attended the theater

"demand[ed] ... a les subtle, less clever more exaggerated ... form of drama" (25) which approached the rneiodramatic.

While Kendrick's and McFarland's observations might make some sense for eariy nineteenth-century works, they do not satisfactorily explain the emergence of the still popular, yet more complex and sophisticated works like Le Fanu's Camiifa and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Le Fanu and Stoker seem to have subtly adopted 39 queemess, not romance, as the informing discourse in their narratives, and still not suffered any loss in popularity. One due to the problem of the apparently inverse relationship between populanty and sophistication may lie in the fact that the shift in narrative approaches occurs in the literary and not the theatrical medium. It may well be because of the souology and dernographics of the viewer-dreaders, or perhaps because the written medium inherentiy lends itself to a greater va* of nuances of meaning than a stage production does. The problem is not easily solvable. In

Dreadfùl Pleasures, James Twitchell observes that "while we know the purchasing and lending audience of the gothic, we really have no fix on who was actively consurning the text" (71)- On the other hand, the populanty of the pleasure gardens and theatrical entertainment for the masses, made the theater a cheap and popular place since the days of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). One popularizing characteristic of the theater was, of course, that Iiteracy was not a pre-requisite for wmprehension or enjoyment.

Regardless of the unevenness in quality, al1 of these new English narratives in fiction and theater co-opted, cannibalized, appropriated and transformed selected titerary ingredients such as character, plot, settings, and selected vampiric motifs such as staking, garlic and crucifixes. The artistic transformation undertaken in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century was also marked by a heavy reliance on the staples of rniddte class romance, 40

namely, heterosexualism, the virtue of female obedience and passivity, a strong

sense of benevolent patriarchy and family, and the sequence of love, courtship

and the security of mariage as a reward for willing wmpliance wÏth this ideology.

This dependence on romance is a phenornenon that has persisted well into the

Iate twentieth century and with very few exceptions rernains, unfortunately, 1

believe, an uncritical staple of the whole vampiric tradition.

As the machinery of the English literary tradition began to transform the

vampire of folklore into a literary object, two deep-rooted and recumng paradoxes

emerged. The first of these is the problern of belief-doubt in supernaturalisrn

because a literate, industrialized society was borrowWIngfrom an oral and superstitious one. The second recurring paradox is queerness, particularly as manifest in gender-blended identity and deviant sexual practice. fts presence and ontogenesis in the vampiric tradition are very difficult to e~~lain.~~It is not that the vampire is alternatively masculine and feminine, but rather that it is both at once, surviving by sirnultaneous penetration and intussusception- The vampire does not reverse its gender; it is both and neither at once.

Both supernaturalism and queerness present a staggeringly large obstacle for industrialized, phallocentric culture to naturalize. In fact, the very concepts are so foreign, so diffmlt to accept, and yet so closely tied to what is already unconsciously known, that they present themselves as inherently impossible, and 41 yet they can be experienced. Thus, the impossible is not only that which can absolutely never happen; it is also any phenornenon that lies outside the hegemonic perceptions of a cuiture and is therefore, that which should not happen. lmpossibilify is the unthinkable but it is not necessarily the unknown.

The impossible is what we may have always known but yet has been rendered nonexistent by reason of habit, custom or predisposition. Impossibility includes ideology, the unconscious, the archetypal, the paradoxical and the enigmatic; it lies dormant and immanent, awaiüng discovery.

It is circular and unhelpful to define impossibility antithetically by suggesting that its opposite is whatever is possible. Nor does it help to suggest that the antithesis of the impossible is the real; epistemological confusion and distorted perception are precisely the elements that horror literature attempts to preserve - not dissolve; in fact, episternological complexity is precisely what animates the textJsdiscourse. A case in point is AubreyJsdenial of the existence of the supematural in Polidori's The Vampyre, and the text's rhetorïcai denial of queemess. Aubrey's denial of the existence of the supernatural is paralleled by a suggestively sexual encounter with the vampire Ruthven in a dark cave. By the conclusion of the tale, Aubrey is punished for the arrogance of his skepticism; he remains imprisoned and immobilized, feminired as it were, in his knowledge of

Ruthven and therefore unable to Save his sister from him. The impossible. 42 therefore, includes any authentic experïence that is incongruent with the culturally dominant belief that the intrusion of supernatural agents into human affairs never happens or cannot happen.

In The Philosophy of Honor, Noel Carroll identifies a type of horror plot that he catls the "cornplex discovery plot" in which "the confirmation function involves the discoverers of, or the believers in the existence of, the monster convincing some other group of the existence of the monster and of the proportions of the rnortal danger at handn (Carroll 101). Those who disbelieve, do so at their own peril, although those who believe are not necessarily immune to the vampire either. Van ~elsing*' educateç other characters (the children of light) but they resist belief in the supernatural because they see the supernatural as the impossible. He compels thern to confront what they do not - and cannot - see.

Van Helsing extends that same mission to the audience, thereby reminding us, by association, that we are those skeptical characters who did not believe.

In the epilogue of Tod Browning's 1931 screenplay, Dracula, for instance,

Van Helsing steps out of the story, but not out of character, taunting the audience and cautioning thern that any professed skepticism is onfy meaningful in the wmfort of a public place, and is really not what we actually feeL3' He points to a discrepancy between public and private values and suggests that there is a kind of dualism in our lives, a split between what we profess publicly and what we

believe privately, between what we know and what we feel:

When you get home tonight and lights (sic) have been tumed out and you're afraid to look behind the curtains - and you dread to see a face appear at the window - why, just pull yourselves together and remember - (Pause) - that, after all, there are such thinas! (Browning and Fort H- 59) 31

Van Helsing bu- out of the narrative's diqe~is~~in a very postmodem rnanner,

and enters ours. His is an epilogue that extends the film's attack on skepticism. The

suggestion that the domestic sphere may be unsafe is a pointed attack on one of the

most powerful symbols of our sense of comfort and security -the home.

Stephen King echoes this sense that the domestic sphere is the center of our

illusions about security. In Danse Macabre he observeç that "our homes are the

places where we allow ourse!ves the ultîmate vulnerability: they are the places where we take off our dothes and go to sleep with no guard on watchn (266). The tmth of this daim seems even more evident when we consider that one of the most repeated

items in many works of horror is the haunted house, for it is here where our anxieües

about the comfort of the domestic sphere are evoked. The fear is unfounded and

incongruous in most cases, but this is precisely what makes its presence ail the

more disconcerting.

Van Helsing is probing a 'phobic pressure point" (4), to use King's phrase from Danse Macabre, by pointing to what most adults intuitively understand as an impossibiîfy- Regardless of whether his tone is serious or in jest, Van Helsing's quip

identifies the dissonance between what we think we know and what we are afraid to know at a deeply visceral level. The ratimalized distance between the fictive worid of vampires (Van Helsing the character) and the cornfortable but illusory world of our ordinary existence (the actor who plays Van Helsing), collapses in a moment of uncertainty and hesitation. The pst-narrative suggestion of a ma/ vampire in our bedrwrns undemines the fictiveness because it is unciear whether the words are delivered by the actor, the character, or both. The address undemines the illusory cornfort and sense of control we have in our ordinary Iives, away from the cinema and the reminden of the irnpossjb~e~~~

It may not be so much that Van Helsing's taunt necessarily makes us believe in "such things," but his taunt does invite us to doubt Our doubt - to be skeptical of

Our skepticism. Skepücism and disbeliep are quintessential characterMcs of vampnic narratives, but the argument show-ng the necessity to overcome these states of mind resembles the discourse of religious faith. Take for example, the following dialogue with Dr Seward:

Van H. I want you to believe. Seward: To believe what? Van H. To believe in things that you cannot. (Stoker 237)

Any victorious outwme of a confrontation with the vampire, is predicated on overcoming disbelieving resistance. It is important to re-establish a 'faith" in the existence of the impossible. Faith, says Van Helsing, is "that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untruen (237)? One might argue, then, that one purpose of varnpiric narratives is to rekindle our faith, but not so much a faith in God as a faith in the devit or the malevolent forces of the univer~e.~~The latter is a much greater challenge than the former because if true, there is a chance that the only powerkil forces in the universe are

To acquire this faith is to enwunter the impossible in an intensely first hand rnanner in one's own Iife, but the problem is to convince others of the veracity of one's testirnony. There is no teacher like first-hand experience. The vampire narrative chips away at the very comerstone of ernpirical, anti- superstitious, secularized modemity, where belief in the supernatural is impossible. However, if the narrative cannot convince us to believe, the next best victory is an erosion of certainty, or what I cal1 a moment of doubting doubt. If we cannot bring ourselves to believe that in our ordinary Iives, the vampire is real, the closest approximation is to doubt our skepticism and disbelief, if only momentarily. Stoker's Harker experiences this doubfing doubf early in Dracula when he is in transit to Castle Dracula and visits a local inn:

whether it is the old lady's fear, or the many ghosiiy traditions of the place, or the crucifix itself, I do not know, but I am not feeling neariy as easy in my mind as usual. (9) Harker is highly skeptical at first and cannot quite bnng himself to believe in

vampires but neither can he quite bring himself to doubt them. His moment of

doubting doubt is a confrontation with the impossible but the impact is visceral,

not rational, and manifests itself as a kind of pathoIogy or dis-ease- The vampiric

narrative struggles intuitively with these impossibie tensions between crises of

"faith" on the one hand, and the rational. scientific, and empincal on the ~ther.~~

Most versions of the Van Helsing character are vampire hunters who are

equally at ease with folklore, superstition, and religion as they are with science and medical proœdures and practices. The character's strength and

effectiveness are inextricably tied to his ability to fuse faith, intuition, and

rea~on.~~Van Helsing's is a vision that resists entrapment in the binary dichotomies of science and superstition, skepticisrn and be~ief.~'Stoker's Harker challenges Seward, the man of strict science, saying,

... you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear .. . there are things which you do not understand, and yet which are ... lt is the fault of our science which wants to explain all. (Stoker 234 ff)-

The vampire hunter is as much an enigma as the vampire itself. Both are equal in the sense that they defy wnventional wisdom and conventional categon'es. Both are manifestations of the impossible and Van Helsing expresses the implications as a paradox: "in this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength" (Stoker 380). The Van Helsing 47

figure exemplifies the Gothic spirit of what Linda Bayer-Berenbaum has called

"imaginative enlargemeM (28) and the awareness of "an expansion of reality" (16).

He reunites religion and science which had ken divorœd since Renaissance

Humanism secularized art and education.

At its most provocative Ievel, the power of the varnpiric narrative emanates

from its ability to persuade the audience to feel that whicii it fears to know,

especially about the supernatural, about the falsity of the dyadic model of gender,

about the confidence of science and the certainty of the material world, and about

the finality of death. The most intense sexual enmunters with gender impossibilities

occur at the moment of greatest intimacy between victim and vampire - the moment

of the bite. The vampire's penetration of the neck40 is a penetration of the body in an

unexpected plaœ4' and it simuitaneously avoids - and alludes to - vaginal andh

anal penetration. Eve Sedgwick's discussions of gender and the homosocial- homosexuaI axis posit a blindness in heterosexual orthodoxy which does not

(cannot) see "the potential unbrokeness of a continuum between [the] homosocial and hornosexual" (Sedgwick, Between Men, 1). The code of masculinity generally prohibits males from any kind of intimacy through physical or ernotional contact, but if the male vampire attacks another male this taboo is broken4' at the moment of the bite. Sine heterosexism defines the masculine as the penetrator and the ferninine as the reœptor, the gender identity and sexual orientation of vampire and 48 vidim, are established quite cleariy in the bite. There is something both perversely deviant and yet consenrative in the bite on the ne&.

The gender-blending ocairs because at the same time as the vampire penetrates its victim it also takes blood into itself, and this intussusœption simultaneously defines ït as ferninine. If a male vampire bites a woman, the attack is a heterosexual act of domination. If a male vampire bites a male, the act is hornoerotic. If a female vampire bites a female, the act is sexually ambiguous; on the one hand 1 subverts patnarchy because it eliminates the male as penetrator. On the other hand it is also a staple of phallocentric eroticisrn. If a female vampire bites a male, the attack suggests that the woman is the aggressive sedudress and the man the victim and further, that the female is ai once desirable and grotesque because the queemess of her behavior is so incongruent with socÏa1 conventions of femininity. The impossible is defined in al1 of these as the simultaneous possession of two opposing gender characteristicç and of sexual pradice that resists narrow variations that conventionafity affords.

Vampirisrn also has its own highly artiwlated pathology with its own special etiology. Paradoxically, the vampire must be systematically researched and

~ate~orized~~by the vampire hunter, before it can be killed and its victims cured, yet the creature and the disease also defy scientific knowledge. In the conte* of gender orientation and sexual practice, staking the vampire is a singulariy phallic and 49

masculine act of penettation, an act of violence posing as an act of science that also

ferninizeç its victirn by rendering hirn or her inert Staking reproduces the vampire's

ability for penetration but since there is no intussusception in staking, the gender

identrty of the person doing the action is polarized masculinity. Thus the act restores sexual and gender orthodoxy to females and effecfively kills males who are a threat to women in the community, Feminized vampiric males return to masculinity, rnasculinized vampiric females are restored to fernininity, and the whole dyadic gender mode1 of sexual pracüce is reaffirmed, but not bebre the unorthodox has been fully savored- The phobias underiying staking obviously echo the days of Vlad the lmpaler and suggest a sublirnated way of fighting fire with fire, as it were, by penetrating the penetrator.

Effeminophobia, as Sedgwick explains it (Tendencies 156), is a fear of feminine traits in men? I would also argue that by extension, maswlinophobia, to coin a term, is a fear of masculine traits in women. Both phobias have counterparts in homophobia and gynophobia, respectively. Gynophobia is a fear often expenenced by the empowered male because its genesis is an impossibility- anxiety that the disempowered fernale (or other) is far more potent and lethal than previously imagined.45 Such a fear encompasses the castration anxiety implied in the idea of "vagina dentata" which is really the vampire's mouth, but also extends to usurpation or rejection of gender specific roles. 50

Queemess, in its largest sense, can be any sexual orientation, any identity, behavior, desire, or practiœ (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual) which does not du plicate and naturalize the orthadox patriarchal paradigrn of gender as exclusive, opposite, and binary. Judith Butler's queer "gender continuum" defines gender as "a free floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and ferninine a male body as easily as a female onen(6). If queemess is a heterosexual Ïmpossibility, the varnpiric bite is the means by which the text intuits the untenable nature of traditional gender dyads. The heterosexual value system, which is also patriarchal in origin and temperament, is the gender- impossible but it collapses ai the moment of the intimacy of the bite, for here, al1 that cannot be - is.

The vampire is dangerous because it reproduces itself so that a new (and dangerously subversive) species of gender-blended or queer monstrosities is bom sui generis and self-perpetuating. Van Helsing is womed that such a population will explode into an "ever-wideningn(261) circle? Consequently, the symbiosis between vampire and victim is offen vilified by phallocentric narratives, regardles of whether the contact is forced on the victim or voluntarily chosen. These narratives conflate the fear of a world overpopulated by vampires with the fear of a worid over- populated by queers. Examples abound in Bram Stoker's male and femate vampires 51

who are equally queer, though (obviously) in different ways. Dracula forces Mina to

suck blood (breast feed) from his chest (337). Van Helsing Mers to him as "this

man-mat-wasn (291) and the epithet is ambiguous because it muid refer to Dracula's

undead state (he is no longer alive) or his queer state (he is no longer a man).

Dracula blows kisses to Harker (66) and is attracted to Mina, altenng her personaiity,

contaminating her and transfonning her from a woman with a 'man's brain" and "a woman's heart" (284) to his puppet and food source. Harker becornes gender-

contaminated and feminized (effeminophobia) as a result of his physical and

psychological contact with the Count When Dr. Seward meets Harker for the first time he sees a feminized man: '1 was prepared" says Seward, 'to meet a good specimen of manhood, but hardly the quiet, business-like gentleman wfio came here tw(273). Lucy, by contrast, aggressively hunts children for food and is transformed into a figure of 'adamantine heartless cruelty" (256). These victims who have fallen under the vampire's spell are identifieci pathologicaliy and eüologically by the narrative and by other 'gender-healthy" characters. The object of the action is to restore Viese characters to health and by implication, to gender orthodoxy.

Problems of gender definition, identity and sexual orientation have their own inherent paradoxes and shift in meaning and context depending on temporal, geographical, and cultural constraints, and depending on who is producing and consuming the work and the medium (fiction, film or stage). In Anne Rice's work, 52 queemess is much more explicitly an issue47 than in her predecessors but queemess in the late Wentieth century also occupies a vastly different social and cultural space than it did in the 1890's. Homosexuality in Stoker's time, though certainly kn~wn,~~was hardly spoken of except in the most codified language.

The moment of the bite is a sublime moment of ecstatic rapture and painful horror

(see Appendix B, Figures 9 and 10). As Gelder would have it, queemess is

"undercoded [or] 'unspeakable' at the level of narrationn(58).

The gender argument in this study will differ from Chrïstopher Craft's notion of gender or Stephanie Demetrakopoulos's notion of 'sex role changesmMin the vampinc tradition. While the discourse of 'inversion" and

"changen is still useful for analysis, these particular notions of gender are still impnsoned in a heterosexual paradigm which reads gender as mutually exclusive. binary and static, rather than synchronously present and fiuid. The nature of gender impossibility in the vampiric is not so rnuch that the vampire has changed gender roles but that vampire has absorbed both gender roles and is both at once.

The impossible draws its potency in the first instance, from the degree of certainty with which we cling to our beliefs and our skeptical denials about other worlds. The potency is drawn further from alternative models of gender identity and sexual practice. The intensity of the impossibility is an inversely proportional 53 reaction against the predictability of its conventionality - those habitua1 expectations emerging from - and shaping - the bedrock of epistemology and cognition in our Iives. Such 'paradigrnatic" challenges, to use Thomas Kuhn's phrase, are "universally recognized" by a given 'comrn~ni~~~or a whoie culture, and can be material, psychological, or even ideological in Terry Eagleton's sense that the Iiterary work "interrogates and transforrns the implicit beliefs we bring to it, [and] 'disconfirms' our routine habits of perception.n" Those 'routine habits of perception" are often ideologically determined, arbitrarily sym bolized. and empirically substantiated so as to invite great confidence in their paradigrnatic veracity.

W.R. Irwin's TIie Game of the lmpossible offers further assistance in defining the impossible. frwin seems concemed with a particular relationship between author and reader. His idea of a "rhetoric of fantasy" includes those narrative devices and impulses that persuade the readerlaudience to accept a philosophical, social or other set of values. Writingkeading, is a game in which

'writer and reader knowingly enter a conspiracy of intellectual subveniveness"

(9). The position toward which we are rhetoficaily urged to move is one that is

"contrary to [what is] known or presumed [as] .. . existentially validn (60). For

Invin, ÏmpossibiMy is "an overt violation of what is generaliy accepted as possibility" (4). The kaleidoscope of combinations and permutations of the 54 impossible that emerge when supematuralism is combined with queemess, provides much of the stimuli for the innovative creativity in the varnpiric tradition.

Of Irwin's five generïc categones of impossibil~,53the supematural is the most pertinent for my purposes here. However, the varnpiric narrative is rarely if ever 'intellectual;" it is visceral. And in spite of some very powerful moments of deconstructive "subversiveness," the tradition is, in the final analysis, wnventionally affining of rational skepticism and heterosexual romance. If impossibility is a 'violation" of that which is presurned, it need not be as "overt" or as sustained as he suggests; and 1 shall demonstrate that the works of Le Fanu and Stoker are probably the most subversive in the whole tradition. although they are so in the most subtle of ways.

Subtle or not, the vampire is the syrnbolic nexus where a rnultipficity of inherently selfcontradidory rneanings appear and at best can only parüally be decoded, provided the readerfaudience can extend itself far enough to "believe,"as

Van Helsing says, "in things that you cannot" (Stoker 237). The nexus is really, as

Peter Messent suggests, "a point of intersection beiween two kincis of knowtedge - the "realistic" and the rationally "unexplainable"; or alternatively, between "two worlds

- natural and supematural" (5). The enigmatic impossibilify of the vampire at once signifies several antithetical and therefore unstable rneanings. The sudden and unexpected conflation of these antitheses resonates with the kind of shock value 55

so often seen in postmodemism. The impulse behind postmodernism is to

"violate classical codes" (Kaplan 33), especially those codes of chronology,

association and definition. The vampire resonates sympathetically with these

objectives.

I have been arguing that experiencing the impossible in the vampiric tradition

is both an inteilectual activity and a visceral, or emotive one. The experience is

neiîher overt nor rational and it signifies a nexus of several antitheses at once.

Moreover, each experience is at onœ new and déja vu. The remainder of this

chapter will gather up these nuances of knpossjblïity and re-contextualize them

against the four theoretical cornerstones that underpin vampiric aiticism: Tzvetan

Todorov's notion of the Fantastic, the paradoxes of fear, the neo-Freudian notion of

the uncanny, and the sublime.

The first mmerstone is Todorov's Uncanny, mich is linked dosely to his

notion of Fantastic. Todorov posits two distinct sub-genres, the Uncanny and the

Marvelous, and a third hybrid genre, the Fantastic, al1 of which are defined by the

certainty with which plot outcornes ernbrace or deny the veracity of the supernatural.

Todorov's work is significant because it shifts the focus away from the extemality of

IN-n's notion of reader-audience and toward the intemality of textual discourse. The

Uncanny, for Todorov, is the supernatural explained away (41). The Marvelous, on the other hand, is the supematural accepted (42). In the vampiric tradaion, instances 56 of the Uncanny are rare, but the Sheriock Holmes vampire case discussed earlier wou!d be one example of the ~ncann~.~

By contrast, the Fantastic is a hybnd genre, poised on the edge of hesitation and uncertainty, vacillating between the Unmnny and the Marvelous (Todorov 44) and urging dosure and reçoluGonusually through the Marvelous, and rarely through the ~ncann~.~~The hesitation is due to narrative ambiguities that leave the readerlaudienœ in a state of what Todorov callç uncertainty, perhaps somewhat analogous to what I have called moments of doubting doubt, by which I mean doubting our skepticism rather than embracing a whole-hearted belief in the supematural.

The vampiric work of horror can be a particularly powerful experience of impossibi/ify in this context of Todorov's Fantastic. For instance, the very narrative in Stoker's Dracula is built on a Fantastic predicarnent in which Mina,

Lucy and Harker are at once resistant to, appalled by, and subsequently infatuated with their physical intimacy with Dracula. They al1 experience pain and pleasure in their contact with him and they are all, at various times, uncertain about whether they are dreaming, hallucinating or actually experiencing physical contact with the Count. The narrative fiuctuates between rational and inaiional explanations for these recurring abnomal phenomena. 57

The nightmare is another metaphor for loss of control and vulnerability and for the impossible. For Coleridge, the power of the nightmare, the drearn, the hallucination and the work of imagination are all relateci. The essence of meaningful experïence is the intensity of emotive, visceral, and even physical reacüons to horrific or temfic stimuli. For Coleridge. the 'Night-mair is not a mere Dreamn (The

Co/iected Works, Vol 5, #A, "Lectures 1808 -1819: On Literature", 135). It is an altered state that occurs between "sleeping and wakingn(136) and it occurs when the experience of fear is so vivid that physical symptoms can occur such as "single

Touch (when another Person's Hand touches me)" (136). Coleridge says "the nightmare unite[s] the Actual Perceptions with the phantoms of the inward Sense - and thus so confound the half-waking, half-sleeping Reasoning Power, that we actually do pas a positive judgement ..- for the reality of what we see & hear: tho' often accompanied by doubt and selfquestioningn (136). It is the "confoundingn of these two separate worlds of the Marvelous and the Uncanny that defines the nightmare, and also that defines the experience of the impossible, especially men what we "see and heaf is the disorienting suggestion that the supernaturai and/or genderisexual orientation queemess are alive in those around us.

The second comerstone is the paradox of fear. Edmund Burke claimed that fear is such a particularly intense and sublime emotion because it is disempowering and debilïtating. He wrote, "no passion so effectually robs the rnind of al1 its powers 58

of acting and reasoning as fear" (96)," and he thought that the most intense fear

was ultimately 'an apprehension of pain or deathn (96). The Burkean idea of fear

was developed further in the work of Howard Lovecraft who suggested that the

apprehension of pain or death is also a very prima1 experiencd7 bemuse that

particular fear is Yhe oldest and strongest ernotionn of humankind (12). For

Lovecraff, "what causes "true" fear is a "hint, express& with a seriousness and

portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conœption of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of nature which are our only safeguard against the assauits of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed spaœn (15)- What lies beneath this prima1 emotion of feâr is the stark reality of human vulnerability, and of course, the more evidence we see around us that asserts human dorninanœ and control, the more resistant we becorne to the very idea of our own vulnerability. The greater the resistance, the more opportunities are created to incite fear.

W is important to distinguish further between two species of fear terror and horror. Terror is the aniicipatory am-ety about a sensed or irnpending disaster or painful moment, and homr is the spectacie of the moment itself. Stephen King calls horror, "the gross-out," (4) and temr, 'the creepsn (5). For King, like Lovecraft, terror is the most potent of the writer's tools, but he also suggests that horror which "invites a physical reactionn (22) and "a gag reflex of revulsion" (25) can also be essential in 59

fnghtening his readerfaudience. Both need to be present but terror is offen more

powerful because it invites the imagination to create multiple possibilities. Horror

completes and actualizes terror and in so doing, is a release.

The impossible in its supematural and queer manifestations, shapes and is

shaped by fear. The horror and ternir that emerge from these impossibilifies are

triggered by psychological, physical or even moral self-preservation. There may also

be concem for the safety of others but the primary fear is concem for the self. The

certainty is, as Stephen King suggests, that our fears are most likely to produœ

tremendous anxiety over "the trump card" (193) - death. King is speaking of literal

death of course, but there is also a further notion here of symbolic death or the

termination of a belief or an idea. ln the vampire we see symbolized both what King

calls Our "real fearç" and Our "fantasy fearsn (129). The ultimate impossibiMy

inherent in the vampire lies in its victory over death and gender orthodo>sr. The

imaginative experience of the vampire addresses at once, our real fear of death and the sexual other, and out fantasy fears through which we live vicariously and wish to experience that which we dread? Varnpirk narratives imagine for us a fantasy fear of what it must feeI like to be dead but stifl conscious and ambulatory, or Mat it must feel like to be either cross-gendered or to be simultaneously masculine and ferninine and yet to transcend those genders. 60

The experience of the impossible rnust, by definition then, be at once

disconcerting and a therapeutic release. The fears of the child, so ostensibly

remote from the rationality of adulthood, are always present, though dormant and

waiting to be re-awakened. Moreover, what is true at the level of individual

psychology is also true at the level of a society's culture- The dormant anxieties

of a whole culture may be unarliculated and latent until the very moment of

confrontation with some unexpected event or experience at which point they may

be awakened. Noel Carroll suggests that the vampire can 'YRgger certain enduring

infantile fears, such as those of king eaten or dismernbered, or sema1 fears,

wnœrning rape and inœstt' (43), and that the vampire can also evoke "the desire to

avoid physical contact - which may be rooted in the fear of finestation" (Carroll 28).

Such fears seem to emerge form the taboos around sexual union, kinship and bodily

function~.~~To recognize these taboos and their inter-relatedness as well as their

desirability, is to recognize the psychosis of our rational skepticiçm, and so to

confront the impossible.

The complexity of the vampire's symbolism and of the vampire's relation to

many different varieties of impossibi~~,is also a consequence of itç multiple

significations that have been over-layered through time. The vampire is "undead"

and therefore neither aiive nor dead; it is neither human nor animal but both; a supematura! agent and a human; it is at once victim and predator, noctumal and 61

diumal, hero and anti-hero, male and not-male, fernale and not-female, powerful and vulnerable, and domicile, alien and revenant As a symbol, the vampire does

more than just resist allegorical interpretation. The vampire is inherently nch in symbolism because it gathers up many of these opposing and contradictory meanings into itself and refiects them ail back to us in a kaleidoscope of meaninçs.

In a sense, fear is a visceral, intuited recognition of the dissonance between what is rationally understood as certain, and what can be imagined as possible. The moment of recognition may ptesent itself as a moment of confusion but our phobias really allude to the deconstruction of those cornfortable habits of thought and feeiing that populate the certainty in our Iives. To bortow Stephen King's phrase, our

"phobic pressure points" (4) are sensitive to the vampire at many IeveIs sirnultaneously. Fear has many faces and the vampire symbolizes them al]: aichrnophobia (fear of sharp, pointed objects), cibophobia (rnorbid aversion to food), eisoptrophobia (fear of one's own reflection in a mirror), gynophobia (fear of wornen and women's power), haematophobia (fear of the sight of blood), homophobia (fear of same sex intimate contact), nosophobia (fear of contacthg a disease), nyctophobia (fear of night or darkness), psychrophobia (fear of anything cold), xenophobia (fear of sirangers or the exotic), taphophobia (fear of being buned alive), 63

and also what we may cal1 queer-phobia (fear of gender roles or sexual practices

that are not heterosexually based)?'

Stephen King quite rightly suggests that the confrontation of colfective and

individual fears through fiction can be a therapeutic activity and that al1 works of

horror are a kind of "danse macabre" or a "search" that is "Iooking for ... your

most primitive Ievel. The work of horror .. . rnay well be .. . the mass-media dream of horror [that] can sometimes become a nationwide analyst's much." (Danse

Macabre 4-5). Often the work of horror embeds the articulation of that fear in a single and particularly skeptical character who becomes a victirn of the vampire's attack, or in a believing character who defeats the vampire, or dialectically in one character with both traits.

The third cornerstone is the neo-Freudian notion of uncanny (not to be confused with Todorov's ~ncanny).~'The uncanny is the experience of a new and ostensibly unique situation that resonates with the familiar because repressed and sublimated instincts have been inadvertently recalled to mind, and only partially identified. My previous discussion of Fuseli and his imitators illustrated this phenomenon to the extent that the familiar is often repeated in various forms. However, an important characteristic of the uncanny is also that it is net immediately or obviously rewgnized as a recumng phenomenon. Like

Friston's Millarca Attacking her Vicfim (Figure 8) which is different enough from 63

Fuseli in the specific elements but not in the functionality of those elements, the

uncanny is familiar but we not do not irnmediately recognize the familiar within it.

The paintings demonstrate that even when the elements are significantly transfomed, they mnsüll retain a large portion of their original significations and their interrelationships-

The uncanny is also present in the vampiric tradition. For instance, in

Stoker's Dracula, both Mina and Dracula have a similar mark on their foreheads;

Dracula's is causeci by Harker striking him with a shovel (67) and Mina's from

Van Helsing holding the sacred host to her forehead (352). The resemblance between the two is uncanny because in the first instance it is not recognized as such by the characters, but secondly because the very idea that Mina could be so closely associated with Dracula is incongruent with what we the readers know of her, and herein lies the paradox and the impossibility. The scar on Mina's forehead has some familiarity to it since we have already seen it on Dracula, but it also appears to be unique to her. The recollection of a past horror can be an involuntary reflex if the stimuli are appropriate. Maggie Kilgour rightly suggests that the presence of the uncanny in the whole, larger Gothic tradition, and therefore in the vampiric tradition as well, is because "'normal' human relationships are defamiliarisedn(Kilgour 12). For instance, that Gothic world with 64 the "aggressive, sexual malen and the "passive spiritual femalen (iüigour 12) looks nothing (and everything) Iike Our own gender-stereotyped world.

There is a rernarkable degree of repetitiveness of therne, expression and ambiance in the uncanniness of vampin'c images and motif%. The repetitiveness affirms Vijay Mishra's conviction that the "duplication at work" in the whole Gothic

Tradition illustrates that "the subject is simply locked into an incessant series of repetitions, [and that] the Gothic rewrites the sublime and prefigures its theorization as 'uncanny'" (71). The generation, reception and transformation of vampiric clichés and motifs from one generation to the next, and one era to the next, is what Walter Kendrick has aptly labeled "genrification" (165ff). He describes the phenomenon as the "tireless repetition of the horrors of being dead

[that] has grown into an enormous international industry" (xvii), and the 'recycling

[of] a tiny roster of scenes and situationsn (254). The Fuseli painting and its imitators are an excellent case in point, but Kendnck misses the nuances of change in motif and the modem shifts that combine queerness and conventional romance.

Psychoanalysis can partially account for the phenomenon of the paradoxical feelings associated with the uncanny for, as Gelder observes, in the

Lacanian formula "the uncanny is always 'at stake' in ideology, which ceaselessly tries to intemgate it, to make it famifiar to itself in order to be rid of it" (52). In a sense, narratives of vampiric supematuralisrn, regardless of whether they are confiated with issues of gender, signify an attempt to gain control over that which cannot, and will not be controlled by expressing or articulating it. Thus, we might re-wnte Nina Auerbach's statement that vampires "an be everything we are, while at the same time they are fearful reminders of the infinite things we are nor

(6) and Say that vampires are also fearful reminders of the things we are. The uncanny and the impossible intersect at the place where al1 that has been denied and abandoned rises from the darkness to meet us.

The fourth and final cornerstone is the sublime. Its essence is the simultaneous expenenœ of opposite ernotions of great intensity, usuaiiy focussing on pain and danger on the one hand, and pleasure on the otherVq

Edrnund Burke's idea of rapture and terror experienced simultaneously in a moment of intense ernotion, is also an apt description of the sublime in the vampiric tradition, even though Burke had nature, not the supernatural in mind wtien he contemplated the sublime. For our purposes here, the essence of the

Burkean experience of the sublime is more important than the stimulus. Certainly in Fuseli's The Mghtmare there might be a suggestion of rapture if the woman has fâinted or is sleeping, but she may also be dead. lmplicit in this very ambiguity of this experience is the sublime. 66

60th the impossible and the sublime share the synchronous presence of

emotional opposites and of other properties (dead and undead) that are

unexpected, not norrnally juxtaposed. In an un-agitated condition we are nomally

in a state of "indifferencen(47) says Burke, and the only other alternative states are pleasure, "painn or both simuitaneously (the sublime) (47). The experience of the sublime produces a kind of mental rapture in which the conscious self is temporanly overcome and moved out of its state of "indifference." The sublime is associated with a kind of 'astonishment," in which the "state of the sou1 [is] ... suspended with some degree of horrof (95) and "terror" wherein the mind is robbed "of al1 ifs powers of acting and reasoningn (96). Such a state is also highly suggestive of Coleridge's observation that the nightmare causes a "wnfounding" of reasoning (136). Terror, for Burke, produces "an unnatural tension and certain violent emotions of the nervesn (252). "A mode of terror, or of pain, is always the cause of the sublimen (258). But the terror must be mitigated by the safety of

"certain distancesn (60) from which we can take "a degree of delight, and that no srnaIl one, in the real misfortunes and pains of othersn (72). Perhaps it is here that we have yet another explanation for why so many audiences have enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, vampiric narratives in al1 media.

Wjay Mishra has modified and adapted Burke's sublime, and re-named it the Gothic Sublime- The Gothic Sublime includes what Mishra calls "the 67 unthinkable --.and the unspeakable" (23). These characteristics can also be aligned with the defining characteristics of the impossible. But Mishra suggests that the defining element of the Gothic Sublime is the moment of death when

"speech is wnsumed by silencen (Mishra 23). It is difficult to see Mishra's self- articulated differentiation fmrn Burke, when Burke himself describes the sublime experience in terrns of the Latin verb "stupeon (to be astonished) and "attonitus

(thunderstruck)" (98), except perhaps that Mishra wants the Gothic sublime to be the most extreme expression of any sublime experience.

There are some troublesome disagreements in the debate over the relationship between the Burkean and the Gothic sublime. Gelder's synopsis63of these differences (46-8) points at Ieast to one important issue pertinent to our understanding of how these ideas can be read against the notion of the impossible. One debate is centered on the proposition that the Burkean sublime eschews psychology and remains locked in the physicality of the experience whereas the Gothic sublime retums to the psychology of forbidden desires and a terror of the consequences of that desire. But one thing is certain; for Burke, the sublime also leads to "interior effects" which he calls *admiration, reverence and respectn (96) and most of these are not generally associated with the vampire, or indeed with anything in supematural tradition, although perhaps Anne Rice's 68

Lestat and Coppola's Dracula inspire some of that because, as in sublime

narratives, we are held in awe of their powerful and tormented personalities.

The nuances of the debate over the sublime do not matter here. The

essence of good horror at its most potent is always an expression of sublime

impossibility that evokes both the psychological and physiological at once: Harker

says that when he was approached closely by Dracula he 'could not repress a

shudder" (26). He later writes that he finds hirnself in a "deep awful silence which

chilled men (60). Harker's experience of the moment is also sublime, preciçely

because it is ai once psychological and physical and it resonates syrnpathetically with Jones' notion of Angst, and with his notion of the wnsistency between the psychology and the physiology of homfic experience. For the purposes of this study, when the sublime emerges frorn impossibility, it is a rapture that in its most powerful manifestation is both physiological and psychological. It wntains the erotic and morbid, the forbidden and the desired, the physical and the psychological, horror and terror.

Stephen Khg has called death the "trump cardn of horror (l93), because the henneneutics of that particular experience are ultimately inaccessible to the living. Perhaps this is why Mishra has suggested that the Burkean sublime produces a kind of "religious awen (Mishra 30). The sense of an oveiwhelming experience that cannot be articulated and that is beyond language is captured 69

effectively in Fuseli's The Nighfmare and in its imitators (Appendix A); but the

sense of being ovenrvhelmed is also highly visible in the specifically vampiric

images (Figures 9, 10 and Il in Appendix B). The specifically vampiric images,

however, consistently articulate the experience of the vampiric attack as sublime

and as wntaining the elements of death (pain) and orgasm (pleasure) simultaneously (Figures 9 and 10 in Appendix B).

One of the major shifts in sensibility from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as we shall see, is a more explicit and increased narrative sympathy for the vampire. The unspeakable-ness of hornosexua~ity,~~especially in the late nineteenth century, was more strongly felt than today, and expressions of homosexuality were by necessity, latent and wvertty coded into the conventions of romance and the heroic. Sympathetic portrayals of the vampire (the heroicized narrative) which portray the vampire as a tragically flawed hero (Thomas Prest's

Vamey the Vampire, Anne Rice's The Vampire Lesfat) do not necessaMy radicalize hegemonic gender discourse any more than the vilification narratives

(Polidori's The Vampyre, Murnau's Nosferatu) necessarily afFÏrm conventional gender. Nevertheless, most vampiric narratives understate some variant of queerness beneath vampirism. and transforrn its seductive and simultaneously repulsive properties into the terror and horror of the supernatural. The varnpirïc narrative contains the potential to deconstruct the limits of gender impossibility, or 70 of any hegemonic values, but, as I am arguing, in most instances that deconstruction is only partially and momentarily achieved before finally re- establishing the conventionality of the limits that have been transgressed.

In surnmary then, the impossible is an irrational, intense, unexpected, sublime expenence that can cause terror and pleasure. The encounter is at once supernatural, physical and sexual, and is incongruent with conventional constructs of knowledge and gender. Fear is counter-balanced by curiosity and pleasure. The impossible ais0 contains multiple, inherent incongruities pertinent to the supernatural, the material, the visible, the invisible, the divine, the secular, social and economic class, men, women, sexual orientation, gender identity, human eroticism, fnendship, community, mariage, courtship, the family, science, and psychology. The impossible appears familiar (uncanny) because we already know it at a deep level and are forced to feel, perhaps even intuit that same truth.

The impossible appears exotic, because the experïence reproduces both those things with which we are comfortable and those that we have repressed.

Heroic and vilification narratives wntain narrative devices and rhetoric that morally judge the vampire positively or negatively. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these two narrative modes prevail. Polidori's and Planché's vampires are morally compt and without conscience, and they are a threat to innocence and to the marÏtal and courtship conventions of romance. Vamey, on 71 the other hand, is also the same kind of morally compt cad. but he is a vampire with a conscience. His suffenng, self-judgement and suicide heroicize him. By wntrast, sublime naratives suspend judgment for or against the vampire and stand hesitatingly on the border between compassion and mndernnation, preferfing instead to explore the vampire neither as a monster nor a hero but as a curious object of study that we are invited to despise and admire. Le Fanu's and

Stoker's vampires are sublime in this sense. and although they are vilified neither writer permits the same kind of moral judgement that Polidori and Planché do.

The early part of the twentieth century echoes the eariy part of the nineteenth century because there was an abandonment of sublime narratives and a retum to narratives of vilification or heroicization (Murnau and Browning for instance). As well, there was a general return, over the whole twentieth century, to romance as the infonning motif of the stories, except perhaps for Murnau and

Stephen King. Finally, the vampiric works of the late twentieth century, as exernplified in Anne Rice and Francis Ford Coppola, show an unprecedented blending of the sublime narrative with the previously incompatible conventions of romance and queerness. In earlier wotks the heroicization or vilification of the vampire emerges from its queemess or the extent of its conformity to conventions of romance, but not both. VVith Rice and Coppola, the vampire's sublimity is a function of both its queerness and its adherenœ to romantic conventions. Endnotes for Chapter One

1 This and al1 future references to The Sussex Vampire are taken from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Ed. William S. Baring-Gould. Volume II (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1960). The Sussex Vampire appean in Volume II. The Doubleday edition is also standard but I have chosen the Baring-Gould because of its cornprehensive annotations.

2 See Chnstopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lod Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber & Faber, 1991). For Frayling, Goethe's The Bride of Corinth (1797) is the significant landmark in the transition from folklore to literature. See also Judith Barbour, 'Dr. John William Polidon, Author of The Vampyren in lmagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanficisms, Ed. Deirdre Coleman and Peter Otto (West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1992) 85-1 10. For Barbour, Thomas Chatterton's An Excelente Balade of chanfie (1769) is an alternative choice.

There is some sense of an English vampiric literary tradition that pre-dates the eighteenth century, as Montague Summers explains in Chapter Two of his book, The Vampire in Europe (New York: University Books, 1929, rpt. 1968). However, the connections are tenuous at best, and as Montague Summers himself admits, 'the allusions are accidental and occasional" (78).

All references to Stoker's Dracula are from Leonard Wolf, The Essenfial Dracula (New York: Plume Books, 1993) unless otherwïse specified. The Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997) is also an excellent edition, but even Auerbach and Skal concede that Wolf's edition contains "richly detailed annotationsn(488). 1 prefer Wolf s edition to al1 others because of the heipfulness of his annotations.

5 Even after Stoker's Van Helsing persuades Seward that Lucy has been attacked by a vampire, Seward still cannot transcend the constraints of the scientific paradigm from which he operates. He wriies that Van Helsing "recognised my retum to my old doubting frame of mind" (250).

The definitive biographies on Vlad are co-authored by Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the lmpale~1431-1476 (New York: Hawthom Books, 1973), and their earlier work, ln Search of Dracula. (Greenwich,Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1972). However, see also, Montague Summers, The Vampie: His ish and Kin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1928, rpt. 1960). There is also a website called The Vampie's Vauit at http:/hivwwhivwwchebucto.nshivwwca/-vampire/waulthl(accessed Deœmber 29, 1999), managed by Beverley Richardson on behalf of the Canadian Chapter of The Transylvanian Society of Dracula. Its purpose is to provide 'a cfearing house of information pertaining to the serious study of Dracula and related topics. Its rnembers comprise historians, folklorists, literary critics, researchers, students, film enthusiasts - anyone with a setious interest in Dracula."

7 The manuscripts all concur that Vlad's wife committed suicide rather than be led into captivity by the Turks. The suicide appears to have been the basis for Coppola's heroicized portrayal of Dracula as a variation on the romantic hero whose tragic Ioss of his wife leads hirn to introspection, isolation and ultimately, a pact with the devil. Modem day wars in Bosnia and vicinity, are the legacy of hundreds of years of ethnic and religious infighting among Hungarians, Szekelys, Hungarian-speaking Szekelys, Saxons, Romanians, Moldavians, Wallachians, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Moslems (see Melton 61 2).

In The Vampire Book, J. Gordon Melton daims that a conservative estimate of the number of victims of Vlad's six-year reign places the body count at approximateIy 40,000. If accurate, this figure makes Vlad "responsible for the Iargest number of deaths by a single rufer until modem times" (668), and it makes even Ivan the Terrible, who was responsible for 10,000 deaths, pale by com parison.

'O Raymond T McNally and Radu Florescu went about the task of discovering Dracula's grave. See also McNally's and Florescu's In Search of Dracula. (GreenwÏch,Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1972).

The whole phenornenon bears an eerïe and sinister resemblance to Christian mythologies of Christ's death, resurrection and the disappearance of his earthly body. l2 See Bathory's biography by Raymond T. McNally, Dracula Was a Woman: In Search of the blood Counfess of Tansylvania (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983). See also J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (DetroitNVashington/London: Visible Ink Press, 1994), 31 ff. 13 Andrei Codrescu, The Blood Counfess (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

14 See Paul Barber's Vampires, Bunal and Death: Folklore and Reality which is a detailed and rather graphic account of a corpse's decaying processes. He also sympathetimlly discusses the inherent logic of folkloric explanations, given that peasants did not have this medical expertise. 15 A damphir (or dhamphir) is the Gypsy name for the offspnng (usually a son) of a vampire and a human, and was thought to have remarkable powers when it came to vampire-hunting because of the duality in lineage.

l6 The OED records the earliest instance of the word vampire in 1734, in a piece entitled The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, contained in the Harieian Miscellany (pub. 1744-6). The OED cites the original meaning as =A pretematural king of a malignant nature (in the original and usual form of the belief, a re- anirnated corpse), supposed to seek nounshment, or do harrn, by sucking the blood of sleeping persons; a man or woman abnorrnally endowed with similar habits." Just as a matter of interest, a re-animated corpse that eats flesh is a zombie and a metamorphosed corpse that eats flesh is a wer-wolf or wer-cat or wer (man) beast.

17 Other attempts to connect the Gothic Tradition to Romantics such as Blake, the Shelleys, Byron, and Keats are much more tenuous and less convincing than the connections to Coleridge, notwithstanding Polidori's close relationship with Byron. For instance, see David Punter's The Merature of Terror, Chapter 4 and D.L. MacDonald's Poor Polidofi passim.

18 See "The Supematural in Poetry" in lnquinhg Spi& A New Presentation of Coleridge from his Published and Unpublished Prose Wntrngs." Ed. Kathleen Cobum (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951) 191. lg Chnstabel is more of a psychic vampire than a literal one, but the vampiric essence is still present. As well, there is a hint of autovampirism in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at fines 160-1 in Part Ill: "1 bit my am, I sucked the blood, / And cried A sail! a sail!". Ali references to Coleridge's Biographia Literana are from The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Colerfdge. Gen. Ed. Kathleen Cobum , Ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, vol 7, PrÏnceton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press (Routledge and Kegan Paul), 1987.

21 See J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. Jack Sage (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962). t2 Stones deafing with the intrusion of supematural agents into human affairs were also present in Medieval times, as illustrated in the lycanthropic tale Bisclavret in the Lais of Mané de France (ca 11 50) and, as Montague Summers has noted in The Vampire in Europe, even in the twelflh-century Mstorfa Remm Anglicamm of William of Newburgh (78).

23 For a further discussion of the artifice of romance and its impact on the Gothic, see David Punter's The Literature of Temr, Ch. 2, 20-53.

" Devendra Varna uses the term in The Gothic Flame, 17.

25 There is a comparable sub-genre in the fine of the ghost story. Wilkie Collins' Mad Monidon (1872),Henry James The Tum of the Screw, and rnuch of Edgar Allan Poe's work, show a narrative ambiguity about whether the ghost is subjective or objective, about whether it is an apparition (Le.: a delusion) or a "realnghost

26 CarroIIJs thesis appears to contradict the argument in The Gothic Flame, (Chapter VII, p. 173ff) where Varna dernonstrates that by the 1820's the Gothic Tradition as it had corne to be known, had al1 but disintegrated into short tales rather than long stories and into episodic moments of the supematural (illustrated later but notably in Wuthenng Heights) rather than sustained narratives devoted exclusively to Gothic themes. Vana does not specify which parts of Wuthering Heights he has in mind, but I suspect Chapter III where Lockwood encounters the ghost of Catherine Linton. Nevertheless, the disintegration of the established literary conventions of the Gothic may be perfectly congruent with the emergenœ of those same romantically transfomed and mutated conventions into popular culture.

27 In 1819, the same year in which Polidori 's The Vampyre was published, there appeared a French and a German translation, and a new French play men co~laborativel~by Pierre Carmouche, Achille Joufftey and Charles Nodier (McFarland 20). The French play, Le Vampire, was staged in Paris on 13 June, 1820, and was then re-cycled back into English via James Planches English version. For a discussion of the difierences between Polidori's The Vampyre and the French stage play see McFariand (26),but it iç clear that Planché was more directly influenced by continental theatrical sources than by domestic fictional sources.

28 It is true that the vampire of folklore is in scme sense. sexually charged. The belief probably came from witnessing corpses with erections. There may be some wnnection between sexual deviance and the fact that the vampire of folklore often attacked family mernbers, aEthough this suggests incest. not queemess, was at the root of the phobia. 29 There are many Van Helsings but the three most notable - and most similar - are Bram Stoker's, Balderston's and Deane's and Tod Browning's. The wntemporary pop iwn is television's Buw the Vampire Slayer.

30 Browning's screenplay echoes a similar sentiment expressed four years earlier in Balderston's and Deane's stage adaptation of Stokef s Dracula. The epilogue, also spoken by Van Helsing, shifts the audierrce's focus from the public forum of the theater to the privacy of the bedroorn, and the waming is essentially the same in substance and purpose: Just a moment, Ladies and Gentlemen! Just a word before you go. We hope the memories of Dracula and Renfield won't give you bad dreams, so just a word of assurance. When you get home tonight and the lights have been tumed out and you are afraid to~look behind the curtains and you dread to see a face appear at the window - why, just pull yourself together and remember that after all, there are such things. (Curtain falls)." (Balderston and Dean 74)

31 Tod Browning and Garrett Fort adapted the film and wrote the screenplay. This item is the actual Universal Pictures screenplay for that film

32 See E. Ann Kaplan, Rockinç Around the Clock: Music, Television, Postmodemism and Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987, rpt. 1989) 187 ff.

33 For a poignant psychiatrie discussion on the suggestive power of horror cinema and how fragile the security in ouf ordinary lives really is, see James C. Bouuto's "Cinematic Neurosis Following The ExomFsf in Richard Noll's Vampires, Werewolves and Demons: Twentieth Cenfury Repods on the Psychiattic Merature, Chapter 12, pp. 187-97. Works of horror can - and do - exert a powerhil influence over even the rnost rational of people. Many who saw The morcist won thought themselves actually possessed and needed extensive therapy.

34 The same phrase, "there are such things as vampiresn originates from Vamey the Vampyre (p- 80). In our own time, Anne Rice's Lestat obsenres that the human resistance to belief is anchored in a compulsion for the rational and the natural, rather than the supernatural. The vampire is permitted to live and move arnong mortals with relative anonyrnity. "Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing tin pans al1 over, pouring water on pillows, making clocks chirne at al1 hours, mortals will accept any 'natural explanation' offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious, supernatural one, for what is going on." See Anne Rice, Intewiew Wifh the Vampire (Toronto, Canada: Ballantine Books, 1976, rpt. f986).

35 For a discussion on the importance of faith to the Victorians, see Walter Houghton The Victorian Frame of Mind: 7830-7870 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957), especially Chapter 4: "The Critical Spirit and the WiII to Believe" (93 ff).

36 See Linda Bayer-Berenbaum's The Gothic Imagination. She reads the whole Gothic Tradition as a decadent religion and suggests that the tradition is Iike "religious depravity that provide[s] a cathartic outlet for the sense of guilt that accornpanies the decline of strong religionn(37).

37 Authorial skepticism about supematuralism coincided with the ernergenœ of the vampire story in English. Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1798, pub. 18 18) and Anne Radcliffe's The Mystehs of Udoipho (1 794) both mock the Iiterary conventions of naive belief in the supematural.

38 Stoker's Van Helsing calls this ability the 'power of combination" (Stoker 288).

39 See Linda Bayer Berenbaum's The Gothic Imagination. She argues that "scientific rationalism . . . has sought to banish the fantastic by explaining it physicalty, sociologically, and psychologicallyn(1 2).

40 Vamey sometimes penetrates his victims' arrns for reasons that are unclear, although one suspects Victorïan sexual decorum may be a factor here. 41 Wynona Rider made this comment in an A&E interview shortly after the release of Coppola's Bram Stokefs Dracula (1992). 42 See, for instance, the cinematic version of Interview with the Vampire in which Lestat's attack on Louis shows both men in an ernbrace floating ecstatically upwards during the bite.

43 See Noel Carroll's The Philosophy of Homr. (London & New York: Routledge, 1990). pp. 105R where he suggests that the essence of the "cornplex discovery plotn in horror fiction often features a single "discoverer figuren (106) or, altematively, a discoverer function that is distributed over several figures (107).

« Psychiatdst Felix Boehm called it "The Femininity Complex in Men," InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis, 11 (1 93O), 444-69.

45 There is. of course, a whole canonical history of feminist writings that deconstruct this phobia, extending from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to Karen Horney's The Dread of Woman (1932) and beyond, to Eve Sedgwick's work

46 Judith Barbouts "Dr. John William Polidori, Author of The Vampy&' (1992) also suggests that those who 'convert" to vampirism "extend the line, spread the infection, or share the self-knowiedge of vampire kind" (97).

47 This study will later dernonstrate that queemess is a much more subdued issue in her films, in spite of the fact that she herself actively participated in the screen writing .

48 The sensational triai of Oscar Wilde began on 26 April, 1895 and not only brought infamy to him but also gave voice to some of the previously silent prejudices of a homophobic society.

49 Christopher Craft, "Kiss Me with those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Represenfations 8(Fall 1984): 107-33.

Stephanie Dernetrakopoulos, "Ferninism, Sex Role Changes and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Fmnfiérs, 11 (1 977): 104-2.

5 1 See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolufions 2"ded. (University of Chicago Press, 1972) viii. Kuhn has in rnind the scientific wmmunity, but the mode1 applies to culture too. For Kuhn, the persistence of the heliocentric and geocentric 'paradigmsn of the galaxy suggest that science seeks only those self- fulfilling pieces of evidence which affirm the curent paradigm, while rejecting or subordinating any evidence to the wntrary. Kuhn writes: 'normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation of those phenornena and theones that the paradigm already supplies" (24). Science, and indeed al1 knowledge, proceeds by "increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm's predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itsen (24).

52 Teny Eagleton, Literagt Theory: An introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1983, rpt. 1989) 79.

53 IMnls six categories are: incredible societies; impossible personal change; an unorthodox notion of innocence; Iiterary parody; extension or adaptation of established ideas about historical fact; and a dominance of supematural powers in some part of the known world (100). While all of these are present in various ways throughout the varnpiric tradition, my focus remains on gender and class as other categories.

54 Todorov has in mind the works of Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe, to which might be added Jane Austen's Nodhanger Abbey (18 18); Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Haunted and the Haunters, or, the House and the Brain (1862); and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sussex Vampire (1896).

55 Todorov distinguishes further between the Fantastic-Uncanny and the Fantastic-Marvelous, the Hyperbolic and the Exotic, the Instrumental and the Scientific Marvelous (43-57),but these nuances do not significantly contribute to or diminish the generat thrust of my discussion here. 56 Al1 references to Burke are from A Philosophical Enquiry lnfo the Ongins of Our ldeas of the Sublime and Beaufifui- The Second Editlon Whand lntroductory Discourse concerning Taste, and several other Additions. Facsimile edition (New York: Garland Pubtishing 1971). Made from a copy in the Yale University Library (Beinecke Kj 757bb).

57 See Paul Barber's Vampires, Burial and Death (1988) for a more extended discussion of these taboos and their relation to fears about death and burial.

58 Such inherent dichotomies also make fear a sublime experience, as 1 shall demonstrate later. 59 See Freud's treatment of the problem of sexuality. taboo and 'olfactory stimuli" in the beginning of Chapter IV of Civilizaiion and Ifs Discontenfs. "The fateful process of civilization would thus have set in with man's adoption of an erect posture. From that point the chain of events would have proceeded through the devaluation of the olfactory stimuli and the isolation of the rnenstmal period to the time when visuai stimuli were paramount and the genitals became visible, and thenœ to the cantinuity of sexual excitation, the founding of the family and so to the threshold of civilization" (46-7).

60 Some these phobias are defined in James Drever, A Dicfionary of Psychology (Harmondsworth, Middlesex. England: Penguin, 1952, rpt., 1962).

61 See Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), passim.

The sublime experience can be caused by many other factors as well for Burke, including the natural world, obscurity, power, vastness, privation, infinity, and darkness. Other eighteenth-century theorists Iinked the sublime to a variety of other sources: Thomas Stackhouse (1731) linked it to language, Robert Lowth (1787) connected it to poetry and Henry Needler (i724) wnnected it to the contemplation of God. The full variety of discussions on the sublime has been anthologized in Andrew Ashfield's and Peter de Bolla's The Sublime: a reader in Bn'tish eighteenth-century aesthek theory. (Great Bntain: Cam bridge University Press, 1996).

63 For a discussion of the political (and other) implications of the sublime see Fred Batting, Gothk (lW6), pp.38-43. Gelder argues that what Polidori's The Vampyre "really wants to Say, but cannot, is that Lord Ruthven is gay" (60). Chapter Two: Vihfying and Heroicizing Narratives of the Early Nineteenth Century: Masculinity in Crisis

The embryonic period of the vampinc narrative in English, between 1819

(John Polidori's The Vampyre) and 4845 - 1847 (James Malcolm Rymer's Vamey the Vampire), contains the origins of both heroicization and vilification narratives-

Polidori vilified the vampire, and both he and his subsequent generic descendants, Planché (1820) and Murnau (1922),' al1 foreground the grotesque aspects of the vampire. The vampire is vilified in several ways. First, it is void of conscience, or if it does have one we are not permitted to see it. The vampire is distanced from the narrative's sympathies because of the absence of any sense of an inner self. There is no psychological interiorïty. Vilification narratives prefer instead to lowte the narrative's sympathies in characters other than the vampire, and usually this means the victims. Secondly, the vampire is defomed, either morally, physically, or both. It usually is repulsive. Thirdly, even though the vampire Iives and moves within a given community, it remains psychologically and emotionally isolated from it - connected yet detached. Fourthly, the vampire is driven by selfishness and by its own desire to feed and survive at alf costs.

Vilification narratives usually exhibit the rhetoric of an overriding moral rectitude at the final destruction ûf the vampire. The death of the vampire is right and just. 82

This vilification of the vampire is most consistent with the continental

folklore surrounding this creature. The vampire of folklore, as Montague Summers

shows us in The Vampire in Europe, was frequentiy thought to be "a body re-

animated by the deviln (78). Notwithstanding Sumrners' somewhat problematic

doubt about the veracity and authenticity of peasant folk tales, it is clear that

Polidori's vilifÏcation of the vampire is an artistic impulse that is consistent wîth al1 its folkloric ongins even though some details have ken altered2 What has been

added to the folklore mythology is the new idea that the vampire is a predator

interested only in virginal rnaidens because they are the oniy food source he is capable of consurning. Such restrictions on the vampire's food supply illustrate how the folkloric rnonster who attacked kin first and then cornrnunity, had becorne transformed into a new kind of heterosemal cad, a monster an appetite for beautiful. and virginal young w0rnen.j The first of the most significant transformations of the vampire then, was to remove him from his peasant roots4 and to make him a decadent, aristocratie womanizer.

It is easy to be fooled by the ostensible simplicity of Polidori's The Vampyre.

Apart from its brevity, the plot is simple and the character development is basic at best and its only apparent insight is a rather banal and implicit daim that readers ought to heighten their sensitivity to strangers who might be vampires and that these same readers ought to act more prudently if they suspect a stranger of being a vampire. The death of Lord Aubrey's sister through marriage to a vampire, couid 83 have been prevented if Aubrey had had a knowiedge of how to deal with vampires.

The story, however, has ken rescued from a diminutive status in the evolution of the vampire narrative firstly because Ït was initially published under a very cryptic set of conditions which still fascinate critics and secondly because Ken Gelder and

Judith Barbour have recently contributed signficantly to a critical sense of the underlying complexity of this piece.

The deliberately-cultivated confusion over Byron's alleged authorship surrounding the publishing of The Vampim is well documenteci in general but perhaps nowhere more extensively than in D. L. MacDonald's cntical biography,

Poor ~olidori.~The Vampyre's appearance on Apnl Fool's day, 1819, in Henry

Colburn's popular New Monthly ~agazine~is mystifying7 but it is signficant that only af€er700 copies were printed and sold did Colbum intempt the printing and remove the so-calied authentic statement that Byron was the author. The resignation of

Colbum's editor, a man named Murray, implicated both Polidori and Colbum in the matter, but Colbum always clairneci he was duped. Byron vehemently denied authorship which in tum, may have contn'buted to even more sales.

The larger point here is the difficulty in ascerfaining whether or not Polidori's work would have enjoyed its popularity, then and now, if the Byronic authorship controversy had not happeneci.* It is difficult to disagree with Clive Leatherdale's assessrnent that at least the 'initial impact" and notoriety of The Vampyre were the 84 combinaüon of its association (albeit false) wah Byron. and Goethe's adding to the

"miçchief' by calling The Vampyre Byron's best work (Leatherdale 50).

Polidori's tale was the first vampire fiction in English and Planches The

Vampi~was the first vampire play to be perfomed on the English stage. The two works share in the honor of having introduced the vampire into English popular c~lture.~Both works also affim the farnily, courtship. mamage, gentlemanly conduct

(chivalry) and conventional dyadic gender-coding in which stmng males protect inert and fragile females. The gender-orthodoxy of these roles was widely enough understood in the culture, as evidenced by the paintings in Appendix 8,figures 6 and

7. The females in Polidori and Planché need protection because their virginity is valued and because their beauty and submissivenes make them desirable to al1 males, including unscrupulous outsiders. Within this very narrow range of gender- specfic conventions, there is an even narrower range of conventional emotional codes. When the heroines experience anxiety, terror or horror they faint or fall into fis of hysteria.'* In Planché, Lady Margaret "relapses into insensibiltty" (55)" and

Effie "shrieksnto be saved from Ruthven (59). And in Polidori's work lanthe is soft- spoken, 'beautiful and delicate (1 1-12)112 like a kind of "gazellen (12). She is an

"infantile beingn (1 3) and little more than the unfulfilled object of Aubrey's desires and a symbol for his encounter wïththe ferninine. Even "Miss Aubrey" (23) is innowous; she has no given name. She shows devoted obedience and deference to her parents. She is 'only eighteenn (19) and waiting patiently in accordance with her 85 parents' wishes to be presented, but only after her brother retums from the continent

US). She is the consummately submissive ferninine. It is her conventional and willing deference to patriarchal ritual that rnakes her valued, and it is clear that neither Polidori's nor Planché's work challenges any gender lirniis of impossibiILty for women; in fact we see precisely the oppoçite in the frequent re-affirmations of conventional femin ine stereotypes.

Masculinity, on the other hand, is more of a conœm for both works.

Conventionally understwd maswlinity has a clearly established code in western culture, with antecedents reaching back to Parson Adams in Henry Fielding's Joseph

Andrews (1742) and of course, much eariier into medieval chivalric codes of honor.

This masculine protector is a role sometimes exercised by professional rescuers such as the fireman in Appendix B Figure 6, the chivalric knight in Appendix B Figure

7 or the father figure in Appendix B Figure 8. However, the rescuer role was the domain of al1 males. A mrollary of the power and pervasiveness of this rescuer role is that the sinister abuse of that protective role could becorne a very powerkil signification of the impossible. The positive role of male as empowered rescuer is especially well-illustrateci in Appendk B Figures 6, 7 and 8, all of which show an omnipotent male rescuing an inert and helpless fernale. In the case of figures 7 and

8, it is the prerogative of the rescuer to gaze upon the recipient of his protection but the woman does not, or cannot, gaze at her rescuer. The negative manifestation of that same male power abused is illustrated in Appendix 6,Figures 9, 10 and 1 1, al1 86

of which show a similar visual relationship in which the male vampire gazes and

preys on his victim but she does not (cannot) gaze on him. When he wbo is father

and protedor becornes predator and vidimizer, the impossible is articulated and the

results are sublime, that it to say, both temfying and pleasurable. Figures 9 and 10

illustrate these paradoxical states.

This masculine pmtective role is one at which Aubrey fails miserably,

suggesting in a very powerful way, his own inadequacy and emasculation. Such a

role failure is impossible from a phallocentric perspective, ideologically forbidden in

this instance. It is an unthinkable gender abnonnality. An anx-ety of this nature may

not merely be limited to a literary articulation but may also be a biographieal

refraction of a real-life power dynamic for Polidori. As Ken Gelder observes, "the

feminising and subordination of Polidori in relation to a masculine Byronn (31) was

certainly a signifimnt part of their real-life relationship and, we might add, the

dynamic of this relationship seems to have been reproduced fictionally in the

relationship beWeen Ruthven and Aubrey.

Aubrey's failure at the masculine protective role is also the direct

mnsequence (one might Say punishment) of his skeptical rejection of the supematural and his refusal to believe in vampires. In the first instance he has arrogantly denied the existence of the supematural. When lanthe wams him of the existence of "a living vampyre", he "attempted to laugh her out of such idle and homible fantasies"; but she "begged of hirn to believe her, for it had ken rernarked, 87 that those who had dared to question their existenœ, always had some proof given which obliged them with grief and heartbreaking to confess t was true" (12-3).

Aubrey's punishment is clear: he witnesses the supematurally impossible in an immediate way: "Lord Ruthven [SM]again before hirn [Aubrey] ... he roused hirnself, he could not believe it possible [my emphasis] - the dead rise again! .-. It was impossible [my ernphasis] that it could be reaIn (20). It is understandable that

Aubrey should lapse into "incoherence" (21) and delirium because his forced silence registers (in this case) the anxious discomfort of patriarchy having wnfronted the

Iimits of its own orthodox beliefs and the irnplicit deconstruction of masculinity by imagining what was hitherto impossible. Through the impossibility of a feminized male, the story not only explores effeminophobia but also simulbneously deconstmcts masculinrty.

Ironically, the more Aubrey stniggles to escape the vampire's spell, the more he brings himself and his sister under Ruthven's power. Judith Barbour quite astutely locates the beginning of this stnrggle in the cave scene, claiming that Aubrey

'pores over the exterior of a female body in ignorance of the takeover of his own cansciousnessn (106). The cave contains a syrnbolic triad of Aubrey's psyche: himseif, the feminine and exotically natural (lanthe) and the masculine and exotically supematural (~uthven).'~The cave is the appropriately symbolic place where al1 of the supematural and gender impossibilifres of the tale converge. The episode occurs in a Spensenan-like "entangled forest" (14). Aubrey arrives at a "hovel," 88

perhaps symboluing a vagina, complete with pubic hair ("masses of dead leaves and

bnishwoodn) surrounding it (14). The location of the conflict is at once intra-

cavemous and intra-uterine. Barbour suggests that the story harbors 'some vulgar

horror of the female" (88), and that "the male-to-male relation has sublime terror as its visionary or hallucinogenic text" (89). In fact, the female's cries for help ultimately

lead to a subliminally homoerotic (and selfdestructive) wrestling match with another male, and so, as Barbour puts ït, "motives of prudence ... substitute the female decoy/lure at the moment of anticipated striken(90). The episode ocwn at a moment of physical and psychological blindness, sinœ he finds himself "in utter darkness" (14) in a place where he cannot see himself or his adversary.

A second impossibiIïty in this text is the cfass-mamage axis and to some degree it intersects with gender impossibility- Contrary to Gelder's assertion that

"there is no trianglen in this story (60), there are actually two love triangles, but only one union is consummated (Ruthven-Miss Aubrey). In both instances, all choices for

Aubrey are Ïmpossibiiities even though they are tantalizingly offered. The triangles are Aubrey-lanthe-Miss Aubrey and Aubrey-Ruthven-Miss Aubrey. In the first triangle, Miss Aubrey is an impossibiiity because she is Aubrey's sister (incest taboo); and lanthe is an impossibiiity, because Aubrey himself ridicules "the idea of a young man of English habits, manying an unedumted Greek girln (13); she is ideologically forbidden because of her dass and ethnicity. in the sewnd triangle, both Aubrey's choices are again forbidden, since any sexual love for his sister is 89 taboo, and a hornoçexual relationship with Ruthven is also forbidden, although it is flirted with here, as matGelder calls "undercoded" (58) potential.

In one sense, the symbolic moment of forced coitus with Ruthven is intempted by the locals stoming into the cave just as Aubrey finds hirnself

"incapable of moving" (44). His adversary has subdued him and his resistance is "in vain," leaving him "disturbedn (14). While the adversary is never mentioned by name, it becornes increasingly clear, though only by implication (again, Gelder's

"undercoding"), that Ruthven was in the cave with Aubrey. Setting aside for the moment, the attack against lanthe herseif, it seems reasonable to conclude that if the cavemous encounter is latentiy hornosexual, the catalyst of that encounter is the fernale (lanthe) even though she has had already intirnate (and fatal) contact with

Ruthven. She, through her cries for help, is the legitimizing mechanism by which the two men are united in fortidden intimacy.

It is the pattern here that is important because it recurs (in rnany variations) throughout the vampiric tradition, and most especially in Anne Rice's Interview wifh the Vampi~. The woman functions as a legitirnizing catalyst that initiates an apparently legitimate pseudo-sexual encounter which is suddenly converted at the very last possible moment into a taboo homoerotic encounter. She exists as a cornmon nexus of male attraction until the last possible moment before coitus, at which she is removed and another male is substiuted in her place. The symbolism in Polidori and elsewhere, seems to support the hypothesis that "the woman is 90

. poçitioned not as a third and equal pariner in the triangle, but rather ..-as an object

of exchange between the already-bonded menn (Gelder 60). Displaced and implicit

recognition of homosexuality can only be alluded to as terror - and never witnessed

as horror because the strength of cultural conviction prohibits the encounter.

Judith Barbour calls the cave epiçode "Aubrey's abysmal experienœ with the

terror of confrontation and the horror of impotencen (107). For Barbour, the gender

Iinpossibility at the œnter of this story, is primarily psychological: Aubrey is suffering

from 'the strain of degenderingn (90). As Aubrey slips further and further into

delirium he becomes increasingly ernasculated (ferninized realty, but Barbour says

"degenderedn) through his inabiiity to protect his sister frorn the malevolently

~upernatural.'~Moreover, as Ruthven moves doser and closer to his desired

lovetfood objed, Aubrey becomes weaker and weaker. Just as scientifTc rationafism

denies the existence of vampires so too does heterosexism deny the possibility of

one man subordinating himself to another because of a physical attraction. A denial

of Ruthven is tantamount to a denial of both premises at once.

Aubrey's swom secrecy about Ruthven's true nature, which is both vampiric

and homoerotic, corresponds thematically and ideologically to a narrative silencing of

the homoerotic. Such undercoding or understateci treatment of queerness does not

in any way contradict Gelder's hypothesis that al1 vampire fiction is by nature,

"essentially que& (58). Rather, the undercoding itself demonstrates that the

compfexity of this particular text cornes from its explicit treatment of the supematural 91 and its mnflation of the supematural with undercodeci homoeroticism. The narrative subtly deconstnrcts the heterosexual impossibiiity of queemess, but can only do so phalIocentrically; the voie of women in this text is faint. lt is only in the last quarter of the nineteenth œntury, in the context of the narratives of the sublime (CanniIIa and D/acuia), that the gender impossibiiify of queemess was extended far enough to indude wornen-

The increasing melding of Ruthven's, Lord Aubrey's and Miss Aubrey's lives and identities, reproduœs the paradoxes (impossibilfiés) of queer attraction and heterosexual revulsion to that very attraction. The mveR confrontation in the darkness of the cave cornes as close as it can to deconstructing homoerotic attraction as executed through the catalyst of heterosexualism. The struggle in the cave yields an ideologically acceptable result for patriarchy: the woman is really a catalysüdecoy for a real encounter between two men. She is ultimately destroyed because her presence at once facilitates and challenges the homoerotic encounter.

Though speaking in a much more generalized context, Herbert Sussman has explained the essence of this male pathology in his taxonomies of early Victorian masculine plots and maniage plots. The masculine plot, he argues, runs counter to the mamage plot (63) because in the "early VictoRan model of male pathology, the fernale Other as the longed for yet threatening possibility of erotic and emotive release must be contained by being destroyed" (79). The woman may be catalyst but she must ultirnately also be punished, even destroyed because she is a 92 seductreçs twice over; once as a heterosexual temptation and once as a homosexua1 decoy.

In Polidori, there is strong evidenœ of masculine plot, wtiereas in Planché, with its focus on heterosexualism and mamage, there is evidence of Mat Sussman calls the mamage plot. Aithough Polidon's tale seems to have a greater complexity of symbolism than Planché's, it is also apparent that Planches work sirnilarly conflates supernaturalism with rnaçculinity in crisis. Planché replaced Polidon's brother figure (Aubrey) with a father figure (Ronald), but the substitution makes little differenœ in ternis of the male protective role and its ideological functionality. The salvation of the consummate ferninine, as signified in Margaret, is contingent upon her willing subordination to a father figure. It rnakes little ideological differenœ whether that figure is her biological father or her husband; the power dynarnic sti11 subordinates the woman to the man. The reward for that subrnission is rescue by the cooperating and potent males (Robert and Ronald), as they collectively mobilize against their vampiric cornpetitor just long enough to hold him at bay until he is destroyed by the lapsing of time and by larger, cosmic forces.

Like Polidori, Planché adopts protedion of the virgin as one of his central motifs, but he varies the therne. The focus in the Prologue cornes to rest on cosmic female solidarity: Unda speaks to Ariel of 'our blended art" (48). They express a collective wïsh to protect the sleeping and innocent Lady Margaret from the terrible fate of destruction through marriage by "Manden's Earln (48). Planché's visionary 93 prologue might appear to offer some unœrtainty about a pleasant outcorne; Ariel says "What can be done? - our power is Iimited'" (48). However, that alternative is effectively silenced when Ariel shows that she has the power both to invoke the vampire: 'At our bidding rise! Appear!" (49). and to remove him, she incants:

"Down, I say" (49)- If only this pleasing outcorne were a little less certain and the alternatives a little more unthinkable (impossible), the cufturaliy subversive potential of this narrative rnight have appmcfied the sophistication of Polidori's work.

A cornparison of Polidori's The Vampyre and Planches The Vamprie, or The

Bride of the hlesf5 shows not just that both are vilification narratives, but that their structures and configurations of impossibrïity ciifFer signficantly. In Polidori's work,

Lord Ruthven is described as "dreadfully viciousn (10) and with "Iicentious habitsn

(1 0). He is referred to four times as a "monstef (twice on p- 20 and twice on p. 22).

He is a caricature of the debauched aristocrat,16 compt and comipting, alienated from soüety mile simultaneously immersing himself in its social activities. He is apparently void of amscienœ when Ît cornes to satisQing his own desires and

"glutting" his "thirst" There iç no atternpt whaisoever by Polidon' ta portray Ruthven in anything other than a distanced and unflattering Iight Ruthven is enigrnatic and visible but still unknown. We never have any sense of his inner thoughts or motivations, and Aubrey marvels at 'the very iinpossibikty [rny emphasis] of fotming an idea of the character of a man entirely absorbed in hirnser (8). Similady,

Planché shows Ruthven as a villain nght from the moment of the introductory 94 vision17 (48) in which, under the name of Marsden, he is described as a 'wicked soula (48). Although polite and well-mannered, the villainy of fIanche's Ruthven is frequently express& as dramatic irony. The charaders are unaware of his true nature, which is symbolized in his repulsive physicality as a 'ffighffully distorted" and

"tenific appearancen (53), but the audience is aware of his duality. He frequently speaks in asides (53, 54, 57, 59) which also reveal his villainy.

For the most part, Planché's Ruthven may be cast in an unfiattering iight, but he does have a few moments of psychological intimacy which slightly, if only temporanly, raise our sympathy for hirn. One notable exception is a brief soliloquy he speaks at the end of 1-ii in which he laments the necessity by which he is driven, saying, "worse than death - annihilation is my lot! Margaret! Unhappy maid! Thou art my destined prey! Thy blood must feed a Vampire's Iife, and prove the food of his disgusting banquet!" (56). There remain the very last lines of the play in which he says "And I am lostn (68)- Here, for one bnef moment, is a glimmer of evidenœ of some intenority. Such interiority is certainly more than

Polidori ever allows his Ruthven, but it is not enough to inculcate any sustained sympathy for Planches vampire.

Both narratives are quite consistent with folkloric antecedents because of their vilification of the vampire, but the vampire of folklore was a decidedly local phenornenon and the attacks were most Iikely to be on immediate or extended family rnember~.'~Unlike their real-life counterparts, Polidori's peasants speak of the kind 95 of "vampyren who feeds "upon the life of a lovely fernale to prolong his existencen

(12). The vampire of folklore never expresseci a particular preferenœ for "loveIf females; a pulse was al1 that was required. Both nanatives also transfon folkloric conventions from the fear of an attack on kin (incest) to the fear of an attack against virginal and beautiful young women, and of course if they are mined in reputation or in fa&, so are their prospects for mariage. This new ingredient of romance provides the context for a shift away from folklore and toward melodrama and middle-class conventions. The literaryltheatrical vampire has been transformed from a local pest into a seaçoned traveier and foreigner, and from a kin-terronst to a debauched womanizer. In ço doing, both writers now shift the parameters of supematural impossibilrfy in accordance with ciichéd middle dass notions of gender and mamage.

The opening incantation in Planches The Vampim establishes vampirism as a punishment and a necessary consequence of divine justice. The vilified

"Marsden's Earln has been transformed into a vampire as a result of "the most tremendous punishment of heavenn(48). One corollary of vampiric vilification is that the idea of becoming a vampire holds no attractiveness. The idea of becoming a vampire couid be a welcome prospect if the creature were glarnonzed, but such is not the case here.

Like Polidori, Planché enhances the mythology of vampiric lore to include virginity and rnaniage as pre-conditions for a vampiric attack. Ail vampires "must wed some fair and virtuous maidenNVhom they do after kill, and fiom her veins/Drain eagerly the purple stream of life" (48). Aithough this kind of attack is still a potential

threat to community. it is also a direct threat to beautifid young women and an

indirect threat to the men who must protect them. A playbill advertising Planches

The Vampire re-iterates this idea that Planches play was deliberately re-

mythologizing the vampire so that the primary horror of the vampire is its abuse of

the values of protectiveness, love and caring that are embedded institution of

THIS PIECE IS FOUNDED ON the various Traditions conceming THE VAMPIRES, which assert that they are Spirits, deprived of all Hope of Etemity, by the Cn'mes committed in their Mortal State - but, that they are permitted to roarn the Earth, in whatever Forms they please, with Supematural Powers of Fascination - and. that they cannot be destroyed, so long as they sustain their dreadful Existence, by imbibing the BLOOD of FEMALE VICTIMS. whorn they are first compelled to rnany. (Planché, 1975, 85)

It is amusing that a vampire would be cornpellecl to many its food, but the underlying

point is clear; the mamage constraint vividly illustrates the projection of middle-dass

romance and values of marnage and orthodox sexuality, on to the supernatural. The

new mythology also deconstructs the illusion of husband as protector. In this specifc sense, Planché may have adopted his emphasis on mamage and virginity more from the Canouche-Joufkey-Nodier French version of the play than fiom ~olidori.'~

Both Polidori and Planché transfomi the folkloric myth of the vampire as an attacker of kin into a new variant of the impossible in which rnamage is narratively deconstructed as a site for predatory practiœs against women. Both Polidori's and 97

Planches Lord Ruthvens occupy the moral low ground because they are cads.

Their actions also effectively but inadvertently deconstwct middle-class notions that mamage is the free choiœ of mutually cornmitteci lovers. Athough both Ruthvens are not polysexual Iike their successor Dracula, they are deariy polygarnous in intent if not in actuality. Planché's Ruthven simultaneously courts Effie and lady Margaret

(59). Polidon's Ruthven uses the power of his 'dead grey eyen (7) to hypnotize eligible women, and he corrupts them by transforming them into publicly shameless women. In the wake of his depatture he leaves many women who threw "even the mask [of virtuel aside, and had not scnipled to expose the whole defomity of their vices to the public gaze (1 1).

Lord Ruthven is a mystenous and sinister foreigner who tricks women into manying hirn so he can vampirize thern. The conflation of xenophobia with the predatory nature of males in mamage articulates what would otherwise be a silenced impossibilify of abusive husbands and domestic violence. Ruthven's exotÏc appearance and demeanor seem to suggest that the abusers are outsiders who infiltrate the native culture; the defenders are domestic. Yet the underlying deconstruction of mamage remains potent here. The vampire is a marital as well as a supernaturai impossibili& it embodies an othenivise denied set of abusive practices normally banished to the peripheral edge of cultural and psychological consciousness Perhaps the story has said more than it intended to say but nevertheless, the deconstruction is innovative. 98

The certainty of a comic plot outcome has a special relation to the vampiric

narrative's potency in subverting hegernonic values; the more certain a cornic

outc~rne~~is, the more likely it is that the narrative is primarily engaged in negating

the impossible rather than subverting it. While poli don"^ tale's outcorne is both tragic

and surprising, Planches is cornic and, perhaps, more predictable. In Polidori there

is a punishment disproportionate to Aubrey's offense, and the unnecesçary death of

the innocent Miss Aubrey. In Planché, the gui& are punished, the innocent are

saved, and although there is no mamage at the conclusion that re-integrates

commun-ity rather than destroying it.

The certainty of Planches ending is further ensured by the prologue which

provides the audience with the story's outwme. Ronald E. McFarland has noted

that the French antecedent to Planché's The Vampk also "assures the piay-goer of

the requisite happy endingn (25). In Planché, the appearance of the introductory

vision has essentially the same effect of redundancy as the playefs dumb show in

Harnlet's staging of The Murder of Gonzago (Hamlet 111-ii), wbich tells the story

before the çtory is told. Suspense is created, not so much in unœrtainty about the

outcome, but in the uncertainty about the working-out of that outcome.

The principles underiying the differences between Polidori and Planché

become the prototypes of differences that continue throughout the next two centuries of vampiric narratives; the fiction seems aimost always more radical in its attack on social conventions, while theater (and film) are generally more affirrning of 99 conventionality. We see it here, in the eariy nineteenth century, and it will appear again in the differences between Stokeh Dawla and Coppola's Dracula film, and even between Anne's Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire and her very own screenplay for the same stoty. Of the two eariy nineteenth-century works we are wrrentiy discussing, Polidori's tale also shows more potential for gender impossibilify or queemess, and is a more complex and varied rendering of different kinds of impossibiiity, whereas Planches is narrower in scope and potential.21

We have been explorhg the two earliest vampire narratives in English. Both are vilification narratives and both are immersed in the polemicç of supematural irnpossibilily. The popularity of Polidori's The Vampyre, which went through five

English editions in 1819 (MacDonald 190), pales in cornparison to Vamey the

Vampire, or The Feast of Blood, which was published serially in a staggering one hundred and nine weekly parts between 1845 and 1847. It was later reprinted as a bound book in two volumes in 1853. The very prolific James Malcolm Ryrner ctearly understood the business of creating successful and profitable popular fiction for his

Victorian readers. He is thought to have kept ten serials running simultaneously

(Altick, The English Common Reader 290), and to have written under "at teast seven namesn(James 36).

Rymer also seems to have understood the value of re-contextualizing his own work against other contemporary popular writings. In his introduction to the Dover edition of Vamey (1972), E. F Bleiler suggests that even the very choice of the 1O0

vampire's name was deliberate in order to encourage "a whole constellation of

associationsn (x) with other Iiterary Vameys such as the one in Sir Walter Scott's

Kenihofh (1821). The idea was also to encourage asscciations with "obvious

derivatives like Variey the Vultumn (x). The deiicately precise combination of the

familiar and the new was the stock-in-trade of this pulp fictionalist, and the effect he

created carries a sense of the uncanny very similar to Fuseii's The Nightmare, its

denvative painiings, and Friston's Miltarca Attacking Her Victim. Varney was at once

refreshingly new and oddly familiar to his Victorian readers.

Vamey is the first vampire in English who is extensively and wrnpassionately

humanized. This humanization is a watershed in the evolution of the vampiric

tradition because it opened the door for the suave and glamorous vampire that Bela

Lugosi created, and it made possible the romanticaliy heroicized vampire that is the

defining characteristic of Francis Ford Coppola's and Anne's Rice's wotk in the Iate

twentieth œntury. Vamey's humanization is achieved through extensive and

sustained discourses on his psychology and his emotions, and through a constant

narrative focus on his guilt, his solitude and his increasingly desperate (and failed)

efforts to control his predatory nature. Vamey's suffering anticipates Anne Rice's

Lestat and Louis, whose complex psychology, alienation and suffenng are typical of the infoming features of her work and of the sublime narrative style. Vamey is aIso the first vampire to suffer remorse and to commit suicide." The story demands that we syrnpathize with him, as evidenced, for instance, by the long intrusion at the 101 beginning of Chapter 171 in which the narrator begins Varney's defense by stating that "there were some good points about [hirn]" (734).23ASO, Chapter 173 shows a tomenteci Vamey weeping over the loss of his wife and children of one hundred and eighty years eariier- The narrative voice cleariy directs our sympathetic response:

"we pity thee Vamey!" (771).

For al1 his faults, Vamey is a creature of refined sensibility. He was, says the narrator, a creature of "dignified courtesy and polished rnanners: ... he had the rare and beautiful gif€ of eloquence" (734). He is a creature who 'regrem that fatal gifî of immortality" (734) and regretteci the fact that "he never had the courage absolutety to take measures for his own destruction" (734). We see him suffering "in his soiÏtuden (771), and his alienation and physical deformation resonate with the qualities of a Byronic hero. The simultaneous expression of remorse and recalcitrance in Vamey's extended sofiloquy in Chapter 175 is reminiscent of Milton's

Satan. When Vamey chastises himself for his sins, he sounds Iike Satan: "in Ife you did one deed which at once cast you out from al1 hope .. . you poisoned the pure font of mercy" (857). Vamey vows that "since death is denied to me, I will henceforward shake off all human sympathies ... I wiil from this tirne be the bane of al1 that is good and great and beautifuln (787). His utteranœs, "Fate, t thee defy!" (787) echo

Satan's "evil be thou my goodn soliloquy in Paradise ~ost.*' If Satan's freely-chosen yet pre-deterrnined pride contributes to his moral and physical deformity, Vamey's deformity is caused, analogously, by the irrevenible fate of his vampirism and his 102 free choiœ in yielding repeatedly to his nasty varnpiric habits. One difference is that

Vamey's impulse for repentance is more frequent than Satan's and that he (Vamey) ultimately commits suicide in order to break the cycle from which he cannot otherwise escape. Vamey seems to achieve a sense of a morality that is higher than his own interests and wants.

Aithough Vamey's heroic stature never diminishes, it does wax and wane. As he degenerates into more and more senseless violence, such as the random murder of the maid Betty and her companion, Vamey seems to suffer the anguish of his conscience in direct proportion to his villainy. The narrative does establish a steadily intensifying dialedic of sympathy and ioathing for Vamey that climaxes in the final scenes just before his suicide. Rymer's dialectical pattern reverses Planché's. In the latter case, the vampire is prirnarily evil but does have a few moments where we feel compassion for him. With Ryrner, the vampire is primarily heroic but is vilified intemittently. If Vamey's heroic stature degenerates when he rnurders Betty and her companion, his heroism diminishes even further when he vampirizes Clara, even if some pathos is invited because he moums over her unnecessary death. Only when he is at his most pathetic does the narrative permit a glimpse of his most morally repulsive side. Chapter 178 reveals that he frequently lives his life in solitude, and that after 180 years as a vampire (771) he has suffered much and "died many deaths" (77 1) . 1O3

Although the rheton'c of nanative wants to make the argument that Vamey is

a tragic victim of his own varnpiric condition, it also simultaneously makes the case

that his condition is a punishment for the homble crime of murdering his twelve-year-

old-son in a fit of rage. Once again, the vampire narrative directly engages the

masculine role of protector and shows the consequemes of abuse. The

synchronized release of heroicizing and vilifying information creates a moral tension

that only dissipates when Vamey cornmits suicide. Like Planché's Ruthven,

Vamey's vampirism is a just punishrnent for his iniquities, but unlike Ruthven, Vamey

perceives himself as a figure whose life is 'the sport of a malignant destiny" Vamey

sees himself as a victim of "the feelings that came over men (862).

The murder of Betty the housekeeper (654) and of her nameless co-worker

bring into focus some gender and class issues around Vamey's vampirism. After

stabbing both housekeepers with a sword during a robbery, and leaving al1 that

perfectly good blood, Vamey simply walks away. Vamey's vampirism has been so

altered from folkloric mots that he bears no resemblanœ at al1 to the killing machine

of the continental peasant imagination. His vampirism, like that of his two English

literary predeœssors, is restn'cted to young, attractive and virginal wornen (this much the text can explicitly state) but he is also attracted to women of status and the text

cannof Say that explicitly, so it is understated. Like Planches Ruthven, Varney is quite restricted in his food supply: ''1 do affect the young and the beautiful" (155) he says. Betty is neither of these, and as a working-dass woman, she is also an 1 O4

ideologically inappropriate victirn for his intimacy. Betty's murder and Vamey'ç

subsequent abandonment of her as a vampiric vicüm is a consequence of an

underlying narrative bias against the jmpossibiIiiy of inter-class mamage and

intimacy. Moreover, the abandonment of the young man is a function of an informing

homophobia. Vamey simply takes the opportunity to rernove a photograph of a

beautiful young woman from the man's pocket in the hope of making her his ne&

victirn (787),then merely walks away.

Since Vamey cannot stop his vampiric and predatory actions while he lives,

he feels he must commit suicide and sacrifice himself because, quite sirnply, he

regrets that he cannot change how despicable he is. There is a certain nobilrty in this despair. His vampirism is a disease of implicitiy sexual compulsion caused by the constraints of the rules of his "hatefui racen (156) as well as his own restrictive and restricting predatory sexual practices that grow increasingly out of mntrol. He simply cannot stop himself from sneaking into ladies' bedroorns at night or fmm trying to many them under false pretenses. He is, in this sense, Planché's Ruthven but with an extended interiority. He differs from his pred-ssor because he is not unifonnly villainous; he does have a conscience and he wavers often.

His self-loathing is the result of a conscience that will not tolerate his sexual, varnpinc, nocturnal activities. Varney's vampirisrn confiates supernaturalism with the

Victorian masculine dilemma of finding appropriate ways to release sexual energy, giving way to the release, and then feeling guilty. Varney's vampirism is a metaphor for the horror of sex and for the horror of intimacy - what he calls the "warm, gushing

fountain of another's veinsn:

it is a mystenous law of our nature, that as the period approaches when the exhausted energies of life require a new support Rom the warm, gushing fountain of another's veins, the strong desire to iive growç upon us, until, in a paroxysm of wild insanity, which will remgnïze no obstacles, hurnan or divine, we seek a victirn (157)

when the dreadful repast is over, then again the pulse beats healthfully, and the wasted energies of a strange kind of vitality are restored to us, we becorne calm again, but with that calmness cornes al1 the horror, al1 the agony of refiection, and we suffer fat- more than tongue can tell (157)

The pathological ebb and fiow of Varney's vampiric urges is really a kind of sexually

compulsive behavior that he condemns out of guilt and despair, almost at the very

moment that he is giving in to his desires and delighting in thern- lt is ideologicaily

convenient that the denial of supernatural impossibiiity is mnfiated with the Victonan

male's sexual pathology. When Dr. Chiflingworth learns of the attack on Flora, he,

as a skeptical man of science, denies the existence of the supernatural, and, by

implication, the very attack itseif, saying, "I won't believe if' (15). He calls her daim

'absurdn (17)? The nanative sirnultaneously engages and denies the supernatural

and its relationship to masculine anxieties around sexuality, women and intimacy.

The connection between sexuality and masculine sexual pathology is an implicit one

only because its desirability is undercut by Vamey's guiit, by Chillingworth's abrasive

negations of the existence of such a thing, and through Vamey's repeated and failed attempts to establish a kind of varnpiric (sexual) contact. 1O6

All these innovations point to the merits of Vamey, but the defects of the novel also deserve some attention. David Skal describes Vamey as a book 'stuffed with rarnbling prose" and having an "endleççly convoluteci" plot (16). E. F. Bleiler finds, charitably, that the work is "a fairly competent attempt to extend a single situation through an indefinite number of variations" (xiv-xv) James Twitchell fin& the novel dull because Vamey "kept retuming month after month, afways doing the same thing - only the necks changedn (Rreadful Pleasures, 121-24). 1 want to suggest, however, that these so-called flaws of repetition can be understood as the novel's way of working through the uncanny issues of masculinity in crisis. The pattern is sirnilar to the repeated themes in the copying of Fuseli, cornplete with the familiar undemeath the new, and the new beneath the familiar.

Vamey's assaults on Flora Banneworth begin immediately in Chapter One and they constitute a kind of overture for the whole work, establishing the pattern of

Vamey's semal aggressiveness and loss of self-control, and also establishing the keynote of his habitua1 repetition of the same behavior in which he is also aiways intempted. There are many other failed atternpts on other women too: the impending mamage to Mary that is stopped by the Admiral (677); the attempt to rnany another; different Mary, a fisherrnan's daughter (708-9), and the wooing of

Isabella, the daughter of one Count Pollidori (sic); Mary Smith; and Clara who is the first of Vamey's victirns to becorne a vampire herself. The high degree of repetitiveness in situation and action may well be symptornatic of the depth of 1O7

Victorian pathological sexual anxieties and the corresponding need to engage those

ideas therapeuticaliy, though vicariously.

Since an attack on a male (a kind of homoerotic queemess) is ideologically silenced in the narrative of Vamey, it also makes sense that the heterosexual paradigm that informs the novel muçt be repeated endlessiy. The rape, and attempted rape, of so many women is the vigorous assertion of conventional

(phallocentric) gender norrnalcy and sexual practice. Conventional masculinity is aggression, activity, and penetration. Although the repetition of sirnilar episodes was at least partially detennined by the profits arising from its serial mode of publication, there may also be some very good ideological and cultural reasons for the redundancy. The noveI seems repeatedly to be working its way through a pathology of Victorian masculiniiy with its dichotornous variations around male rape fantasies and the confiicting sensitivities of Victorian masculinity in the protector ro~e.*~The co-existenœ of these sensibilities is both a cultural and a psychological impossibility that is narratively deconstructeci. What remains constant is a structure of impossibiMy in which the varnpiric supematuralism is melded with the male protector myth and also activeiy engaged against it.

In contrast to masculinity, femininity in Vamey is conventionalized and never deconstructed. Flora's stereotypical femininity is both innate and forced upon her by Vamey's hypnotic stare. Her conventionali#' is evident in her paralysis and her vulnerability that make her an inert victim for Vamey. All she 1O8 can manage to utter dunng the attack is "one shriekn (3) and the rest is an

"intense fear [that] paralyzed the Iimbs of the beautiful girl." That tiny outburst is followed by complete paralysis: "she could not scream, - she wuld not moven

(3). This inert and helpless condition is also Jones' angst, or, a "panic-stricken terror, ... [an] awkrl anxiety, dread and anguishn (20) uttimately resulting in a sense of "utter powerlessness and a feeling of complete paralysis" (22).

For al1 her horror, Flora also seems to be experiencing a sublimity of emotion that is sexual. "Her eyes are fascinatedn (3) by the approaching figure and "she drew her breath short and thick" (3). Her bosom heaves and her limbs tremble, yet she cannot withdraw her eyes from the marble-looking face. He holds her with his glittering eye. There is a long "pause [that] lasted about a minute - oh, what an age of agony" (3) and then "a strange howling cry that was enough to awaken terror in every breast." Her ferninine inertness is really an angst attack. For Jones, the angst attack is, in a very generalized way, characterized by "agonizing dread", a "sense of oppression or weight at the chest which alarmingly interferes with respirationn and "conviction of helpless paralysisn

(20). The "main thesisn in Jones' On the Nightmare is "that the malady known as the Nightmare is always an expression of intense mental conflict centering on some form of 'repressed' sexual desiren (44), and it seems to apply here to

Varney. Jones' general claim that "the erotic character ... however hateful at first, becomes more or less suddenly transformed into a most attractive being of the opposite ses2' (48) seems appropriate to Flora's experience here.

The erotic and the violent are almost ahnrays conffated in Varney's attacks, thereby making them a sublime experienœ for the vidim (and the reader). From a phallocentnk perspective at least, these attacks force pleasure on to the woman

Mile simultaneously temfying her- Vamey seizes Flora by her hair and drags her back to the bed. The attack is descnbed in a stylized but erotic language:

Then she screamed - Heaven granted her then power to scream. Shriek followed shriek in rapid succession- The bed-clothes fell in a heap by the side of the bed - she was dragged by her long silken hair completely on to it again. Her beautifully rounded Iimbs quivered with the agony of her soul. The glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over fhat angelic fom with a hideous satisfaction - homble profanation. He drags her head to the bed's edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-Iike teeth - a gush of blwd, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the varnpyre is at his hideous repast! (4) lt is not just the contrast of angelic innocence and comipted ugliness that drives the scene but the fact that it is still possible to see beauty amidst horror that makes this sublime. Is this attack erotic, or violent or both? Moreover, this very ambiguity is an uncanny re-visitation of Fuseli's The Nightmare in which violence against the female is erotically portrayed.

The attack against the fiirtatious Miss Smith (Mary) is also an uncanny re- visitation of the eroticism of Fuseli's The Nightmare, and of the earlier attack. Mary was 'in a sweet sleep, and was as calm and as unconscious as the blest" (566); she 110 is utterly passive. As Varney gloats with a 'trembling eagemess, and a ghastly smilen (566) he assumes the role of the demon sitting on top of Fuseli's woman and she al=, Iike Flora, takes on the symbolic function of Fuseli's inert woman; she

"could not scream, she wuld not utter a soundn ... she could not even shrink from the homble king who approached her" (566). The hypnotic spell that Vamey casts holds her in "a species of fascinationn (566) so that, like Flora, she cannot even shut her eyes. By implication, the voyeunstic role of the home rnay be extended to the reader. Moreover, this particular articulation of this rape fantasy is very powerful because the male controis the intemal psychology of his victim as well as her body.

The fantasy of such extensive control extends beyond a mere subduing of the corporeal and reaches into total mental and physical dominance. The delusion, of course, is that in exercising such control, the male is fulfilled and the female is, in spite of herseif, pleased and satiated.

These repeated scenarios of intempted rape might be construed as bad wnting because of their ostensible redundancy, but the repetition also signals the extent to which the Victorian psyche was obsessed with witus and terror of discovery. Varney's attacks are alrnost invariably intempted by some protective male figure like the Admiral. For instance. the attempted rape against Mary is intempted by her father who runs to the door to aid his daughter when he hears shneks (567). The pathology of Victorian masculinity, as it is uncovered in

V'mey, is continuously redefined against this backdrop of vicanous onanism; Il1

afrnost every one of VameyJs attacks on inert women is intemipied and he is

frustrated at every point by elder, protective males.

The repeated intention of violence against women rnay alone be sufficient

evidence to support Bleiiefs hypothesis that males were the most common

consumen of this genre.29 Bleiler's suspicions are also consistent with Stephanie

Dernetrakopoulos's hypothesis that the vampiric (and all horror art) is a "wflective

dreamingn (106) and a "sexual pathology" of male fantasies of rape and perhaps

even of being raped. But those hypotheses need to be dialectically read against

the more consenrative role of masculine protector. These are also narratives that

probe the workings of a kind of psyche that cannot be imagined without difficulty;

how can a single personaiity be masculine, aggressive, self-seeking, ruthless,

violent, and predatory, while it is simultaneously feminine, sensitive and even

empathetic to its victims, tomenteci by its very life style and immortality, and

vulnerable to so many forces outside itself?

The gradua1 discovery and the ultimate staking of Clara is the result of the

inability of al1 the males in her life (her brothers and father), aiong with Mr. Bevan and

Ringwood, to protect her from Vamey. In this sense, these males fail in the protector

roles just as Polidori's Aubrey does. The staking episode at once echoes Ruthven's

victory in Polidori's The Vampyre and foreshadows Lucy's transformation in Stoker's

Dracula. Clara obviously foreshadows Stoker's Lucy in other ways as well, especially in her attack on the young girl named Anna who [ives with her widowed 112 mother. We are never permitteci to see any of her psychological interiority but she is most certainly transfotmed into a monster like Varney. Clara becomes what the

Banneworttis feared Flora would becorne. Marchdale voices that amüety when he says that "'it is dreadful to think there may be a possibility that she [Flora], with al1 her beauty, al1 her excellence and punty of mind, and atl those virtues and qualities which should make her beloved of ail .. . should bemme one of that dreadful tribe of beings who ding to existence by feeding, in the rnost dreadful manner, upon the life blood of others - oh, it is too dreadful to contemplate! Too homble - tço horrible!'" (823).

For al1 its wnservative affirmations of femininity, Vamey is significant for its embryonic treatment of gender Hnpossibilifies for women, especially in the case of

Clara She seems to be rnuch less fastidious about her food than Vamey, her maker, and, apparently, not bound by any of Vamey's social deconm. 60th Clara's vidims are "blarneless persons" (827). We do not see the attack by Clara on Anna diredy but we do get Anna's report on it (827). This understated, or implicit lesbianism between Clara and Anna is pushed to the penphery of the narrative's vision but it is conflated again with the debate of the existence of the supematural.

Mr. Bevan's skepticism leads hirn to guffaw at "popular superstition" (834) and he will not concede the possibility of vampires without "ocular demonstrationn (834).

Clara suffers a homble and veiy public punishment at the hands of the men of the village, driven on by the blacksmith (843). Clara does not seem to be trans- gendered by her vampirism, but she is a threat to the well-king of the mole 113

cornmunity. In this sense, she seems to have the characteristics of the vampire of

folklore. Like the later staking of Lucy in Stoker's Dracula, this is a maledriven rituai

that does violence to a woman in the name of her own good. VVith a single shriek,

Clara is gone; there is no sublirnated orgasmic reaction here, as there is in the

Stoker's staking of Lucy. Furthemore, the actual ritual of staking in Rymer is not a

calrnly rational adivity as it is in Stoker; it is a frenzied mob sœne (842). Lastiy, her

death is the final mtalyst that converts Vamey to repentance and leads ultimately, to

his own suicide. Her death is also the event that converts Mr. Bevan into a believer,

even into a sympathizer with Vamey, as he Iistens to Vamey "open the vast store-

house of his memory" (847). At the end of the novel, it is Mr. Bevan's professed

belief in the supematural that resolves the question of supematural impossibility in the affirmative.

Ail three of these narratives in the first half of the nineteenth century (Polidori,

Planché and Rymer) are immersed in supernaturalisrn as the informing NnpossibiMy.

Polidori conflates supernaturalism w*th masculine queemess, and Rymer and

Planché conflate supernaturalism with Romance. Rymer and Polidori deconstmct the rnyth of rnasculinity's protedor role while Planché asserts it. Ail three works are also conventional and unimaginative in their portraya! of femininity. Polidori's specifk contributions to vampiric lore are immense, including the idea that the rays of the moon can resuscitate the vampire, and the idea that the vampire is a continental anstocrat. Rymer's contributions include the idea that the vampire can be diumal as 114

well as noctumal, and the idea of a woman bansformed by the bite of a vampire who

then willingly repents. Al1 three worùs conflate the malevolent evil of the vampire with heterosexual practice in males, while queemess is an implied element in the

structure of impossibility in Polidori and lesbianism is intimated in Rymer's portrayal

of Clara's attack on Anna. In spite of - or perhaps because of - its popoiarity of its own day, Planché's vilification narrative is the most conventional. Planché's work is

irnmersed in romance. Its wnventionally portrayeci gender roles, and its optimistic ending, must have been most satisfying to mass audiences.

By the middte of the nineteenth century, there were certain constants and certain variables that had been cleariy established in the vampiric tradition. What could change was the vampire's psyche and his capacity to feel compassion for his victims. The vampire could be a villain or a hem, could be noctumal or diumal, and could be evil or just tragically destineci. His origins and motivations couid be known and understood or could remain as a mystery. He could be exotic or domestic. His victims were mainly women but he could attack men if he so chose. What rernained constant was that the vampire was a heterosexual, aristocratie cad, who abused courtçhip and mamage because he preyed on beautiful, virginal women. The vampire's sexual orientation was, for the most part, conventionally heterosexual but evidence to the contrary could be intimated. Vampires like Carmilla and Dracula are powerful because through hypnosis, they impose their will on their victims and 115 compel them to perform unnatural vampiric acts which are also queer; such acts rnight not necessarily be the victims' conscious choice.

The work of Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker radically altered almost al1 of the constants established in the first half of the œntury. In fact, the second half of the nineteenth century has the air of a varnpinc renaissance, because the fertile imaginations of Le Fanu and Stoker tumed the narrative techniques and the thernes of their predecessors upside down. The course of the vampire's evolution would tum away from heterosexual romance and toward anti-romance and queemess. The vampire would be imagined as fernale, thus pemitting the deconstruction of female gender impassibifities. The narrative mode would neither vilify nor heroicize the vampire but instead would indulge in a much more love-hate, attraction-repulsion relationship with the female vampire. Endnotes for Chapter Two

1 Stephen King's Salem's Lof is the twentieth-century descendant of this Iine. * In The Gothic Flame (1957), Devendra Varna has traced the European influences more directly. He attributes the emergenœ of Engiish Gothicism to "tradîtional lofe of old, heathen Europen (25), to Macpherson's Ossian (1760-1 763) (25),to We spell of Italy," 'frorn Germany, mers of Sturm und Drang* (31), fiom Goethe's Gavon Bedichingen, (1773),frorn Schiller's Die mer(1781) and fmm Ghost-Seer(1 795).

3 Andy Warhol's Blood For Dracula (1974) satirkes the motif of the vampire needing the blood of female virgins. The film features a gaunt, aristocratie Dracula (Udo Kier) who travels to ltaly in search of the blood of "wirginsn (sic). The joke is that there are no viwns in al1 of ltaly in spite of what they claim publiciy. Each encounter with 'bad bloodn leaves the poor Count in worse shape than before, vomiting and writhing on the fioor, and wmplaining that "the blood of these whores is killing me."

4 Recall that the vampire mass hysteria of the 1700's started with a local peasant, Peter Plogowitz of the village of Kislova in Serbia.

5 See D. 1. MacDonald, Poor Poiidori: A C&ical Biography of the Author of The Vampyfe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991 ), espedally Chapter 17.

6 MacDonald says Colburn published the work in book fom on 27 March, 181 9.

7 Colbum may have received the manuscript directly from Polidori, but it is also possible that John MiHord may have procured it from Mme Brelax, Polidon's lover in Geneva, and then passed it on to Colbum.

8 Carol A. Senf (1988) has observed that the tale "continues to attract attention because it originated in the sarne Gothic-story contest that produced Frankensteril, and because it contains the first vampire character in English fictionn (197) but does not mention the association with Byron. Planché was innovative in many other ways as weil. He developed a special "new form of trapdwr" called ''the Vampire-Trap," which permitted actors to create the illusion of walking through walls. 'O McFarland observes that in Planché's work, Margaret's frequent fainting spells derive from the French anteœdent (by Pierre Carmouche, Charles Nodier and Achille de Jouffroy - June 13, 1820 in Paris). and that Planché seems to have deliberately emphasized her stereotypical feminine vulnerability.

11 There are several editions of Planché's The Vampire (1820): The Cambridge edition -Cambridge University Press, 1986. edited by Donald Roy and 'The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles: A Melodrarna"; in The Hour of One: Six Gothic Melodramas, Ed. Stephen Wischhusen (London: Gordon Fraser, 1975) which is a facsimile of the actors' copy. Unless specified, al1 references are to the Cambridge edition, but at all points it has been collocated with the Wischhusen facsirnile. l2The Sherwood, Neely and Jones edition (181 9) is contemporary with Polidori. Carol Senf uses it in "The Vampyre: Combining the Gothic With Reaiismn, North Dakota Quaitedy 56: 1Winter(1988), 197-208 but I have no reason to suspect the integrity of the Penguin edition either. Judith Barbour uses the Penguin edition in, "Dr. John William Polidori, Author of The Vampyrenl in lmagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Ausfralian Romanficisms, Ed. Deirdre Coleman and Peter Otto (West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1992) 85-1 10 (cf the bibliography, p. 109). Unless otherwise specified. ail references are to the Penguin edition, edited by Alan Ryan.

13 A Jungian interpretation also makes sense here with Aubrey as the self, lanthe as his anima and Ruthven as his animus andfor his shadow.

14 Gelder notes that Aubrey is "distracted' by a feminised folk-image" (37) i.e. lanthe, but does not note that it is Aubrey himself, who becornes more and more closely associated with the feminine as events unfold. j5 Planché's play spawned an anonymously-written short story entitled The Bride of the Isles. The story is anthologized in Peter Haining, The Shilling Shockers: Stones of Temr fm the Gothic Bluebooks (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1978). In this version of the tale, the vampire, Oscar Montcalm, is compelled to wed a virgin every HalloweJen. The tale merely re-affirms the importance of the rnarriage plot in vampiric romance, and it contributes little innovation to the tradition for the purposes of rny argument, except perhaps that the story shows Margaret happily rernamed after the vampire's death. 16 Phy llis Roth believes that Ruthven "prefigures the cold, aristocratie fascination exercised by Count Dracula" (95) but the anticipation of Bela Lugosi and Chriçtopher Lee is also ap~arenthere.

17 This notion of a suave aristocrat has a twentieth-century Iegacy in Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula in the 1932 fiim version.

18 This behavior is extensively documented, but see Carol Senf (1988) for a discussion of this point in the context of Polidori's The Vampyre (pp. 200 and 205)- l9Planché's indebtedness to the writing team of Carmouche-Joufffey-Nodier is extensively explored in R. E. McFarIand, "The Vampire on Stage: A Study in Adaptations," Comparative Drama 21(1 987), 19-33.

1 am not making a case here for comic or tragic sub-genres within the vampiric tradition. By mnic I simply mean a satisfying and successful resolution to love's impediments in which one or more pairs of lovers are united through the promise of mariage. By tragic I simply mean endings in which the innocent have suffered or in which the punishment for crime has far exceeded the crime itself, leaving us with a sense of unnecessary loss and suffering.

21 An explanation for this difference in radical and conservative outcornes is by no means self-evident, but one answer rnight lie in the direction of the sociology and the class status of the readerlviewer-ship. Studies such as Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social Histoty of the Mass Reading Public: 7800- 7900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, rpt i957), and Louis James, Fiction for the Workng Man: A Study of Literature Produced for the Working Classes in ean'y Victonan man England (London: Oxford University Press, 1963) shed some light on the demographics of readership, but the complexity of readership goes far beyond working and middle class affiliations. Perhaps the precise meaning of popular culture necessarily implies a conflation of values comrnon to both working and middle classes and may well be associated with what Kendrick has called "blatancy" (57) and a maudlin display of sentimental emotion-

22 Thus, the simultaneously titillating and terrorizing male fantasy in Vamey concludes with a desperately repressive solution which paradoxically redirects violence once airned at women, back against the self. The suicida1 action foreshadows the events of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll 8 Mr Hyde (1886) except in that case the impossibilify of character is effected by chernicals and not the supematural.

23 Unless otherwise specified al1 references to Vamey the Vampire are from Vamey the Vampyre or, the Feast of Blood. Facsimile edition, with an introduction by E. F. Bleiler, Volumes I and II (New York: Dover Publications, ? 972).

24 See Paradise Lost in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose Memtt Y. Hughes, Ed- (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957) Book IV, 1. 110, but the soliloquy actually begins at IV, 1.32.

25 In spite of his skepticism, Chillingworth does seem knowtedgeable about vampire legends from Noway and Sweden and with legends of how vampires can be restored to Iife under the rays of the full moon (18). He anticipates Stoker's Van Helsing.

26 See Herbert Sussman, Victon'an Masculinitiesi Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victonan Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Sussman identifies monasticisrn as a central underpinning of Victonan masculinity. He defines monasticism as "imaginatively distanced celibacy; virility is divorced from sexuality; potentially dangerous psychic energy channeled to productive work and contained by dissolving the individual ego in affective submission to a stronger male within a bonded male society" (17). The description most ciosely fits the variations of masculinity in Stoker's Dracula because Harker, Seward and Quincey al1 submit to Van Helsing's authonty. Varney, however, never makes that submission; nor, for that matter, does Polidori's Au brey.

27 The young and obedient Helen, whose avaricious mother wouid willingly send her daughter off "to be sacrificed upon the altar or Mammon" (4851, is yet another passive and inert model of femininity. She is like Flora, or Planché's Lady Margaret, or Polidori's Miss Aubrey. Helen willingly commits hersetf to self-annihilation out of bfind obedience to her mother. Filial obedienœ in wornen is valorized. ** Jones is irnplying the lncubus and Succubus. Each is ostensibly a mutually exclusive gender: the incubus is male and the succubus is female. In fact, however, this is not really the case. The Malleus Maliflcamm [sic] mentions that the lncubus and Succubus can be both male and female. The creature is in fact a heterosexuaily-contracted queer since it operates by first becoming female to extract semen from sleeping males (a heterosexual encounter) and then transforrns itself into a male in order to ejaculate the previously captured sperm into a sleeping woman (another heterosexual encounter). See fleinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, The Malleus Maliflcamm. Trans. Montague Summers (New York: Dover Publications, 1971) 109 -1 14. r, See Everett Bleiler, Introduction to Vamey the Vampyre, oc The Feast of Blood, by James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest (New York: Dover Publications, 1972). Bleiler offers evidence that 718 of street vendor sales were "ta gentsn (vii). Chapter Three: Narratives of the Sublime in the Late Nineteenth Century: Gender in Crisis

The sublime expenence contains both pleasure and terror, so the narratives that describe these kinds of experiences often stand indecisively between feelings of attraction to, and repulsion hm the vampire. Such narratives are not, in the first instance, concemed solely with the vilification or heroicization of the vampire, but move dialectically beyond those ternis and toward a focus on the vampire's power and modus operandi, its-origins, and the dilemma of attraction to, and repulsion from such a powerful supernatural entity.

The sublime narratives of Shen'dan Le Fanu's Carnilia and Bram Stoiker's

Dracula, both written in the later part of the nineteenth century, show seweral literary and thematic departures from the precedents set earlier by Polidori,

Planché and Rymer. This new configuration of the narrative's domimant impossibjiities retains supematuraiism as the centerpiece but also shifts May from a focus primarily on masculinity and embraces romance along with the eroticism of unorthodox sexual expeflences and queer gender identities.

The vilification of the early nineteenth-century narratives derives from the vampire's abuse of courtçhip, engagement, and mamage (they are al1 cads).

However, there is most certainly nothing familiar about the villainy of Carmilla and

Dracula. Theirs is a villainy that is insatiable, without conscience and quite apart from any conventions of romance, courtship, or mamage. Theirs is a varnpinism 122 that indulges in erotic deviance and gender queerness, as comfortably as with

heterosexual eroticism. These are the first vampires with the insidious ability to

compel their victims to enjoy victimization in such a way that they continue to

seek out the vampire long after the attack- These narratives, therefore, introduce

for the first time in the vampiric tradition the convention of addiction in which

vampirism and al1 its associated signifiers are understood as an illness with a

specific etiology and pathology that causes the victim to enjoy - even desire - the disease.'

Carmilla's queemess probes the 'phobic pressure points," to borrow King's

phrase (4), of vampirophobia and masculinophobia; Dracula's queerness probes homophobia, masculinophobia, and effeminophobia. The violation of such

"phobic pressure points" continues to onginate ftom culturally and racially exotic aliens from another place and time. These vampires are uninvited guests who take up pennanenf residence, but more importantly, they are objects of interest.

Narratives of the early period seem only to engage vampiric biography peripherally; Vamey does so for sympathetic effect and the Prologue of Planché's

The Vampire does so in order to convey dramatic context. The systematic and detailed discovery of vampiric biography is essential to these new narratives perhaps because staking, a new component of the plot, is a necessary task for the final solution and cannot occur unless the skeptical characters corne to a full comprehension of the nature of the vampire. As well, this biographical 123 information humanizss the vampire by uncovenng the contours of a life filled with joy, pain and regrets. These sublime narratives are concerned in a very sustained way, with the vampire's whole ontogenesis rather than merely a biography or an ernotional state of mind, as was the case with Vamey.

Ontogenesis is the means by which characters and the audience diagnose the etiology and pathology of vampir-isrn and, by implication and extension, queerness; and therefore, this sarne fascination with ontogenesis becornes the means by which an ambivalent interest in the vampire can be sustained.

During this second period of vampiric writing , sensibilities about blood, death and explicit violence also change significantly. The introduction of staking, with al1 its phallic denotations, now becomes the appropriately phallocentnc and ideoiogical response to the new kinds of gender and erotic phobias being explored which include not only the feminization of males but the masculinization of fernales. This new plot feature of staking also substantially modifies the nature of what Carroll wouid cal1 the "confrontationnsegment of the "Cornplex discovery plot" as it had been established earlier in the century. Now for the first time, the vampire is actively killed by the collective action of several characters who must act woperatively. In eariier narratives, by wntrast, the vampire destroyed itself

(Rymer), or escaped unscathed (Polidon) or was simply held at bay until his allotted time for finding a bride e~a~ses.~ 124 The staking of the vampire was also now applied more vigorously to female

vampires than males. The collective action taken by males to destroy the female

vampire (Carmilla, Lucy and in an embryonic and leser sense, Rymets Clara),

seerns to affirrn David Sussman's more generalized obsenration that this kind of

Carlylean fantasy "depends upon psydiically erasing wornen from the society" (19).

In Stoker and Le Fanu particularly, the erasure is quite vindictive. The General in

Cannilla says,

'1 mean, to decapitate the monster" .----*--..--*-...----...-.---.--.-- "What!" exclaimed my bther, more than ever bewildered, "To strike her head off!" "Cut her head ofln "Aye, with a hatchet, with a spade, or with anything that can cleave through her murderous throat. You shall hear." He answered, trembling with rage. (126-7)3

Carmilla of course, is guilty and the general's rage is quite understandable, perhaps even justified. However, these legitimizing reasons for the misogynistic loathing of the female vampire, and for doing violence to her, are also symbolically and intrkately intertwined with al1 of Carmilla's other significations: queemess, lesbianism, and the fact that she is sexually aggressive, erotic, and a child-molester.

Both Carmilla (1872) and Dracula (1897) are more sophisticated alternatives to earlier vilification and heroicization narratives and to the variations of the impossible. Dracula himself has no apparent qualms about feeding a baby to his three varnpiresses in Castle Dracula. Both novels expand the parameten 125 of su pematural impossibility by conflating female vampires and queerness,

thereby deconstructing femininity through vampin'c supematuralism. They meld

the sinister and the heroic, the masculine and the feminine, and the penetrator

and the receptor. They dewnstruct more phobias at more levels than their

predecessors and so might be said to be more complex and more sophisticated.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu died in 1873, so the anthology, In a Giass

DarWy (1 872), was published iate in his career and Carmilla has ail the

sophistication that one might expect from a mature writer. The novel is a

remarkably cornplex and layered work that cornes close to fully deconstructing

gender identity and sexual practice in patriarchal Victorian England- The work

shows Le Fanu at his best, and the tale is a landmark for many reasons. This

exploration of female queemess by a male author is unusual enough, but the

action also stands as a mirror image to Anne Rice's Infervréw wifh a Vampire and

The Vampi~Lestaf, both of which are explorations of male queerness by a female author. Carmilla is not only the first extended account of a fernale

vampire, its most striking impossibiiity is the suggestion that children can be

sexual and queer beings. Le Fanu's treatment of children in the context of vampirism also anticipates Stephen King's Salem's Lot

Carmilla herself anticipates Bram Stoker's Lucy because, to put in it in

Robin Appleby's terms, she is vilified as a "sexual woman," not a "reproductive

~ornan."~Carmilla is the woman who does not depend on males for pleasure, 126 sustenance, or companionship, but who seeks her own gratification5regardless of

her victims' needs. Perhaps the phallocentrïc imagination of Le Fanu imagined a

woman-vampire so hideous that she had no maternai impulses. Her atrocities

are multiple, but perhaps more importantly they are unwomanly and un-motherly

by patriarchal expectations. She therefore receives, like Lucy, a "violently phallic

destruction, [ofl death by penetration" (Appleby 32). There is no reproductive woman in the tale; Laura has no mother, although there is a hint that Carmilla

attempts to usurp that role by befriending Laura, taking her into her confidence and putting her to bed at night.

Although Carmilla may have been intended to be read specifically in the context of the other stories in the anthology6it certainly has enough nerit to stand on its own. The confluent themes are: varnpiric supernaturalism, lesbian eroticism, penetrationlreceptor reversals of sexual practice (and by implication, gender identity) and a fernale-dnven Lolita-complex in which an older wornan becomes erotically involved with a naive youth. AI1 of these impossibilities are syrnbolically intewoven with Carmilla's supematural powers and with the alluring and seductive powers of her womanhood. Just as it is impossible to imagine a vampire, so is it impossible to imagine this kind of nithless female assaiiant.

Carmilla's repulsiveness and consequently the legitimizing basis for her phallic execution, is a function of her sexual aggressiveness, her queerness, her pewerted attraction to youth and innocence, and Rer nocturnal frolicking with a 127 same-sex partner. Her vampirism is also combined with patriarchy's most conventionally understood traits of femininity; she is an Eve, or perhaps more accurately, a Lilith figure. Carniilla is "the prettiest creature I ever saw" (83).

She is 'absolutely beautiful" (83) and she has "such a sweet voicen (83). She also has tiny hands and thick, sensuous hair that is very heavy and yet is

"exquisitely fine and soft" (88). When questioned by males, she often answers

"srniling bashfully" (100).

At the center of the impossibiiity surrounding her character - and at the center of the rationalizing basis for her violent staking - is the issue of masculinophobia. Carmilla's queemess cornes fmm her gender-blended psyche as well as her lesbianisrn. Although hints about her masculinity are interrnittently dispersed throughout the text, it is only when she is attacked or threatened that her aggressive and repulsive nature is made manifest (131). We are told, for instance, that "she was above the middle height of womenn (88), and that Laura finds herself wondering about Carmilla's sex: "was there here a disguise and a romance? 1 had read in books of such things. What if a boyish fover had found his way into the house, and sought to prosecute his suit in masquerade, with the assistance of a clever old adventuress?" (91). But Laura notes also that 'except in these brief periods of mysterious excitement her [Carmilla's] ways were girlish; and there was always a languor about her quite incompatible with a masculine 128 system in a state of healthn (91). It is not that Carmilla is a feminine impersonator

of rnasculinity: she seerns to be genuinely masculine and feminine at once.

Carmilla is also masculine by virtue of her hands as well as her demeanor.

In the General's first attempt to kill her, Carniilla's delicate little hand8 suddenly

becornes remarkably powerful: "he stnick at her with all his force, but she dived

under his blow, and unscathed, caught him in her tiny grasp by the wrist. He

struggled for a moment to release his am, but his hand opened, the ax fell to the ground, and the girl was gonen (131).' She is certainly stronger and more confrontational than the effeminate Varney, who spends most of his time evading angry mobs of males and dodging their bullets- Carmilla's power is clearly gender-dissonant with the sweet bashful young lady of refinement which is the face she wears in public. The attractive, retiring young woman who is bashful, also speaks in the "clearvoice, of a female's [but the voice is] very deepn (105).

This gender dissonance makes her eroticism sublime.

Carmilla is anything but direct in her attacks, often appearing at the foot of the bed first in the form of a cat or some other animal. She appears initially in a dream as a "very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bedn (74). Years later, her attack on Laura occurs as most varnpiric attacks do: when "it was very dark" (102). Laura can barely perceive "something moving around the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurateiy distinguish" (102). The combination of

Carmilla's excellent camouflage and Laura's inability to distinguish anything 129 distinct defines the sublime elements of the experience and also becomes a

metaphor for the whole theme of the supematurally mystical and unknown.

Carniilla's vampirism is not at a11 easy to detect, even for the adults,

making the deception of an innocent young girl even more Iikely. Laura awakens to a noctumal visitor who "caressed me wïthher hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling. 1 felt irnmediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep againn (74). The attack is particularfy insidious because it does not feel like an attack; the victim does not understand how imminent the danger is. If Planché's and Ryrner's vampires seduce with words, Le Fanu's vampiress seduces with touch. The expenence is not traumatic but most pleasant; and Laura's uneasiness about CarmiIIa is only registered as an anxiety vaguely felt, perhaps even intuited, rather than any kind of emotion that can be given a clear expression. Laura says she 'felt rather unaccountabiy towards the beautiful stranger ... [and] ... 'drawn towards her,' but there was also something of repulsionn (87). Laura's mixed feelings illustrate precisely, the kind confusion and uncertainty inherent in the sublime narrative.

Carmilla's vampirisrn is the fhing fhat cannot be named, and the narrative cannot, by extension, name Carmilla's queerness either; the impact of that state of being is intimated rather than articulated. These are impossibilities that are intuited but not expressed. Laura's ambiguity of feeling is also uncanny precisely because she has seen Carmilla before in her childhood dream. The premonition 130 of the encounter is uncanny and rnakes the real attack seem like d$à vu. The

result of that enwunter leaves Laura feeling both "delighffully soothed" (74) and

yet in pain from "a sensation as if two needles ran into my breastn10(74). As

Carmilla's attacks become more frequent and more urgent, Laura increasingly

becomes an unwnscious and forced participant (102). Her unconsciousness

foreshadows Harker's unconsciousness after Dracula's attackl' and makes her

inert and passive while also conveniently absoking her from the responsibility of

enjoying forbidden pleasures.

It is highly problematic that Laura, as narrator, never makes clear why she

is unable to resist the vampire. She seems only to explain the behavior, noting,

for example, that Carrnilla 'would press me more closely in her trembling

embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon rny cheek. Her agitations

and her language were unintelligible to men (89). While it is true that Laura has

only the faintest of impulses to escape from Carmilla's embraces, she is by her

own admission, at a loss to offer a real reason why she did not: "1 used to wish to

extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail men (90). Like Flora under

Varney's attack (Rymer 3-4), she falls inert under the hypnotic, mesmerizing spell

of the vampire: "I could not cry out" (104). However, the extent of Laura's willing

participation remains ambiguous in spite of the increasing amount of forceful

power that Carmilla uses. At the end of Chapter V Laura says that Camilla's

"infatuations ....her crazy talk and looks ... embarrassed, and even fn'ghtened me" 131 (991, and that she finds Carmilla's advances 'hateful yet overpowerÎngn (90); yet

she still continues to do nothing. Laura's embarrassrnent may be more social in

ongin than heartfelt.

Notwithstanding the fallacy of blaming the victim, one has to wonder about

the extent to which Laura participates, wnsciousiy or inadvertently, in her own

victimization. Most of the adults in her worid disregard her anxiety as a kind of

hysteria and treat her condescendingly. The nursery maid and house cleaner

"made light" of her dream (75),but she protests that she has endured quite a few erotic moments with Carmilla. Perhaps, most significantly, her prophetic

premonitions of Carmilla's amval extend into phantorn feelings for her long after the staking: "to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to mernory ... and often from a reverie I have started. fancying 1 heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room floof (137). The anticipation of Carmilla's arrivai, and the Iingering sense of her continued preçence long after her death show the fascination with the vampire that is typical of sublime narratives, and point to the certainty that lesbian eroticism is always latently present, long after the collective action of protective males has ostensibly rid the domestic sphere of its presenœ.

The erotically queer Lolita-ism of the text may be implicit but it can hardly be rnissed. The vampinc attacks are not only about the undead attacking the living and a woman attacking another fernale, they are also about an adult attacking a child. Yet, the suppression of that Lolita-ism wmes from a nurnber of 132 different places, the first of which is that Laura herself is an unreliable narrator who repeatedly excuses and attempts to naturalize the recurrence of these nocturnal encounters without ever realiy putting an end to them. Her excuses receive voice finally in Chapter VI1 where she says, "1 should have told papa but

[did not] for two opposite reasons. At one time I thought he would laugh at my

story .-A and at another, I thought he might fancy I had been attacked by the mystenous cornplaint which had invaded our neighborhood ... [and] I was afraid of alaming himn (103). Admittedly, she speaks wilh the innocence of a chiId's uncertainty and she is also wnfronting a situation which is impossible on rnany levels, but one wonders whether the narrative's insistence on normalizing

Carmiila's attacks and Laura's minimal resistance to them betrays her post- narrative attraction to the vampire.

Another explanation for the implicit expression of Lolita-ism is that it is

Laura herself who invites Carmilla in at the moment of the carriage accident, pleading, "Oh! papa, pray ask her [Carmilla's mother] to let her stay with us - it would be so delighfful" (81). Is Laura a vampiric victim who herself is the very means by which the vampire is introduced into the domestic sphere? A further attempt to naturalize the continuing and forbidden contact between Laura and

Carmilla is that Laura's father, Iike his friend General Spielsdorf, has been "made the dupe of a pretematural conspiracyn (1 16). He has been too skeptical, rational

(and male) about the supernaturai to pursue any solutions to his daughter's 133 problems. The victirn theme is echoed here too. General Spiefsdorf is the next generation of Aubreys: '1 curse my wnceited incredulity, my despicable affectation of superiority, my blindness, my obstinacy - ail - too late" (77); but

Laura's father has an opportunity to transcend the fate of his predecessors.

While Le Fanu's Carmilla shares the comic ending of Planché's The

Vampire, it does so without any intention of asserting the value of mamage or romance. Instead, Cannilla asserts the definitive importance of protectiveness as a defining quality of the masculine. If the message of Polidori's The Vampyre is that skepticism about the supematural emasculates and disables the male protective roie, the message of Carmilla seems to be a similar but more comic version of that, suggesting that skepticisrn and endangered masculinity are redeemabie at any moment by the power of belief in the impossible. Unlike the men in Miss Aubreyys world, the men in Laura's world are able to Save her through their collective action. The problem is that she may not have wanted to be rescued. Perhaps her reluctance to identify Carmilla's vampiric behavior to her father is a metaphor for her, and her society's, reluctance to confront the queerly impossible.

Laura's reluctance to be rescued from Carrnilla is understandable. The sexuality in Laura's vampiric contact is intimate, tender and orgasrnic:

Sometimes it was as if warrn Iips kissed me, and longer and more Iovingly as they reached rny throat, but there the caress fixed itseif. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly, fully drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and tumed into a dreadful convulsion, in which my sense left me and 1 become unconscious. (105-6)

The attack is typical even of heterosexual vampiric attacks: in al1 cases the victim

feek a kind of Angst and a paralysis up to the point of penetration, but not

beyond. Laura says "1 could not cry out" (Carmilla 103), Flora Bannerworth 'could

not scream - she could not rnoven (Ryrner 3)' and Jonathan Harker says he 'was

afraid to raise my eyelids" (Dracula 52). Laura's "sense of strangulationn may be

syrnptomatic of a repulsion for penetration even though she cannot precisely

detect the moment at which it happens because of a kind of hysteria. On other

occasions, however, she does feel the moment of penetration, such as, for

instance, when she has her premonition of Carmilla's appearance: "two needles

ran into rny breast very deepn (74). With Carrnilla as penetrator and Laura as

receptor, the heterosexual paradigm of sexual practice is at once subverted and

re-affirmed. The paradigm is subverted because a woman is the penetrator but it

is affinned because the moment is driven by the phallocentric notion that

penetration is necessary to both parties for erotic pleasure.

Carmilla wants, and takes, that which cannot be named in Victorian

society; she is the sexually empowered man-woman, noctumal and nightmarish, a succubus/incubus whose activities and impossible erotic preferences directly contradict the Victorian belief that 'the rnajority of women (happily for them) are

not very rnuch troubled by sexual feeling of any kind."" It is only after the story is ended and Carmilla has been staked, decapitated, bumed and drowned (the 135 ashes "were thrown upon the river and borne away" [134]), that the narrative

even attempts to explain the full pathology and etiology of this disease, or that

she can even be named. The impossibility of vampiric supematuralisrn is

conflated with the Lolita-ism of lesbian queemess- The narrative seems to signal

cleariy that "the horrible enemy" (133) rnust be made totally inert, even if it is done

through a "pious sacrilege .-.which will relieve out earth of certain monsiers, and

enable pious people to sleep in their beds without being assailed by murderers"

(1 16)- The excessive use of violence and force brought against Carmilla is an

overcompensating response. The attack against this attacker is, in essence, four

murders on the same being. She is staked, decapitated, bumed and drowned.

Such actions are more than a conventional repetition of folklonc apotropiacs.

The severity of this collective male action is a measure of just how profound the anxiety is that somehow, Carmilla rnight find a way to return. There is no real victory here because the structure of these impossibififies cannot be resolved or overcome. As Laura says, 'often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carrnilla at the drawing roorn door" (137). This narrative then, cannot decide whether it wants to kill Carmilla or to embrace her so she can continue her caresses.

Brarn Stoker's Dracula (1897) certainly did not eam him much money in his lifetime; it was a "rnodest success at best " (Wolf xviii), and yet the impact of its legacy in the twentieth century cannot be underestirnated. The variety of 136 critical interpretations it has invited is extensive, and inctudes Ferninist

(Weissrnan, Senf, Byers), Freudian (Appleby, Astje, Bierrnan, Hatlen, Homan,

MacDonald), Queer (Gelder), Narrative (Appleby, MacGillvray, Seed), Jungian

(Hennelly), and Marxist (Wasson, Wicke). Dracula himself has been interpreted as the Shadow, the id, the animusfanima, the anti-christ, the repressed, the exotic, the sernite and even as a consuming form of capitalism.

A simifar varie& of responses welwmed Dracula when it was first published. Contemporary reviewers were quick to discover the paradoxical elements in the work. One anonymous reviewer in The Afhenaeum found it

'highly sensational but ... wanting in the higher literary sense." The same reviewer noted that "Mr. Stoker's way of presenting his matter ... [is] too direct and uncompromising .. . [It] lack[sl the essential note of awful remoteness and at the same time subtle affinity that separates while it links our humanity with unknown beings and possibilities hovering on the confines of the known world." In spite of al1 the coolness toward Dracula, this same contemporary reviewer noted that "at times Mr. Stoker almost succeeds in creating the sense of possibrïity in impossibil~ai others he merely commands an array of crude statements of incredible actionsn [my emphasis]. The novel's power is really in its inherent ability to overcome rationality and skepticism, and to convince us that that which we thought could never be tnie, is true. The novel's power cannot be underestimated and its containment of opposites seems to have been noticed by 137 contemporaries as well. Another review by A. Constable found that even though

"we must own that, though here and there in the course of the tale we humed over things with repulsion, we read nearly the whole with rapt attention"

(Constable 129).

Another reason why Dracula has remained such a powerful influence well into the twentieth century is because it owes a substantial debt to many of its literary predecessors. Stoker's masterpiece is the accumulation and modification of many recurring elements in the now-estabfished vampiric tradition, especially the wnflation of undercoded queemess with the debate about the existence of supematuralism. For instance, Dracula transfoms the effeminophobia so understated in Polidori's The Varnpyre into a much more intense and prolonged expression of queer fear, while sirnultaneously doing the same for the masculinophobia of Le Fanu's Carmilla. Harker's weakness and Lucy's power show how Stoker was able to build on elements of earlier varnpiric narratives.

Finally, the power of Dracula is the consequence of the tensions between the silences of what it cannot Say about queerness and the consciously articulated statements it is able to make about the associated polernics of vampiric supematuralism. Dracula is much more resoiute and definitive than

Carmilla in declaring victory over the vampire, but it does so through an awkward domestic appendage of an epilogue on domestic family life. Mina's value as a woman centers on her maternity, her reproductive capacities, and on her denial of 138 self-gratification, unlike Lucy and the terrifying Carmilla. Put another way,

Dracula's radical ability to dewnstnrct gender through supematuralism is greater

than its predeœssors, but the novel's resofution is also proportionately more

conservative than its predecessors.

Critical scnitiny of Stoker's biography and of Dracula's undercoded

deconstruction of queerness, has led some critics to the controversial hypothesis that Stoker was a closet homo~exual.'~The point is an important one only

because it accounts for why Dracula explores masculine and feminine queerness so deeply and then vigorousfy suppresses al1 traces of its own insight We do know that Stoker moved in the same social and literary circles as Oscar Wilde until his trial for sodorny, after which Stoker never mentioned him or spoke to hirn again. Some suspicion has also ken raised about a possible homosexual relationship with Henry Irving. The inordinate amount of nocturnal time, even for a stage manager, that Stoker seems to have spent at the Lyceurn theater15 with actorlowner Henry Irving has also led to speculation that Stoker's mamage was a cover for his hornosexuality. If there were any truth at ail to the suspicion, more ironies appear because the relationship between Irving and Stoker may welI have inadvertently echoed the one between Byron and Polidori.

If Stoker was an amphibious being who lived in the separate worlds of the

queer and the heterosexual, some of the gender impossibilities in the novet

make clear sense when contextualized with biographical data. For instance, 139 Jan McDonald notes that when Dracula was first published many

contemporaries instantly recognized Irving's "appearance" and "personality" (82)

in Dracula's. Also, Irving and Dracula shared 'The height and the slenderness. the

long hair, the high forehead and the heavy brow, the aquiline features, the thin

high-bridged nose and the arched nostrils" (82). While it may be dangerous to read

the novel as biographical allegory, it is tempting to contemplate the implications of a

novel in which Harker is Stoker and Dracula is ~rvin~.'~This biographical quality

may also have contributeci to the ambiguous quality of the vampire that Stoker

develops-

The parallel between Harker-Dracula and Stoker-Irving has been

extensively dealt with by Talia Schaffer who notices that Harker is an echo of

Stoker because like Harker, he was "a manied man, a solicitor who had not

practiced law. and a younger man working for a beloved older man" (398).

Schaffer also draws some parallels between Harkefs degenerating physical

condition and Wilde's condition after one year in prison, noting that affer a year in

jail Wilde's hair tumed white and he cried often. The same happens to Harker:

"Last night he was a frank, happy-tooking man .... today he is ab] ... old man,

whose white hair matches well with the hollow buming eyes and grief-written lines

of his face" (359).

There is also some literary evidence to support a hypothesis that Stoker was generally fascinated with issues of gender and queer orientation. In Famous 140 imposfors (1910), for instance, he shows a repeated and sustained fascination with the "true" histories of women who posed as men, and vice versa, and especially with the so-called Bisley Boy, a male transvestite who allegedly posed as Queen Elizabeth 1 in order to deceive the king about her (his) identity (Farson

207). There is also, as Skal points out, the fact that Stoker's 1905 novel, The

Man, has a heroine narned Stephen (33). The play on names and its queer implications are very much at odds with the severe position Stoker publiciy took in the articles he wrote for Centwy Magazine. By 1908 Stoker was speaking strongly in favor of censorship and against homosexuality (Farson 207). The contradiction between Stoker's public opinions and his Iiterary experimentation is yet another manifestation of the sublime.

While Dracula's deviations from the conventional, heterosexual nom are not always explicit, they are present in clear enough ways to be detected as a motif. We know, for instance, that he lives with three women, "two [of whorn] were da*, and had high aquiline noses, like the countn (51). Perhaps the physical resemblance implies, as Wolf suggests, that they are his sisterç. The implications of inœst are consistent with folklore in which the vampire inevitably begins its career by attacking kin. We also know Dracula takes Jonathan Harker as his own, clairning "this man belongs to me!" and that "i too mn loven (53).

Dracula also promises the three women that, 'when I am done with him you shall kiss hirnn (53). We know further that he quite fancies Harker, who writes in his 141 diary that "Dracula was kissing his hand to me, with a red Iight of triumph in his

eyes and with a srnile that Judas in hell might be proud of" (66).

In addition to polyandry, incest, and homosexuality, Dracula also shows a

vicious, domineering streak in his heterosexual intirnacies with Mina- When he is

trapped by the men he snarls that 'your girls that you love are mine already"

(365),and says to Mina in a subsequent attack, that she is "to be punished" (343) for plotting against him. Her punishment will be that she "shall corne to my call,"

and in this way he exercises total dominance and control over her thouyhts as weli as her body. Furthemore, in the rnost aggressive of his nocturnal attacks

against Mina, Dracula "gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom," and fie compels her to drink the blood from his "bare chest" (337).

The action has connotations of both breast feeding and oral sex, but the episode is a poignant moment of impossibilify because he uses his masculine strength to feminize himself. The gender-blended and queer Dracula is the "man-that-wasn

(291) but he always retains the forceful and dornineering part of his personality.

At the unknowable center of Dracula is the novel's titular hero, this "man- that-was." His behavior remains largely unpredictable, even as the children of the light pursue him back into the carpathiand7 However, Harker, and to a lesser extent, Mina, provide considerable detail about Dracula's physicality. We know that he is "clean shaven Save for a long white moustache" (22-3) and that he is

"heavy" (25). He is "clad in black from head to footn (25).has an "aquilinenface, a 142 "high bridge of the thin nose" and "arched nostn'lsn (25). He has "massive eyebrows," "bushy hair," and "sharp, white teeth" which "protrude over the lips"

(25) and, as Mina notes, "reeking lips" (343). We also know that the tops of his ears are "extremely pointed" (25) and that he has "broad" hands with "squat fingersn and 'hairs in the center of his palm" (25). His "nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point" (25). Mina describes his nose as "beaky" (215) and says he was a "tall, thin mann (215). There is no Dracula film that captures the physical essence of this vampire to any degree of accuracy. Murnau's Nosferatu is the film monster who most approximates Stoker's Dracula: he has the pointed ears but the big moustache and the bushy hair are rnissing. 60th vampires are physically repulsive.

Dracula does more than combine queemess and supernatural vampirism, although these impossibiiities are certainly two of the dominant themes in the novel. The paradox of Dracula's supernatural vampirisrn is further developed in two contradictory explanations of his phylogenesis. Van Helsing hypothesizes that Dracula has "had dealings with the Evil Onen and thaï he must have leamed the devil's secrets in the "Scholomance (291, n.24), a center for the occult where the devil allegedly took every tenth scholar as his own in exchange for showing the school's students the occult arts (291, n.24). Such a hypothesis is a supematural explanation of Dracula's origin, but then Van Helsing also speaks of an organic ongin as well. He suggests that Dracula is not the product of the 143 devil, but of "afl the forces of naturen which "must have worked together in some

wondrous way" (378). In this theory, Dracula, and many of the undead, are born

from a "strangeness of the geologic and chernical world" in combination with

"sornething magnetic or electnc* in the random 'combinations of occult forcesn at

work in the "deep cavems and fissures that reach none know whither" (378). It is

difficult to comprehend how Dracula wuld have emerged from both sources, and

even more difficult to conceive of these orîgins dialectically.

The interiocking structure of supematuralisrn, phylogenesis, and

queemess is not merely registered in how these factors are manifest in the

Count, but also in how they appear in his victims. In their vampirized gender

transformations, there is evidence of a vampiric queerness that empowers

wornen and renders males vulnerable. Dracula can be understood dialectically as

patriarchy's nightmare in which the impossibilify of masculine and ferninine

gender blending is imagined (made manifest), and as a queer nightmare in which

gender-blended entities are animated and then stalwartly rendered inert through

phallic staking. Just as the impossible is imagined and expressed, so is it

transformed back into the Iinpossib/e and then silenced again. The zealous, though reluctant, staking of Lucy registers the narrative's cornmitment to

heterosexuafity as does the staking of Dracula. On the other hand, the simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from Dracula felt by Lucy, Mina, and 144 Harker, tums this narrative in on itself and registers a silent attraction to queerness.

Harker's hatred for Dracula is inordinately intense, and perhaps it is so not only because Dracula is a vampire but also because conventional masculinity has been conditioned to loathe gender-blended identities. Such loathing comes from effeminophobia, or the fear of the ferninine within the masculine. Harker confesses that 'a horrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a rnonstef (67).and then he smashes the sleeping Count's face with a shovel.

Harkefs hatred of the Count in this instance is also connected to the Count's masculinity as signified in the tumescence he gains at the expense of the blood of others. Harker describes Dracula as "bloated .... gorged with bloodn and like 'a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion" (67). Harker's hatred of the count is at once a hatred of the vampire and also an implied hatred of queemess. Such vehemence is shared by al1 the males in the narrative except the lunatic Renfield. who plays John the Baptist to Dracula's anti-Christ, by preparing the way for his

"master" (135). Tafia Schaffer's observation that "Harker's hatred of Dracula problematically hovers on the margins of self-hatred" (401) partially accounts for

Harker's intense desire to kill Dracula if Dracula is the extemalized signifier of

Harker's latent queemess. The sirnilarities between Dracula and Harker are rnany, but one obvious point of cornparison is Dracula's impersonation of Harker i 45 by wearing Harker's clothes: "It was a new shock to me to find that he had on the

suit of clothes which l had wom whilst travelling here (60).

Harker's joumey into the Carpathians is yet another kind of encounter with

the impossible. Castle Dracula does, and does not, exist: it cannot be located "on

any mapn nor is Harker able to find any 'work giving its ... exact localitf (3). Yet

he is ultimately escorted into the depths of that physical reality. Harker does

realize that the horseshoe Carpathians forrn 'some sort of imaginative whirlpool"

(4). and that there is a strangeness for which he cannot account. He finds the

clothing of the local peasants 'fitting almost too tight for modesty" (6) and

inadvertently reveais his xenophobia when he admits to being quite disturbed by the "queer wordsn and "rnany nationalitiesnhe encounters (10). Harker is also an

Aubrey figure insofar as he is skeptical and finds the local peasants "ridiculousn and 'idolatrous" and scoffs at their beliefs (8-9).

Talia Schaffer interprets the Carpathians as an area "between two poles"

and a place of "margins" and "bandage" (4034). Harker's "strangely

unsubstantiated escape" (403) is only a partial one and is not complete until he

"realizes his experiences were real rather than imaginary" (405). The novel is

also framed with settings in the Carpathians. The narrative thus begins and

ends with a joumey into this wild, uncharted country whose primitiveness and

desolation are threatening. The Carpathians are isolated, difficult to reach,

chaotic and menacing; and Castle Dracula, which is located in the Carpathians, 146 is not present on any maps. The wildness and intangible aspect of these

mountains suggest both the rnipossible and the unconscious.

As a guest in Castle Dracula, Harker spends most of his time asleep or having bad dreams that seem "startlingly realn (51). Castle Dracula is a place of the irrational where the impossible cm, and does, happen. Even Harker's biological rhythms are altered so that he abandons his diurnal habits and finds that "1 am beginning to feel this noctumal existence tel1 on me. tt is destroying my nerven (46-7). Castle Dracula terronzes Harker with the threat of vague and nebutous fears which he cannot name. This silence is also an indicator of the impossible. His mysterious fears are metaphorically sirnilar to the castle which he cannot locate on any map and these fears are punctuated with the physically horrifying revulsion he feels when he cornes close to Dracula: "Every sense in me revolted at the contactn (67). Harker finds himself confronting nameless impossibiiities, both vampiric and queer, and discovers that he is "encompassed with terrors that 1 dare not think of (48). "1 doubt, I fear, 1 think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own souln (26). The greatest terror of these impussibilifies is that they point to the irrational but cannot be named: '1 must be careful of such dreams, for they would unseat one's reason if there were too much of themn (31 1).

The longer Harker stays in Castle Dracula, and under Dracula's spell, the more feminized he becomes. Hiç diary entry of 15 May (48) inadvertently reveals 147 that he is beginning even to occupy the same physical place that ladies of oid

used to occupy. He writes: "Here 1 am, sitting at a Iittle oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen ... her ill-spelt love-letter" (49). The next night, he writes that "1 determined ... to sleep here, where, of old, ladies had sat and Sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of rernorseless wars" (50). He also speaks of the dread of "this horrible place overpowering me" (48) and of a sense that ''the conviction of rny helplessness overpowered al1 other feelings" (37).

Harker's helplessness locates him solidly within the feminine paradigm that was established in the earlier nineteenth-century vampiric narratives and folfowed in other works by stoker.18 Like Polidori's Miss Aubrey and Rymer's Flora

Banneworth and Lady Margaret, Stoker's Harker appears to be in need of rescue by a heroic and protective male figure. Harker's feminization is also diametrically opposite to the extreme masculinity of Van Helsing who has an "iron nerve, a temper of the ice-brook, an indomitable resolution, self-command ... and the kindliest and truest heartn (147). By wntrast, Harker is uncertain, indecisive, unable to act on his own behalf, and secret~ve.'~

Another paradigm of stoic masculinity is Quincey, who is described by Dr.

Seward after Lucy's funeral as one of the most manly of men:*'

It is ail over. Arthur has gone back to Ring, and has taken Quincey Moms with him. What a fine fellow is Quincey! I believe in rny heart of hearts that he suffered as much about Lucy's death as any of us, but he bore himself through it like a moral Viking. If America ango on breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world indeed. (216-7).

This ernotionally repressive, gun-toting model of Amencan manhood has a 'brave

.-. spirit" which the narrative insists did not die with his death, but which was passed on to Mina and Jonathan's child, Quincey Jr. He has a "strong resolute tone of quiet commandn (441) that is perhaps reminiscent of Dracula's masculinity and evidenced by his 'imperious gesturen (53) and the quality of his 'voice which, though low and almost in a whisper, seemed to cut through the air and then ring in the room" (53). Quincey is even stoical when Lucy rejects his proposal of marnage and confesses to her that, "I'm a hard nut to crack; and 1 can take it standing up" (79). Quincey is also the man who takes control: "he had always been the one to arrange the plan of action" (363).

The ferninization and subsequent rape of Jonathan Harker is articulated as a set of binary opposites (al1 impossibilifies) melded together: the "dark" wornen and the "fair" woman (51), the "hard" laughter (51) and the "softness of human lips" (51). Harker's sirnultaneous "longing"(51) and "deadly fear," his "agony of delightful anticipation" (52) and the "honey-sweettf and "bitter offensiveness" of smelts, his feeling of the "thrilling and [the] repulsive" (52) and the use of the vampire's "teeth and Iips" (52). Harker's 'Yascinated passivity in surrendering to his sexual fantasies, even while admitting the wickedness of what he desires"

(Spencer 21 5) is manifestly clear in these alternating oppositions, but it is also the reluctant resignation of masculinity to its feminine wunierpart in the nightmare of 149 gender reversal. The masculine nightmare can often be the ferninine fantasy; for the former, the drearn of gender reversa1 means disempowement; and for the

latter it is an opportunity for enfranchisernent-

The entry in Harker's journal immediately after the attack (Stoker, beginning of Chapter 4) shows the extent to which Harker is prepared to deny his encounter with the vampiric and the queer. Kathleen Spencer believes that

Harker's lapsing into unconsciousness immediately after the attack is a matter of convenience (216). Harker mnnot. perhaps will not, "amve at any unquestionable result" (55) about what has transpired. His clothes have obviously been taken off by someone else, since he observes that they "were folded and laid by in a manner which was not rny habit" (55). Beyond that, he chooses to see only 'certain small evidencesn (55) of a physical encounter with

Dracula yet is qui* to assert that 'these things are no proof" (55). Harker's post- attack anxieties make him want to be secretive. The effect of the underwded hornosexuality of the attack is perhaps the cause of his ps.ychological embarrassment. He observes that "it is not good to note this dom; lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth" (51). Thus. he "closets" his vampiric and queer experiences. For Harker, a homosexual encounter is an impossibilify which he resists at al1 conscious levels but succumbs to unconsciously: "then the horror overcame me and 1 sank into unconsciousness" (53) he writes, just as Dracula attacks him. 'l5O Harker's encounter with Dracula seems to leave hirn noticeably

transfonned into a man-woman- His unmanliness is later noticed by Dr- Seward

who mesthat, "Mr. Harker arrived at nine o'clock ... I was prepared to meet a

good specimen of manhood, but hardly the quiet business-like gentleman who

carne here today" (273). Harker shares much in comrnon with Mina and Lucy;

al1 three are the vampire's victirns. Marjorie Howe has observed that much of the

novel revolves around "a feminine (homoerotic) desire to play the passive woman's part and be penetrated [which in turn] leads to a defensive reaction

against the feminine" (Howes 108). Such a desire is unconscious on Harker's

part because it is such a powerful taboo. Mina's own account of Dracula's attack against her illustrates how she succurnbs to his will without any struggle and how she becornes inert for the sake of his pleasure:

With a mocking srnile, he placed one hand on my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so: 'First a Iittle refreshment to reward my exertions. You may as well be quiet; it is not the first tirne, or the second that your veins have appeased my thirst!' I was bewildered, and, strangeiy enough, I did not want to hinder him- 1 suppose it is a part of the horrible curse .. . (342-3)

Mina has conscious knowledge and memory of the attack but Harker does not, suggesting that the debilitating part of the vampire's attack is an erotic nightmare of feminization for Harker, something to be resisted consciously and enjoyed surreptitiousiy, but it is ctearly a trauma of degradation for Mina. 151 The identity of the three women who attack Harker in Castle Dracula is, as

Leonard Wolf observes, "a major mystery in the bookn (51, n. 43). It may well be

that the two dark-haired women with "high aquiline noses like the countn (51) are

the Count's sisters, given the family resemblance, but I would suggest that the

fair one who is different frorn the other two may really be a symbolic

representation of Harker himself This theory accounts for Harker's observation

that he "seemed somehow to know her facen (51). Perhaps he cannot identiw

her because she is the ferninine part of his psyche, the Jungian Anima.

Robin Appleby astutely observes that Mina, and indeed al1 un-vampinted women in Dracula, are appropriately dispassionate in a Victonan way. The corollary

is that the vampirized women are passionate. As Dracula comes to Mina for the firçt time as a fog, Mina Mes"1 was powerless to act" and "1 lay still and endured" (310).

Her sexual response places her as passive but conscious and alert: "1 closed rny eyes but could see through my eyelids" (310). Similariy, Harker also view his female attackers "under the lashesn(52) of his half-closed eyes. The attack on Mina is interrupted by Van Helsing just as the attack of the three vampireses on Harker is intempted by ~rauila.~'Both epiçodes are reminiscent of the rewmng patterns of intempted onanism in Varney but Stoker explores the extremes more extensively, alluding to both climax and full transformation.

A significant moment of gender slippage occurs at precisely the moment that Harker is about to consummate his attraction to the three female vampires. 152 He describes "the sofî, shivering touch of the Iips on the super-sensitive skin of

my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing theren

(52). This queer fantasy places Harker in the ferninine role but still locates the

episode solidly within heterosexism until Dracula slips into Harker's fantatsy

sequence at precisely the moment of penetration and screams "This man belonrgs to me" (53).= Dracula's defiant "yes, I too can love" (53) and his promise that

"when I am done with him you shall kiss him" (53) are indications that his vampirizing is a metaphor for phaliic penetration and both gender and vampiric transformation. This is the kind of scene that has been foreshadowed in Polidori's

The Vamypre where Aubrey and Ruthven encounter each other in the cave through lanthe.

The forbidden and impossible physical contact between Harker and

Dracula can never be fully articulated because it is taboo. Stoker is rerniniscent of Polidori in this sense, and it is only in the work of Anne Rice that physical contact between males can be explicitly articulated. Male to male physical contact is an Impossibihly in Stoker that can be aliuded to metaphorically but mot vividly renderedan Even though Harker hirnself will never explicitly record ts details, the episode sends ripples of influence across the rest of the narrative.

This unexpected and forced homosexual encounter is the central silence for

Harker, and indeed, for the whole novel. 7 53 While Dracula is ostensibly the vampire that Harker and the others want to stake, the sublime nature of the narrative is manifested more interestingly in the staking of Lucy, a surrogate Dracula. The narrative and the characters are divided about having to stake 'sweet" Miss Lucy, and it is in this reluctance, counterbaIanced with compelling necessity b rid the world of so horrible a creature that defines the essence of this sublime narrative. The vilification of

Lucy is based upon her anti-matemal and unferninine behavior. When Seward first hears that Lucy has made the punctures on the neck of the child, he cannot believe that a woman as sweet as Lucy could do such a thing. His rage is directed against Van Helsing as he denies this impossibility. He writes: 'sheer anger mastered me;" and with great doubt he questions Van Helsing, asking him,

"are you mad?" (239). Later, recalling his experience of first seeing the varnpirized Lucy, he wntes "there was no love in rny own heart [for Lucy], nothing but loathing for the fou1 Thing (sic) which had taken Lucy's shape without her soul" (260). And "even Arthur's face grew hardn (260) as he looked at Lucy.

These kinds of ambivalences locate the narrative's sympathies somewhere in between vilification and heroicization.

When Majorie Howes says that Dracula explores "grotesque [images] of phallic overcompensation" (109), she rneans that "the men's anxieties about their double roles as indulgers in and suppressors of desire appear as anxieties over gender rofes and distinctions" (106). Although Howes unfortunately does not 154 provide examples, it is clear that Dracula is dnven by masculine

overcompensation for queemess which becornes the subtext for the remainder of

the novel after the rape of Harker in Dracula's castle. Masculine self-

defensiveness in the novel is ultimately expressed as a solemn and brutal gang-

rape of Lucy. It is not just, as Howes suggests, that "homosexual [desires in the

novel] are masked as monstrous" (104); it is rather, that al1 significations of

queerness are conflated with the monstrous, either as the rnasculinophobia in

Lucy's sexual aggression and anti-matemal behavior, or the effeminophobia in

Dracula's implicit homosexuat attraction to Harker, or in the breaking of the

masculine protector role in Dracula's domineenng heterosexual attraction to Mina.

Mina unselfishly wants to be "usefut" (71) to her husband-to-be. Lucy, by contrast, contemplates her own gratification first as a pre-condition of marnage:

"why can't they let a girl marry three men?"(78) she asks. Lucy's associated wth sexuality is later reaffirmed when Mr ~wales~~tells her she's sitting on the tomb of a suicide, but with a wily bit of sexual innuendo he quips 'it may make poor

Geordie gladsome to have so trim a lass sittin' on his lap" (90). Lucy is a woman who attracts men at a deeply sexual level whereas Mina's appeal is more intelledual. When in Whitby, Mina marveis at the unfairness of a ptiallocentfic worid in which women are valued more for their appearance than their intellects:

"the old men did not Iose any time in coming up and sitting near her [Lucy] when we sat down ... even my old man succumbed and did not contradict her but gave 155 me double share [of contradiction] insteadn (87). Lucy's appeal is in her fiirtatiousness and her social charm, Mina's is her level-headedness, but around men, even the old ones, it is Lucy who first catches the eye.

Dracula's intimacies have a powerful and negative impact on Lucy.

Afthough not hornosexual in this instance, the queerness with which he infects her, transfomis her Rirtations from 'sweetnessn and "purity" (256) to 'adamantine heartless cruelty" and "voluptuous wantonnessn (256). Lucy becomes a thing with an "angry snarln (256) and, as Wolf points out, she is a 'travesty of motherhood"

(256). Female sexuality and rnatemalism are mutually exclusive in patriarchy; such are the Iimits also of Victorian paradigms of motherhood and femininity.

Furthemore, there is a sense in which Lucy's transformation is not really a transformation at al1 but simply an intensification of the being she always was.

The transformation is not a change in nature, only of degree. Lucy has had a predisposition for nocturnal wanderings long before Dracula ever arrived. Mina wntes that Lucy "has lately taken to her old [my ernphasis] habit of walking in her sleepn and the genetic predisposition is there too: 'Lucy's father had the same habit" (96).

Lucy's attacks on innocent children are a very powerhd way of articulating a gender-behavior impossibilitu; she is simultaneousIy dehumanized and de- feminized according to the patriarchal conventions of womanhood and rnotherhood. Her predatory actions also associate her with the three anti- 156 matemal vampiresses in Castle Dracula who apparently have no qualms about making their rneals on infants- Harker suspects that the sack which Dracula tosses over to the women contains a child because of the 'gasp and a low wail, as of a half smothered child" (53) that emerges from inside the bag.25 The Bloofer

Lady's anti-maternalism and excessive libido are recruited by hegemonic ideology as legitimizing reasons for her metaphoncal rape and staking. Those legitimizing reasons are mitigated by sedudive attractiveness, and she is Iike Carmilla in this sense- Lucy's "corne to me, Arthur" seductiveness works well on Arthur, who

"seemed under a spelln (257) until Van Helsing 'sprang fowardn between them.

In Stoker, the rape and domination fantasy of the vampiric attack is rendered from the perspective of the male victim; in Rymer, the same fantasy is rendered from the perspective of the male predator. Stoker has reversed Rymefs point of view, but nowhere on the vampiric Iiterary landscape is there a sense of the psychological interiority, the point of view of a female vampire, from the inside out. Even Anne Rice favors the psychology of the male vampire, and regrettably, in vampire lore as in life, articulating the interiority of the female psyche and giving it a voice, is still too much a rarity.

The staking of Lucy is the moment at which the effects of the vampire's penetration of Lucy are undone by Arthur's penetration of her. Arthur's phallic penetration of Lucy is a means to reclaim her from his male rival, Dracula, without appearing to enjoy the sexuality. The scene also mirrors Harker's experience in 157 Castle Dracula where there was one passive and inert male (Harker) attacked

and metaphorîcally raped by three women, and subsequently feminized. In the staking of Lucy, one passive and inert vampiress (Lucy) is staked by four men

hovering over her so that she is restored to her sweetness without the sexual aggression. The Castle-Dracula scene introduces the vampiric and queerly impossible, and the latter scene restores the varnpiric and the queer back to impossibility. Once staked, Miss Lucy cm never retum to her unacceptable vampiristic condition. As George Stade suggests, Arthur's

high duty ... is to give Lucy in spades, the punishment she was asking for, but the trick lies in not letting yourself know that you enjoy doing it. The knowledge would cancel out the enjoyrnent. One therefore does one's duty, but the strain is avvful. (213)

The staking is ai once self-repressive for men and repressing to Lucy, and indeed, to al1 wornanhood. The security of masculinity is re-affîrmed by the collective use of phallus power, which, when driven into Lucy's heart, causes the body to shake and quiver orgasmically and to twist "in wild contortions" (262).

Lucy's female sexuality is neutralized by male sexuality through this ritual gang rape. The stake, which was "sorne two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet long" (260) is the male fantasy phallus and it is the weapon that prevents Lucy from contributing to an "ever widening" (261) circle of vampires and of sexually aggressive women. 158 The scene climaxes in an ejaculation of sorts: "the mouth was smeared

with crimson foam" (262) and the blood "welled and spurted up around" the heart

(262) because of the relentless penetration of that "mercy bearing stake" (262).

She is made finally to "lay still" (262) and it is only then that ''the terrible task was

over" (262). The result for Arthur, is "great drops of sweat [that] sprang frorn his

forehead. and his breath came in broken gasps" (263). The sublimity of this

expenence lies in the tension between the indulgence of orgasmic pleasure and

the manly act of repression of the pleasure instinct for the sake of duty and

allegiance to other males. In Vamey the Vampire (Chapter 207) the vampire

Clara is staked by a local mob and dies with "a single, shrill, piercing shnek

(843). Carmilla also dies with "a piercing shriek" (134). What Stoker changes

radicaily, however, is the nature of the female vampire's death, shifting it away from a simple shriek to an orgasrnic ecstasy, and linking sexuality and violence together in a traditionally masculine way.

In patriarchal culture "most episodes of major violence .. . are transactions among men" (Conne11 83) and such iç clearly the case in Dracula. Perhaps this is also why it remains so popular a story in our culture. All of this repressive activity braœs these men and bonds them so that "the sight of it [Lucy's staking] gave us courage1' (262). The scene also substantiates Herbert Sussman's more generic argument that one Victorian ideal of masculinity is "the practice of celibacy as an heroicized model for the practice of manliness as the control of sexuality" (33). 159 Such a code of maswlinity "equates manhwd with the dissolution of the self throug h submission to the male leader wïthinan all-male community" (33). By submitting to

Van Helsing's adviœ, though reluctantly, Arthur achieves several victories at once: he asserts his own masculinity; he asserts the masailinity of the brotherhood of males who are present with him, and restores Lucy to her pre-varnpiric, sexually non-threatening state. The episode suggests that vigomus and grimly detached phallic penetrations are what is needed to re-establish patnarchal and heterosexual paradigms. Phallic penetration has the same reactionary funcüon as scientifÏc rationatisrn, which is to deny and suppress al1 manifestations of the impossible.

Lucy's posf mortem inertness is attractive to the male children of Iight because in death she epitomizes the ideal phallocentric convention of passive femininîty. She symbolizes the impossibility of an anti-matemal, sexually-driven impulse. In her death, therefore, the males find her even more attractive than in life: "every hour seemed to enhance her loveliness" (211). This ambivalence of opinion is again evidence of a sublime narrative-

Leonard Wolf quite rightly identifies the attraction to Lucy's inertness as the worship of 'female invalidism", but I think the suggestion of the late nineteenth-century rest-cure also seems to be alluded to here. Barbara

Ehrenreich and Deirdre English write that 'woman's lot, from a masculinist point of view, consisted of menial labor and sexual humiliationn(Ehrenreich and English

273), and the narrative of Dracula seems to separate and distribute these two 160 lots. The rest cure was a fom of 'healing by comrnand" (132) and compelled women to remain in bed even if they had to urinate or eat. The cure was used to correct psychological disorders thought to be associated with various forms of female hysteria. These disorders ranged from inordinately high sexual appetites

(a husband's inability to sustain his wife's libido), to marital ennui or depression.

Women doctors were thought not b be able to effect the cure because "they could not 'obtain the needed control over those of their own sexe1 Only a male couid command the total submissiveness that constituted the 'cure"' (133). It is

Van Helsing and the trio of males who bring Lucy and the three sisters in Castle

Dracula to a "cure." It is Van Helsing who conducts Lucy's "cure" with the instructions that patriarchy has for all wornen: "we must obey, and silence is a part of obedience; and obedience is to bring you strong and well into loving amis that wait for youn (169). The reward for consent to patriarchy is the love of a man; the punishment is staking.

The repressive business of rendering women inert is carried further by Van

Helsing just before the clirnactic conclusion of the novel when he is faced with the task of staking the three infant-wnsuming women wito tormented Harker. Van

Helsing, like Arthur with Lucy, now finds himself facing the necessary but unpleasantly "terrible taskn (436) of staking those "three awful women" (60) who attacked Harker. The staking of these three vampiresses is an uncanny re- visitation of the staking of Lucy. Like Arthur, Van Helsing has a bief moment of 161 sublime rapture as he peers into the coffin and hesitates, gaa'ng on the seductive

attractiveness of inert pulchritude: "she lay in her vampire sleep, so full of life and

voluptuous beauty that I shudder as though I have corne to do murder" (436).

Van Helsing says he felt a 'yeaming for delay which seemed to paralyze rny

faculties and clog my very souln (437), and nghtly so. The staking of these female vampires is predicated on a psychosis in which the agent of

phallocentrisrn must convince himsef that the act is not really what it seems

because the women are not really what they seem. He is about to re-affim, once again, the necessity of demobiliring the aggressively feminine by means of

penetration. This is an uncanny moment of doubting doubt for Van Helsing

because the actions are symbolically and metaphoricaliy acted out every day in western culture. His is the reaction of the oppressor who needs to legitirnize his violence; he is at once unabie to face or recall the "horrid screeching as the stake drove homen (438), and seems cornfortable with the re-affirmation of gender normality because each of them seemed to become "placid."

Van Helsing is the very manifestation of the "monk" figure of which Herbert

Sussman speaks. Van Helsing is "the celibate male working and praying within an enclosed all-male wmmunity -- fwho] becomes the central figure through which the wntradictions and anxieties about manfiness are registered" (1 6). It is

Van Helsing's monkish chastity, his refusal to succumb to feminine charms that carnes him through his "homd task" (437) of "butcher work" (438). In a way, he 162 resembles Ulysses who Iistens to the sirens and enjoys their beauty, but must

restrain himself so as not to be brought under their spell. When Van Helsing

looks at the three vampiresses, he is held captive: 'Yes I was moved - Il Van

Helsing, with al1 rny purpose and with my motive for haten(437). His best defense

is the aversion of his eyes. By this means he is able to retain his celibacy by not looking at the other sister "lest once more I should begin to be enthralled" (437).

Driven simultaneously by the imperative to kili the vampire and by masculinophobia, Van Helsing's action does not fully resolve the impossibiiity, but rather leaves him relieved, exhausted, and yet honified at the deed.

If the final staking of Dracula is an anti-climax after the prolonged ordeals of Lucy and the three vampiresses, it is so because the real battle (Le.: against women) has already been won by the tirne Dracula is chased down outside his castle in the Carpathians. Harker decapitates ~racula*~'with his great knifen

(443) at the same moment that Quincey plunges his bowie knife into Dracula's heart (443). The action is at once rational (the head) and visceral (the heart).

Dracula's execution is similar to Lucy's because of the phallic penetration and because of the collective action of a group of males, but with substantialiy and predictably different results. There is no gushing blood, no orgasmic contortions and no "shrieking" - only "dustn (443). The act of staking Dracula is no less an act of penetration than it was with Lucy or the three vampiresses. iiowever, the staking is an anti-climax because these actions and their consequences re-affïrm 163 masculine gender nomalcy and ease the anxiety of effeminophobia. This is also an attack on the brotherhood; after ail, when Dracula is finally retired to peace, he is a male. The staking of the Count is a rejection of his queemess and his ability to rnasculinize his female victims or ferninize his male ones

These males collectively rape Dracula just as he and his vampiresses metaphorically raped Harker, but significantly it is Quincey, the most repressively masculine of al1 the men in the novel, who performs the final action and then dies.

A polarized rendering of the masculine like Quincey is volatile because as the impossible, it cannot occupy any ideological space in the novel indefinitely. Even

Quincey's idealized after-death memory is displaced outside the novel in the epilogue's account of the birth of Mina's son, Quincey Jr.. Dracula as a text, is unstable because neither the queer nor the hetero-sexualized paradigms of masculinity can be sustained. The former paradigm is volatile because it contradicts heterosexuai conventionality and is an affront to masculine nomalcy.

The latter cannot be sustained because it is an inherently false notion of masculinity.

Mina's fate is no different in essence frorn al1 her female counterparts, even though ostensibly this would hardly seem to be the case. The final vision of

Mina transforms her into a Madonna figure. Her matemity redeems her from vampirïsm and queerness, and moves her away from any implied deviance because of her 'man's brain" (284); she is located quite solidly in the 164 conventionally female world of motherhood- Her matemity is defined in ternis of her relationship to her son, who in turn "links al1 our Iittle band of men togethef

(444). Stoker's epilogue reads Iike a vestigial remnant of Planché, with its forced comic ending. Yet, the promise of domestic bfiss is deconstmcted by the observation that 'in al1 the mass of material of which the record is cornposed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of type-writing" (444).

There is nothing of value in what Mina has produced with her typewriter; only what she has produced with her uterus. As surely as the staked Lucy and the three women of Castle Dracula, by the time of the epilogue, Mina has succumbed to heterosexual, middle-class patriarchy.

Because it was men and not women who were the secretaries by convention in the 1890's, Mina's occupation as secretary for the children of light associates her with the radical new woman. And yet as Kathleen Spencer astutely notes, Harker "never records any erotic reaction to Mina ai all" (216).

There is something more here than just the idea that passion is inappropriate between husband and wife. The "New Woman movementn of the 1890's provided, in a very public way, many instances of gender impossibiiity- Since

Stoker's own mother was a New wornann and highly cornmitted to the cause, it is not surpfising to find both oblique and direct allusions to the movement in his fiction. Mina writes: "Some of the 'New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and wornen shoutd be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing 165 or accepting. But l suppose the 'New Wornan' wonY condescend in future to accept

She w.ll do the proposing herseIf" (120). Although there is some ambiguity of tone here, Mina is most likely king mildiy sarcastic, implying her level-headedness about the new movement and her reluctanœ to becorne the fully sexual king Lucy seemed to wish to be. Mina's gender identity is deviant in the most malleable and acceptable fom for patriarchy- She is appropriatefy asexual and matemal. When

Arthur gives 'way utterly snd openly" to his grief over Lucy's death (278). Mina cornforts him and in her diary she writes

we women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller rnatters when the rnother-spirit is invokecf; I felt this big sorrowing man's head resting on me, as though it were that of a baby that some day rnay lie on my bosom, and l stroked his haïr as though he were my own child. (278)

Furthemore, Mina's industry, energy and ability are manifest moût often in her secretarÎa1 tasks that she inevitably deploys in the service of other males and not her own advancement. She even permits Van Helsing to use her as a psychic connection to Dracula and voluntariiy offers herself for hypnosis (370),which is an act of wmplete and utter surrender to Van Helsing.

The real ideological threats in Stoker's Dracula are the vampiresses, not

Dracula. Carol Senfs observation that "four out of the five women characters are portrayed as vampires" (34) seerns to support his daim. I would hasten to add that al1 four of them end up dead and the fifth one ends up blissfully happy in her subordination to patriarchy. The choies for women are not resplendent I can find 166 little evidenœ to support Carol Senfs daim that Mina's matemity is Stoker's

"ambivalent reaction" (Senf, SRNW, 34) to the New Woman. On the contrary, I

see a gender-orthodox, phallocentric fantasy in which the Minas of the 1890's

become domesticated through maternity and the more sexually aggressive (and

hence dangerous) Lucys and varnpiric sisters, like the Carmillas, are staked and

put to rest with solernnity, perhaps even enjoyment, and always wath rnuch regret;

but nevertheless put to rest.

Carmilla and Dracula as texts, focus on the full spectwrn of human

sexuality, in al1 its queer manifestations of homoeroticism, gender-blending and

feminism. There also seems to be a contrary message of repulsion and guilt

caused by the impositions of conventional phallocentrism. Tom on the one hand

between the forbidden impossibiMies of pleasure and power which they seek, and

on the other by the rewards (love and secunty) which accompany wnformity to

conventional gender roles, the resulting anxieties of these narratives are also

conflated with fears of attraction and repulsion to the rnalevolently supernatural.

The result is an extraordinary Iiterary experience.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the vampire had become something quite different from what it had been during the first half of the century. The

malevolent noctumal, male predator who abused the institution of marriage and preyed on beautiful, virginal women, became an alluring and queea cfeature who was without compassion or benevolent human feeling of any kind. Preying on 167 men and children was a modus vivendi Of course, the old, aristocratic vampire

foreigner of Polidon and Planché did not disappear; he found continued Iife in the

Count himself, except now the vampire could attack men as well as women- No

one was safe. Elernents of romance al1 but disappeared. The likelihood of

compassion or empathy for the vampire was minimal because the psychology

and emotion of the vampire's interiority have been silenced. Vilifcation of vampires is also much more difficult because they are so wonderfully attractive that it is easy to forget how lethal they can be. Intimate contact with them is a sublime experience.

Because of the seminal influence of Carmilla and Dracula, the vampires of the twentieth century are diverse and varied. Viiification and heroic narratives continue, as does the staple ingredient, romance. Issues of gender and hurnan sexuality also continue to be conflated with the supernaturai and disbelief. In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, we will also see the triumph of romance conflated with the impossibility of queemess and supematuralism. The

Iine of vilification narratives continues strongly; but the Iine of heroicization fuses with narratives of the sublime to create a new species of vampiric romance in the work of Francis Ford Coppola and Anne Rice. Endnotes for Chapter Three

' Talia Schaffer claims that Dracula is 'arnong the first epidemioiogical horror novelç" (407), but does not explore its relationship to Carniila. * The mechanism of holding the vampire captive until natural causes destroy hirn was resurrected again in Murnau's Nosferatu (1922).

Al1 Mure references to Carniilla are from 'Carnila" in The Penguin Book of Vampies Ed. Alan Ryan (Harmond~worth~England: Penguin, 1988). The Penguin edition has becorne acceptable as a standard and was used by Piya Pal Lapinski in "Dickens's Miss Wade and J. S. Le Fanu's Carmilla: the Female Vampire in Little Donit," Dickens Quarte* 1 1(2) (Aug ust, 1994) 8 1-87.

4 See Robin Appleby, "Dracula & Dora: The Diagnosis and Treatment of Alternative Narratives," Literature &-Psychology39:3(1993) 16-37.

These tens are from Robin Appleby's "Dracula & Dora" and have been adapted from their original application to Mina, to extend to Carmilla.

6 See Helen Stoddart, "'The Precautions of Netvous People are Infectious': Sheridan Le Fanu's Symptomatic Gothic." Modern Language Review 86(l),(l99l) 19-34. Stoddart notices that the four tales in In a GksDarkly are set between 'the framing figure of the volume, Dr. Martin Hesseliusn(1 9).

7 Liiith, alternatively spelled Lilleth and Lilluth, appears in the Gilgamesh Epic as "a vampire harlotn (Melton 370) and she is also, according to the Talmud, Adam's first wife who was ejected from Eden because of an argument with her husband about who was to be dominant during sexual intercourse. Her punishment was the curse of barrenness and she was said to have a penchant for attacking newborns and new mothers. See J. Gordon Melton's The Vampire Book, "Lileth." 8 Dracula also has remarkable strength in his handç. When Harker meets hirn for the first time, Harker says that Dracula "grasped mine with a strength which made me wince" (23).

Carmilla's "power of the hand" (137) may also allude to the power of her eroticism and onanism since that is how she most often makes physical contact with Laura (see pp. 74, 90,105). Carmilla's is a hand that brings pleasure to women and frustration to men because it usurps phallic power- 'O I have been unable to locate any Lacanian interpretations of this scene but it seems clear that the episode could accommodate a Lacanian reading of anxiety and pre-Oedipal breast-feeding: See Joan Copjec, 'Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiew October 58(1991) 25-43. The basis of Copjec's anaiysis is the scene when Dracula forces Mina's face into the self-inflicted gash on his chest.

" Harker says 'the horror overcarne me, and I sank down unconsciousn (53).

12 William Acton, quoted by Steven Marcus in The Ofher Victonans (New York: New Amencan Library, 1977), 31.

13 Anonymous, The Athenaeum, No 3635 (26 June, l897), 835.

14 See Daniel Fanon, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (New York: St Martins, 1976), especially pp. 3542. Farson, who is Stoker's grand-nephew, highlights Stoker's social connections to Wilde while downplaying homosexuality. Carol Senf (Wracula: Stoker's Response to the New Womann. 38), notes that Stoker died of tertiary syphilis and that he was "ceiibate" with Florence, his wife. Talia Schaffer believes that the hrvo men had a love-hate relationship and feit compelled to "construct a viable public fn'endship" (Schaffer 394). The other biographer is Harry Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula; the Life story of Bram Soker. Leonard Wolf criticized Ludham because he was "unwilling either to notice or to answer al1 the critical questions that are raised by the recorded facts of Stoker's Iife "(Wolf xv).

15 David J. Skal cites one contemporary and very public opinion which claimed that Stoker's "'real"' marriage was to l~ingand not to his bride (1 8).

16 There is another, less literal and more generaiïzed possibility here, Schaffer suggests that "Dracula explores Stoker's fear and anxiety as a closeted homosexual man during Oscar Wilde's trial" (381).

l7See Robin Wood, "Burying the Undead: The Use and Obsolesce of Count Dracula" Mosaic i 6(Winter-Spring 1983): 175-87, where Wood suggests that "Dracula must never be allowed a voice, a discourse, a point of view he must remain the unknowable, whom the narrative is about, but of whom it simultaneously disowns al1 intimate knowiedge" (1 79).

18 In the short story Dracula's Guest, which is the deleted first chapter from Dracula, the narator wrîtes: "I was alone - unmanned, [my ernphasis] shivefing with cold" (Wolf 452). Stoker seems to have intimated that Harker is 'unmannedn too. '' When writing of his "buming desire that they would kiss me with those red Iipsn (51) Harker afso writes that "it is not good to note this down; lest someday it should rneet Mina's eyes and cause her painn (51).

" Arthur has one private moment of emotional display; Mina says he "gave way utteriy and openly" (278); and Van Helsing has his moment of hysterical laughter and tears in the famous King laugh episode (217-9). Even Harker has his moment of tears when he "hid his face in the folds of her [Mina's] dressn (367).

21 There is evidence to suggest that Van Helsing and Dracula are Dopplegangers: both are strong, Eumpean continentais who speak with foreign accents and are older and wiser than the other characters. They bofh recognize the power of the occult and each is pitted against the other. 22 See Talia Schaffer, "'A Wilde Desire Took Me': The Homoe-rotic History of Dracula," English Literary Hisfory 6 1(Summer 1994); 38 1-425. Schaffer reminds us that the line "This man belongs to me" was one of the first lines Stoker wrote for this novel (404).

23 The Tod Browning film version is the only one which approximates the barely latent hornosexual encounter between Harker and Dracula: the sœne fades, in replication of Harker's own consciousness, just as a hovering Lugosi leans forward to penetrate the prostrate and unconscious Harker. In all other versions, even the hint of a homoerotic encounter is completely silenced and suggests that the cinema shaws the same spirit of conservative heterosexualism that was manifested in Planché's The Vampyre in 1820.

24 Stoker may have modeled Mr. SwaIes after the ever-inebriated Mr. McSwiIl in Planché's The Vampyre.

25 Dracula also preys on children. Harker sees the Count go into the countryside in Harker's clothes, canying "the terrible bag which I had seen the wornen take away. There could be no doubt as to his quesr (60). Later that night, when the mother of (yet one more) kidnapped child cornes knocking at Castle Dracula's gate and is tom apart by wolves, Harker says "I could not pity her, for I knew what had become of her child" (61).

26 The scene has been interpreted by Richard Astle as the fulfillment of the Freudian ritual murder of the Father by the sons, in order to gain access to the fernales. See Astle's "Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus and Histow Sub-stance 25(1980): 98-1 05. 27 See George Stade, "Dracula's Women," Parfisan Review 53:2(1986): 200-15. Stade notes that when Dracula makes his first home in England, he chooses the grave of a man who has killed himself to spite his mother (203). Stade hypothesizes fürther that "the grave of this young mother-hater (to whom Stoker has given a number of his own feelings) looks over the harbour" (203). Chapter Four: Narratives of the Twentieth Century lmpossibilify in the Vilification Narrative

Twentieth-century vampire narratives are more resistant to king organized

into the same Iinear and chronological paradigm as their nineteenth-œntury

predecessors. For this reason, chapters Four and Five cover the same time period twice- Chapter Four explores the vilification narrative in the Mentieth century and

Chapter Five explores the sublime narrative in the same period. In the twentieth century viIification and the sublime are cleariy the two main fines of narrative development, and they mutate separately but in juxtaposition with each other. The vifification nanative, which I discuss in this chapter, continues with supernaturalism and the deconstruction of masculinity in Murnau's Nosferatu (1922),and then, by way of Hammer films, evolves into Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1975) with its supernaturalism and deconstruction of the innocence of children.' The heroicization narrative essentially disappears; there is no room in the twentieth century for the one-sided pathos of the vampire as seen in Vamey the Vampire. It seems that the sentimentality of such pathos has becorne maudlin in our time.

In Chapter Five I shall discuss the ernergence of a new structure of impossibiiity that combines supematuralism, heterosexual romance, queerness and semai devianœ, ail within the sublime narrative mode. This new mutation is embryonic in the work of Balderston and Deane (1 927) and Tod Browning (193l), but becurnes fully manifest im Anne Riœ (interview, 1976 and the film version, 1994)

and in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). Furthemore, these

works, especially the latter Wo, offer a hitherto unprecedented opportunity to

scwtinize differenceç between the printed word (the novel andlor the screenplay)

and its visual representation on screen-

The narrative of vilification dominates mudi of the Wentieth century. In the vilification Iine, the vampire continues to be an exotic, predatory, aristocratic male,

but the romance elements of courtship and rnam'age have vanished. These are vampires with no allure or cham; they are repulsive and the details of their phyiogenesis are relatively unimportant. Most importantiy, the psychology of their interiority rernains absent as iit was in the early part of the nineteenth œntury; they rernain objects, not personailities. In this sense, twentieth-century vampires are derivative of Polidori's Ruthvetn, but the narratives have no element of romance.

To understand just horw dominant the vilfication namtive fias becorne, we need only to consider the power of the Harnmer Studios vampire films. The pivotal point in this century for understanding the vilification narrative is the Hammer rnythology and iconography because their work looks backwards to Murnau and his cinematic predecessors,* and foward to Stephen King and beyond. Hammets contribution is impressive in quality and quantity,3 and includes more than a dozen vampire films between 1958 and 1970. The films of director Terence Fisher, screen writer Jimmy Sangster, and actors Christopher Lee (Dracula) and Peter

Cushing (Van Helsing), reached unprecedented populanty. Alain Silver and

James Ursini have commented on the significance of the fact that Hammer films were the first to add color to vampire films; the studio capitalized on the special effect of focusing on "blood-streaked fangs and breasts" (Silver-Ursini 124). The stock-in- trade of Hammer films viliikd the vampire and used explicit sexuality and graphic violence to do so. As Peter Hutchings observes, Hammer vampire films are characterized by "a robust physicality, an insistenœ on the solid and corporeal nature of the conflid between good and eviln (57). This physicality included graphic biting sœnes and the frequent destruction of property on screen.

There are no extensive or sustained gender deconstructions in Hammer films and so they remain conventional and unchallenging, but there are some very radical innovations in Murnau's work- Essentially, the twentieth-century vilification narrative naively afirms a world in which the females are seductively voluptuous and the males are macho. It is true that Hammer studios were the first to bring vampiric lesbian lovers to the screen (Vampire Lovers and Counfess

Dracula), but they seem to have done so more for purely phallocentric erotic purposes rather than for artistic purpose or for any deliberate gender deconstruction. They were also the first to develop Van Helsing into a cultural cliché as a professional vampire hunier.' But it was Murnau who made his wmpetent vampire killer a woman, and this contribution was highly innovative and signihnt for its impact on the work of Hammer studios.

J. Gordon Melton observes that Hammer drew on the style of "a French and

British stage tradition originally developed at the Theatre du Grand Guignol in Paris.

Grand Guignol emphasized the shock value of presenting gruesome and temfying scenes to the audience realistically" (Melton 286). and this phenornenon is rerniniscent of the Schauermmantiks of the late eighteenth œntury who transfonned the whole Gothic tradition by emphasing violence and sexuality. Phyllis Roth comectiy locates Frederich Wilhelrn Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des

Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Hom within the mntext of German expressionisrn as manifest in the Schauerfilme such as Der Goiem (1920) [Roth

"Suddenly Sexual Womenn 31 11. It is here, in the eariy twentieth century that the vilifed vampire gets its introduction into mass culture through a new medium.

The particular narrative and artistic contours of Nosferatu owe their existence to the quirks of copyrQht law in the late 1890Js,and to the litigation with which Bram

Stoker's widow threatened Murnau. Mrs. Stoker was zealous in ensunng that no one use her husband's work without copyright permission, and Murnau's film threatened to do just that. Copyright law in the 1890's covered novels but not any subsequent stage adaptations of the work. Stoker seerns to have anticipated just such a problem because he had been careful to establish his copyright on any dramatic reproductions of Dracula. On the moming of 18 May 1897, he had his own stage adaptation performed one single the at the Lyceurn. The performance was staged but the advertising was minimal, and even so, only on the very rnoming of the production. One can only condude that Stoker did not want audiences to attend the production. This first staging of the play was likely not intended for general public consum ption, but Ït effectvely discouraged unauthorized adaptations, illegal royalties and other kinds of piracy.

Murnau's Nosferatu narrowly avoided oblivion only because a few stray copies were secretly kept after Stoker's widow's successful litigation compelled the film's producen, by court order, to burn al1 copies? These events transpired in the early rnonths of 2929, but since the court orders could not be camed out irnmediately, some copies were surreptitiously saved. Even before the litigation,

Murnau was (rightly) worried about the legalities of using the story and sought to avoid a lawsuit by alterhg Stoker's story line. In that same year (1929) an

Amencan print of the film was screened but was entitled Nosferatu the Vampire.

Also in 1929, an edited version was screened in Europe but was re-titled, The

TwelRh Hour. Count Orlock's name was changed to Nosferatu. In short, there are a number of versions in which the characters have different names. Murnau himself changed the names of the characters, and then, to make matters more complicated, prints of the film manufactured in other countries made further changes to the characters. Several prints of the film used English rather than

Gerrnan subtitles-

Mumau's own changes were quite transparent, and the corresponding

characters in Stoker's work are easily identified: Graf Oflock/OrIof is Count

Dracula, Knock is Renfield. Hutter is Harker, Ellen is ~ina.~Murnau's vampire is

ais0 particularly repulsive physically, with his bald head, bulging eyes and talon-like

hands. No attempt is made to instill pity or to aounteract this repuIsiveness, as there

was, for instance, in Varney. Mumau's Dracula or Orlock has the cold and

unflinching stare of a shark or other such predator. He only has the faintest

resernblanœ to a human king and even walks with a stiffness that makes hirn

surreal, almost phallic.

Mumau's most significant alterations to character and storyline are

centered on modifying the roles of dominant males, including minimizing the role

of the male vampire hunter, the Van Helsing figure. Murnau also devised a new

ending in which Nosferatu is seduced into the lethal sunlight by a woman, not

staked through the heart by a group of men. Murnau disrnantled and

reconfigured Van Helsing's masculine role of protector and re-assigned it to a woman. The deliberateness with which Murnau seems to have attacked conventional masculinity seems to be substantiated further in the notable absence of Quincey from the film. Quincey's American machismo is powerfully expressed in Stoker's novel through his reticence, through the discharge of his

rifle, and through his frequent displays of his large bowie knife. Without either the

Quincey or Van Hefsing figures, there are no macho, protective male figures in

Murnau's narrative.

On the other hand, one might well argue that like Polidori and Rymer, Murnau

is prirnarily concerneci with deconstructing masculinity and if in the process femininity

is also deconstructeci, it is perhaps more by accident than by design. William Luhr

has argued convincingly that Murnau's deconstruction of masculinity reçonates with

Gemany's sense that its own masculinity in the post-Worid War World I was

threatened. All the males in Nosferatu are "weak, ineffective or rnad" and they "are

unifonnly ineffective in either perceiving or in deafing with him [Nosferatu]". For Luhr,

Mumau's particular portraya1 of weak and ineffective males emerges ideoiogically

frorn Gemany's "humiliating defeat in Wodd War 1" and frorn "itsforced disamament

after it" (454)- Thus, for Luhr, Nosferatu is not really focused on strong femininity as

much as it is infatuated with weak masculinity and the "inversion of traditional

sexuaüheroic roles" which "may be seen as ironically commenting upon the whole

notion of male dominance, since the only genuinely powerful and dominating male in the film is Nosferatu" (454). Luhr wants to suggest that Mumau's deconstruction of

masculinity is an attack on machismo in the context of a Germany "where a strong tradition of masculine dominance, rnilitary prowess, and epic heroisrn existsn (454);

but such machisrno muid not be reconciled with military defeat.

The deconstruction of masculinity is further tied to skepticism about the

supernatural, and in this sense, Murnau's Harker is a reincarnation of Polidori's

Aubrey. While en route to Nosferatu's Castle, Harker stays at a local inn. When

he awakens in the morning, the scene dissolves to an outside shot of horses and sheep scattering over the countryside in the early moming light, with local peasants frantically chasing after them and trying to bring them back.

Presumably the animafs have been frightened by the presence of Nosferatu.

Harker laughç at an item in The Book of Vampires that has ominously been left next to his bed. The passage reads: "Men do not always rewgnize the dangers that beasts can often sense at certain times." With his flippant dismissal of written vampiric lore and local peasant superstition, Harker, Iike Polidori's Aubrey, is confidently asserting the impossibiliry of the supernatural. The extent of

Harker's defiance and scorn of peasant superstition also associates him with the fearless narrator of Stoker's Dracula's ~uest.

AI1 of Murnau's men are broken and "incapable of defending either themselves or their society" (Luhr 456), but Harker's particular broken-ness is the punishment he pays for being skeptical about the existence of vampires; his disbelief blinds him to Nosferatu's power. The attacks on Harker, and the images associated with them, are so vivid that they dominate the whole ambiance of the

film. The images of these attacks have in themselves bewme cinematic icons

(See Appendix 6,Figures 9 and 10). One such memorable scene is the swelling shadow that is cast on the wall by Nosferatu as he mounts the stairs to Harker's

room with a slow, methodical step. With each step, his shadow grows larger and larger, suggesting both an increase in varnpiric or predatory powers and tumescence (Appendix C, figures 12 and 13). Like Polidori's The Vampyre, and

Stoker's Dracula, Nosferatu conflates the impossibiiities of supematuralism and deconstructed masculinity, showing that the skeptical Harker is forced into a feminized role white inside Nosferatu's Castle. One of the most poignant images of deconstructed masculinity in the film is that of Harker cowenng in a fetal position, trembling with fear like the cliched image of a damsel in distress and passiveiy waiting while Nosferatu approaches slowly and relentlessly.

Murnau's deconstruction of masculinity is also achieved syrnbolically in the very phallic and tumescent nature of Nosferatu and in the manipulation of height in the camera shots of Nosferatu's castle. Irnmediately after Harker crosses the bridge he looks up from a subordinate position below the cade and this syrnbolic deference also exaggerates the castle's prominenœ and its large tumescence. Height and physical space becorne symbolic expressions of dorninanœ and submission between Nosferatu and Harker. Harker is significantly shorter and less powerful than the Count The power dynamics between the hoare apparent when Nosferatu invites Harker to "chat," and in a se* of physical gestures, Nosferatu walks forward as Harker backs away, al1 of which suggest Harker's yielding of ground Iiterally, psychologically, and perhaps even sexually.

The first attack on Harker happens off wmera; it is intimated, not seen, and resonates with the ambivalence of Stoker's novel in the sense that the sœne intuitively alludes to a hornoerotic encounter, but such an impossibiIdy cannot be visualized. An explicit moment of male-to-male intimacy iç still ideologically forbidden in the script (and in the culture), but its understated presenœ suggests a recognition at sorne remote level of this sexual impssibilify. The abruptness of the non-sequifur after the attack also seems to confim a moment of narrative discornfort. The fadeout of Nosferatu hoverïng over the inert and prostrate Harker is immediately followed by a text-insert that reads: "As the Sun rose, Harker felt himself freed from the oppressions of the night-" These mysterious "oppressions" can never be articulated or explored further, the ambiguity signais that homoerotic physical intimacy with the vampire has been repressed and yet not altogether avoided.

Touching another male, in this instance, is synonymous with touching a wrpse; the intensity of the experience cornes from the fascination it holds and its repulsiveness-

The temifyingly numinous experienœ of homosexuality is present in Murnau only as an intuited impossibility that is silenced as soon as it is raised. Here, Murnau is no different from his predecessors- Although actual physical contact is never shown. the bite marks which are the consequenœ of that contact are quite apparent.

Murnau's Harker becornes aware of the tell-tale marks on his neck in a more explicit way than Stoker's Harker. The bite alludes to the impossible both as sexuai identity and gender mles.

The second attack against Harker is more homfying and explicit than the first, and establishes the dynamics of the dominance-subordination power relationship between Nosferatu and Harker much more clearly. The threat of the impendïng attack is much more obvious here than in the first scene. The actual attack is still very much hidden off camera, and we really only see the fhreat of the attack, then

Mina's reaching out to Harker and then Nosferatu's departure from Harker's room.

Perhaps the repet'ion of the scene is uncanny in the same way that Ryrner's repetitive rape sœnes are uncanny - they allude to anxieties which are inœssantly recalled, examined and re-suppressed, only to be re-called yet again. In this instance, however, the anxieties emerge from the impossibilify of homosexuaf encounters, not heterosexual ones.

One important characteristic in Murnau's film is that while its main focus is to deconstnict rnasculinity, it does manage, perhaps inadvertently, partially to deconstruct the ferninine as well. This partial deconstruction of femininrty is registered in Mina's rnasculinization, both physical and psychologid, and secondarily, through Harker's feminization. Mina is gender-ambiguous, both physically and behaviorally. The opening scene shows Jonathon Cavalius (sic) in a garden gathenng fiowers and bringing them to Mina. The close-up of Mina reveals hands that are unusually large for a woman, and they also appear ruggedly masculine in the tight shot where she strokes the bouquet hich Jonathon has just given her. Her hand size, and its masculine significations could be dismised as a simple accident of anatomy and casting if Ït were not for the conscious carnera effort to draw attention to her hands by zwming in on them. The gender blending of the masculine in the ferninine echoes Stoker's gender deconstruction in his portrayal of

Mina as a woman with "a man's brain" (Stoker 284). In a film where Nosferatu's monstrously long hands play such a significant visual role, Mina's oversized hands associate her more closely with Nosferatu than with Harker. The subtfe implication that she is a Doppelg&ger for Nosferatu further supportç the hypothesis that she has usurped Van Helsing's foie.

Murnau's Mina achieves what Stoker's cannot: the destruction of the vampire through her own choices, abilities, and actions, independent of al1 masculine assistance. She is still conventionally feminine in the sense that her manner of saving the city of Brernen from Nosferatu is through self-sacrifice. The subtitle says:

"Only a woman cm break his fnghtful spell - a woman pure in heart - who will offer her blood freely to Nosferatu and will keep the vampire by her side until aiter the cock has crowed." Although it is perhaps more conventional to portray woman both as savior and temptress. Murnau locates the heroic ftrmly and solely in the self- sacnficing feminine role here. It is Mina's chastity that is potentially sacrificeci to

Nosferatu. Like her blended gender, the meaning of her actions is also ambiguous.

She simultaneously asserts the heroic potential of women, and yet her actions are dependent on patriarchal notions that female worth and redemptive power emerge from a wornan's voluntary annihilation of her will.

Although both women are very strong, there are some-very significant differences between Stoker's Mina and Murnau's Mina. Matthew Brennan associates Mina's self-sacrifice with the heroic because it is a "willed act" (5). and this is certainly a point which the film makes clear. However, it is not only, as

Brennan states, that Mina, in typically selfiess heroic fashion, "seems to gain nothing from the destruction of the vampire" (7). In the tradition of most heroes, she is prepared to place the good of the cornmunity over her own self-preservation if calleci upon to do so. Ironically, however, by sacrificing herself sexually, Murnau's Mina makes the kind of sacrifice that would have horrifted Stoker's Mina. Stoker's Mina is an unwilling victim of Dracula and she assists in his destruction only through hypnosis, suggesting perhaps, that she is çomehow subconsciously compliant with

Dracula's wishes. Murnau's Mina takes the man's role in a womanly way. This gender- blending impossibility has been made possible by virtue of the fact that the males are incapable of assuming the protective role. She defends the city and those who cannot defend themselves (in this case the men), but at the same tirne, she resorts to the conventionally ferninine tactics of deceit, self-sacrifice and sexual sacrifice. She uses her çexualify, the most conventional of ferninine weapons, to assert her power, and these actions leave femininity in the same conventional gender paradigm that has informed vampiric narratives since the early nineteenth

œntury. Robin Wood is correct to point out that Mina's actions really do imply that her ~elf-sa~fice"enlists the woman in the battle for patriaichy, but the nature of the sacrifice is profoundly ambiguous, and the prie of victory is her own destructionn

(Wood 184).

Mina deœives her husband in order to invite Nosferatu into her bedroorn.

Such an action appears adulterous at the same time that it is hemic. Whether it is the supematural world of vampires or the secular worid of men, Murnau's Mina has value because her body has value. The range of her possible actions here is restncted by the vampire's desire for her body. She must be deceitful and so she is heroic, perhaps in the Ulyssean sense of craftiness. This seduction scene significantly reverses Stoker's rendering of 1. In Stoker, Mina is attacked and then forced to suck Dracula's blooâ. In Murnau's rendering, victirn and victimizer are much more voluntarily reciprocal in their participation. This liaison is ostensibly about

mutual adult desire.

In an ending that is reminisœnt of Planches ending to The Vampyre, sunrise bnngs about Nosferatu's death through photosensitivity so that Mina does not even have to touch the dreaded rnonster. This is not death by sbking, but death by out- smarting the vampire. The forbidden and impassible physical contact behnreen Mina and Nosferatu is alluded to but not actually encountered. The same window shot that earlier showed Harker standing in front of it, now shows Nosferatu standing in front of it (in the same position) and the daylight disçofving him. Nosferatu's annihilation in Murnau is quite ethereal and bloodless, and, in wmplianœ with the orthodoxy of conventional gender roles, completely without violence or any symbolic phalfic aggression because his death is brought about by a woman, not by a group of men. Mumau is the first varnpiric myth-maker to use daylight innovatively as the vampire's weakness; yet because death is through dissolution rather than staking, its context also seems to imply that phallic staking and its power, are not the business of women.

Murnau was thus able to introduce some gender deconstruction into the vilification narrative. In the hnrentieth century, the continuation of the tradition of varnpiric vilification begun by Mumau is continued by Stephen King in the novel

Salem's Lot (1979, but King locates issues of gender solidly in orthodoxy just as he situates his narrative in the middle of a very ordinary middle-ciass America. In a

highly insightfbl analysis of her own work vis-a-vis Stephen King's, Anne Riœ

obsewed that King's work represents 'the tn'umph of Protestantism ., . in America .. .

[-fi] affinn[s] the Protestant vision that everything is sort of an interior decision to

make - as you make a good living and as you fit into the commun-@in which you iive

(60)."~She rightly understands King as 'the rnaster of talking about ordinary people

in ordinary situations and then confronthg them with the supernaturai or the homble.

That's Arnerïan and Protestant to take horror and put it in that context" (61-2). On

the other hand, she locates her own work in a different tradition, one that is more

omate and heavily infiuenced by the spectacie and public rituals of Catholicism. She

attributes these qualities to growing up Catholic in New Orelans.

Salem's Lot makes disbelief and the debate about the existence of

supematuralisrn such a pervasive and ovemding theme that afl action is recniited

into the service of undermining that assurnecl confident skepticism in the reader-

King's characters frequently articulate the nanatively anticipated skepticism in the most colloquial, off-hand rnanner. For instance, in a dialogue with Susan, Ben anticipates Susan's skepticism about the existenœ of Barlow the vampire, and says to her. "Let me answer you by saying what you think. You think the Marçten House has buggered rny brain to the point where I'm seeing bats in my own belfry, tu coin a phrasen(219). And a Iittle later, Ben says to hirnself, "If it's al1 true [the existence of malevolent vampires in Salem] then we're in a citadel of disbeiief, where nightmares

are dispatched with Lysol and scalpels and chemotherapy rather than with stakes

and Bibles and wild mountain thyrnen (228).

King's worid is a place where secularization and complaœncy have replaced religion and spirituality, and so the potential for belief in the supematural has diminished considerably. Even the local Catholic priest, Father Callahan, who is

"amazingly conversanr (302) on the subject of the occult, is, by his own admission,

"a bit jaded, a bit cynical, and just lately sufFering a crisis of .. . what? faith? Identi?"

(303). Father Callahan speaks of "a new concept of evil as it rnarched into the twentieth century: evil with a small 'e'. With a devil that was not a red-homed monster complete with spiked tail and cioven hooves, or a serpent crawiing through the garden .. . the devil according to the Gospel According to Freud (sic)" (303).

King spends considerable time and energy tryhg to break down an assumed audience skepticism and the magnitude of his efforts is directly proportional to the degree to which contemporary culture is immersed in the secular and the rational.

Another kind of impossibilify in Salem's Lot is malevolent. vampinc ~hildren.~

Like Le Fanu, King places a child in the enter of the narrative, and iike Le Fanu's

Laura, Mark is tempted by vampires and finds the adult worid around him unreceptive to his anxieties. But unlike Le Fanu's Laura, King's Mark Petrie is alert to supernaturéil presences and is not as easily victimized. Mark Petrie is, paradoxically, an innocent in the world of adults, yet he is set apart from them because his experience and receptiveness to vampires permit him to see what adults cannot. He is reœptive to the impossible as an intimate and integrated component of his daily existence. His rom is filled with Dracula and Frankenstein toys (137). King's portrayal of Dan Petrie suggests that it is these kinds of childish beliefs that really equip humans to deal effectively with supernaturai impossibiI~, and that it is preciçety the rational skepticisrn of adults that makes them vulnerable to attack:

There is no group therapy or psychiatry or communtty social services for the chiid who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely baffle must be fought night af'ter night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood .. - The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart sekure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped toosely in his right hand Iike a child's rattle. Such is the dÏfference between men and boys. (King 242-3)

Failure to look at the world through a believing child's eyes is a fatal error in Salem's

Lof. The kinctionality of the child Mark Petrie is analogous to that of those naive peasant voices of belief in other works, such as the Transyivanian peasants in

Dracula or lanthe and the Greek peasants in Polidori's The Vampyre. They remind us very sirnply, that the supematurally impossible is ahys close at hand if we only know what to look for-

King is also strikingly innovative in his exploration of a new impossibiity in horror - the idea that children cm be sexual, malevolent, and varnpiric. He prefigures Anne Rice's Claudia in this regard. The homfic appearance of Danny

Glick floating outside Mark's window, and tapping on it. and inviting him to corne out to play, vividly captures the paradox of the sublime: the child is fascinating to look at and sirnultaneously repulsive; he looks innocent and evil at once. Danny

Glick was starÎng in at him through the glass, his

skin gravepale, his eyes reddish and feral. Some dark substance was smeared about his lips and chin, and when he saw Mark looking at him, he smiled and showed teeth grown long and hideously iong and sharp. 'Let me in,' the voie whispered, and Mark was not sure if the word had crossed dark air or were only in his rnind. (239)

This image of a child outside a window asking for shelter (212-14) is strikingly new to the vampiric tradition but it is not without its antecedents, perhaps the most noteworthy of which is the appearance of the ghost of Catherine Linton at

Lockwood's window in Chapter III of Emily Bronte's Wuthering ~ei~hts.'

The father of these evil children of Salem is Kurt Barlow, a vilified, slightly exotic, transptanted European who speaks with a "faint accent in the words, although they were perfectly spokenn (144). He wears a three-piece suit, "vest and all" wÏth eyes that are "wide-set" and a hypnotic power such that "there was no way you could look away from them, although it wasn't polite to staren (145).

This vampire kills, but he also re-vitalizes his victirns and empowers the disenfranchised and the alienated. For example, the adulterous Corey Bryant has been humiliated by the irate husband, Reggie Sawyer, who catches him in the act of adultery. Reggie humiliates Corey by placing a gun barre1 in his mouth and pulting the trigger on an empty gun and subsequently, Barlow offers the angry Corey an opportunity for revenge; as he bites him, Barlow says: 'And you shall have your vengeance on those who would fiIl themseives while others want"

(236). Barlow is a vampire who encourages maliciousness in his undead victims.

Such actions are a fantasy of empowement offered to the disempowered but we are never alfowed to like or even be curious about Barlow. He is not the heroic

Iiberator of the oppressed. He is pure evil incarnate and his destruction is welcomed without hesitation-

Like Murnau, King never shows us an actual attack from any objective point of view, but sometimes we expenence the biting expenence vicanously through an omniscient narrator or through the testimonials of victirns who tell their stories. Corey Bryan "sank into a great forgefful river" (236). and young Dr.

Jimmy Cody says "when she was doing it, l Iiked it, Ben. That's the hellish part. 1 actually had an erection. Can you believe it? If you hadn't been here to pull her off, I would have ... would have let hef (270). At other times the immediacy of

the experience is transmuted to an extemal scene: "He [Mike Ryerson] tried to

drag his eyes away from that glittering, frozen stare and was unabie. He

muttered: 'Jesus -' The sun's diminishing arc passed below the horizonn (135). By

articulating the victim's experience of the bite, King pyschologizes the experience

of intimacy during contact with the vampire while still relegating the intenonty of

the vampire's psychology to the unknown.

The power of Salem's Lof's ending lies in the fact that the staking of the

vampire does not mark closure of any kind, except perhaps for Barlow only.

Barlow is staked in his coffin without too much struggle, and he evaporates, dying with "a puff: gas; putrescence, horrid and fleshy; a moldy Iibrary smell, acrid dust; then nothingn (413). The real horror of the ending lies not so much with the staking of the vampire but with the emergence of the "lotn - the other vampires that Barlow has created: Eva, Weasel, Mabe, Grover and rnany others, al1 of whorn emerge at the death of "the Mastef (414). The made-for-television version is especially brilliant in showing a distraught Mark Petrie totally intent on watching

Ben stake Barlow, when in the background, and quite out of focus, we see the hordes of Barlow's vampiric progeny crawling relentlessly toward the unwitting boy. Mark's and Ben's decision to become vampire-hunters is counterbalanced by the terror that "a lot of them couid be killed ... or destroyed ... . But not al1 of themn (427). The open promise of other battles and new terrors seems to invite a re-thinking of the "Complex Diswvery Plot" (onset, discovery, confirmation and confrontation) that Noel Carroll articulates The Philosophy of Honor (Carroll 97 ff), since confrontation only leads to a new, and even more homfic discovery. In

Salem's Lot, the appearance of the new brood of Barlow's offspring implies onset, discovery, confirmation, confrontationldiscovery. This new pattern is not cycl ical but a downward spiral in which each new confrontation seems to lead to an even greater onset.

Although the novel eamed much acclaim, the television special was generally not well received. Michael Collings finds that 'Salem's Lof fails as a film because it bores rather than horrifies. In part, the properties of the film result from the constraints of television [and] other problems stem from production or directorial decisions" (49 - 50). Collings is disrnayed at what he mlls "the sanitizing effect of commercial television" (52) and he may well be right because of the many distortions and omissions that were required to make the television special work. Alain Silver and James Ursini were a Iittle more ambivalent than

Collings, finding the television special somewhat "odd" but also thought-provoking

(Silver-Unini 150). 1 have already suggested that the special has moments of brilliance, and would hasten to suggest that nuances of meaning in print do not lend themselves to a uniform transliteration into nuances of visual meaning.

In the television film version, director Tobe Hooper chose to make

Barlow's physical repulsiveness very much Iike Murnau's Nosferatu: he is taIl and bald with disproportionately long arms and legs, pointed ears, and very long fangs dose together. Barlow's eyes remain white for most of his appearances, beginning with his attack on Ben and Father Callahan. Straker, who is a more deliberately malignant version of Stoker's enf field" keeps refemng in this scene to Barlow as "the master." There is nothing attractive about any of King's vampires; they are al1 hideous and never for a moment are we deceived or allured by their chams. Nor are we particularly invited to feef anything for them or even to be fascinated by them; they are fike vermin - even the children - and there is considerable release, perhaps even pleasure, in their extermination. The special captures this ambiance brilliantly through the physical symbolism of the vampire but it cannot, Iike the Hammer films, portray sexual voluptuousness and graphic violence in a medium which reaches into peoples' homes and to which chiidren generally have unrestricted access.

If Michael Collings is right about 'the sanitizing effect of commercial television" (52), and I think he is, then it seems unlikely that television will ever contribute significantly to the kinds of radical innovations that are the stock-in-trade of the vampinc tradition. Perhaps television is a conservative medium because of

Ïts audience; but the financiaf support of sponsors may also be a factor.

Ironicalty, the treatment of vampires in the TV special, shows how correct King is to have identified the incongniity of associating children with anything vampiric.

One might expect that a cinematic version would be more IikeIy to be innovative in its treatment of impossibilifies but as I shatl demonstrate in Chapter Five, the cinematic medium is also far more conservative than print.

The legacy that vilification narratives passed down to Anne Rice and

Francis Ford Coppola was a physically repulsive vampire with prima1 qualities, driven by overt sexuality and graphic violence, and void of human feeling. Rice and Coppola, in turn, would transform that legacy by romanticking the vampire whi1e still embracing the overt sexuaiity and violence. Their works strive to create a fear of the vampire's evil, but alongside a fascination with this creature's interiority. They also show a vampire that is part human and part abomination.

The trend in the latter part of the twentieth century has also been to background the debate over the existence of supematuralisrn without eliminating it entirely.

The focus shif€s to the psychological and emotional interiority of the vampire with some vilifcation and some heroicization. The current shifi toward romance as a dominant cornponent of the narrative has proved popular and seems to have driven a metaphorhl stake through the heart of the pure vilification narrative. Endnotes for Chapter Four

1 Danny Glick in Stephen King's Salem's Lot and, later in the century, Claudia in Anne Rie's Interview with the Vampire. Hammer Studios may have popularized sexuality and violence in film, but they œrtainly did not invent it. Nosferatu set the standards for Hammer, but there are many vampire films which predate Nosferatu and which, as McNally and Florescu note in In Search of Dracula, have becorne "obscure* (232),but which may have influenced Murnau. McNally's and Florescu's pre-1922 Filmography (232-247) indudes no less than twenty-two vampire films made between 1909 and 1922 Most of these were Arnerican-made, although the French, Italians, Danes and Swedes also made some. McNally and Florescu note that many of these films were "actually about 'vamps' - female flirts who entice or captivate menn (232). Their observation is substantiated by Volume III of the supplernent to the OED which shows that by 1904 the word "vampn meant "to behave seductivetyIn and that by 1911 it meant "a woman who intentionally attracts and exploits men." By 1918, the word seems to have corne into full currency. It is diicult to determine conclusively whether or not Mumau was aware of these new usages but it is also tempting to contemplate the possibility that he was deliberately working to counteract this widely popular obsession with ail things 'vampy."

3 The list of Hammer films includes: The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Brides of Dracula (1960), The Kiss of the Vampire (19621, Dracula, Pkce of Darkness (1 965), Dracula has Risen from the Grave (1 968), Tasfe the Blood of Dracula (1970), Scars of Dracula (1 971) Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (197 1 ) . Countess Dracula (197 1) (based on Elizabeth of Bathory), Vampire Clicus (197 1 ) , Dracula, A, D. (1972) , Captain Kronos (1 972), Vampire Hunter (1972), Twins of Evil (1972) and 7'he Safanic Rites of Dracula (1973). Hammer studios also produced other horror films, including: The Cume of Frankenstein (1957), The Hound of the BaskewilIes (1959), The Curse of the Werewolf (1 960), The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960), and The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964). It would be a distortion to understand Harnmer films as one kind of film only. Nevertheless, there are enough significant similarities between the vampire films to lead critics to draw conclusions about a Hammer aesthetic. 4 For a discussion of Hammer's transformation of the character of Van Helsing, see Peter Hutchings' Hammer and Beyond: The British Homr Film, (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993), 60ff. For an excellent account of the events leading up to, and surrounding the lawsuit and the destruction of the film, see David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula From Novel to Stage to Screen (New York: Norton, l99O).

1 have retained the names used in the Republic Pictures reprint, which for the most part, are Murnau's originals (Le.: Stoker's names). The home video release is Republic Series VHS 3029, lSBN 1-55526-764-5- Dracula's Guest was intended initially as a chapter in Dracula but Stoker deleted it. See Leonard Wolfs The Essential Dracula, Appendix A, pp. 446 ff. In this narrative, Jonathon (sic) looks with pity on the peasant's 'perfect paroxysm of fear" and quips, "'Walpurgis Nacht doesn't concem Englishmen"'. Abandoned by his guide, he proceeds with a 'light heartn until his confrontation with wolves and other rnysterious (super)natural phenornena that leave him "unmanned, [and] shivering with coldn (448-52). 8 The source of this information is Anne Rice's Playboy Interview in March of 1993, V.40(3), 53-64. The document is aiso available at http://www.prirnenet.com/-rsu/anne.html (accessed 5 January, 2000). Since the source is the Intemet, there are no pages. Rice never indicates a source for her ideas, alt hough Victor Sage's Honor Fiction in The Protestant Tradition (London: MacMillan, 1988) does define a clear Protestant tradition in the context of the anti-Catholic sentiment in late eighteenth-century novels which show evil Monks and other members of the Catholic clergy in satanic roles. Matthew LewisJ The Monk is included here. 9 For an interesting discussion on the role of children in King's fiction, see Tony Magistrale. Landscape of Fea~Stephen King's American Gothic (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1988), Chapter 5 ("Stephen King's Terrible Childrenn).

10 Loc'cwood believes the tapping on his window is from a tree branch and puts his knuckles through the glass only to find "the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand. A most melancholy voice sobbed - 'Let me in - let me in!.'" Cf. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Ed., William M. Sake. Jr., (Norton Critical Editions Zndedition, New York: Norton 1 WZ),30. 11 For a detailed cornparison between Brarn Stoker's Dracula and Stephen King's Salem's Lot, see Sharon A. Russell, Stephen King: A Critical Cornpanion, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. 1996 ) 40 ff. Chapter Five: Narratives of the Twentieth Century The Tnumph of Romance

Anne Rice's lntemiew with the Vampk (1976) and Francis Ford Coppola's

Bram Stokeh Dracula (1992) are arguably the rnost influential and well-craffed

vampire narratives of the late twentieth century. They are unique because they

combine the ambiguous sympathies of the sublime nanative and the deconstruction

of gender and sexual pracüce as evidenced in Le Fanu and Stoker, with the

elements of romance, love, courtship, marnage and the family, as found in Planché.

Their twentieth-century predeœssors, John Balderston's and Hamilton Deane's

Dracula: The Vampi~Play in Three Acis (1Wi), and Tod Browning's pioneering

film, Dracula (1931), do not have the same potency nor the same radicalism, but

rather single-mindedly take romance as their centerpiece. Rice's Interview wifh the

Vampire and Coppola's Brâm Stoker's Dracula, on the other hand, are based

predominantly on thepremise of a promised but forbidden love that fails. These

modem vampiric narratives are re-visiting the romance evident in Planché; these are

love stories in the spirit of the star-crossced lovers motif. Human love for vampires, or

vice versa, is forbidden and impossible because of the incompatibility of the species

bamers; yet in the process of bringing these together, gender and sexual practice

are also deconstnicted.

These modem hybrids wntain a phenornenon that Carol Senf has obsenred, namely, that each successive new generation of vampires is "often 200 more human than their predecessorsn (18). Hurnan psychology has increasingly becorne a central element in contemporary vampiric narratives, and wnsequently the narratives center more and more on individual pathology, as well as their predatory activities. The combination of romance and interiority also distinguishes this line frorn the vilification line. If we share more emotional intimacy with Lestat than we do with Vamey it is not necessarily because we feel any more syrnpathy or pathos for Lestat. The complex intricacies of Lestat's or

Louis' psyche are more psychofogically compelling whereas by contrast, the ernotional states of Vamey's psyche evoke compassion more than curiosity.

While intenority is certainly dominant in these narratives, it is also clear, again and again, that the narratives lament the idea of alienation through lost love. Although choreographer Charles Bennett's ballet production is not well known, the romantic sentirnentality undemeath his controversial production certainly is. Bennett's analysis of Stokefs Dracula interprets the Count as "a tragic figuren (Plett 38).' Dracula, says Bennett. is "a deeply romantic figure who has both an appeal and a replient quality. In rny mind he's a tragic figure, and certainly with a side to him that cm be very vicious and self-protective. I feel he's caught, he's captured, he's helpless, he's iookihg for a reiafionship [rny ernphasis] - he just happens to have one small Rad' (Plett 38). Historically, vilification narratives have interpreted that "one small flaw" as an abomination before God and nature.

However, Bennett's sentiments are echoed in many places, such as an interview 201 with Tom Cruise, who, when discussing his role in Neil Jordan's interview with the

Vampire, said that Lestat is "not such a bad guy, he just has viilainous aspects to him -.. from this point of view .. . he's a really tembly Ionely charactef (Slotek 14). In narratives of the sublime, this psychological suffering of the vampire is rningled with the vampire's ruthlesmess and repulsiveness.

AI1 these twentieth-century sublime narratives have minimized the supematural and humanized the vampire. Secondly, film and stage adaptations2 of the Dracula story have fluctuated between extremes of conservatively re- iterated hegernonic gender types, exemplified by the patriarchal Bela Lugosi; and the more radical yet heterosexualized renderings of queemess in the farnily, as in lntemkw Whthe Vampire- Rarely are there instances in which straight and queer paradigms are explored simultaneously, or in which either paradigm is deconstnicted in a way that escapes dyadic pairing and the idea of romantic true love. Instead, there is evidence to suggest that twentieth-century stage and film adaptations of Dracula tend to re-affirm conventional gender by heterosexualizing ali relationships, and favoring the heterosexual and the romantic in favor of the homoerotic. And yet, there is also evidence of increasing dissatisfaction with conventional gender identities, especially machisrno behavior in men and passivity in women, and, sornething quite new, fhese gender concerns are now explicit.

Paradoxically, in spite of al1 this innovative Iiterary activity, there is liffle evidence to suggest that the values and assurnptions of the conventional paradigms of gender have been transcended in any sustainable sense. Even Rice's bi-sexual,

pedophilic vampires are Iooking for pairing relationships and a nuclear family unit.

The twentieth-century ongins of the combination of romance and the supernatural can be found in John Balderston and Hamilton Deane's Dracula: The

Vampii Play in Three Acts- In the first instance, both men were conscious of a need to overcome a fundamental and deeply-rwted skepticisrn in their audiences.

The theatrics of the production were extended beyond the stage performance and into the lobbies of the theaters before and afkr the performance, and this diegetic fracture was new. Nurses in uniform, for example, were placed in highly visible places in the theatre and the "Notes on productionnwhich acmrnpany the play, state cleariy that

A Red Cross nurse can be used in the lobby. This 'çtunt' is good publicity as it sets the rnood of the audience as they were being seated- Unles your audiences are more hardened than the audiences played to in New York and on the road, you will have people fainting in the auditorium for the nurse to take care of, and this is always good press material. (Balderston & Deane 9213

The ploy apparently worked; people fainted regulariy during productions, probably as much from the power of suggestion as from anything temfying on the stages4

Audience skepticism about belief in the supernatural is a phenornenon that seems to expand as vampires becorne an increasingly popular recumng motif in film and theater, and this jaded de-sensitization was a major obstacle that needed to be overwme. 203

The orchestration of consumer sentiment convincingly attacks an assumed

public skepticism about the supematural as part of the adveitising plan. Production

notes accompanying the script acknowledge that We press can be an immense help

in giving publicity to your productions" (106) and provide pre-men press releases

that local theater groups might consider using to promote their particular production.

One suggested adverthment reads: 'Dracula even caused the most hardened of the 'Now show me's' to shudder and shiver in their seatçn (108). EveryViing about the production was aimed ai breaking down audience skepticism, including a

mechanical fiying bat that became the central prop in the play. The notes on

production advise that the use of this 10-12 long bat 'should be as mrefully rehearsed as the play itsel$ (89).

It was in June of 1927 when Balderston agreed to do a New York production of Deane's play; he re-wrote it extensively, paying particular attention to the tenor of discourse and making it more colloquially American, both syntactically and in its ~exis.~This popularking of language was one of the elements that would contribute to the tremendous success of the play, and in tum lead to the Tod Browning film version of Dracula (1931). By October 1927, the

New York version was CO-billedas the ~alderston-~eane~production.

Two rnembers of the London cast, Raymond Huntley (Dracula) and

Bernard Jukes (Renfield) were offered parts in the Broadway version. Jukes accepted. Huntley declined, and a young man named Bela Lugosi was hired in 204 his place. Jukes subsequently became the most popular and long-standing actor to play Renfield, and Lugosi, with his forrnally attired version of Dracula, became synonymous with the famous vampire. The New York version positively transformed Dracula from the monstrous ta the chivalric. It also changed him from the "middle agedn and "malignant" London version to a "sexy continental, with slicked-back patent-leather hair and a weird green cast to his makeup - a

Latin lover from beyond the grave, Valentino gone slightly rancidn (Skal 85).

Here, the eariy film version of Dracula marked a movement away from Murnau's vilification of the vampire, and a retum to Polidori's Lord Ruthven and perhaps even Vamey, who was wel t mannered thoug h physically repulsive. Lugosi's specific looks and authentic European accent undercut the image of the vampire as a bestial predator by making him believably exotic and fearful, and yet also attractive to Arnerican audiences. Lugosi was a sublime Dracula.

These "improvementsn were specifically designed to appeal to a fernale audience - and 'it worked" (Skal 85-6). It was a line of interpretive thought that would later be pursued by Francis Ford Coppola with much sucœss. The combination of vampiric perversions with chivalry and romance had been popular sinœ Planché (1822),and most notably when Rymer used it in Vamey, but never had the vampire ken ascribed such sex appeal. Horace Livenght, the Arnerican publicist of the New York stage production of Dracula, became a millionaire by i 929 because of the play's revenues. Once romance and sex appeal were addd to the 205 vampire's arsenal of weapons, Dracula was completely transformed from the villain of folklore to a romantic fantasy figure, and the iucrative vampire industry crossed a new threshold for profits.

The New York Balderston-Deane play reverses Stoker's roles for Mina and

Lucy, making Lucy the woman who is uitimately spared, not Mina, and thereby inu'rnating that the "New Woman" connotations enveloping Stoker's Mina had not realiy been accepteci by the next generation of mersand audiences. In Balderston-

Deane, Mina is the blmfer lady (52-3) hile Lucy is the woman under attack by

Dracula and in need of rescue by the colledive action of the men. The Balderston-

Deane play does not imagine a worid in which impossibly gender-btended women like Stoker's Mina might be worth saving. In keeping with the conservative nature of vampinc theatrical productions, and probably with local censorship boards as well, this play avoids the homoerotic and queer dissonances intimated in Stoker and

Murnau. In spite of similarities, therefore, not al1 sublime nanatives are created equally. Mile fiction tended to be more radical than theater, it is also true that cinema was more radicaI than made-for-television specials. Both cinema and theater in tum, have tended to be more consewative than the fiction.

The original qualities in Stoker's Mina, especially her masculinized strength, have been eliminated in the i-e-characterization of Mina as Lucy. For instance, the bedroorn sœne in which Cracula sucks Lucy's blood and then fores her to suck his own is now merely a scene that is recounted, not shown. Lucy very tersely says "He 206

scratched open one of his veins. He pressed my rnouth down to it He called it a

mystic sacrament - he made me - he made me drink - I can't, I can't go on" and she

rushes out "hysterically" (66). Lucy is helpless and vulnerable. Significantly, the

play's "notes for productionn make clear that her role is also erotic and ornamentai.

The notes say she "should Wear a long negiigee that is semi-revealingn (91) and she

remains (un)dressed this way until the very end of Act III sœne i (103). She does

little in the play exœpt "register attraction to Draculan (22).After Murnau went to the

trouble of making his vampire hunter a woman, this theatncal portraya1 of both

women is disappointingly retrograde.

The play's dramatis personae are streamlined, showing only eight characters

in total: a maid, Harker, Dr Seward, Van Heising, Renfield, a new character called

Butterworth [an attendant who looks after Renfield], Lucy and Dracula. Lucy is

Seward's daughter in this production and the presenœ of a biologiml father figure

resonates with the protective role of patemity attiwlated earlier in Planché and Le

Fanu. Ironically, once under vampiric attack this Lucy becomes more fngid and les

sexual than her predecessors, so that when Harker kisses her, 'she shudders" (19),

midi prompts him to ask her: "'VVhy do you shrink Men I kiss you? You're so cold,

Lucy, afways so wld noMn (19). Later, Lucy becornes much more sexually

aggressive (%orne to me, my dariing I want youn [63]),but of course, only after she

has made Harker promise not to let her seduœ him. She is therefore, sexually contrary to pairiarchai demands on fernale sexuality, becoming fngid when Harker 207

wants her to be inviting, and inviting when he wants her to remain aloof. Her

independence of spirit is hinted at in the production and then, disappointingly,

abandoned.

The play also modemizes and re-mythologizes Dracula in several ways. For

instance he arrives not by water but by air at Croydon via 'a three-engined Geman

plane" (41) along with "six packing casesn of di& This is the kind of liberty that Andy

Wahol would later take in his BIood for Dracula where the Count travels through

ltaly in an old automobile and searches for Man virgins. Baldenton and Deanes'

play also introduces the now clichéd mimscene in which Van Helsing notices that

Dracula has no presence in the mirror, and Dracula quickly smashes it when Van

Helsing observes that there is no refiection (48).

In spite of al1 these innovations, however, the fact remains that the play does

Iittle beyond what Planché had already done more than one hundred yearç eariier.

Even so, is not a vilification narrative. Van Helsing shows compassion for the dead

Count when he observes a look of peaœ on the staked Count's face, and tenderly

covers the corpse (74). Even Lucy herself, who "cannot face this honor that I am

becorningn (65), asks that when the men destroy Dracula, they do so uwith pity in your hearts, not rage and vengeance. That poor sou1 who has done so much evil

needs our prayen more than any othef (65). Such compassion underwts sentiments of repulsion or loathing for the Count, rnaking the sublime narrative more sophisticated than a mere vilifmition or heroicization narrative. 208

There is certainly nothing of the deconstructive power of Le Fanu, Stoker or

Murnau here, but merely the successful rescue and salvation of a young woman who

othewise would have ken made a very unhappy bride. Dracula says to Van

Heising: "in a century I shall awake. and cal1 my bride to my side from her tomb, rny

Lucy, my Queen. 1 have other brides of old times who await me in their vaults in

Translyvania. But 1 shall set her above them all" (69). Those plans are thwarted, and the passively vulnerable fernale has been happily, and of her own volition. re assigned to the patnarchal control of her father and her fiancée. The ending is a triurnph of patnarchy and conventional gender roles without any critil apparatus to move beyond the sfatusquo.

If the theairical version of Dracula lost much of Stoker's original subtlety. the first "talkie" fard only slightly better. The history of Tod Browning's career as a director might suggest otheMlise because it shows that he was deeply obsessed

the grotesque. Shortly after Dracula, he produced the now classic Freaks

(1932), based on Tom Robins' Spurs. The film's adon are circus freaks who work in a real cirws sideshow. They revenge themselves on a beautiful trapeze artist who fails in her attempt to seduce and poison a sideshow rnidget Before Dracula,

Browning also directed Lon Chaney in a now lost rnovie entitled, London After

Midnight (1927). Only promotional stills remain, but it seerns clear that Browning was interested in bringing the homr of physical repulsion to the screen. Browning's 209

interest in the grotesque links him to the Schauer-mmantiks of the late eighteenth

œntury, and especiafly to Beckford's Vathek and Matthew Lewis' The Monk.

The casting of Mina is cleariy indebted to the sentiment established by

Balderston and Deane, and ferninizes her much more than Stoker's version by elirninating al1 her masculine qualities. In so doing, the work's inforrning gender paradigrn is monolithically conventional. Helen Chandler, who played Mina in that film, said: played one of those bewildered Iittle girls who go around pale, hollow- eyed and anguished, wondering about things" (Skal 126). Any opportunities for deconstructing gender seern to have kenscrupulously avoided, except perhaps for the one notable exception of Dracula's encounter with f-farker, as I shall later dernonstrate. It is ternpting to conclude that the more extensively cornmon the medium, the lesimpossibilify it is capable of sustaining, and the more likely it will be to affirm the sfatus quo. Such a principle might explain why Stoker's novel is innovative and why so many films based on it are so conservaiive-

Browning's production was scheduled to open on Friday 13 February, 1931, at the Roxy theater in New York, but he seems to have had an attack of triskaidekaphobia and changed his mind, opening the play on 12 February instead.

The promotional pidure showed Lugosi leen'ng over an inert woman wÏth "prominent nipplesn (Skal 140) and caused a stir because of itç ambiguity: "no one knew what kind of picture this was ... a horror story? A love story?" (Skal 140). The ambiguity of this combination of eroticisrn and violence was not new; it is readily apparent in 21 O

Fuseli's The Nighfmare (Appendix A Figure 1) and perfiaps even more so in Burne-

Jones's oil painting, The Vampire (Appendix C Figure 15). This amflation, perhaps

even confusion over the erotic and the violent is an essential part of the vampiric

tradition-

Browning's Dracula is located at the nexus of consewativeiy deconstnicted

maçculinity and the supematural. In the opening sœnes where a coach is travelling

through the Carpathian mountains, the film highlights the difierences between the

calrn, rational skepticism of the English tourists, and the irrationality of the focal,

superstitious peasants. Renfield, wtio is also traveling in the coach, is the epitome of

masculine, British reserve; he sitç in the coach stiffiy, and has the air of a man not

easily drawn into the emotional or the superstitiously irrational. However, if not for

specific instructions in the script, it is unclear how a general audience might have

interpreted these meanings at such a subtle level- Browning's intentions about

deconstructing gender are not at al1 obvious visually. The script indicates that one of

the passengers is "a mannish-looking Englishwoman in tweeds" and that her

(fernale) secretary is "a little mouse-like creature with a ppetually womed aif (A-

3).7 The script insists that the English woman have "a mind of her ownn and be

'stoic in her lack of concernn for her safety. She wears a man's attire (vest and tie) and like Renfield, remains unrnoved by the local peasants' womed insistence that ihey keep rnoving so they can amve safely before Walpurgis night. This would be a

most startling and powerful moment of gender deconstruction, except for the fact 21 1 that the woman who represents this kind of impossibilify is a pei-ipheral character and is seen only this once in the film-

Renfield's madness, which is so rnarvelously resistant to analysis in Stoker's novel, is heavily rationalized in Browning; Renfield substitutes for Harker and thereby provides a reason for why Renfield later calls Drawla "Master" (514). Like

Murnau's Harker, Browning's Renfield appears feminized and shows very Iittle machisrno in the presence of Dracula. He reacts nervously and vulnerably after king dropped off at the cmssroads at midnight by an equally nervous local.

Renfield's mol extemal reserve disintegrates into outnght fear a short Mile later when he cranes his head out of Dracula's stagecoach wïndow in order to get the driver's attention and discovers that there is no driver - just a large bat fiying over the horses' heads as they gallop through the pas(A26-A28).

Renfield's subordination to Dracula follows the precedents established by

Murnau's cinematography, and is punctuated by camera angles that highlight the vertical relationships between Renfield and Dracula and Renfield and Castle

Dracula. As Dracula and Renfield speak on the steps of the castle, the carnera shot peerç upwards hmRenfield's perspective into Dracula's face, and as Renfield speaks, the camera shoots downward from Dracula's perspective into Renfield's face8 This vertical expression of dominance and subordination which symbolizes

Renfield's disempowement in the presence of a more powerfuf male, is also carried 21 2

over to the scale of oversized rooms, windows and general frame of the castle, ail of

which dwarf Renfield in size and underscore his helplessness.

Like Murnau's Nosferatu, Browning's film confronts the IinpossibiMy of

homoeroticiçm when Renfield accidentally cuts his finger. The acüon of a male

cutting himseff and another male licking up the blood provocatively irnplieç

circumcision, castration, and ejaculation, and it does so in a way that combines

sexualrty and violence. This scene was first introduced by Murnau and continueci by

Balderston and Deane and then by Browning. In Our own time this particular scene

has becorne conventional, even cfichéd, and appears as recently as Francis Ford

Coppola's Bram Stokefs Dracula. The powerful syrnbolism inherent in the actions

appears to be difficult for most directors to resist, even though it symbolically

expresses the culturally forbidden impossibiIiiy of homoerotic intimacy, and the taboo of intimacy between the living and the dead- Browning's Dracula is cornpelleci at the sight of blood spurting from the finger, almost as if by reflex, to move toward

Renfield with what the script calls a "SMstealthinessn (A-54) followed by a senes of

'penetrating looks" (A-55) beginning at (A-36) and continuing throughout this section.

Al1 the eroticisrn happens without any actual touch or physical contact and therefore the homoerotic is strikingly displaced into the visually syrnbolic.

In the first attack on Renfield, the script calls for the entry of a large bat which strikes him so that he knocks his head against the door and then "collapse[s], unconsciousnbefore the three women, who then attack hirn (A-59). But significantly, 213 in the final pnnt Renfield rnerely gazes out the window, and suddenly and inexplicably stiffens up and collapses, leaving the distinct impression that he has, in a most ferninine fashion, fainted- This partiwlar departure from the script may imply an intention to feminize Renfield and by extension, to deconstruct his masculinity.

The modification also rnakes the attack of the three women arguably more psychological and intemal, more subjective than objective.

In Browning's film, the three wornen in Castle Dracula never physically touch the unconscious Renfield (something that Coppola significantly alters). Here again, even the heteroerotic is sublimated into visual abstraction. The women simply approach him and remain hovering over him as he lies unconscious on the floor, until

Dracula enters the room and, with a sweeping gesture of his am, compels them to retreat, That particular fmzen moment in which the women hover over Renfield alludes to a male rape fantasy that never rnaterializes. Stoker's allusive ÏmpossibiJity of heterosexual eroticism and voyeurism has ken very effectively recreated visually here.

The script also calls for a fade out with the three women hovering over

Renfield, but the final cut shows clearly that it is Dracula, not the women, who hovers over the prostrate Renfield at the fadeout, Thus, the original script calIed for a more clearly heterosexual, though still forbidden erotic enmunter, but the final cut suggests a more explicitiy homosexual component. Al1 of the hornoeroticism inherent in Stoker's dialogueg is absent in Browning, so that the impossibiMy of 214

masculine queemess is encountered and deconstmcted irnplicitly at the level of visual symbolism only and not expiicitly at any verbal level. The impossibility of male queemess is shown, not spoken; 1 is effectively alluded to but not articulateci. Such

understatement does not seem to produce the same compelling tension in Browning as it does in Stoker-

Browning also humanizes the vampire by concealing Dracula's animal nature.

The intimate moment of contact between vampire and victim is not for public spectade, but if it were, we would most certainly see the vampire for the monster that he is. Even though the script actually calls for the 'disclosing [ofl the fang-like teeth" (C-3)at the moment of the bite, the final cut never shows that bestial side of the vampire. Dracula's attack on the flower girl, for instance, is highly stylized and again, implicit. Attacks are syrnbolically alluded to but not show and in this sense,

Browning follows Balderston and Deane whose Lucy only describes her attacker and his actions. In Browning, the beginnings of the attack and its cunsequences are shown but not the actual moment of intimacy; the young flower girl is subsequently found dead by a policeman.

Even moments of adult heterosexual intimacy between male vampire and female victim are silenced in Browning. Browning's Mina strolls confidentiy out into the night air while Van Helsing, Seward, and Harker debate the existence of vampires inside the house (E-72). She ambles into Dracula's waiting amis; her face is about his chest-height, ar;d she nunles into him as he envelops her in his cioak; 21 5 the scene dissolves (E-72) into a library shot (E-73). Both are iülly dothed. The symbolism of male dominance and the sexual intimacy is cfear, and the echo of

Stoker's bedroom scene with Mina and Dracula is alço clear, but a11 of the eroticism of the sexuality and exchange of blood and bodily fiuids has been excised.

Browning's Dracula is not the folklorïc vampire, motivated by survival, hunger, or revenge; othewise he simply would have pounced on whatever food he could safely find. Like Polidori's and Planches vampires, Browning's Dracula seems motivated by a rather ungentlemanly sexual hunger, in this instance for Lucy who, like her counterpart in the Balderston and Deane stage version, appears throughout this scene in a negligée. Dracula approaches the bed, hands threateningly extendeci, and moves toward her neck. The script calls for "his lips [to] part in a wolfish snarl" (D-9). but in the final cut we never see any of these bestial feeding signs, again suggesting that Browning was trying visually, to downplay Dracula's monstrosity without avoiding his threatening qualities.

Mina's blended gender is less apparent in Browning than in Stoker, but stronger than in Balderston and Deane. In Browning's film. Mina is never referred to as having a man's brain, and her only expression of sexual aggression ocwrs in a scene which must have kenirnprovised since it appean in the final print but not in the script. As Mina and Jonathan stand romantically on a balcony gazing at the stars, she makes some offhand comment about the fog. While Harker gazes distractedly upwards Mina leans ever so subtly forward into his neck, suggesting the 216

threat of sexual and a vampiric aggressiveness, but he tums to face her at just the

Hght moment to prevent her intended attack. The attack is aborted when Harker tums and stares into her face. Once that level of mutual intimacy has kenreached, the element of surprise has been taken away from her and she is neutralized. She is

aware of him as prey but he is not aware of her as predator. He is an unwitting victim and he does not see Mina's sexuality because she hides it from him. Thus,

Mina's sexual aggressiveness is still present but certainly not developed in any sustained way as Stoker's Lucy's was.1°

ln Browning's film, women are reluctantly sexual. The physical and erotic aspects of the vampire, so wonderfully vibrant in Stoker's LUC^," are minimized, flattened, edited or ornitted in this film. Even the phallic, violent and erotic staking is backgrounded. Browning's film manages mornentarily to deconstmct gender and sexual orientation, but more often than not, the film is characterked by affirmations of heterosexualized gender stereotypes through romantic love. ft is not the colIective action of males that conques a predator like Dracula, but the iron will of an individual

Iike Van Helsing which tiumphs over the supematural and the perverted. And with al! notions of gender impossibilify vanished, we are left with the impossibiIity of the supernatural, attached primarily to the inferred Ïmpossibilify of gender deconstruction and homoeroticism. The original script mils for an ending very much Iike the

Balderston and Deane stage play where Van Helsing steps forward in an epilogue and addresses the viewer saying "aiter ail, there are such things!" (H-59). However, 217

in the final print, Browning cut that last scene and ended the film with the penultimate

scene in Mich 'Mina and Harker are walking slovdy up towards the top of flight - through the breaks in the walls, the moming sunlight streams - they pas from the

shadows of the dim old staimvay into a broad beam of light and continue up, as we

FADE SLOWLY OUT (sic)" (fi-58). It is dear that Browning wanted to conclude the film by emphasizing the romantic union of the two lovers who were destined to be together and who, in the best tradition of romantic comedy, are meant for each other, then are separated by evil (or mischievous) forces and finally, who through the heroic actions of friends (Van Helsing in this case),are (re)-united.

Like Browning, Anne Rice places romance at the center of the vampiric narrative, but she is also quite consciously re-mythologizing her vampires. especially her male ones, and she is doing so in a way that Browning did not. In her

Piayboy interview she said that she tried to create ail her vampires, but especially her male ones, so that they are neither 'absolutely straight or gay" (60). She indicated that she wanted them to have "a polymorphous sexualitf so that '1 no longer rnatters whether the victim is a man or a womann (60). Nevertheless, it is a remarkable paradox that al1 Rice's queer vampires seem to want to form conventional bourgeois families whose organization and structure are derived from the heterosexual conventionality of mother and f&ther figures, and their gender detemined roles. Louis, for example, becornes a mother figure, Lestat becornes a father figure, and Claudia, the child. I am suggesting here, that as radical as Rice's 21 8

vision may be, what is süll beyond the scope of her vision is a vampire family with

two masculine (or two feminine) parents- Put another way, Rice's deconstruction of

gender transcends the psychology of individualized queemess but nevertheless

remains bound up in heterosexual conventions of genderdefined roles in the family.

She has rnoved far beyond the conventionality of Browning's wot-idview, but at the same time, is still very much tied ta it.

Louis' severanœ from his wife and child (through their death) makes it more ideologically permissi ble for him to have homoerotic contact; he is conveniently

\ detached from traditional heterosexual ties by fate. Lestat's attack on Louis occurs precisely at the moment when a whore is fellating him, and simultaneously at the moment at which he is about to be robbed, perhaps even killed, at knifepoint. The collocation of oral sex and orgasm with the phallic threat from another male, al- symbolically coincides with the vampiric intrusion into Louis' Iife. Lestat's attack on him intemipts a heterosexual encounter and at the last possible moment before climax, substitutes a male surrogate for the female whore so that what began as a heterosexually erotic moment suddenly becomes transformed into a homosexual one. This motif of surrogacy echoes the attack on Harker at Castle ~racula" in

Stoker's Dracula, and the encounter in the cave in Polidori's The Vampyre, both of which begin as an hetero-erotic encounter with females but which conclude as an implicit erotic attack by another man. The attack on Louis is sudden, sexual, explicitly violent and very erotic. In the film version, Lestat simply says "I've [my 219

ernphasisj drained you to the point of death," but in the novel he says "1 am going fo

[my emphasis] drain you now to the very threshold of death, and I want you to be

quier (18). This subtie shift in verb tense, and the issuanœ of the one addÏtiona1

instruction for passivity, reveals that the fictionaI version presents Louis with a choice

before the attack, and the film version, after. In other words, the script shows Louis

in a less consciously cooperative, homoerotic relationship with Lestat, and the novel

seems to suggest a more willingly amscious consent to the homoeroticism in the

attack. The reciprocal sharing of blood is achieved thrûugh the wrist - an unlikeiy

erotic port of entry into the body but also perhaps symbolically suggestive of a

phallus. The mouth-to-wrÏst contact also suggests a more masculine-to-masculine

contact, perhaps even implying a blwd-brother relationship. This is male bonding at

its fuilest.

The homoerotic pleasure in the attack is more explicitly articulated in the

novel than the film in other ways as well. In the novel, Louis notes that "Lestat

whispered to me, his lips moving against my neck. 1 remember that the

movernent of his lips raised the hair al1 over my body, sent a shock of sensation through my body that was not unlike the pleasure of passionn (18). In the novel

he also states that Lestat 'put his right arrn around me and pulled me close to his chest. Never had 1 been this close to him beforen (18). This kind intimacy does not appear in the film; in its place is an orgasrnic experience in which Lestat floats 220 upwards. high into the air, carrying Louis with him. and then suddenly drops him into the Mississippi river - a kind of baptism into new rites of pleasure and Iife.

Riœ clearly set out to deconstruct gender in her works, but most of her foais is directed toward masculinity. For her. Lestat is "a reaf eighteenth-century bisexualn

(Playboy 60). In the novel, Lestat's machismo enjoyment in killing young men is a repeated theme. In Louis' opinion, Lestat is attracted to them "because they represented the greatest Ioss to Lestat, because they stood on the threshold of the maximum possibility of life" (41). The film minimizes this predatory aspect of Lestat's personalrty. although his coldness and unfiinching response to human suffering and death are never altogether absent Lestat feeds. not only to satiate his physical appetite but also for much deeper psychological rewards - what Louis calls "the experienœ of another Hen which re-enacts "again and again the experience of that loss of my own life." This tapping into a life force, is, for Rice's vampires, "the ultimate experiencen (28). The full experience of another life is one of the highest forms of inümacy and it is the pervasiveness and extent of this sympathy that informs the romantic nature of Rice's vampire chronides. LestatJsmasculinity is defined by his compulsive consumption of life and energy, and he prefers the energy of young men to al1 else. In a sense. Lestat has subsumed the ferninine role that patriarchy fears women adopt naturally - the taker of the male life force. Lestat is also gender- blended bemuse of the very aggressive way in which he purçues his compulsions. 221

The familial institution is another major theme for Riœ, and it is at once

radicalized and conventionalized equally in the film and in the novel. Lestat is

conventionally fatheriy, teaching Claudia to hunt and kill, hile Louis is

conventionafly matemal and teaches her that "our eternal life was useless to us if we

did not see beauty around us" (100). Their familial relationship is at the nexus of the trans-gendered, the homoerotic, the trans-species and the incestuous. The

homoerotic relationship between the feminized Louis and the mascuiinized Lestat is

rnediated by Claudia, the woman-child. Louis sees himself as her Merand lover

(102), but laments his alienation from them when he notices that Claudia and Lestat

"would wave to me beneath the window, off to share what they shared: the hunt, the seduction, the kill" (102). Thus, even though the gender identities are queer, the conventional role assignments Winthe basic famity remain intact.

At the enter of this vampinc family are the ambiguities also inherent in

Claudia's vampinc identity. These ambiguities themselves are the impossible: she is both vampire-child and vampire-woman/adult (106), a kind of malevolent, female

Peter Pan figure who never grows up physically, but who is mentally old enough to be an experienced, intelligent, and formidable adversary. Claudia is a kind of chronological impoSSiblity, for 'a woman3s mind ... lived within that small body"

(245). She is a child who kilis adults mthlessly and completely without conscience and in this sense, Rice has extended the idea of child-vampire as implicitly begun in

Le Fanu's Carniilla and continueci later in Stephen King's Salem's Lot Claudia 222 resembles the vampire of folklore more than most fictional vampires. Louis calls her

"my daughter and rny loven(256), wtiich is suggestive of the Pygmalion myth; he falls in love with his creation, and in this sense, his love for her is also a self-love.

Claudia's personality is distinct, but she also symbolizes the woman inside the man and the child inside the adult-

While the novel makes clear Lestai's potential matemal side ("1want a child tonight. I am like a moth ... I want a childn [89]), the film wmpletely avoids this issue of gender and sexual orientation inside a family context, and its effeminophobia scnipuIously avoids ail references to matemity in males, even when the novel makes it obvious that Louis is a rnother figure for Claudia.

Paradoxicaily, the film shows greater toterance of sexual orientation and homoeroticisrn than the novel, but is far less tolerant of gender identity in the context of parenting roles. Louis is both Claudia's parent and her lover. He refers to himself later in the novel as uhopelessly her lover" (104). but since he also created her as a vampire, he is also her parent in this sense. Their relationship is incestuous, pedophilic and heterosexual, but it is also self- containing. Claudia says, "1 am your vampire self more than you are" (1 18), and

"Louis my love, I was rnortal to you; you gave me your immortal kiss; you became rny rnother, my father; that's why I'rn yours forever" (A 18).

The novel is also radical in its portrayai of Lestat as homosexual pedophile.

His near demise is engineered by his vampiric daughter, the crafty Claudia, who offers him 'two srnall boys .... no more than seven years oldn wÎth Yhat perfed

beauty that is of neither sex, but angelicn (134). Lestat is drugged by the large amount of absinthe'j in the boys' blood. The homoeroticism of this scene in the novel is unabashed and overt. Lestat

stroked the [sleeping] boy's moisi hair [and] ... ran his fingers over the rounded lidsn; Mat"slid down off the cushions of the couch to his knees on the floor, his am locked to the boys body, pulling it up close to hirn so that his face was burieci in the boy's neck. His lips move over the neck and over the chest and over the tiny nipple of the chest and then . . . he drew the boy up üght and sank his teeth into his throat . . . his [Lestat's] own back arched and rigid, his body rocking back and forth . . . his long moans rising and falling in time with the slow rocking , until suddenly his whole body tensed, and his hands seerned to grope for some way to push the boy away . . . . He withdrew. His hands pressed the boy dom. He knelt there, his head thrown back, so the wavy blond hair hung loose and disheveled" (135-6).

Lestat's pedophilic homosexuality is also conflated with his vampinc impulses and he is, in this sense, the male version of Le Fanu's Carmilla. The film, however, oompletely omits the erotic and orgasmic nature of this episode, reducing it to

Lestat's simple question to Claudia: 'We forgive each other then?" followed by

Lestat's merely seizing the boy and sucking his neck roughly. The effed in the film is to downplay Lestat's vulnerability and his pedophiliac inclinations, and to render him somewhat more conventionally masculine and more conventionally heterosexual.

The fierce recklessness with which Lestat yields to his impulses shows that he imposes his will on al1 those around hirn without any pangs of conscience. Leçtat 234

advises Louis to "do what it is in your nature to don (88) and yet Louis cannot. Lestat

sees vampires as "da* angels" (88) whose nature is doser to the divine than any

other aeature (89). The vampiric code of behavior urges a deliberate yielding to ail

impulses, regardles of moral implications; its morality is predicated on an authentic

integrity to oneself and one's nature as p~rnary.and to social, religious and political convention as secondary. Mat tenifies Louis is the indestnictibility of Lestat (and

hence the indestructibility all that he represents - ruthlessness, aloofhess, detachment from emotion - in short, the traditionally masculine) for as Louis and

Claudia set sail for Europe, Louis ponders Lestat's "resun-ectionn and his having

"triumphed over death" (165). Louis hirnself is trapped in his varnpiric nature, but also trapped in the blended and queer nature of his own maswlinity and femininity.

Claudia is trapped in her vampirism and in the incongniity of her expert and machisrno Nthlessness inside a little girl's body.

Louis' role in Claudia's Iife is ultirnately assumed by Madeleine, and in a parody of the mariage ritual, Louis asks Madeleine if she ~Ïllcare for Claudia (269).

The reciprocity of attack-surrender, maswlinity-femininity in Madeleine's birth into vampirism is remarkably like Louis' own initiation at the fangs of Lestat; the transformation is defined by symbiosis and by a reciprocal sharing of the roles of intussusception and penetration in which the contact begins with Madeleine as the ferninine receptor - "her mouth openn- (271) and 'her breasts crushed against" him as she ÿveakens" (271). As the roles begin to reverse and she sucks Louis' blood, 225

she becornes stronger, and he the receptor so that her bite 'was cutting me, scoring

me, so 1 cried out" (272). Each takes on the function and role of the other

seamlessly, suggesting a continuum along which bath males and females move.

Louis believes he is unsuited for vampirisrn, even a failure, because of his gendered impossibil. he feels inadequate because of what he himself calls "the great ferninine longing of my mind" (237). He believes he is "incapable of

[masculine] detachment" (236) because "1 thought myself pose& of a passive mindn (237) and "incapable of exerting my own will" (241). Out of this sense of his gender identity difference, emerges his alienation which seems to be most alleviated when in the Company of Armand; it is a proximity which results in "the rarest, most acute alleviation of lonelinessn (237). His alienation for the most part, however, leaves him "lonely" and "totally without hopen (240). Armand affims the social ostracization attached to the impossibdify of gender differenœ when he explains to

Louis "that you are flawed is obvious to them [the Théatre des Vampireq: you fed too much, you think too much" (254). Again, Rice's work is brilliant at deconstructing these gendered impossibilitrés in a way that is unprecedented in the varnpiric tradition. This perhaps is her greatest contribution to the tradition.

If the relationship between Claudia and Louis also suggests the forbidden impossibilify of queer romance, then the relationship between Louis and Armand

(from the Théatre des Vampires) suggests the impossibility of romance and homoeroticism. Armand is the vampire who srniles without moving his lips (230). 226

Like his srnile that is not a smife, he signifies a forbidden hornoerotic love that is intuited but not articulateci in any identifiable way. When first encountering Armand's homoeroticism, Louis experienceç the same phallocentrically conditioned horror, denial, and fascination that Stoker's Harker feels in Cade ~racuia.'~Like Harker's ambiguous relation to Dracula and his three women, LouisJ relation to Armand expresses the same kind of repulsion and attraction, discornfort and pleasure. Louis says: "1 had the urge to reach for him, to shake hirn violently ... and suddenly 1 found him pressed against me, his am around my chest, his lashes so close I could see them matted and gleaming above the incandescent orb of his eye .. . it was delirium.

1 moved to get away from him, and yet I was drawn to hirn and I didnJtmove at al1 ... the moment end& ... 1 drew back, flushed, stunned" (231). This is the first moment in the vampiric tradition in which the homophobia that was so understated in Polidori,

Le Fanu, Stoker, Murnau, Browning is actually explicit.

Although this moment of intimacy and self-identification brings with it a

knowledge of what Louis calls "the infinite procession of my own kindn' (231), the moment is, nevertheless, also tied to the discovery of the homoerotic within the masculine. The referenœ to 'my own kind" muid mean either vampires or men.

Louis observes: "His soft, subtie smiie seerned to draw me close to hirn; his hand over mine ... and 1 felt my body tuming toward himn (291). The intense homoeroticism of this moment is completely removed in the film, again suggesting 227 that cinema tends to be mucb more conventional in its portraya1 of gender, and much more reiuctant to encounter the impossible unless it is tied to heterosexual romance-

A subsequent erotic encounter between Louis and Armand's boy-lover re- ueates the Louis-Lestat-Claudia tiad in such a way that the homoeroticisrn between two males, in this case Armand and Louis, is rnediated by a young boy instead of

Claudia. The young boy is at once sexually aroused as a male and inert. He is enticing. Louis speaks of "'the hot aroma of his ffesh'" (231) and says that he "could feel the hard strength of his sex beneath his clothes pressing against rny leg ... a wretched gasp escaped rny Iips ... 1 sank my teeth into his skin, my body rigid, that hard sex driving against me, and 1 lifted him in a passion off the floor. Wave after wave of his beating heart passed into me as, weightless, I rocked with him, devouring him, his ecstasy, his conscious pleasure" (231). The encounter leaves

Louis ''weak and gasping" (231), but Mat troubles him most is not guilt, but embanassment. The boy "would iive on, comprehending, surviving that intimacf

(232). For many gays who are pnvateiy content with their sexual orientation but terrified at the prospect of public disclosure, that fear of embarrassrnent would be a much more powerkil reaction than guilt. The absence of this sœne and these sentiments frum the film signifies a level of impossibility for which the cinematic medium of film is apparently unprepared.

Completely absent from the fitm, is the trip into the oId worid of continental

Europe and the confrontation with older, European vampires. This omission from 228 the film is significant because that joumey of discovery is a powerful engagement with the real vampire of folklore - the monstrous abomination that feeds on blood, regardless of gender, age, or any other psychologically sophisticated reason. These old world vampires are portrayed in Riœ's nanative as lower-evolved foms of the vampire species - sub-vampires, as it were. The European vampire really is a rnonstrosity, charaderized by a &great,huge shouldef (190) and "a mas of tangled filth that was his haif (191) and 'the stench of fetid breath" (191). They live in close proximity to a human culture which, unlike the North American skeptical one, is far more reœptive to the idea of vampires. Says Louis, "Never in New Orleans had the kill to be disguised. The ravages of fever, plague, crime - these things competed with us always there, and outdid us. But here [in Europe] we had to go to great lengths to make the kill unnoticed. Because these simple people ... believed cornpletely that the dead did walk. They knew our names: vampire, deviln (171).

The cultural relativism here is a reminder that continental Europe, with al1 its peasant superstitions about vampires, is much more reœptive to the impossibÏ1iry of the vampire than industrïalized and rationalized North America.

The novel's referenœ to Arnerican skepticism in contrast to European belief, is aiso Riœ's attempt to deoonstnid what she has elsewhere called "the triumph of

Protestantism" and its seculanzed faith in Yhe les magical, [the] more practical, [and the] more down-to-earth" (Playboy 60). Protestantisrn's vision is one which Rice finds "ultimately .. more sterile" than Catholicism (60). The encounter with those 229 zombie-like vampires of the European countryside is a violent one, repfete with allusions to the notion that this kind of impossibifify is once removed from the audience's skepticisrn about vampires. Here, for the first time in varnpiric fiction, is an encounter with a creature who represents varnpiric impossibility to another vampire.

This moment of confrontation is high in dramatic irony. The episode confiates skepticism about the existence of vampires, a belief in the apotropaics needed to combat them, and the vampires' very own skepticism about the power of these weapons and about belief in the vampires of folklore. Just as the secularity of Arnerican Puritanism killed the Catholic and pagan-based belief in vampires, so too Rice's Arnerican vampires kill their European cousin. The skeptical Morgan (176) resists the very idea of staking his dead and beloved Emily

(he is reminiscent of Stoker's Arthur") and his skepticism blinds him to Claudia's and

Louis' real, vampiric nature. Ironically, however, even Louis, himself a real vampire, pleads with Morgan for the locals not to impale Emily (186). In this diegesis, the vampire is skeptical about the remedy for killing other vampires, but also anxious to kill another vampire.

The killing of the continental vampire is ultimately managed by Claudia, as al1 kills are, because Louis is incapable of completing it. Louis and Claudia are gender- blended in opposing and complernentary ways. He is male, she is female, he is physical adult, she is physiwl child, she is aggressive with a ruthlessness of spirit 230

that enables her to kill without conscience, he is ernpathetic to his victims' suffering

and feels guilty whenever he kills. Louis becornes helpless as a vampire once he

achieves any degree of intirnacy with his victim- By his own admission, he states

that "the Englishman Morgan, because I knew hirn, was as safe from my fatal

embrace as Babette had kenn (199). in the physical confrontation with the

monstrous European vampire, Louis wrestles with hirn and manages to throw "my full weight against himn (1 91) and to pound the vampire's "head over and ovef (1 91)

but ît is Claudia who "knelt on his chest ... scattering the fragments of his skull."

It is Claudia whose hunting and killing instinct most closely resembles

Lestat's, so it is the child who protects the parent, and the female who protects the male. Claudia has a frustrated wish that "I had your [Louis'] size and that you [Louis] had my heart" (186). This "wizard of O? syndrome suggests that each is searchîng for the qualities the other is lacking, but the text wants to argue that the partnership is unsatisfactory because the qualities are mis-açsigned. The natural consequence of the impossibiiity of that gender mismatch, from a hegemonic perspective, is a barren relationship that cannot produce a child, even in the convoluted way that

Louis and Lestat did: "1 [Louis] could not do what Lestat had done with both of us?

Why could I not make another vampire?" (198). Regardless of how radically the text treats these blended gender roles, there is also some consenrative affirmation of conventionality hinted at here in the attribution of sterility to these creatures- 231

The endings of the book and the film differ significantly, and again wnfirm

the constraints of popular film and its preference for the conventionai rather than

the radically impossible. The novel, for instance, shows us an enraged Louis

reacting to the death of Claudia and Madeleine by kicking the decapitated head of

Santiago (314). The film ornits this whole scene and instead shows an angry but

very controiled Louis who stares unflinchingly at the smug Celeste and Santiago

until he (Louis) is gently led away by Armand. The film never shows this

aggressive side of Louis. One cannot help but wonder if this omission implies

that ferninized males are incapable of acts of violence and aggression, or

alternatively, that aggression and anger are inappropriate when collocated with

the feminine. The film's omission of the syrnbolically charged scene in which

Lestat and Louis fight over Claudia's yellow dress is also revealing. The

ambiguity in this scene lies between their cornpetition to win Claudia's love and

the shared fernininity in their personalities.

Anne Rice has made an astounding contribution to the development of the

varnpiric tradition. She has broken new ground with regard to gender, queemess and supematuralism and connected vampiric queerness to psychological identity.

She has re-rnythologized and vivified the vampire, and transformed this nocturnal

predator into a compelling psychologi~âicase study, and made the vampire's

psychology the center of attention. She has given the vampire its own voice; after all, Interview has really imaginatively articulated the vampire's most intimate 232 thoiughts and feelings through his own testimonial narrative. That said, Rice's work is still essentially about male actions in a male world. While it is true that her females are strong and many of her males are sweet. we are still looking at a mabcentered world in Rice's work; it is male actions that dnve the plot and that caulse things to happen. The vampiric tradition has yet to explore the same for the female.

The tendency of lnte~ëwwith the Vampii (film and novel) to emphasize heterosexualized romance at the expense of gender deconstruction, and to foreground familial conventionality at the cost of vilifying the supematural, is a tendency repeated in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stokefs Dracula. Coppola's work wntains the same elements as Rice's but Coppola places forbidden romance as Xhe central impossibilify in the story, together with a modicum of gender deconstruction. Ail other elements are subordinated to this feature and in this way,

Coppola's work is unique.

Coppola and his screenplay writer, James V. Hart, both believed they were bringing what Hart called, "the real Dracula [that] has never been told" to the screen.

Coppola also boldly claimed in his tiüe ("Bram Stokefs Dracula") and subsequently in an interview, that "we were scrupulously true to the book" (Beachy- Matthews 75) .'6

1 am inclined to agree with Beachy's and Matthews' reaction to this daim: "Not. Not, not, mot, not, not" (75). For Beachy-Matthews, the Coppola production is not faithful 233 to Stoker because "the sex in Stoker was rnostly between the lines, not the covers;

Coppola leaves nothing to the imagination" (75).

James V. Hart decided very deliberately 'Yhat women, not men were his marker17 (Beachy-Matthews 75), and with Dracula in the lead role, the emphasis on heterosexual confomity is self-evident The latent homosexuality of Stoker's tex- is backgrounded in favor of a more conventional rendering of gender, although the film does have its moments of gender deconstruction. The Columbia-Tristar home video release18 is subtifled "Love Never Diesf1and the promotional matenal on the back of the cover deciares that this production is a "passionately seductive version of the classic Dracula legend" based on a retum "to the original source of the Dracula myth." It is perhaps with unintentional irony that the promotional material daims at once to be authentic and also to show us "Dracula as you've never seen him."

There is no Menevidence, and only the most tenuous of oral evidence, to support a clairn that Coppola has "returned to the original source of the Dracula mythn as the mver of the video release suggests. The extensive and wnvincing research done by Raymond T. McNally and Radu ~lorescu'~shows that there were a number of pamphlets and books wrïttenroughly contemporaneously with Vlad's life, and these were writien in German, Russian and c ou ma ni an." They estirnated

"no les that fourteen accounts about Dracula have been foundZ1 in locations as diverse as the Public Archives of Strasbourg and the Benedictine Monastery of St

Galln (In Search of Dracula 1O 1-3)? Nowhere is there any detailed infcrmation 234 about Dracula's first wife, or even her name. Coppola's decision to cal1 her Elisabeta is artistic license but it is not part of the myth. McNally and Florescu found that printed versions of the story confimeci that a Romanian member of the Janissary corps had shot an arrow into the castle with a note warning Dracula to escape.

Dracula's wife did commit suicide, but it was 'peasant imagination that reconstnicted the story" (Dracula, a Biography 106) to include a suicide note which said that she would rather have the fish of the Arges river eat her curpse than surrender to the

Turks, so she jumped to her death (Dracula, a BBiogphy 106).

What Florescu and McNally also show convincingly, is that Dracula remamed a few yean later (1 13) and converted under great dures. to Roman ~atholicism.~~

The historical Dracula most likely renounced his faith in order to become a Catholic and remarry; the Coppola version suggests he renounced his faith out of despair at the loss of his true love. My point is not rnerely to state that Coppola misinterprets history. Of greater literary and imaginative significance are the principles on which this historical matter has been imaginatively reconstnicted. The film's utter failure to mention Vlad's second wife intensifies the romantic tragedy of the loss of his Rrst wife. To show Vlad rnarried and living domestically in the city of Pest in 1466, as he really was. (Dracula, a Biography 114-5) would make it very difficult to write a convincing script that showed Dracula as a man driven in life (and death) by the los of his one true love. At the center of Coppola's vision is a loyal and romantic love 235

affiir of tragic proportions akin to Romeo and Juliet's ill-fated and mistimed

communications.

In his defense, it should be pointed out that Coppola wanted, as he put it,

"to try to see the story from Mina's point of view" (A&E), and to reach for a sub-

textual "untold story" which centered on the impact that Dracula couid have on

Mina's life. The quintessence of Coppola's production is the story of love lost,

and found, and then lost again, and herein lies the impossibility. Dracula notices

that Mina bears an uncanny physical resernblance to his fourteenth-century wife,

Elisabeta, and both parts are played by Winona Ryder. Near the cinematic

display at the world trade show, after he has lured Mina off to the side, Dracula

hovers over her, whispenng unintelligibly, although the script tells us he is actually

saying 'You are the love of my lifen in Roumanian. He whispers to her, "you are

she - the one 1 lost. I have crossed oceans of time to find youn (84). Their

meeting is emotional, erotic, mysterious, exotic, and yet restrained; it is both

public and yet pnvate, and dangerous and safe (he is about to attack her but

cannot bring himself to do so). Each is excited by the presence of the other and they must contain thernselves- The encounter is a romantic version of the sublime, combining terror and attraction, fear and pleasure, potential and

Inipossibilify, with a 'knownn stranger; the experience is uncanny.

In a brilliant improvisation, Coppola cast Anthony Hopkins both as Van

Helsing and as the fourteenth-century Greek Orthodox priest, Chesare, who 236

witnesses Vlad's renunciation of Gad and is struck by Vlad. He also dual-casts

Wynona Rider as Elisabeta and Mina. By using the same actors (Ryder, Hopkins

and Oldham) in similar roles for different tintes in history, Coppola achieves a

sympathetic resonance between past and present, suggesting a kind of repetitive

cycle in the unfolding of pre-destined love. in the fourteenth-century segment, it

is Wynona Ryder (Elisabeta) who loves Vlad, and Anthony Hopkins (Chesare) who opposes hirn, and in the nineteenth century it is Winona Ryder (now cast as

Mina) who loves Vlad and Anthony Hopkins (now cast as Van Helsing) who opposes Dracula. The dual casting makes the uncanny a central part of the film's power and offers an important rationakation for why characters who faIl in love seem to have what has been colloquially termed, a "natural chemistry."

Consistent with the romantic obsession of the film, Mina is seduced by

Dracula, not in the bedroom as Stoker would have it, but in a dining room, with a glass of Absinthe (The Green fairy") at a private dinner and dance." Their intimacy is steeped in a shared sadness over the loss of Elisabeta and in the absence of Harker, whose escape from castfe Dracula is spliced in as a sen'es of cuts between their dancing. Mina's sense of déjà vu is evident when Dracula movingly observes that her description of his homeland is as though she has

"seen it fi& handn (97). Says Mina, "It is your voice, perhaps. It is so .-.familiar

... Iike a voice in a dream 1 cannot place-" It is this mystical, intuited affinity for each other that characterizes the romantic nature of their attachment. The 237 attraction is no longer about hypnosis, seduction or malevolent spells, but about their mutual sense that they have always known each other. Theirs is an expen'ence that is mutualiy uncanny in a very explicit way, and this occurrence is unprecedented in vampinc narratives. When Dracula firçt sees Harker's picture of Mina, he gazes at it and quips: "Do you believe in destiny? That even the powers of time can be altered for a single purpose - The luckiest man who walks on this eafth is the one who finds - tme loven (41, 44). Waltzing arnidst hundreds of candles, the embrace and the kiss between Mina and Dracula are mutual and voluntary, and it is eroticism with tendemess and intimacy, not the bloody forced enwunter that we see in Stoker's Dracula where "The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink" (337). Coppola has significantly diminished Dracula's savagery.

The sexual encounter between Dracula and Mina is the nexus of at least two kinds of impossibiIiw inter-species coitus (vampire-human) and the infidelity of a mamed Victorian Englishwoman to a European foreigner. Their encounter is a sublime passion out of control, a reluctant excitement which itself has the paradoxical nature of something attractive and horrifying. When she realizes that

Dracula has no life within him, Mina 'shrinks back in revulsionn (134) and yet still vows that "you are my love - and my lifen(?34). Stoker's Mina is always repulsed by Dracula: she sees herself as "uncleann (339). Coppola's Mina is more attracted than repulsed and sees no uncleanness in the attraction, This is how 238

the sublime expenence works. Coppola's Mina even says that she 'wanted this to happenn (133) - a desire which is never articulated in Stoker. Even when

Dracula himself challenges her, saying, 'you cannot know what you are sayingn

(133), she replies "Yes ... I do know" (133). In a scene not contained in the screenplay but added to the final cut of the film, Mina realizes Dracula has murdered Lucy and she confronts him, striking him repeatedly and sobbing until he seizes her hands and she says, "1 love you" (134). That moment of anguish strongly suggests that Mina rarely doubts her love for Dracula.

Coppola transfomis Stokefs rape of Mina, into a romantically-set marriage ceremony. The screenplay indicates Dracula should be "holding her gently in his hands, as in a vampire wedding (134) [my emphasis] and he says "1 take you as rny etemal briden (135). Nowhere in Stokefs work does Dracula ever use the word bride- The word does occur three times in the novel, but is uttered twice by

Renfield (133) and once by Van Helsing (219). Coppola's Dracula, reminiscent of a guilt-ridden Vamey, changes his mind at the last moment about attacking her, and with eyes full of tears, says: '1 cannot let this ben (135). Coppola's Mina is fully cunscious when she accepts the exchange: "Please - I don? care - make me yoursn (135). The reciprocity of desire necessarily undercuts, if it does not eliminate, the sublimity inherent in Stoker's rendering of the scene. Nevertheless, the scene is elegantly done in Coppola, showing nicely, that once Dracula has opened up his chest and invited Mina to suck his blood, he becomes more 239 uncertain, more hesitant, just as Mina becomes more aggressive and self- assertive. Each becomes the other.

The film's rendering of Dracula's physicality shows the vampire, initially at least, as monstrous, then he is gradually anthropomorphized, and finally, vilified again. This particular cyclical sequencing also makes the vampire both repulsive and attractive, thus making our experience of him, sublime. This larger pattern traces the contours of the story's romance, beginning with what is repulsive, then transfoming into a love story, and rnutating again to a vilifcation narrative in which Dracula is staked. Dracula is ultirnately enraged and provoked into a return to a repulsive vampire because of Mina's note to him indicating that she has gone back to her fiancée; "1 will never see you again" (105) she wntes, and his lover's jealousy and hurt transforrn him into a hideous monster. There is no primordia l feeding urge here, just the anger of a lover rejected. The reconciliation of the twro more conventional lovers, Jonathan and Mina, is orchestrated as a series of cuts between their two separate but parallel struggles; each partner encounters an ideologically forbidden sexual impossibilify and after briefly succumbiing to ternptation, repents and seeks the solace of the more appropriate partner. Jonathan encounters the whorish women of Castle Dracula and then escapes to the protection of the "good sisters of the blessed sacrament" convent

(1 OO), Mina fiirts at a romantic dinner Dracula and then returns to Jonathan. 240

Mina's relationship with Dracula becomes more and more rornantically seductive until she discovers that Jonathan is alive and "in a convent in

Roumania, suffering from a violent brain fever" (102). Her decision to go to him tnggers Dracula's devolution into bestiality, as shown in the quick cuis back and forth between Mina's and Jonathan's wedding ceremony and his physical and moral degeneration into the bestial. Dracula's assault on her friend Lucy, condernns her "'to a living death'" (1 12), but this bestial side of Dracula is never too far from the surface. When the men enter Carfax, we see Dracula hanging upside down from the ceiling, looking like the creature in al1 those paintings of

The Njghtmare and afso resembling a bat (130) (see Appendices 6 and C). This particular bat also bears a resemblance to Murnau's Nosferatu.

ln his early appearances in the film, Dracula is oddly repulsive, with red eyes and lips, thick, wrinkled, blanched skin, and a curious coiffure showing, as

Hart suggests, 'a haunting asexuality' (38). Stoker's Dracula is "a ta11 old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywheren (Stoker 22), and nothing is mentioned of his (a)sexuality at all. Coppola's Dracula's asexuality was the conscious design of Eiko Ishioka, the film's costume designer. She was apparently trying to emphasize the androgynous quality in his character (Hart 38)

(see also Appendix C, Figure 14). Ishioka wrote that for her, "the costumes are the setn (Coppola-lshioka 24). She said that "the basic wlor scheme for Dracula 24 1

is red, white, black, and goldn and that "every costume is designed to cause a fresh sensation each time Dracula appears on-screenn (Coppola-lshioka 33). '1 wanted to give Dracula an infinite vartety of personalitiesn she writes, so that his true self is not easily revealed, remaining a mystery to the audience. Is he a man or a beast? a devil or an angel? handsome or ugly? male or female? He is constantly changing, in a different mood every time, like a kaleidoswpen (41).

This gender deconstruction does not quite have the power that Anne Rice's does, but the impulse does, nevertheless, produce a sublime effect.

The mystery surrounding Dracula is also symbolized in ways other than gender ambiguity, in particuiar around the obscurity of the coach driver. As

Harker is about to step on to the coach, the driver offers an extended hand whose reach is exaggerated and whose appearanœ is sinister. The gesture was initiated by Murnau and conventionally quoted and understood in most subsequent films to be Dracula himself. Dracula's hands resernble the claw-like hands of Murnau's Nosferatu (see Appendix C, Figure 12). The menace of the claw-like hands appears again in Castle Dracula, and the Count's shadow approaches Harker with hands outstretched, even though his physical body shows no such threat. Coppola's iwnography owes a great debt to Murnau's.

Coppola has obviously studied Murnau closely, and has used the motif of shadows extensively to suggest Dracula's power and his envy when he leams that Harker is engaged to Mina (44). By detaching Dracula's bodily actions from 242

the projection of his shadow on the wall, Coppola detaches effect from its cause,

and in so doing is able to convey a sense of epistemological dualism. The

dissonance of this physical impossibiiity is chilling.

Notwithstanding these brilliant cinematic effects, the hpossibility of

vampiric supematuralisrn is subordinated to issues of love and sexuality in

Coppola's production. The hornoerotic attraction between Dracula and Harker is

intimated through syrnbolism, not dramatized. When Harker cuts himself shaving with a straightedge razor, Dracula takes the razor and, unknown to Harker, licks the blood from it, shuddefing erotically as he surreptitiously hides his excitement.

This is a phallically-driven eroticism of which Dracula - and the audience - are aware, but Harker is not. The film is much more cornfortable dramatizing a phallocentric fantasy of a single man having sex with multiple female partners sirnultaneously. This heteroerotic encounter in Castle Dracula is arguably the most intense and graphic version on film to date, beginning with Harkefs auditory expenence of an aroused woman calling his name and then showing the first of the three women rise up from the bec! between his legs. They begin by licking and biting him, drawing blood in smali quantities, undoing his trousers, and then disappearing immediately after one bites him off camera and below his belt, causing him to scream. Coppola's visualization here is brilliant, suggesting at once that the moment of Harker's most intense sexual pleasure is also the moment at which he expenences the most intense castration anxiety and physical 243 pain. This moment is also juxtaposed with a last minute coital surrogate in the appearance of Dracula, who also enters precisely at the moment of greatest intensity. The essence of this scene, which really is the substitution of a male vampire for a female at precisely the point of orgasrn, is highly reminiscent of

Stoker's version and of Rice's treatment of Lestat's attack on Louis just as a whore is fellating him.

In Coppola's production, Dracula enten and interrupts the erotic play with his angry invocation "How dare you touch him! When 1 have forbidden it - This man belongs to men (57). The impact of these words spoken in Roumanian with

English titles on the screen, is a chilling and brilliant innovation. It creates an additional layer of dramatic irony in which Harker does not comprehend what

Dracula is saying to hirn but the audience does. The foreignness of the language, and Harker's inability to understand Dracula's meaning beyond only the faintest intuition of what the paraverbals imply, makes the subconscious power of the homoerotic even more intense; it is felt, not understood, intimated, not seen.

The final moments of this scene show Harker screaming in terror and Dracula laughing quietly. It is Harker's loss of control that marks him as defeated, and as reluctantly cornpliant to Dracula's urges.

Coppola seems to have addressed the three most likely combinations of human sexuality: the heteroerotic, the male homoerotic and the female homoerotic. It is dificult to read anything in Stoker's text that might indicate, or 244 even intimate, that lesbian homoeroticism between Lucy and Mina is present, even as the faintest of sub-te&. This newly added erotic cornponent seems to have emerged entirely from Hart's and Coppola's imagination. The scene shows

Lucy and Mina ninning through the rain in the labyrinth of the garden. It is a scene that evokes ideas of lost innocence and disorientation, Their kiss takes place under the superimposed image of Dracula's face against the sky and against the sound track of his laughter (66). The subsequent coital scene between an ape-like Dracula and a sensually unselfconscious Lucy, takes place in the same garden at Hillingham. Mina's frantic search for Lucy in the garden leads her to an embarrassing moment of recognition, both for her and Dracula because she accidentally discovers Dracula's raw, unbridled sexuality in its animalistic fom. This discovery is also embarrassing for Dracula because the woman he loves (Mina) discovers him in this animal form and with another woman. His wmmand to her, 'No ... do not see men (71), also suggests his embarrassrnent and his desire to conceal his sinister self from her. The whole garden sequence manages to invoke the power, the horror, and the eroticism associated with Dracula's rape of Lucy (or Mina in Stoker's case), but the un- welcomed attack is directed against Lucy, not against the object of his affections.

It is Dracula's love for Mina that holds the impossibility of recasting bestial desire into affectionate, tender romance. 245

Coppola seems to have worked consciously to use Mina's new-found sexuality at the end of the film to make her attack on Van Helsing a very powerful one that echoes Dracula's atiacks on Harker at the beginning of the film, but that recasts them frorn the homoerotic to the heteroerotic. In the homoerotic wntext,

Dracula says, mile hovering over Harker, "1 too can love." In the recast heteroerotic context, afier exposing her breasts to Van Helsing, Mina says "1 too know what men desire" (152) (see appendix C, Figure 16). Coppola wants to show Mina as sexually aggressive; the script calls for the revealing of her

'newbom fangs erect in titillationn(l52). In the film, Van Helsing sucks on Mina's breast just as she did on Dracula's and although this is a re-assertion of heterosexual eroticism it is not conflated with the assertion of the machismo that is so prominent in Stoker.

Dracula's death scene takes place in the same chape1 in which the fiim began. The death scene goes beyond his heroicization, and deifies him. In a significant departure from Stoker, Coppola's dying Dracula profanely echoes the rnartyred Christ's dying words of despair on the cross when he says "where is My

God? He forsakes men and "It is finished" (163). But when Mina "speaks intimately in Rournaniann (163) to Dracula, the power of their affinity is reinforced in a way never present in Stoker, and certainly never present even in the film's rendering of her relationship with her husband-to-be, Jonathan Harker. ln response to Dracula's request to 'give me peace," she stakes him and then 246 decapitates him (163). Mina becornes the vampire slayer, the bearer of the

phallus and then she tums to embrace Harker. The impossibi'ity of a woman bearing the phallus has been explored, acted out. and rejected. She returns to her conventional relationship where there is less romantic intensity, and where queerly erotic impossibilities have been rejected by her and husband-to-be.

Coppola's film, Iike so many other vampiric narratives, such as Le Fanu's

Carmilla, confronts the impossible, explores it and then reluctantly abandons it in favor of wnventionality.

Our own contemporary period has transformed the vampire yet again. The vampire is now a ruggedly-cast individual with a history (biography) and a fully- developed interiority that shows a restless, alienated creature in a dependent relationship with humans. The vampire has become a psychological study Iike

Varney, but unlike Varney, the modem vampire has become a guiltless killer, a polysexual animal and an intricately compiex psychological study. The return to romance has not necessarily meant a retum to courtship and marnage as articulated by Planché, but it has meant a re-visitaiion of couple-love in some forrn, whether it be heterosexual, homoerotic or adult-child- This couple-love continues to be the emotional center of narration and that high status should corne as no surprise; we are living in an age when even the sinking of the Titanic must be recast as a heterosexual coupIe-love stoty. It is predictable that literary narratives are more apt to engage radical themes and issues than cinematic 247 narratives. Literary varnpiric narratives are not immune from the pervasive influence of couple-love but they are more Iikely to re-cast romance with adult thernes. Endnotes for Chapter Five

1 Charles Bennett is choreographer and associate director of the California Ballet Company. See Nicole Piett, Nosferatutu [sic]. (Dance Magazine (Octo ber) 1993 v.67), 38.

The focus of this thesis is fiction and film. The only two drarnatic works discussed (Planché and Balderston-Deane) have been included because their influence has permeated other non-theatricai genres.

All future references to this play corne from Hamilton Deane and John L. Baldersion, Dracula: The Vampire Play in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1927, rpt., 1960). * In The Man Who Wmte Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. (New York: St Martins, 1976), Daniel Fanon daims that one night as many as twenty-nine people fainted during one of these infamous productions of Dracula (165).

BalderstonJsmotives for the rewrite were at least as much driven by money as by artistic integrity; he wrote to Deane saying that without the rewrites, he would have "no [royaltyl rights whatsoevef' (Skal 81).

The London version ended in January of 1928, sa there was a few months overlap when both productions ran simultaneously.

Ali references to the film corne from Tod Browning, Garrett Fort, Dracula: From the Book "Draculanby Bram Stokerr Adaptation and Dialogue by Tod Browning and Garrett Fort. Continuity by Dudley Murphy. E. M. Aher, Associate Producer. 4m draft (Final) Universal City, California: Universal Pictures Corporation, 1930 (screenplay).

8 The screenplay indicates that the camera "swoops to a large CU [Crane Shot] and he pauses looking down at Renfield" (A-34); and further that Renfield is to be shot "as seen from Dracula's point of view" (A-35). The script also calls always for the camera to be shooting "up" to Dracula (A-40), and 'downn to Renfield (A- 39).

'You never loved" and "this man belongs to me" (Stoker 53).

'O In Coppola's version, however, the attack is on Van Helsing and it is very explicit. Van Helsing nuzzles his face into Mina's breasts (see Appendk Cl Figure 16) in a sœne that echoes Mina nuzzling into Dracula's chest Both Browning and Coppola explore female sexual aggression, but these impulses are hardly radical; in fact, they barely go beyond the most basic of phallocentnc fantasies. In Browning, these fantasies are only alluded to, whereas in Coppola they are explicit. Coppola's script disfor Mina to approach Van Helsing with her 'robe ... open, exposing her nipplen (1521, although that scrïptedscene never rnaterÏalized. Instead. Coppola made the scene more suggestive; Mina approaches Van Helsing echoing Lucy's eariier line: "1 too know what men want,"

11 See Chapter 5 when Lucy says, 'Why can't they let a girl marry three men. or as many as want her" (78).

l2Harker is intempted preakely at the moment at which Harker says he could 'fee1 the soft shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat. and the hard dents of two sharp teeth [were] just touching and pausing there" (Stoker 52).

l3 Francis Ford Coppola seems to have improvised on this theme established by Anne Rice. Coppola reasoned that "Absinthe was sort of the LSD of the Victorian era" (96)- He used it Iiterally and symbolically as an extensive metaphor for Dracula's seduction of Mina in the "Spell of the Green fairy" scene (95 ff).

14 Harker is repulsed: 'I shuddered as 1 bent over to touch him, and every sense of me revolted at the contact" (67),and then the denial immediately after the contact: "Then the horror overcarne me and 1 sank down into unconsciousnessn (53)- 15 When Van Helsing suggests that Lucy be staked, Arthur responds, "choked by indignationn and denies his permission on the grounds that it would be 'a desecration of the graven (251 ). l6 Most of the Beachy-Mathews rnaterîal is excerpted (unacknowledged) from the A&E Biography of Dracula, produced in October, 1994, by R- M. Associates, a subsidiary of L. W. T. (London Weekend Television Productions).

17 Hart apparentiy overheard a woman Say that she would rather spend one night with Dracula than the rest of her life with fier husband alive (Beachy-Matthews 75). 18 This release was issued in 1993, and is catalogued as Tristat series number (51413). l9The first work they completed was In Search of Dracula (1972) followed immediately by Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the lmpaler (1973). 20 See Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula, New York: Wamer Paperback Library Edition, 1973, rpt., 1974, Chapter 5 et passim.

2' McNally and Florescu observe that Dracula's Iife and death coincide with the invention and use of 'the new mobile metal type that made printing on a large sale possible. By 1465 this new type of printing has reached Italy, and within five years (1470), France- Caxton's press in England opened in 1477, the year after Dracula died. In 1480 the first Dracula news-sheet was circulating in the Germanic worid in the vernacular, VVithin two decades thirteen editions of the first version of the Dracula horror story were pnnted ... and [were] perhaps the first best-sellers in history" (McNally and Florescu, Dracula, A Biography 8)-

22 McNally and Florescu based their reconstmction of Dracula's life on Manuscript No. 806 at the Monastery Library of St. Gall Switzerland, (Search, 185), on MS 11/i 088 in the Kinllov-Belozerçky Monastery Collection at the SaItykovSchredin Public Library in Leningrad (Search 192)' and on some local folktales.

23 McNally and Florescu render the Russian version of the story as "he abandoned Our Orthodox faith and received the Catholic religionn (Dracula, a Biography 11 4).

24 Coppola and Hart imagined a restaurant inhabited by artists; the liqueur of seduction would be Absinthe. Conclusion:

The modem vampire story has inherited a nch legacy of Iiterary practices, sensibilities and conventions, most of which can be traced back to the romanticism of the late eighteenth century or to the eariiesi expressions of vampitisrn in English Iiterary practice in the nineteenth century. The historical moment that marks the entry point of the vampiric tradition into English Iiterary consciousness coïncides with the collision of the superstition and spiritualism of

European folkloric cultures, and British industrial culture with its penchant for scientific rationalism. The dissonance and incompatibility behnreen these two cultures provided fertile ground for vampiric explorations of the impossible. Th us, the vampiric tale is the site where gender can be both deconstnicted and re- affirmeci, where death and eroticism are tantaiizingly conflated, and where the disturbing impossibilifrés of worlds beyond our own can be imagined, explored and laid to rest.

Since their ernergence into the English Iiterary tradition, Vampire narratives have continuously reconstituted the impossible by recombining thernes of queerness, supematuralism, and romance in multiple permutations and combinations Innovation has been made especially complex by the interplay of these combinations with the various narrative modes that altemated between vilification and valorization of the vampire, and the hybrid combination of thern 252 both, the sublime narrative. Historically, the vilification line is ernbedded in the

very origins of the tradition; it is present in Polidori (1819), Planché (1820),

Murnau (1922), and King (1975). The valorkation narrative appears most

predominantly in Rymer (1847), but its legacy does extend to Rice and Coppola.

The sublime narrative, on the other hand, is a late nineteenth-century

development, emerging for the first time with Le Fanu (1872) and Stoker (1897)

and extending into Coppola's and Rice's work The combination of supematuraf

and romantic impossibility begins wïth Polidori (181 9) and Planché (1820), and

continues through Rymer (1 847), Balderston and Deane (1927), Browning (2 SM),

Rice (1975) and Coppola (1993). The combination of supernatural and queer

impossibility begins with Polidori, Rymer, Le Fanu, and Stoker, and connects

these writers to Murnau (1922), and Rice The combination of queer and

romantic IinpossibiIity begins in Polidori and extends to Murnau, Rice and

Coppola.

Obviously, there is no single line of development if we consider the tradition

chronologically. Rather, the tradition has evolved sporadically and in several

different directions at several different levels, beginning with viltfying the supematural

and romance in Polidori & Planché, then shifting to the valorized, romantic supematuralism of Rymer, and then shilling to the sublime, queer supematuralism of

Le Fanu and Stoker. The twentieth œntury began with Murnau's use of romance alongside a continuation of Polidon's vilfication of the supematural, but the thread 253 does not really ernerge again in that form with the (admittedly notable) exception of

Stephen King. The combination of supematural and romantic imposçibility emerges

fully in the work of Rie and Coppola, and the tradition seems to be continuing to

evolve in this diredon for the time being, although these writers have also managed

to challenge gender orthodoxy in the proceçs-

The vampirk tale at once challenges our cornfortable sense of what is tnie

while simultaneously assuring us that we can be cornfortable with the basic

secularized and gender beliefs of our world. Paradoxicaily, in spite of its

iconoclasrn, the vampiric tradition has vigorously reaffimied, through the persistenœ

of conventional romance, that love, courtship, mamage and couple-hood are

perennially the most campelling aspects of human life. This nucleus of romance

remains constant even when the individuals involved, such as Anne Rice's

charaders, are queer. The iconodasm of queemess and supematuralisrn almost

inevitably seems to give way to the clichés of romance, even men the most

unorthodox challenges have been issued, and this relapsing into the conventional is

what remains disappointing in the tradition.

The stereotypical gender roles in Planche and Rice illustrate this point, but

these are not neœssanly a negative judgment of their work. As Walter Kendrick

astutely observes, the tradition itself is really based on the very volatile balancing of two mutually untenable opposites: "The deverest horror films [we may say, vampiric

narratives] rnay offer political commentary, even social criticism, thereby winning the 254 approval of those who would otherwise never glance at a horror movie. But such things are extras; they're far from neœsary, and they çornetimes threaten to impede horror's fundamental errand - to assure the viewer that his flesh wi-Il ahivays remain firm and intact, that for al1 this display of rot and carnage, there is nothing to fear" (a).The findings of this study concur wÏth Kendrick's underlying point, narnely, that in spite of many moments of radical deconstruction of the conventional, the vampiric tradition is, in the main, a conservative affirmation of the sfatus quo. I remain unconvinced that the obsession with romance is a good thing, or something that is conducive to critical thinking about our culture. As a culture, we have lost the ability to tell an epic story without transfoming it into romance; recent accdades for the film The Titanic seem to wnfirm this hypothesis. Disasters of great magnitude, or tales of the extraordinary like Coppola's Dracula, are really epic narratives that have been squeezed (and trivialized) into love stones.

WNiin the tradition itself, a medium like prïnt seems more likely to be iconoclastie than theatncal and cinematic performances which, in tum, seem more likely to succurnb to mnventionality. Reading is a private act that demands active visualization and perrnits a relatively safe iconoclasm as long as consumption remains a private activity. Cinema and theater, on the other hand, are publidy shared spectacles visualized for us. Radical assauits on Our cornfortable sense of what is impossible are perhaps psychologically safer in public than in private, but the public sphere is also more susceptible to scnrtiny from œnsorship boards and other 255 hostile opinions. The vampiric tradition has never sinœ achieved the public potency of the vampire hysteria of eighteenth-century continental Europe, but the larger hormr tradition has approximated this phenornenon, as evidenced in Warren Blatty's

The Exotciist, which sent many people off to their psychiatrists because they feared that they were demonically posçessed'.

There has always been a strong afinity between the popular and the varnpirïc as expressed in fiction, theater, and film. The connection was evident from the very beginning, with Planché's stage adaptation of Polidori's short story-

Athough the vampire continues to be popular for many reasons, it is the idea of impossibility that has defined the longevity of the tradition. The vampire is a grim reminder that things long-dead-and-buried - Iiterally and metaphorically - can be involuntarily resuscitated when we least expect it. The vampire is also a symbolic reminder that the repressed, the hidden, and the unknown on, and MI1 be involuntanly resuscitated when we are least prepared. The continuing fascination with vampires is a deeprooted psychoiogical and cultural need to enjoy and escape from these anxieties at once. The resulting excitement provides the ernotional, visceral and intellectual intensity to sustain interest over tirne, place, and various media. Endnotes to Condusion

1 See James C. Bonuto, "Cinematic Neurosis Following the Exorcist: Report of Four Cases" in Richard Noll, Ed.. Vampires, Werewolves and Demons: Twentieth-Century Reports Ni the Pyschiatnc merature (New York: Brunner - Mazel Inc., 1992) 187-97. Appendix A Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Appendix B Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 267 Figure 10 Figure 11 Appendix C Figure 72 Figure 13

Figure 16 Works Cited

Primary Sources:

Blatty, William. The Euorcisf. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Browning, Tod & Garrett Fort. Dracula: From the Book aDracula" by Bram Stoker; Adaptation and Dialogue by Tod Browning and Garrett Fort. Continuity by Dudley Murphy. E. M. Aher, Associate Producer. 44 draft (Final) Univenal City, California: Universal Pictures Corporation, 1930 (screenplay).

Browning, Tod, Director. Dracula. No. 55003, Universal City, California: MCA 1991.

Coppola, Francis Ford, Director. Bram Stokefs Dracula. Columbia Tristar Home Video, 1993.

Coppola, Francis Ford and Eiko Ishioka. Coppola and Eiko on Bram Stoker's Dracula. San Francisco: Coilins Publishers, 1992.

Coppola, Francis Ford and James V. Hart. Bram Stokeis Dracula: The Film and the Legend rhefilm script]. New York: Newmarket Press, 1992.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. General Editor Kathleen Cobum, Vol. 5. "Lectures 18084819: On Literaturen and Vol. 7, Biographia Liferaria, Ed., R, A. Foakes, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969 - present.

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Le Manoir du Diable. Robert-Houdin film, France, 1896. Amencan title: The Haunted Castle. Eng lish title: The Devil's Castle.

Vampire of the Coast USA, 1909

The Vampire's Trail* USA, 1910.

Vampym. Sweden, 191 2.

Vampe di Gelosia. Italy, 1912.

The Vampire. 19 1 2, Messter.

Danse Vampireseque. Denmark, 1912.

The Vampire. USA, 1913.

The Vampire. USA, Kalem, 1913.

In the Gnp of the Vampire. USA, 191 3.

Vampires of the Nighf. 19 14.

(The) Vampire's Trail. Director, Robert Vignola, USA, 19 14.

Vampi~sof Warsaw. USA, 1914.

(The) Vampire's Tower. Ambrosia films, USA, 1914.

Saved from the Vampire. USA, 1 9 14.

(les) Vampires. France, 1 9 15.

(7he) Vampire's Clutch. (Knight Films), USA, 1915.

Was she a Vampire? (Univenal), USA, 19 15.

' Entries in bold refer to films directly referenced in this dissertation. Kiss of the Vamprie. USA, 1915.

Mr. Varnpire. USA, 1916.

(A) Night of Homr. Director, Arthur Robinson, Germany, 19 16.

(A) Vampire Out of Work. Vitigraph, 19 16.

Cenene Vampe. Italy, 1916.

(A) Village Vamplie. USA, 19 1 6.

(The) Beloved Vampire. USA, lW7.

Maaia. Director, Alexander Korda, Hungary, 19 17.

Dracula. Russia, 1920. Unlicensed adaptation, not in print.

The Vampire. (Metro), USA, 1920.

Drakula. Hungary, 1921. Unlicensed adaptation. No surviving prints

The Blond Vampire. USA, 1 922.

Nosferatu. Director, F.W. Murnau, Germany, 1922.

London AmMidnight. Director, Tod Browning, USA. With Lon Chaney. Director, Tod Browning, 1927.

(The) Vampire. United Pictures, USA. Released in France as Vampire a du Mode, 1928.

Dracula. Director, Tod Browning, USA, 1931.

Dracula. Director, George Melford, USA, 1931. Spanish Ianguage version shot on the same sets as Tod Browning's film. With Carlos Villar.

VampyK Director, Carl Dreyer, France, 1932. (The) Vampire Bat Director, Frank Strayer, USA, 1933. With Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill.

Condemned To Live. Director, Frank Strayer, USA, 1935.

Mark Of The Vampire. Director, Tod Browning, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, USA, 1935. VVith Bela Lugosi.

Dmcuia's Daughter. Director, Lambert Hillyer, USA, 1936.

Preview Murder Mystery. Director, Robert Florey, USA, 1936.

(The) Devil Bat Director, Jean Yarborough, Releasing Corp., USA, 1940. With Bela Lugosi.

Dead Men Walk. Director, Sam Newfield, (PRCPathe), USA, 1942.

(The) Refurn Of The Vampire. Director, Lew Lanciers, USA, 1943. With Bela Lugosi . rhe) Son OfDracula. Director, Robert Siodmak, USA, 1943. With Lon Chaney Jr.

Dead Men Walk. Director, Sam Newfield, USA, 1943.

House of Frankenstein. Erle C. Kenton USA, 1944, VVith Boris Karloff.

House of Dracula. Director, Earie C. Kenton, USA, 1945. With John Carradine.

Isle Of The Dead. Mark Robson. Director, RKO Radio Pictures, USA, 1945.

Cnhe Doctofs Courage. Director, George Sherman, USA, 1945.

(The) Vampire's Ghost. Lesley Selander, Republic Pictures, USA, 1945.

Devil Baf's Daughfer. Director, Frank Wisbar, Releasing Corp., USA, 1946.

Face of MaMe. Director, William Baudine, USA, 1946. About a vampiric dog- Abbott And Cosfello Meet Frankenstein Charles Director. T. Barton, USA, 1948 Bela Lugosi as Dracula.

Old Mother Riley Meets The Vampire. Director, John Gilling, UK, 1952. With Bela Lugosi.

Drakula Instanbulda. Director, Mehmet Mutar, Turkey, 1953.

(The) Bowery Boys Meet the Monstem Director, Edward Bernds, USA, 1954.

Plan Nine From Outer Space. Director, Edward D. Wood, USA, 1956. Bela Lugosi's last film.

Blood of Dracula. Director, Herbert L. Strock, UK, 1957,

(The) Vampire. Director, Paul Landres, USA, 1957.

(1) Vampin. Director, Ricardo Freda, Italy, 1957. Released as Lust Of The Vampire.

(El)Ataud Del Vampiro. Director, Fernando Mendez, Mexico, 1958.

Blood of the Vampire. Director, Henry Cass, Tampean Productions, UK, 1958.

Dracula. Director, Terence Fisher, UK, 1958. With Christopher Lee. Also known as The Horror of Dracula.

(The) Retum Of Dracula. Director,Paul Landres, USA, 1958.

Curse of the Undead. Director, Edward Dein, USA, 1959.

Onna Kyuketsui Director, Nobuo Nukagawa, Japan, 1959.

Tempi Duri Per 1 Vampin. Director, Pio Angeletti, Maxima, Italy, 1959.

(Eo Vampiro. Director, Fernando Mendez, Mexico, 1959.

Black Sunday. Director, Mario Bava, Italy, 1960.

(The) Btfdes of Dracula. Director, Terence Fisher, Hammer Studios, UK, 1960- Et Mourir De Plaisir. Director, Roger Vadirn, EGE Films, France, 1960. Adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's Camiila. USA release as Blood And Roses.

Frankenstein, El Vampiro Y Cia. Director, Benito Alarraki, Mexico, 1960.

(La) Maldicion De Nostradamus. Director, FrederÏco Curiel, Mexico, 1960. Wth German Robles.

Nostradamus Y El Genio De Las Tiniebras. Director, Frederiw Cun'el, Mexico, 1960.

(La) Sangre De Nostradamus. Director, Frederico Curiel, Mexico, 1960. Wit h German Robles.

L'Ultima Preda Del Vampiro.. Director, Pîere Regnoli, Italy, 1960. Released as Playgiils and the Vampire.

A hkea KhotsYongmin. Director, Lee South, Korea, 196 1.

(L3 amante Del Vampiro Renato Polselli. ltaly 1961. With Walter Brandi. Released as The Vampire and The Ballerina.

Maciste Contro II Vampiro. Director, Giacomo Gentionis, Italy, 1961.

Nostradamus Y EI Destnrctor De Monstnros. Director, Frederico Curiet , Mexico, 1961-

(Il) Vampiro Dell'opera. Director, Renato Polselli, Italy, 1961.

(El) Vampiro Aececha. Mexico, ca. 196 1.

(El) Vampiro Sangnenio. Director, Miguel Morayta, Mexico, 196 1. Released as The Bloody Vampire.

(El) Castillo De Los Monstruos. Director, Julian Soler, Mexico, 1962.

Ercole Al Centro Della Terra. Director, Mario Bava, Italy, 1962. Also known as Hercules In The Haunted Worid.

House on Bare Mountain. Director, R. L. Frost, Olyrnpic International, USA, 1962. (La) Invasion De Los Vampiros. Director, Miguel Morayta, Mexico, i 962.

Kiss of the Vampire. Director, Don Sharp, UK, 1962.

(La) Maldicion De Los Kamstehs. Director, Camillo Mastrocinque, Spain, 1962. With Christopher Lee. Also known as Terror In The Crypf-

(El) Mundo De Los Vampiros. Director, Alfonos Corona Blake, Mexico, 1962.

Santo Contra Las Mujeres Vampirus. Director, Alfonso Corona Blake, Mexico, 1962.

(La) Strage Dei Vampin. Director, Roberto Mauri, Italy, 1962, Released as SIaughter Of The Vampires,

Tempi Dun' Per l Vampiri Itaiy, 1962.

Black Sabbath. Director, Mano Bava, Italy, 1963. With Bons Karloff.

(La) Dama Macabre. Director, Antonio Marghereti, Italy, 1963.

Escala En Hi-Fi. Director, lsidoro Martinez Ferry, Spain, 1963.

(Der) Fluch Der Grunen Augen. Director, Akos Von Rathony, Germany, 1963. With Wolfgang Preiss.

(La) Huella Macabra. Director, Alfredo Crevenna, Mexico, 1963. Also known as The Macabre Mask.

Kiss Me Quick. Director, Russ Meyer, USA, 1 963.

Sexy Proibitissimo. Director, Marcello Martinelli, Italy, 1963.

Dr- Terrofs House of Homrs. Director, Freddie Francis, UK, 1964.

Dracula- Director, Andy Warhol, USA, 1964.

(The) Last Man on Earth. Director, Sidney Salkow, Italy, 1964. With Vincent Price. (Le) Vampire de Dusseldorf Director, Robert Hossein, France, 1964.

Biood Thi. Director. Newt Arnold, Philippines, 1965.

Bioodless Vampire, Director, Michael du Pont, USA, 1965.

Dracula Prince of Darkness. Director,Terence Fisher, UK, 1965. With Christopher Lee-

Echenme Al Vampiio. Director, Alfredo Crevenna, Mexico, 1965.

Terrore nella Spazio. Director, Mario Bava, Italy, 1965. USA release, Planet of Blood.

Billy The Kid Versus Dracula. Director, William Baudine, USA, 1966. With John Carradine.

BIood Bath. Director, Stephanie Rothman and Jack Hill, USA, 1966.

(El) Chan-O De Las Calaverasl. Director, Alfredo Salazar, Mexico, 1966.

Hand ofDeath, Director, Frederick Goode, UK, 1966.

Munster Go Home. Director, Earl Bellarny, USA, 1966.

Queen Of Blood. Director, Curtis Hamngton, USA, 1966. Also known as Planet Of Blood,

(The) Vampire People. Director, Geraldo de Leon, Phi1lipines, 1966 Also known as The Blood Drinkers.

(Un) Vampim Para Dos. Director, Pedro Lazaga, Spain, ? 966.

Batman Fights Dracula. Hemisphere, Phillipines, 1967.

Dance of the Vampires. Director, Roman Polanski, UK, 1967. With Sharon Tate.

Dr, Terrots Gallery of Honors. Director, O. Hewitt, USA, 1 967.

(A) Tasfe Of Blood. Director, Herschel1 Lewis, USA, 1967. (El) lmpefio De Dracula. Director, Frederico Curiel, Mexico, 1967.

(Le) Bal des Vampires. Director, Roman Polanski, Cadre-MGM, France, 1967. USA release, The Feariess Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in my Neck.

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave. Director, Freddie Francis, UK, 1968. With Christopher Lee.

Dracula Meets fhe Outer Space Chicks. USA, 1 968.

(La) Reine Des Vampires. Director, Jean Rollin. France, 1968.

Sangre De Viigines. Director, Emilio Vieyra, Mexico, 1968.

(Um) Sonho de Varnpiros. Director, lbere Cavalcanti. Brazil, 1968.

(Las) Vampiras (The Vampire Girls). Director, Frederico Curiel, Mexico, 1968.

(Le) Viol Du Vampire. Director, Jean Rollin France, 1968.

(The) Blood of Dracula's Casfle. Director, Al Adamson , USA, 1969.

Dracula and the Boys. USA, 1969. Also known as Does Dracula Really Suck?

Dracula, The Dirty Old Man. William Edwards, USA, 1969.

Dracula VS. Frankensfein. Director,T. Demicheli and E. Meisohner, Spain, 1969.

One More Time. UK, 1969. With Jerry Lewis and Chnstopher Lee.

Beiss Mich Liebling. Director, Helmut Foernbacher, Germany, 1970. Released as LoveMaking Vampire-Style. uhe) Magic Christian. Director, Joe McGrath, UK, 1969.

Malenka La Vampira. Director, Amando de Osorio. Spain, 1969.

(La) Marca Del Hombre Lobo. Director, Enrique L. Eguiluz, Spain, 1969. Men of Action Meet Women of Dracula. Director, Arternio Marquez, Philippines, 1969.

Santo En El Venganza De Las Mujeres Vampires. Director, Frederico Curiel, Mexico, 1969.

Taste The Blood Of Dr-accrla. Director. Peter Sasdy, UK, 1969. With Christopher Lee.

(Las) Vampiras. Director, Fredenco Curiel, Mexico, 1969.

Vampir-Cuadeuc. Director, Pedro Portabella, Spain. 1969. Documentary with Christopher Lee on the making of El Conde Dracula.

(La) Vampire Nue vhe Naked VampireJ. Director, Jean Rollin, France 1969.

(El) Vampiro y el Sexo. Director, Rene Cardona, Mexico, 1969. Also known as The Saint and Dracula's Treasure.

Blood of Frankensfein. Director, Al Adarnson, USA, 1970.

(The) Body Beneath. Director, Andy Milligan, USA, 1970.

Count Dracula. Director, Hany Aian Towers, England-Spain, 1970.

(El) Conde Dracula. Director, Jesus Franco, Spain, 1970. With Christopher Lee. Released as Bram Stokefs Dracula.

Count Yorga, Vampim. Director, Robert Kelljan, USA, 1970.

Draculas Lusteme Vampire. Director, Mario D'Alcala, Switzerland, 1970.

Dugong Vampira. Director, Gerardo de Leon, Philippines, 1970.

Every Home Should Have One. Director, Jim Clark, UK, 1970. With Marty Feldman as Dracula.

(Le) Frfsson Des Vampires. Director, Jean Rollin, France, 1970. Released as Sex and The Vamplie. Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? Director, Laurence Men-ick, USA, 1970,

House of Dark Shadows. Director, Dan Curtis, USA, 1970.

(The) House That Dnpped Blood. Peter Duffell, UK, 1970. lncense for the Damned. Director, Robert Hartford-Davies, UK, 1970. With Peter Cushing. Aiso known as Bloodsuckers.

Lust For a Vampire. Director, Jimmy Sangster, UK, 1970.

Midi-Minuit. Director, Pierre Philippe, France, 1970,

(La) Noche De Walpurgis. Director, Leon Kiimovsky, Spain, 1970.

(La) Sadique Aux Dents Rouges (The Sadist With Red Teeth]. Director, Jean- Louis Van Belle, Belgium, 1970.

(The) Scars Of Dracula- Director, Roy Ward Baker, UK, 1970. With Christopher Lee.

(The) Vamprie Lovers. Director, Roy Ward Baker, UK. 1970. Based on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. With lngrid Pitt.

(El) Vampiro De La Autopista. Director, Jose Luis, Madrid, Spain, 1970. Released in UK as The Homble Sexy Vampire.

Vampyros Lesbos. Director, Jesus Franco, Spain, 1970.

Chantoc Contra El Tigre Y El Vamprio. Director, Gilberto Martinez Solares, Mexico, 1971 .

Chi O Suu Ningyo. Director, Michio Yamamoto, Japan, 1971. Also known as Lake of Dracula,

Countess Dracula. Director, Peter Sasdy, UK, 1971. With lngrid Pitt.

Count Erotica, Vampire. Director, Tony Teresi, USA, 1971 . Daughters of Darkness. Director, Harry Kumel, Belgium, 1971.

Dracola Contra El Dr. Fankenstein. Director, Jesus Franco, Spain, 197 1.

Dracula vs Frankensfein. Director, AI Adamson, USA, 1971.

1 Drink Your Blood. Director, David Durston, USA, 1971 .

The Lake of Dracula. Japan, 1 971.

Nella Stretta Moma Del Ragno. Director, Antonio Margheriti, Italy, 197 1.

(La) Notte Dei Diavofi. Director, Georgio Ferroni, ltaly, 1971.

(O) Macabro Dr. Scivano. Director, Raul Calhado/Rosatvo Cacador, Brazil, 1971.

(The) Omega Man. Director, Boris Sagal, USA, 1971. With Charfton Heston.

(The) Retum Of Count Yorga. Director, Bob Kelljan, USA, 1971.

Twins Of EviI. Director, John Hough, UK, 1971.

(The) Vampire Happening. Director, Freddie Francis, Germany, 1971.

(The) Velvet Vampire. Director, Stephanie Rothman, USA, 1971.

Vierges Et Vampires. Director, Jean Rollin, France, 197 1.

Capulina Contra Los Vampires. Director, Rene Cardona, Mexico, 1972 .

(Les) Chemins De La Violence- Director, Ken Ruder, France, 1972. Also known as Lips of Blood.

Ceremonia Sangriento. Director, Jorge Grau, Spain, 1972.

(The) Deathrnaster. Director, Ray Danton, USA, 1972.

Dracula. Director, William Crain, USA, 1972.

Grave of the Vampire. Director, John Hayes, USA, 1972. Dracula AD 1972. Director, Alan Gibson, Hammer Studios, UK, 1971- With Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

Vampire Circus. Director, Robert Young, (Harnmer), UK, 1971 .

(La) Hua De Dracula. Director, Jesus Franco, Spain, 1972.

(El) Ataque De Los Muertos Sin Ojos Amando de Osorio. Spain, 1973. Released as Attack of the Blind Dead.

(La) Lfamada Del Vampiro. Director, Jose Eiorietta, Spain, 1972. Also known as The Corse of the Vampire.

(The) Night Sfafker. Director, John L. Moxey, USA, 1972.

rhe) Night Strangler. Director, Dan Curtis, USA, 1972.

(La) Novia Ensangrentada. Director, Vincente Aranda, Spain, 1972. Also known as Bloody Fiancee.

Pastel De Sangre. Director, Francesco Belmunt, Spain, 1972.

Santo Y Blue Demon Conra Dracula Y El Hombre Lobo. Director, Miguel Delgado, Mexico, i972.

Vampire Cims. Director, Robert Young, UK, 1972.

Vampiro 2000. Director, Ricmrdo Ghione, Italy. 1972.

Blood. Director, Andy MilIigan, USA, 1973.

Capfain Kronos, Vampire Hunter. Director, Brian Clemens, UK, 1973.

Count Downe. Director, Freddie Francis, UK, 1973. With Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr. Released as Son of Dracula.

Ganja and Hess. Director, Bill Gunn, USA, 1973.

Hannah, Queen of the Vampires. Director, Ray Danton, Turkey, 1973. Legacy of Satan. Director, Gerard Darniano, USA, 1973

(La) Noche Del Temr Ciego. Director, Amando do Osorio, Spain, 1973.

(La) Orgia Noctuma De Los Vampiros. Director, Leon Klirnovsky, Spain, 1973.

(El) Retomo De Walpurgis- Director, Carlos Aured, Spain, 1973.

(The) House of Dracula's Daughter. Direcior, Gordon HessIer, USA, 1973.

(La) Saga De Los Draculas. Director, Leon Kiirnovsky, Spain, 1973.

(The) Safanic Rifes Of Dracula. Director, Alan Gibson, UK, 1973. With Christopher Lee.

Scream, Btacula, Scream. Director, Bob Kelljan, USA, 1973.

Vamplia. Director. Director, Clive Donner, UK, 1973. Witli David Niven.

(The) Vault Of Homr. Director, Roy Ward Baker, UK, 1973.

(Die) Zarfiichkeit Der Wolfe, Director,Uili Lommei, Germany, 1973. Released as The Tendemess Of Wolves.

Blood. Director, Andy MiIligan, USA, 1974.

Bram Stokefs Dracula. Director, Dan Curtis, USA, 1974,

Count Down - Son of Dracula. Director, Freddie Francis, (Appte Films/Cinemation), UK, 1974.

Count Dracula. Director, Dan Curtis, UK, 1974. With Jack Palance-

(The) Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. Director, Roy Ward Baker, UK/Hong Kong, 1974.

Andy Warhol's Dracula. Director, Paul Morrisey, USA/ltaly, 1974. Udo Kier as Dracula. Also known as Blood For Dracula.

Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary. Director, Juan L. Moctezuma, USNMexico, 1974. Vampyres. Director, Jose Larraz, UK, 1974.

Bany McKenzje Holds Hl's Own. Director, Bruce Beresford, UK, 1975.

Chi O Suu Bara (The Evil of Dacola). Director, Michio Yamamoto, Japan, 1975.

(La) Noche De Los Vampiros. Director, Leon Kiimovsky, Spain, 1975. With Carlos Baltesteros.

Tendre Dracula. France, 1975.

Spemula. Director, Charles Matton, France, 1976.

Suck Me, Vampire. Director, Maxine Debest, France, 1976.

Bloedvewanter (Blood Relations, Les Vampires en Ont Ras le Bol). Director, Wim Linder, France/Netherlands, 1977-

Dracula 's Dog. Director, Albert Band, (VidCrown), USA, 1977.

Count Dracula. Director, Phillip Saville, (BBC) UK, 1978.

Graf Dracula Beisst Jetzt in Oberbayem (Dracula Blows His Cool). Director, Carlo Ombra, Gerrnany, 1979.

Dracula Sucks. Director, Ph ilip Morris, USA, 1979.

Nocfurna. Director, Hamy Tampa, USA, 1979.

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. Director, Werner Herzog. GermanylFrance, 1979.

Salem's Lot: The Movie. Hooper, Tobe, Director. Richard Kobritz, Producer. (Warner Home Video Series, Warner Brothers), USA, 1979.

Love at Fi& Bite. Director, Stan Dragoti, USA, 1979.

Last Rites. Director, Domonic [sic] Paris, USA, 1980.

Mr. and Mrs. Dracula. Director, Doug Rogers, (ABC), USA, 1980. Salem's Lot Director, Richard Kobritz, USA, 1980.

Nosferatu in Venice. Director, Augusto Carminito. Italy, 1981.

Dracula Rises From the Cofin. Director, Lee Hyoung Pyo, South Korea, 1982.

Ferat Vampire. Director, J uraj Herz, Czechoslova kia, 1982.

1 Desire. Director, John L. Moxey, (ABC-Columbia), USA, 1982.

La Morte Vivante (The Living Dead Gin')- Director, Jean Rolfin, (ABCMakdAleriaz), France, 1982.

(La) Belle Captive. Director, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Argos, USA, 1983.

(The) Hunger. Director, Tony Scott, USA, 1983.

1 Mamed a Vampire. Director, Jay Raskin, USA, 1983.

Pura Sangra (Pure Blood). Director, Luis Ospina, Columbia, 1983-

(The) Black Room. Director, Elly Kenner and Norman Thaddues Vane, USA, 1984.

Came de Tu Came (Flesh of Your Flesh). Director, Carlos Mayolo, Columbia, 1984.

Fnght Night. Director, Tom Holland, (Coumbia), USA, 1985.

(The) Midnight HOUE Director, Jack Bender, (ABC), USA, 1985.

Blood Freak. Directors, Steve Hawkes and Brad Grinter, (Royal Video) USA, 1986.

(A) Polish Vampire in Burbank. Director, Mark Pirro, USA, 1986.

Graveyard ShiE Director, Gerard Ciccoriti, USA, 1987.

(The) Losi Boys. Director, Joel Schumacher, (Wamer Brothers), USA, 1987. (The) Monster Squad. Director, Fred Dekker, USA, 1987.

Near Dark. Director, Kathryn Bigelow, USA, 1987.

(A) Refum to Salem's Lot- Director, Larry Cohen, USA, 1987.

Beverly MIS Vamp. Director, Fred Olen Ray. VidmarWAustin, USA, 1988.

Dinner With a Vampire. Director, Lamberto Bava, Italy, 1988.

My Best F*nd is a Vampire. Director, Jirnrny Houston, USA, 1988.

Not of This Earth. Director, Jim Wynorski, USA, 1988.

Teen Vamp. Director, Samuel Bradford, USA, 1988.

Vampire at Midnight Director, Gregory McCIatchy, USA, 1988.

Waxwork. Director, Anthony Hickox, USA, 1988.

Carniila. Director, Gabrielle Beaumont, (ShowtimeTThink Entertainment), USA, 1989.

Dance of the Damned. Director, Katt Shea Ruben, USA, 1989.

Dracula's Wdow. Director, Chris Coppola, USA, 1989.

Graveyard Shi#: The Understudy. Director, Gerard Ciccoriti, USA, 1989.

(The) Jitters. Director, John M. Fasano, USA, 1989.

Vampire's Kiss. Director, Robert Bierman. USA, 1989.

Daughter of Darknes- Director, Stuart Gordon, USA, 1990.

Red Blooded Amerfcan Gid [sic[. Director, David Blyth, Canada, 1990.

Rockula. Director, Luca Bercovici, USA, 1990.

Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat. Director, Anthony Hickox, USA, 1990. Tiansyivania Twist Director, Jim Wynorski, USA, 1990.

Vampire Cop. Director, Donald Farmer, USA, 1990.

Vampyre. Director, Bruce G- Hallenbeck, USA, 1990.

BIood Tiea Director, Jirn McBride. (Fox-n//S hapiro), USA, 199 1 .

Undyhg Love- Director, Greg Lamberson, USA, 1991.

Bloodlusf. Directors, Richard Wolstencroft , Ron Hewitt , (Windover) , Australia, 1992-

Buw, the Vampire Slayer. Director, Fran Rubel Kuzui, (20~-~entury FoxSandollar-Kuzui), USA, 1992.

Innocent Blood. Director, John Landis, (Wamer Brothers). USA, 1992.

Tale of a Vampire. Director, Shirnako Sato, UKUapan, 1992.

Bram Sfoker's Dracula. Director, Francis Coppola, (Columbia Tristar Home Video), USA, 1993.

Midnighf Kiss. Director, Joel Bender, USA, 1993.

Bloodsfone: Subspecies II and Bloodlust: Subspecies 111. Director, Ted Nicolaou, (Full Moon), USA, 1993.

Dracula Risriig. Director, Fred Gallo, USA, 1993.

Love Bites. Director, Malcolm Mamorstein, (Waymar/Moviestore), USA, 1993.

To Sleep Wdh a Varnpi~.Director, Adam Friedman, USA, 1993.

Interview with the Vampire. Director, Neil Jordan, (Greffen Pictures, Warner Brothers), USA, No. 13176, 1994.