MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO American Gothic Fiction: Vampire
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MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO FACULTY OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE American Gothic Fiction: Vampire Romances Final thesis Brno 2012 Supervisor: Author: PhDr. Irena Přibylová, Ph.D. Mgr. Jitka Čápová Declaration I hereby declare that I have written this final thesis myself and that all the sources I have used are listed in the bibliography section. Hradec Králové 13 August 2012 …………………………………………… Mgr. Jitka Čápová Acknowledgements: I would like to thank to PhDr. Irena Přibylová, Ph.D. for her time, patience and valuable advice. I would also like to thank to my family for their support. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1 2. Theory ................................................................................................................................................. 2 2.1 Gothic ................................................................................................................................................ 3 2.2 Romance ............................................................................................................................................ 5 2.3 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 9 3. Analysis ............................................................................................................................................. 10 3.1 A traditional vampire ....................................................................................................................... 11 3.2 Surviving stereotypes - similarity with a tradition .......................................................................... 12 3.3 New qualities of a contemporary vampire ....................................................................................... 14 3.4 Traditional and contemporary romance protagonists ...................................................................... 22 3.5 The Rice´s and Harris´s approaches ................................................................................................ 25 3.5.1 A comparison of the approaches .................................................................................................. 29 4. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 31 5. Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................... 34 6. Appendix ........................................................................................................................................... 37 7. Summary ........................................................................................................................................... 38 1. Introduction Vampire novels have always been popular as they combine a dark atmosphere and mysterious creatures with special abilities. Readers admire a fascinating appearance of vampires, and they envy them immortality. At the same time, people are terrified by an unusual nature of a vampire that includes drinking blood and sleeping in a coffin. In the past vampires had been usually depicted as villains who attacked and killed human beings. These days an image of a vampire has significantly changed. I have come across the vampire novels written by the American writer Charlaine Harris. Her books do not follow the usual pattern of evil vampires and innocent people. They are about vampires full of emotions, such as love and empathy. Then I have found out that Anne Rice is considered to be the first author describing a vampire´s mind and humanlike character. I have decided to explore main differences between a traditional vampire concept and contemporary concepts, analysing the novels Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice and Dead Until Dark (2001) and Club Dead (2003) by Charlaine Harris. The aim of this work is to show the development of vampire romance. In the theoretical part I will describe the most influential genres that modified vampire romance. In the analytical part I will aim at a description of the main protagonist of vampire romance. First, I will choose typical features of heroes/heroines of the depicted genres and I will compare them with features of contemporary protagonists. I will show similarities and differences between a traditional and a contemporary concept. Finally, I will characterize concepts of Rice and Harris, and I will show the new issues they have introduced in their vampire romances. 1 2. Theory In this chapter I want to describe roots of vampire romances. First, I will introduce the historical development of the vampire fiction according to the James Twitchell´s study The Living Dead. Then I will describe the literary genres which have formed contemporary vampire romances. As Twitchell states, before the 19th century the vampire existed in folklore tale and the figure of a vampire in literature appeared in the early 19th century in the Polidori´s short story The Vampyre (1819) (7). Many other Romantic authors used the vampire as a personification of the various topics, such as maternal attraction in Coleridge´s Christabel or homosexual attraction in Sheridan LeFanu´s Carmilla, says Twitchell (6). However, the first writer who introduced the vampire in the novel and who fully expressed “the sexually explosive and ambivalent nature of the myth” was Bram Stoker in his Dracula (1897) (Twitchell 6). The story involves a romantic issue between a vampire and a human, which is the nature of the contemporary vampire romance as well. Thus, in my opinion, the novel Dracula stays at the beginning of vampire romance in literature. The most distinctive genres that influenced vampire romance are Gothic novels, romance and its sub-genre paranormal romance. As the primary source for genres characteristics I have used The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English by Ian Ousby (1993) and The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J.A.Cuddon (1992); Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic by Anne Williams (1995) for a description of Gothic fiction; A Natural History of the Romance Novel by Pamela Regis (2003) for the romance characteristics; Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Fiction by Nancy Traill (1998) for the paranormal fiction. 2 2.1 Gothic Gothic fictions developed in the later 18th century along with Romanticism. Ousby says that Gothic novels „anticipate and to some extent overlap with Romanticism proper“ (851). To support this statement, I will start with characteristics of Romanticism and then I will depict Gothic fiction to show the similarities. Romanticism “pulled away from the rationalism and neoclassicism…developing … freedom from the dead letter of rules and conventions”(Ousby 851). The important points were authentic feelings and individualism. A hero was a solitary person distraught by inner feelings, often travelling to enrich a personal experience (Ousby 851). Gothic fiction was also a reaction against rationally oriented neoclassicism (Ousby 405). One of the most distinctive attributes of the Gothic is an “atmosphere of doom and gloom” (Cuddon 381). The stories usually take place in old castles or ruins set in a deserted area, with the eerie feeling evoking violence and hidden crimes (Cuddon 381). Gradually the novels were placed into an urban setting that introduced visions of dark streets at night full of indefinable danger. Cuddon states that Gothic fictions “contain a strong element of the supernatural” (381) which reflects in a presence of unusual protagonists, usually “wicked tyrants, malevolent witches, demonic powers” (382), and also evil creatures like vampires or werewolves. Williams emphasises that a Gothic protagonist is a “brooding, mysterious hero/villain” (14). As Williams says the Romanticism and Gothic fictions shared the intellectual background: they turned away from objectivism, emphasised subjectivity of a lone hero/heroine and they often used similar settings, such as abandoned places. Despite of these facts, Gothic fiction was treated by the Romanticists and critics as „an illegitimate cousin who 3 haunts the margins of literature, pandering cheap and distressingly profitable thrills“ (Williams 4). This point of view had continued until the 20th century when literary critics either considered Gothic fiction to be dead for a long time or thought of it as subordinate to its contemporary Romanticism (Williams 6).Yet this „dim“ and „shapeless fiction“ has become very popular as we can see from the best-seller lists (Williams 6). Therefore Realism-centred critics have had to find some explanation or excuse of the existence of Gothic works. In 1986 Ian Watt in his essay on the novel “Otranto” assumes that there exist two branches of Gothic: “one . continues in an increasingly sub-literary and specialized tradition about vampires and werewolves, while the other brand continues to deepen the main moral perspectives of Gothic in works which in other respects come closer to the main tradition of the novel” (qtd. in Williams 2). Contemporary Gothic writers try to come up with new questions which could make readers to think about a piece of work in a different context. Readers can find interesting ideas, such as in depicting of dangers hidden in social relations or