Sookie's Place(S): New Roadways Into the South of the Southern Vampire Mysteries
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University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2016 Sookie's Place(s): New Roadways Into The South Of The Southern Vampire Mysteries Sarah Holder University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Holder, Sarah, "Sookie's Place(s): New Roadways Into The South Of The Southern Vampire Mysteries" (2016). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 878. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/878 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SOOKIE’S PLACE(S): NEW ROADWAYS INTO THE SOUTH OF THE SOUTHERN VAMPIRE MYSTERIES A Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Southern Studies The University of Mississippi by Sarah Holder May 2016 Copyright Sarah Holder 2016 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT Charlaine Harris’ bestselling paranormal romance series, the Southern Vampire Mysteries is only beginning to be understood as more than a cultural phenomenon, but rather as a highly politicized and critical work of fiction that shines through genre designations such as romance, mystery, and fantasy. Much of this praise can be attributed to the series’ heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, who gracefully traverses boundaries that divide what are arguably racial and ethnic groups ever at odds with one another as they share political and social space. Her adventures therefore pose significant questions concerning diversity, equality, and nationalism, but more obviously they ask what southernness has to do with these issues of identity. The SVM situates itself between south as place and south as imaginary, insisting on the utility of this region and its attendant baggage by localizing issues plaguing American collective consciousness, such as identity politics and civil equality, class castes and poverty, racism and homophobia, violence and hate crimes. Such a south allows for the misdirection of American rhetoric, which demonizes the south as the nation’s Other, but employs its given role to effect change, to take Americanness to task. That is, here the south operates as not only a state of being (i.e. a place, an identity, etc.) but also a process. This thesis aims to locate where the “process South” operates in the SVM—in bodies, between bodies, across communities—in order to map its myriad successes and failures and thereby create a blueprint for reading the series’ “real” repercussions. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis would not exist in its present incarnation without the care and patience of Dr. Katie McKee, my committee chair, Southern Studies advisor, and personal mentor. I appreciate her efforts to find her own avenue into the “Sookieverse,” and for her unfailing enthusiasm and encouragement during each stage of this process. I also thank Drs. Jaime Harker and Jeffrey Jackson, for taking my vision for this thesis on great faith and for finally coming to share it. The Center for the Study of Southern Culture similarly deserves my thanks, because without its investment in me as a scholar I would not have tamed my southern and strange demons—for now. Finally, I wish to thank Rachel Johnson for listening to my epiphanies, Jenny Jackson for supportive lunches, Caleb Gray for always telling me to narrow my focus, and Jeff Miller for everything else. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………...…… ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………………….… iii INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………….. 1 CHAPTER ONE…………………………………………………………………………………12 CHAPTER TWO……………………………………………………………………………...... 38 CHAPTER THREE…………………………………………………………………………….. 65 CHAPTER FOUR………………………………………………………………………………. 88 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………... 115 WORKS REFERENCED……………………………………………………………………... 124 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………………131 iv AN INTRODUCTION TO THE UNCANNY “Sookie and I go way back. We’re practically sisters,” Charlaine Harris writes of her most famous protagonist-detective (The Sookie Stackhouse Companion ix). I cannot claim this level of closeness to Sookie Stackhouse, the telepathic barmaid and heroine of the Southern Vampire Mysteries (SVM), though I have travelled with her through thirteen novels, a growing number of short stories and companion texts, and a poorly transmediated HBO drama running seven seasons, several times each. It was my spring semester of my senior year of college—as I held my preordered hardcover copy of Harris’ final Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead Ever After, and in the hours that followed its arrival as I voraciously sped read its three hundred pages—that it finally dawned on me that I was reading literature. I should have known by then. I was completing a degree in so-called Literature, after all. But my forays into the chick lit, fantasy, and young adult sections of the library during my school breaks were just that, a break, and I considered the SVM of the same caliber—just my most recent dose of brain candy. But there was something familiar about the way in which vampires, weres, fairies, and demons played sociopolitical games and waged private battles in these books, and something iconic about fair- skinned, curvy, blonde Sookie always at the center of these conflicts, as if they orbited around her. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, but thereafter Sookie haunted me in the same way the south had always haunted me: a something I couldn’t quite articulate, a something from which I was distinct but somehow always carried, a something that shifted and moved and happened but was gone the second I looked closer. My education in Southern Studies has always been a way for me to figure out Sookie, and in this, my final opportunity to anatomize her, I hope that I may 1 learn to call her not a sister but perhaps a friend. Any critical analysis of the SVM promises to be a gargantuan undertaking, not only for the sheer amount of text the series encompasses but also for its scope: where do you even start? Perhaps that is why so few scholars have bothered to take it up, as opposed to its television adaption, True Blood, which has accrued much more critical attention. By the time True Blood was shooting its penultimate season, scholars continued to refer to early moments in the show, which seemed to promise it as a brave representation of southernness that broke the rules—that made room for black queer characters to steal the spotlight, for example—and whose popular moment was sure to matter to national discourse on AIDS, marriage equality, and multiculturalism (Dhaenens, Frohreich, Reyes, Lindgren Leavenworth, Gaynor). But these same critics never attempt to reconcile the show’s hopeful opening episodes with its backwards final ones, in which an exaggerated, AIDS-like disease debilitates the vampire population who then rabidly attack humans in genocidal-size waves. Other academics focused on the show’s interpretation of the SVM as a means of drawing attention to a global South, depicting vampirekind’s integration via entrepreneurship and other forms of economic stimulation (McPherson, Mutch). Such a theoretical lens is certainly appropriate for True Blood, which featured in its concluding episode two ruthless vampires grinning wildly for a television spot advertising their cure for this global disaster, available for purchase in a convenient and colorful can no less; but for the SVM this approach is shortsighted. An economic reading does not address what happens when integration fails, when money doesn’t remind people to forget they’re dealing with non-humans. This “Hep-V” crisis, a colorful invention of True Blood writers, never appears in the SVM. The novel series doesn’t require a disease to create its demons, but instead depicts 2 realistic and extant dangers: hate groups, racism and homophobia, sexism and domestic abuse, homelessness, war, and so on; problems that have no easy fix, either political or economic. Certainly there are supernatural elements to every conflict Sookie encounters. Often it is the intervention of the supernatural into the human world that incites fear and provokes aggressive behavior, operating as a catalyst for the deeply-seated issues latent or bubbling beneath the surface of Sookie’s community. But what is more interesting, and perhaps more insightful into the workings of the south the SVM depicts, is how those supernatural elements act upon one another. Vampires may be the “newest and most recently legally recognized minority” to enter the world scene (Dead Until Dark 1), but they are only one of a countless number of supernatural subcommunities who populate and contribute to society, in Bon Temps and beyond, most of whom remain publicly “closeted” and only privately commune, exercise their power, and continue their traditions in the course of the SVM. These groups are not without infighting; there is as much animosity between them as between humans and the now-visible vampires, and for many of the same reasons. As often as vampires, weres, fairies, and demons (and other offshoots of these supernatural family trees) chafe against one another, vying for space, business advantage, or underground sociopolitical power; however, they also provisionally ally themselves when facing a common enemy or new threat. As Sookie develops both personally and socially, maneuvering herself through these supernatural groups about which she, like us, is clueless, sheacts more and more as broker of these alliances. She is—quite literally at times—the crossroads at which supernatural communities meet, barter, and mutually triumph. By her great effort, the human and supernatural parties she learns to masterfully traverse become more and more congenial, and she attracts friends and lovers across boundaries of race and gender, a nontraditional family and network by which she creates a comfortable and safe community for 3 herself and her neighbors—at least for now. True Blood, though attempting in many ways to recover its literally disastrous conclusion and throw together a “happy family” ending, can boast no such community.