WOMEN AND VAMPIRE FICTION: TEXTs, FANDOM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY Millicent Williamson Goldsmiths College University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD ABSTRACT This thesis examines what vampire fiction and vampire fandom offer to women and uses as a case study the accounts offered by women fans in New Orleans and Britain. Textual approaches to vampire fiction and femininity have largely proposed that just as the woman is punished by being positioned as passive and masochistic in the texts of Dracula, so too is the female viewer or reader of the texts. This thesis argues that such approaches are inadequate because they impose a singular ('Dracularesque') structure of meaning which both underestimates the variety of vampire fiction available and ignores the process of reading that women interested in the vampire figure engage in. It is argued, based on the women vampire fan's own textual interpretations, that the vampire can be read as a figure of pathos who elicits the fans' sympathy because of its predicament. It is further argued that this approach to the vampire appeals to the women because it brings into play a melodramatic structure which resonates with certain problematic experiences of feminine identity that are often suppressed in our culture and thus difficult to articulate. The figure of the vampire offers women fans both a channel for their creativity and a means of rebelling against the imposed norms of femininity. It is a well-rehearsed position in theories of fandom that the activity that fans engage in is a form of rebellion or resistance. However, this thesis has suggested that the rebellion that the women fans engage in is a rebellion of the 'self which is both filled with contradictions and limited to the personal sphere. Furthermore, through a comparison of two fan clubs, it will be argued that fandom is not automatically a culture of resistance and that different fan clubs position themselves in relation to two opposing, yet dominant, sets of values in the cultural field. Vampire fandom offers women the chance to construct alternative identities, but participation in fandom does not constitute resistance to dominant culture. 2 AcKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the following colleagues from the University of North London for their help: Elizabeth Wilson, Bill Osgerby, Eileen and Sula for their technical help, and the members of the H. T. E. Faculty Research Committee. I would also like to thank my friends Don Slater and Joanne Entwistle for their guidance and support, and Susie Coggles for her friendship, time, and help in New Orleans. I would also like to thank David Morley for asking me pertinent questions at the beginning of this research project. I am indebted to my supervisor, Christine Geraghty, for her intellectual guidance, comments, criticisms, encouragement and all round support. I would also like to give my whole hearted thanks to John Budis without whose total support and endless encouragement over many years, this thesis could never have been completed, and to my daughter, Emmeline, for being cheerful despite my frequent absences. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 8 CHAPTER ONE: THE VAMPIRE AND THE CRITICS: TEXTUAL APPROACHES TO THE SPECTATOR READER 14 Introduction 14 Part One: Principal Accounts of the Meaning of the Vampire 16 Psychoanalysis and the vampire: text, sex and masculinity 16 Feminism and the vampire. -femininity as 'monstrous'; as 'lack; as 'castrator'_ 19 Society and the vampire. - changingfears in changing times. 23 Part Two: An Alternative Approach to the Vampire: Femininity and Gothic Melodrama 28 Genre: the changingface of the vampire 28 Vampires, the gothic and melodrama 31 The gothic, the vampire and the text: accounts of identification 35 Conclusion 38 CHAPTER Two: THEORISING FANDOM 40 Introduction 40 Part One: Fandom as a Mode of Resistance 42 Reading as resistance 42 Distinctions as resistance 50 Texts injandom 53 Approaches to hierarchies 56 Approaches to 'the mainstream' 62 Part Two: Bourdieu and the Field of Cultural Production 65 The structure of the culturalfield 65 The dynamics of the field 66 The t-wopoles and the strugglefor dominance 67 Fandom in the field of cultural production 72 Conclusion 73 CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO WOMEN AND VAMPIRE FANDOM 74 Introduction 74 Ethnography 75 The sample 81 _ 4 The case stu 83 Generalizing 84 The interview approach 85 What kind of interviews 87 Rapport and empathy 89 Data analysis 94 Practical Issues 97 CHAPTER FOUR: MEETING THE FANS 99 Introduction 99 Making contact 100 Trust and rapport in New Orleans 103 The reverse 'snowball' effect 103 Conclusion 105 CHAPTER FIVE: WOMEN READING THE VAMPIRE: GOTHIC MELODRAMA AND THE PLEASURES OF PATHOS 107 Introduction 107 Fan empathy and antipathy: the pleasures ofpathos 108 The 'Vampire Chronicles': fan javourites 114 Serialization: emotional proximity and critical distance 120 Vampires and verisimilitude: "knowing" the vampire and the pleasures of "playing the game " 123 The gothic as a mode of history 127 Conclusion 128 CHAPTER Six: THE VAMPIRE AND THE SELF 130 Vampiric outsiderdom and the seýf 130 The vampire, the seýf and the dilemma ofpersonaljuýfilment 132 The vampire, the seýf and the question of identification 135 Women and the vampire. - the possibility of self 138 Conclusion 141 CHAPTER SEVEN: FEMININITY, THE VAMPIRE AND DRESSING THE SELF 144 Introduction 144 Femininity as ambivalence: experiencing a paradox 145 The experience of 'notfitting in' 147 Standing out 150 5 Dressing in black and standing out 153 Black as revolt 156 The dialectics ofpast andfuture 158 The vampire as 'wish image' 160 Conclusion 162 CHAPTER EIGHT: WOMEN WRITING THE VAMPIRE: BODIES AND BOUNDARIES_ 164 Introduction 164 The vampire and the mind1body dualism. - 166 Vampires in cyberspace 172 Writing boundaries 177 Conclusion 181 CHAPTER NINE: VAMPIRE FANDOM IN THE FIELD OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION 182 Introduction 182 Part One: Official and Unofficial Vampire Fandom in New Orleans 186 The Memnoch Ball 186 Vampire fans talking about each other 189 Officialfans: gate keepers at the boundaries offandom 192 Commercialism in vampirejan culture 195 The space ofpossible positions in the hierarchy of official vampire jandom 196 Anne Rice in the sub-field of vampirejandom 203 Part Two: Vampire Fandom in Britain 206 Fandom-for-fandom's-sake: autonomy and conflict 206 The 'London Vampire Group' 210 The L VG gatherings 212 Conclusion 213 CONCLUSION 217 NOTES AND REFERENCES 220 6 Appendix One 224 Appendix Two 229 Appendix Three 230 Appendix Four 234 Appendix Five 239 Appendix Six 240 BIBLIOGRAPHY 241 INTRODUCTION This thesis examines the relationship between vampire fiction and the practices that women fans of this fiction engage in. Vampire fiction and vampire fandom are very particular aspects of popular culture and yet an analysis of these cultural forins and practices raises issues which have long concerned cultural studies. For instance, for the type of engaged and enthusiastic audience member (the fan) addressed in this research, the question of the text is significant. The approaches to the text can be seen to sit on opposite sides of a problematic binary which can be characterized on the one hand as 'textual determinism' and on the other as 'readers' resistance'. Textual analysis of vampire fiction has tended (in film and cultural theory) to reproduce the former. Chapter One offers a critical examination of the textually derived theories of the vampire's cultural significance and challenges the supposition that the figure speaks to pre-existing (masculine) drives. In addition, the assumptions about audiences for the vampire that are made as a result of this perspective are questioned. The chapter draws on the widespread feminist critiques of those theories that neglect or marginalize women from discussions of textual and cultural meaning, but which have not been influential in conventional theories of horror. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that feminist approaches to women's genres offer insights about the potential reading pleasures on offer to women in vampire fiction. This fiction has not traditionally been considered to be a 'female' form, but it is argued that literary theories of the gothic and feminist accounts of melodrama offer interpretations that are not male-centred and which emphasise historical and cultural specificity in meaning production rather than trans-historical psychic drives. Drawing on the arguments provided by audience studies that analyses of texts must be made sensitive to different audience groups who are located in culture in a variety of (often criss-crossing) specific ways, this thesis has concentrated on the female engagement with the vampire in order to address the absence of the female in existing textual analyses of horror. Yet, while the textual determinism of much vampire and horror theory is challenged, this thesis also questions the opposite view that meaning only resides in audience interpretations. This view is particularly prevalent in theories of fandom, partly as a way to challenge the pathological view of fandom which dominates discourses about 'the fan'. Chapter Two offers a critique of the small, but growing, field of fan studies which share a disregard for the texts that motivate fandom in favour of analyzing the 'resistant' readings that fans produce. It is suggested that this strategy allows academic analysis to sidestep difficult questions about the criterion by which judgements of texts might be made, and also to ignore the continuing issues about power and domination in the cultural field. This approach to the issue of cultural resistance is evidence of another binary opposition. In a move away from the dominant ideology thesis, fan studies contribute to a tendency to homogenize what people do in culture uniformly as acts of subversion. The chapter suggests that the trajectory of such an approach is the uncritical celebration of consumer capitalism as seen in some studies of media fans.