My fascination with vampires began as a form of rejection to Little Women. The teacher at school had told my mum that I could not read very well and that I would benefit from practising at home. And so mum, ever zealous when it came to my education, had me read out loud a chapter a day. I didn't like the book. The characters annoyed me. The setting was decrepit and as conceptually irrelevant to my life as it could be. As I was going through it, my mind often wandered to the day when I could read for myself, not 'age-appropriate' stuff, but rather what I really wanted to read.
The time came soon enough, when I was eleven, and I finally got my hands on Dracula and Frankenstein. The latter did not impress me much (ironic, considering how much Frankenstein I inserted in my PhD which, really, is about vampire literature and the romanticisation of imagination), but the former changed my life. Much as remembrances of Carmilla still thrill me to this day, it all started with Bram Stoker's seminal novel.
From then on, I actively sought information about Dracula in all its incarnations. When Bram Stoker's Dracula by Ford Coppola was released in 1992, I recall being disgusted by the travesty it represented. In it the Prince of Darkness is a romanticised figure we are made to empathise with, not the repulsive beast that Stoker depicted many decades previously. It was only fifteen years later that I addressed (and, finally, understood) in my PhD the complex relation between our rewriting of works of literature for the silver screen and our appreciation of the inevitable changes that affect different versions of the same novel. I accepted that Ford Coppola's film was valuable in telling us about the ever-changing appreciation of literature, even if I did not approve of it, so to speak.
I've written extensively about Dracula both as an undergraduate and later. The best thing of all was coming to the realisation that a profound root of its success is to be found in the deeply sexualised interactions among the characters. In their turn, they have originated vast numbers of essays grounded in disciplines as varied, and as complementary, as sociology and psychoanalysis, with critical readings as diverse as gender studies, new historicism, deconstruction and combined perspectives. As Christopher Frayling observes, ‘Dracula was probably transgressing something – but the critics weren’t quite sure exactly what’ (2003: viii).
While Frayling is referring to Stoker’s contemporaries, we now have evidence that the subsequent critical responses to the novel were not so much contradictory in their judgment of the work’s quality, but focused instead on its multi-faceted appeal. Dracula attracted little attention from critics for much of the twentieth century, but beginning in the fifties, and increasingly since the seventies, it has drawn responses from academics interested in a variety of topics. Some of them focused on psychoanalytic readings of the novel, while others concentrated on contrasting territories which revolve around history or society other than mind (Riquelme, 2002: 408-9).
Many interpreted the vampire as a liberating symbol, especially when analysed in its Victorian context, for Dracula is often scrutinised as the expression of a deviant sexuality that becomes so abnormal, so obscene, so perverted that it develops into absolute perdition. He is the infernal charmer who tears through innocence with such a totalitarian malignity and sensuality to become irresistible. To unite with Dracula does not simply mean to lose one’s innocence, but to sacrifice one’s own self to the life-in-death of the undead, therefore finding oneself in the liminal position of lost soul that does not belong to either world. In its total chaos, the vampire’s sexuality is ambiguous and polymorphous, for its expression is distorted and unnatural.
In his essay, ‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Christopher Craft focuses on the separation of the masculine and the feminine and on the continuous ambivalence between one and the other that Stoker’s text enjoys. He asks whether we are penetrators or are penetrated and whether there is a subtext to the possibility that we may be both, as the vampire is (Carter 1988: 170-1). He also hints at the elemental principle that blood is the giver of life and that the male and the female are forever entwined in the dance of procreation which, in this context at least, threatens us to the core.
Next week for Part II
As ever, full biblio details are available if you need them.
Just drop me a line.
Ooh... Fantastic stuff. I need to read more about this. So interesting.
I loved the movie version. I was a young teen when I first saw it, and thought it quite thrilling. I just loved the blur of horror and romance (not the modern teen vampire romances though... blurg!).
I thought the empathy element worked quite well to contrast and therefore highlight the monstrous element of Dracula, though I agree they probably over-do the empathy a bit in the film.
'I've crossed oceans of time to find you...' *shiver*
Posted by: Sophie Playle | 09 March 2011 at 19:15
I do enjoy the movie versions of Dracula. But still (obviously) nothing beats the original, terrifying & destructive, Dracula. Can't wait to see part 2
Posted by: RSA Certificate | 15 March 2011 at 21:15