Vampires have come a long way since their beginning in the eighteenth century. The quintessential vampire tale that marked the true beginning of the vampire and began the vampire’s transformation is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The count paved the way for the modern vampire and began the vampire’s widespread popularity in all mediums to the megastar status they hold in today’s culture. Gender plays a major role in Stoker’s novel, especially the portrayal of the vampire as poly-sex, and the flexibility of women’s culturally defined gender roles. Gender and the introduction of the homosexual vampire combined with the glamour of the twentieth century mark the transformation of the modern vampire in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles in general and particularly Interview with the Vampire. Each vampire reflects the society of their individual time and as each time period has characteristic problems so to does each vampire. The progression of the modern vampire, seen through Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, is best portrayed through an analysis in the changes of gender as they reflect the changes in the culture at large.
Bram Stoker’s novel is a direct representation of the Victorian ideals of gender that were popular at the time. It was during this time, particularly in England where the largest portion of the novel takes place, that “there was a strict separation between the genders” (Tacon 214). The male living in the Victorian era was meant to be forceful, sexualized, he is “the doer, the creator, the defender” his energy is for “conquest” (Craft 108). The female was not only to be passive, sweet and virginal but also “enduringly, incorruptibly good and infallibly wise with passionate gentleness”, she has to have the “modesty of service” that make her passive (Craft 109). Dracula represents the Victorian anxiety over the “potential fluidity of gender roles” (Craft 112). Anything that did not fit into these rigidly controlled gender roles was not defined as male and/or female. It is the fear of the thing that shatters these gender codes or gender inversion, the “negotiation between socially encoded gender norms and a sexual mobility that would seem at first constrained by those norms”, that takes place in the novel that is given precedence (Craft 112). This novel plays off the anxieties of the Victorian culture which include gender inversion, homosexuality, child murder, and female sexuality.
Gender inversion is demonstrated through female penetration and male passivity within the confines of Stoker’s narrative. The three vampire women trapped within the confines of Dracula’s castle are masculinized through “their ability to penetrate another” with their elongated teeth (Tacon 214). The vampire women are sexualized “as a result of a disease” and even though this is not their own sexuality it is still defined on male terms (Tacon 215). Jonathan Harker is attracted to the female vampires much more so than he is attracted to Mina, his wife to be. The vampires are forward, their sexuality openly expressed while Mina, and other “proper” Victorian women are passive and “innocent” and not what attracts Harker who “enjoys a feminine passivity and await’s a delicious penetration from a woman” after which “life giving fluid” will be released (Tacon 214). This is a perfect parody of sexual intercourse only during this exchange it is the women who penetrates and the men who wait for that pleasurable penetration. Lovemaking is confused with blood-feeding in this scene and then “juxtaposed with the nauseating cannibalistic image of child murder” as Dracula feeds his hungering females an infant (Wai Yu 148). It is the male’s desire for penetration coupled with “an intense aversion to the demonic potency empowered to gratify that desire” that create most of the action and the emotion in Dracula (Craft 109). With the actual penetration of the male, Harker, there comes an unsexing. But the penetration is denied by the interruption of Dracula who states “this man belongs to me” (Craft 109), wanting him not for the blood he can provide but the knowledge.
The novel “obsessively” defines the vampire as a foreigner, as “someone who threatens and terrifies precisely because he is an outsider” (Stevenson 139). Dracula is strange to all those he encounters, strange in habits, appearance and physiology. The count is unforgettable for his nose, shape of his teeth, mark of his forehead, and the color of his lips, eyes, and skin. In fact, color is used in Stoker’s novel, a common racial classification, assists in identifying Dracula as the foreigner through the emphasis on redness and whiteness. The women vampires in the castle are primarily red and white their white teeth shining against their ruby red lips. There is also red blood dripping on the white nightgown of both Mina and Lucy after they are visited by the dark Count. Both Mina and Dracula receive red marks on their white foreheads caused by the host pressed on the vampire’s forehead which are a kind of “caste mark… of a group that is foreign to the men whom Mina supposedly belongs” (Stevenson 141). This mark is a sign of sexual possession and defilement of the outsider worn by Mina as the non-vampires mark off the vampires demonstrating again their explicit foreignness.
It is Lucy who receives Dracula’s affections in England before he sets his sights on Mina. The Crew of Light, led by Van Helsing, try to “counteract Dracula’s subversive series of penetrations with a more conventional series of their own” in the form of the several transfusions given to Lucy to replace the blood she has willingly given to the beast (Craft 120). Lucy receives the blood of four men, Arthur, her chosen suitor, Dr. Seward. Quincey and even Van Helsing himself give their life blood to poor Lucy but still she is taken to the other side. These penetrations replace sexual penetration for medical and reassert the male penetration of the female that was reversed by the female vampires in Dracula’s castle. According to Van Helsing “penetration is a masculine prerogative” (Craft 122). It is in this way that Van Helsing is similar to Dracula, for both penetrate women in a non-sexual way, one with his elongated teeth and the other with a hypodermic needle.
The penetrating and forceful male is extremely violent to the sexualized woman. In Dracula, this is portrayed through the staking of Lucy. This is the novel’s “most violent and misogynistic moment” as Arthur hammers the stake deeper and deeper into her chest as she lay quietly in her coffin (Craft 122). Lucy is punished for her sexual inversion, for her breaking of Van Helsing’s gender codes. The staking of Lucy presents the Crew of Light with a dual guarantee of exorcising the “hungering feminine sexuality” and “counters the homoeroticism latent in vampiric threat” (Craft 122). This eradication of the vampire Lucy reinstates the male penetration and the passive, receptive female.
Dracula has a self imposed incest taboo. Dracula refers to Mina, as “flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin” implying she is his wife at first but once their union is complete and she becomes a vampire they become more like “kin” and can be his “wine press” only for a short while (Stevenson 143). It is when her transformation from “good” “innocent” Englishwoman to vampire is complete Mina will become a “daughterly companion and helper” (Stevenson 143). Dracula works in the opposite direction of primal hordes mating ritual which is daughters become wives, instead making wives daughters. Another example of the daughters becomes wives is the budding relationship between the vampire Louis and Claudia in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire in which Claudia begins as the daughter but matures intellectually to Louis lover, if not physically given her aging difficulties.
The vampire became a “liminal, transgress figure, a stage upon whom the fears and secret desires of society could be acted” in the hands of so many authors each portraying their own individual version of their “social commentary” (Benefiel 262). The vampire has been used to transfer the fears of society into popular literature particularly the fears of drug addiction, homosexuality, and AIDS. The vampire has explained the ever-changing span of human social and sexual behavior over the last few generations, explaining the transformation to the modern vampire. George E. Haggerty feels that Rice’s vampires “express our culture’s secret desire for and secret fear of the gay man” (6). These vampires also fulfill the needs of the “straight world” that seeks to defeat the lure of darkness (6). It is through this century’s cynicism that allow masculinity to become unapproachable, and straight. Lestat demonstrates the corollary of this new gruff form of masculinity with his wit, elegance, and rock star status. But Lestat also serves as an example of “the castrated male” (7). This male represents the hope prevalent in the nineties that masculinity can survive the feminization that deadly straightness epitomizes. The heterosexual culture of the nineties, post the discovery of AIDS in the eighties, needs Lestat “as a reflection of its own dark secret” (Haggerty 7).
The vampire was portrayed as the solitary predator whose sole purpose was “to drive the plot, and give the vampire hunters something to pursue” but it with Anne Rice that finally the focus has shifted from the vampire hunters to the vampires themselves (Benefiel 261). These vampires gave themselves to introspection, using the centuries lain at their feet through their immortality to search themselves. Rice redefines the vampire paradigm in many ways. In Rice’s Interview with the Vampire there are strong homosexual overtones in the interaction between Louis and Lestat during the act of penetration. This typical male penetration of the victim with their teeth is followed by the characteristically female nuturing, Lestat feeding Louis his blood from his body.
Rice uses her vampires to portray a “subversive alternative model to the nuclear family”, a major theme in her novel never really associated with vampires before. The incest taboo not blurred in Dracula through the strict gender codes of the time period are blurred through Interview with the Vampire as lover is turned into child, through Louis and Lestat, and even its reverse through Claudia. It is the master vampire, Lestat, who plays the multitude of roles that make this family possible. He is the father, the mother, and husband while those younger vampires are children and/or lovers. The actual, biological mother has become obsolete with the male’s ability to “create” others of their kind with nothing more than a mixing of a little blood. This family is isolated from the outside world, a perverse gift due to their longevity, and this creates abnormal pressures amongst the members of this family.
Through the course of this novel two handsome vampire males, Louis and Lestat, create a child, parallel to that of a man and a woman creating a parody of sorts of the traditional family. There is no sexual contact between the members of this family and in fact they seek comfort from complete strangers. Claudia, their monstrous child creation, is trapped in the body of a child forever, to never physically age despite her intellectual and emotional growth. She is referred to as their daughter and treated as such in the beginning but when she begins to “grow up”, not literally, she takes on more the role of the lover. She was created by Lestat to keep Louis with him. It was an effort compared to a couple having a child to save a marriage. This does not work in the traditional marriage/family and it does not work in this instance either only creating the blurred lines of an incestuous family with two male vampires as the head (Benefiel). This family breaks down much like the modern family, a hint of the social commentary inherent in the fear of society at large.
This breakdown of the family is strongly tied to the adolescent rebellioness of Claudia, the monster doll, whose “rage against her infantilization and dependency in a world defined by her fathers” (Doane and Hodges 425). It is Claudia’s rage toward her father, Lestat, that marks her entrance into womanhood and not the onset of her menses, as is the most common sign. The creation of Claudia leads to the eventual development of a homological triangle. This triangle involves the men in her life: Lestat, and Armand who both fight for the affections of the tortured Louis with Claudia placed directly in the center fulfilling her double role as child/lover to Louis. Women in this novel, particularly Claudia serve as nothing more than “an object of exchange between men” (Doane and Hodges 427). Claudia is an emotional link between the men in this novel while the other minor women in this novel only serve as “food for the immortals”.
Louis serves as Claudia’s mother-like figure while she is still a child during the sixty-five year run of their “happy, little family”. Louis “dotes on his new child, showing her how to live in her new surroundings with her new requirements” (Benefiel 268). While Lestat remains her father figure, always there to teach her how to kill and to discipline her for her mistakes. Louis desires the father, a characteristic reserved for the maternal, not becoming the father but wanting the father. He searches for “a homosocial bond in older male vampires” to replace the bond Claudia destroyed when she murdered Lestat (Doane and Hodges 425).. He finds this bond in the form of Armand, the leader of a troup of vampires performing at the Theatre of Vampires of Paris. The final triangle is complete and Louis yearns for the comfort only Armand can provide and Claudia feels her lover, her father, pull further and further away from her.
Vampires’ change according to their time and as a result are often reflections of their time. Beginning with the great Count who is himself the “embodiment of the shift from the nineteenth century’s ghostly intimate to the twentieth century’s power hungry predator” (Goddu 129). Dracula is born from a decade “shaped by medical experts” his “primary progenitor” is the criminalized homosexuality, while Anne Rice vampires were created in Interview with the Vampire admist the post-Watergate 1970’s and their rush to fill the vacuum of authority created by the scandal. The sequels in the Vampire Chronicles “die under the Reaganite authoritarianism prevalent in the 1980’s” (Goddu 130). Even the very tapes Louis tells his story on carefully recorded by David, the eager reporter in 1990’s San Francisco, is reminiscent of the Watergate tapes. Lestat is a response to a time of fallen leaders representing the fantasy of a past, finer nation. Lestat is a direct representation of his age seen through his living through the exchange of bodily fluids, a sure way to contract AIDS in the 1980’s. His equal defiance and equal reconstitution of the family reflects the confusion inherent in the culture as the social institution of the family slowly deteriorates. Lestat lives dangerously through the exchange of bodily of fluids but represents the healthy alternative to a “body weakened by AIDS” but also threatens to be gay (Haggerty 10). Our culture wants the young hero to “defy convention” to escape the “demands on health, family and sobriety” but that same culture that wants him to rebel also condemns this “movement as unhealthy, immoral, and deadly” (Haggerty 10).
The vampire has been analyzed as both the homosexual and having characteristics of the maternal, but it seems contradictory for a vampire to be both. A possible solution to this problem would be to think of the vampire as a “pan gendered construct in which traditional male and female genders are combined to form a whole” (Benefiel 268). The vampire is neither male nor female but both. It cannot be homosexual because he is not male and he cannot be mother because he is not a woman. Immortality is obtained through the sucking of the vampiric blood from the vampire much the same way as sustenance is sucked by an infant from their mothers breast. Rice’s vampires transcend the bonds of sexuality, lying down with both females and males respectively, just as they have transcended the bonds of immortality since their creation with Stoker’s classic character. This transcendence of sexuality is a characteristic of the modern vampire.
In conclusion, vampires have come a long way since their creation during the Victorian era in Britain. The vampire is a reflection of the times they live/ are created in. Dracula was a direct result of the culture’s fears of sexual inversion and homosexuality coupled with the new development of medical technologies that pushed the Victorian era closer to the modern era. The modern vampire is in direct opposition to the Victorian vampire in that gender has become obsolete, a fact greatly feared by Victorian society, This is best demonstrated through the novels of Anne Rice, who portrays this sexual freedom of males laying with both other males and females at their whim. Rice also revolutionized the vampire genre by focusing the story on the vampires themselves and not those hunting them, like the Van Helsing and his coherts in Dracula.
Works Cited
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