Transference of the Monstrous: Heroic Monsters and Heroines as
Questionable Role Models
Naomi Schellekens
Student Number: 5885507
Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Ken Monteith
MA Thesis Literary Studies – Literature and Culture - English
30 June 2014
Schellekens
Table of contents
1. Introduction
3
2. Evil and Lack Thereof in Early Vampire Fiction
6
3. The Journey of the Romantic Paranormal Hero
25
3.1 Monstrous Heroes
30
3.2 Re-humanizing the Posthuman
33
4. Romantic Heroines Who are not Afraid of Bending the Rules
4.1 Death Drive
36
38
5. The Flight of the Heroine
38
6. Conclusion
44
2
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1. Introduction
It seems as if somewhere between Dracula and Twilight, the image of the vampire has
changed completely. Susannah Clements argues in her book The Vampire Defanged: How the
Embodiment of Evil Became a Romantic Hero, that because of the demise of Christian
symbols and values in contemporary Western society, the vampire is no longer the
‘embodiment of evil’, but instead became a ‘romantic hero’. However, I do not agree with this
argument and will, in a comparison between several books and tv-series about vampires
ranging from Dracula to the present, firstly demonstrate that as far back as Byron’s The
Giaour and Bram Stoker’s Dracula vampires were already not pure evil and secondly I will
argue that contemporary vampires are not simply romantic heroes. The seemingly harmless,
beautiful and sparkling contemporary vampires are not merely romantic heroes; they too have
a dark side. Most of the contemporary vampires only show a greater sense of and emphasis on
free will; they often go through extreme measures to temper their blood lust. But they are not
the only ones who hate their hunger for blood and their supposedly damned existence;
Byron’s ‘infidel’ in The Giaour is prophesized to become a vampire and hate what he is and
has to do to survive, and Varney the Vampire starts to regret the choices he has made in his
life and ends his own suffering by commiting suicide. Why should we think that Dracula is
not the same? The reader never really knows what Dracula thinks or why he commits certain
acts, because Dracula is not able to tell his side of the story. Dracula does say that he loved
too once. And much of his hatred towards Jonathan and his friends, stems from the fact that
they have stolen his property and made sure he could not enter his own house anymore, not
necessarily from some innate demonic source. It is not surprising then that eventhough movie
adaptations of Dracula such as F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) and
Carl Laemmle’s Dracula (1931) show Dracula in a thoroughly evil light, there are also those
movie adaptations such as Francis Ford Coppula’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Love Never Dies)
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(1992), tv series such as Cole Haddon’s Dracula (2013) and books such as the sequel to Bram
Stoker’s book by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt Dracula: The Un-Dead (2009) and the rewriting
of Bram Stoker’s original told from the point of view of Dracula himself, namely Fred
Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975), that show an evil yet also tormented and capable of
loving side to Dracula. Veronica Hollinger explains this phenomenon in Fantasies of
Absence: The Postmodern Vampire by referring to the changes in literature that came about
with the advent of postmodernism, where the loss of faith in metanarratives resulted in the
“widespread movement of decentering” which generated the foregrounding of “voices
historically relegated to the margins of discourse, of representation [and] of authority” (199).
The focus of horror stories thus shifted more towards the ‘monster’ and his point of view and
emotions, it is therefore highly logical that more and more writers towards the end of the
twentieth century realised that Bram Stoker’s Dracula lacked Dracula’s perspective on the
events and that even in the original story it is evident that Dracula is not all evil. Richard
Corliss summarises this view on Dracula nicely when he discusses Francis Ford Coppula’s
film and states that “everyone knows that Dracula has a heart; Coppola knows that it is more
than an organ to drive a stake into. To the director, the count is a restless spirit who has been
condemned for too many years to interment in cruddy movies. This luscious film restores the
creature's nobility and gives him peace”. Thus there is definitely more to Dracula than just
him being a type of Christian evil symbol as Clements claims he is. Furthermore it is not even
just the supernatural or monstrous that is deemed evil or most evil, because humans in the
novels and tv-shows this thesis discusses, even the Romantic heroines, also often partake in
actions that are morally wrong or at least part of a vast morally grey area. As Joanne Watkiss
argues “it is not always the supernatural or monstrous that disrupts the security of the home
and family” as humans are also often responsible for destruction, even of the supernatural
(533). A fourth point in my thesis will be that our fascination with a seemingly more
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romantic vampire/supernatural hero nowadays stems from a desire to control the
uncontrollable and to somewhat re-humanize the posthuman, without loosing the posthuman
body, where love is the cure to the ‘monstrous disease’. This is evident in the amount of
literary romances between supernatural beings and humans, ranging from The Vampire
Diaries to Warm Bodies. The paranormal romance genre has widened to include not only the
known vampire-human love story but also the even more unlikely zombie-human love story.
Where we could learn to imagine that vampires who wanted to suck our blood were not as
different from us as we thought they were and that they have free will as well, it is harder to
imagine that zombies as mindless rotting corpses that want to eat our flesh or brains could be
similar to us and be a potential love interest. The zombie as a lover cannot completely retain
his posthuman body; the rotting corpse is too foreign and uncanny to be able to be a love
interest, therefore in order to incorporate all posthuman entities in the paranormal romance
genre, the zombie needs to be re-humanized which happens through love. Eventhough the
vampire as lover is now mostly accepted, they too needed to undergo a process of rehumanization in order to make the relationship between a human and a vampire a relatively
believable one. The re-humanization process of the vampire seemed complete with the advent
of Edward Cullen in Twilight, yet there are more 20th and 21st century literary and cinematic
vampires who are not complete ‘good guys’ or demi angels such as Edward. They are morally
ambiguous and their re-humanization process through love veers off course, when they
influence the ethics of their human lover in turn.
By means of a close reading of selected texts this thesis will argue that the ideas
brought forth by theorists such as Susannah Clements concerning the idea that all literary
vampires before Twilight were pure evil and that contemporary vampires are mostly joyful
creatures are not true. This thesis will show that these ideas of pre-twentyfirst century vampire
monsters mostly stem mostly from ,especially the earlier, movie adaptations, not from the
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novels themselves. Furthermore, since not much research has been focused on the heroine in
vampire fiction, this thesis argues that in the development of the romantic vampire gothic, not
only has the vampire figure changed, but the heroine has changed alongside him in order to
make a relatively believable couple and adhere to the romance format.
2. Evil and Lack Thereof in Early Vampire Fiction
Susannah Clements does propose certain interesting ideas about vampires that I do
agree with, because there is definitely a difference between modern-day vampires and the
older ones created by Stoker, Polidori and Rymer. However, I believe the difference is not so
much good versus evil, but more free will versus hardly any or no free will at all and a chance
of redemption, not necessarily in the theological sense but also in a spiritual, non-Christian,
sense. As well as this, the romance aspect is more expected of vampire fiction today. This
section disputes against Clement’s idea that the conceptions of ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ and definitely
the concept of ‘human’ are necessarily connected to Christian values. It further argues that
the vampire figure is not so much unquestionably evil, but rather a case of nature versus
super-nature, where we could view the vampire as a new species (or step up on the
evolutionary ladder) rather than something that defines evil for Christianity.
A number of aspects to Clement’s theory clash as she complicates her own arguments
several times. Clements starts her theory off by stating that “Vampires would not have
become as popular as they have if they didn’t mean something to us as a culture. They
represent something to us—something that matters … Vampires are more than just monsters
to us” (2). This ‘something that matters’ is explained by Nina Auerbach in Our Vampires,
Ourselves, where she argues that “each [vampire] feeds on his age distinctively because he
embodies that age” (1). Each vampire embodies the age in which he was created by holding
up a mirror to that age and showing its “fears and desires” (Clements, 4). This is one part of
Clement’s reasoning that I do agree with and which is supported by Nina Auerbach in Our
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Vampires, Ourselves, Ken Gelder in Reading the Vampire and several other academics.
Vampires have always fascinated us, whether they instilled fear or a curiosity for the
supernatural. The portrait of the vampire has changed over the years. It changed from when
the legends were put into literature, after Bram Stoker’s Dracula it changed again, and from
then on gradually parts of the vampire myth kept changing. In her theory Clements simplifies
this change when she argues that “it is over the last hundred years of so …that [the vampire’s]
portrayal in our culture has morphed from monster to lover, form single-minded villain to
complex antihero” (Clements, 2). Dracula was already not a pure monster, and the so-called
‘complex antiheroes’ of today have got a very deep dark side as well.
Moreover, Clements already complicates her own argument here by referring to a
vampire story, which she even claims Stoker to have been influenced by, published before
Dracula, namely Varney the Vampire “which was first released in inexpensive pamphlets
called the ‘penny dreadful’ in the 1840s and featured one of the first examples of a conflicted
vampire.” (4). With this comment early on in her book, Clements already immediately
undermines her own argument. She begins by discussing Dracula and how deeply intertwined
his evil character and Christian ideas of sin and the devil are. However, by starting her theory
off with Dracula and arguing that ever since the vampire legend was put in print it was
associated with evil and sin, where evil and sin seem in Clement’s view to be only
synonymous with a Christian worldview because she argues that “sin and evil cannot be
tolerated, as it is an affront to God’s nature. Thus Christians have the responsibility to resist it,
knowing they can only do so through the power of God” (27), and where the vampire figure is
a pure monster and representation of evil, she forgets to take into account the fact that Varney
the Vampire was put into print long before Dracula and that she herself has already stated that
Varney was a conflicted vampire, he in fact hates his actions so much that he kills himself by
throwing himself into the mount Vesuvius. A monster would be something that has no regret,
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no remorse and knows no love, which Varney obviously does have. Varney may have sinned
and committed evil acts, but his guilt gets the better of him and he wants to redeem himself by
ridding the world of his evil actions through his suicide. In doing so however, he shows the
reader he is not all that evil, that there is still a sense of right and wrong in him, which makes
him already a sympathetic hero of sorts since he obviously does try to fight his cursed nature,
but fails to do so and has no other option.
Clements further claims that “as the vampire myth was first turned into fiction, the
associations of the vampire with evil and temptation were established, characteristics that
have been diminishing gradually since” (4). I do not agree with Clements on this level. The
vampire is still associated with evil and temptation, even if they are now often portrayed as
lovers to humans, they still retain their dark side. If they did not have this dark side, which
makes them crave human blood and kill others with relative ease and hardly any remorse,
they would be mere elevated humans with supernatural powers. Even though humans can be
evil enough themselves and some can also kill without remorse, there is I believe a part of us
that is horrified by human crimes, yet intrigued by supernatural beings who commit the same
crimes. Contemporary societies shun criminals, yet celebrate supernatural beings who commit
similar crimes because we know that most of the time they cannot help who they are; they are
not mere psychopaths, they kill because they want to live and after that killing is easier
because it is part of their nature. Just as the tiger cannot help but kill the antelope and we as
humans eat meat. These vampires represent a kind of helplessness in overcoming who they
are, a struggle with their dark side, which they sometime overcome and sometimes do not,
this intrigues and scares us, because it seems to be our own struggle as well as a species.
Clements does explain this well in her theory, by stating that “a vampire is a monster that has
a human shape, and so it becomes a picture through which we can explore the human
condition.” (Clements, 5). Somehow when we see humans as monsters, we think about
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psychopaths who kill without remorse and who might even possibly inspire a hint of intrigue
in us like Hannibal Lector does. Many people would like to stay as far away from that image
as possible and not even admit to having a dark side. People have got however both good and
bad potential and it depends on our choices on which side we end up. But we prefer to see this
struggle in a different species, so we can distance ourselves from it, yet stay close to it at the
same time because vampires are a species that, according to legend, came from us and is
better than us, yet worse and also the same; they represent a wealth of ambiguities and
disgression of boundaries that we simultaneously find both uncanny and appealing.
Two of the most frequently acknowledged notions connected to the representation of
the vampire in popular culture are in relation to “our fears and our sexual desires or
experiences” (Clements, 5). According to Clements , the vampire was traditionally an evil,
frightening being and thus its early representations tended to reflect society’s fears
(5). Clements therefore claims that early vampire stories such as Le Fanu’s
Carmilla represented a fear of “sexually aggressive” women as was the fear of Victorian
culture. However, Carmilla is not aggressive most of the time and seems to genuinely care for
Laura and want to be Laura’s friend yet does not always seem to know how to do so, just like
a kitten toying with a mouse, not necessarily meaning to harm it, yet enjoying the game.
According to Carol A. Senf, “Carmilla’s actions are concistently described as loving, not
violent” (79). In addition, most vampires, as Nina Auerbach explains, before Dracula were
actually “singular friends. In those days it was a privilege to walk with a vampire” (13), which
is what Carmilla mostly longs to be as well when she says to Laura “I wonder whether you
feel as strangely drawn towards me as I do to you; I have never had a friend—shall I find one
now?” (J. Sheridan Le Fanu, 87). Furthermore, besides our fears, Clements argues that the
figure of the vampire has always been connected to sex, as the act of drinking blood involves
a certain kind of penetration and is very intimate. According to Clements, the drinking of
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blood used to be connected to sin and the vampire luring humans into temptation (6).
However, first of all, sex in itself is not necessarily sinful to the Christian worldview, it is
only so when it happens outside of wedlock. There are some vampire stories in which the
vampire is required to marry his victim first, such as Lord Ruthven has to do in The Vampyre
written by John Polidori, before they are able to drink their blood, this takes away the aspect
of the vampire dragging his victim down into sin, because they are married therefore the
penetration is technically not a sinful one. As well as that, if the act of exchanging blood is so
sinful, then are Dr. Van Helsing and his vampire fighting crew not just as guilty when they all
transfuse some of their blood into Lucy? Because when Arthur speaks at the funeral about his
part in Lucy’s blood transfusion and when he does so Dr. Seward sees Van Helsing’s face
turn white and purple, as if he is embarrassed about the whole affair. This might indicate
some reference to a possibility of sin, especially since blood transfusions were very new at the
time and moreover especially because the men comment on the transfusion as some sort of
marriage and in turn it implies a consummation of marriage. Arthur argues that “he felt since
then as if they two had been really married, and that she was his wife in the sight of God”
(185. In turn Van Helsing says to Dr. Seward that if Arthur and Lucy were basically married
through the blood transfusion, then “what about the others? … Then this so sweet maid is a
polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church’s law, though no
wits, all gone—even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist” (187).
Bigamy is also a sin in the eyes of the Church. Thus eventhough Dracula is, almost by
definition because he is a vampire connected to Christianity according to Clements, a sinner
and morally ambiguous, he is not the only one, for the men are also morally ambiguous.
Clements mostly focuses on the vampire in relation to theology, thereby constantly
relating sin and evil to Christianity, which is useful because there certainly are many Christian
symbols present in vampire stories and they exist for a reason, however she often overuses the
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link to theology, thereby exhausting it and often also by use of it even complicating her own
arguments. She argues that, although most Christians disregard vampire fiction because they
find it demonic, “ignoring a cultural phenomenon as influential as the vampire myth makes it
impossible for Christians to learn from it—to reflect on how our culture understands itself,
how our worldview has transformed through time, and what it means to be human.” (7). She
furthermore argues that most vampire literature concerning evil and demonic vampires is
often most deeply rooted in a “Christian worldview” and should therefore not be ignored, as
well as that the messages conveyed in popular vampire fiction that lacks any “spiritual
associations” may actually be more dangerous to Christians (7). She also argues that because
the vampire is now reproduced in a secular age, whereas the vampire as a powerful metaphor
was connected to Christian values, the vampire has now “lost much of its metaphorical
power” and therefore also its fangs (164).
Clements complicates her own argument about the vampire having lost his fangs
when he moved further away from a theological worldview, when she describes first how
vampire legend has been traced back to “ancient cultures all over the world” and how the
vampire myth gained its “Christian elements” when the Catholic Church was mixed with
pagan legend (3), and yet she discusses how certain vampire stories affirm or deny the
“Christian roots of the vampire legend”, when there really are no Christian roots to the
vampire legend as it already existed before the Christian Church (9). There are definitely
Christian elements to vampire stories ,as there are in many formerly pagan stories that the
Christian church has usurped, but these Christian elements do not form the roots to the
vampire legens, even though they have been an important part of vampire fiction for many
decades. She never really discusses any vampire fiction created before Dracula in depth,
thereby seeming to claim that Dracula is the most important work of vampire literature and
Byron and Polidori’s work for example does not matter. I believe she only disregards them or
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mentions them quickly in passing because they weaken, if not completely destroy, her
argument that the figure of the vampire started as evil monster and that theology has always
played an important part in the portrayal of the vampire as epitome of evil. Clements
furthermore claims that “Stoker makes it clear that the symbol of the cross should highlight
the novel’s spiritual themes and purposes”, however she immediately undermines this
argument by saying that “none of the religious symbols or theological themes of Dracula is
handled simplistically, nor is Christianity accepted as foundational by rote or without
consideration” (14). She attacks her own argument further by relating how Jonathan Harker,
the main character, is a Protestant and does for example see the effect the cross, an old lady
gave to him as a safeguard, has on the count, but he does not understand why, he even
explains that it might be merely a “[conveyance] of memories of sympathy and comfort”(15).
Thus on one hand Clements claims that Dracula is fundamentally Christian and therefore
portrays the vampire as pure evil and a portrait of sin, yet on the other hand she counters her
argument by saying that religion and its holy objects are called into question throughout the
entire novel (14). In starting off by saying that “the vampire was once held up as the
embodiment of evil and temptation, but has now become the ultimate romantic alpha-hero”
(2) and yet arguing towards later on that “it could be easy for us to naively declare that all
vampires are bad, or declare the opposite, like Sookie Stackhouse in True Blood: ‘I don’t
think Jesus would mind if somebody was a vampire’” Clements rather subtly contradicts
herself and thereby complicates her own argument (8). She undermines her own arguments
further by claiming that “just as Edward and the other Cullens in the Twilight saga were made
to be ‘good’ vampires, so the heroes of other vampire romances are made good rather than
evil, often without even the moral tension we see in characters like Angel and Knight” (150151) yet she also argues towards the end of her book that “vampires do not have to become
‘good guys’ in order to be sympathetic heroes. No one is really good in a world that is all
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about power” (159). On the one hand the argument that she really seems to be trying to make
is that vampires started off as evil, mindless killing machines but that such an image of the
vampire has changed over the course of time and through some secular sort of vampire
evolution, or in Clements’ view more of a secular decline, they are now rather harmless
heroes. Such is the argument Clements starts off with in her book, however throughout the
course of her book she sometimes confirms and other times basically refutes these claims as
well. This next section will disprove Clements theory of the pre-twentieth century vampire as
inherently evil.
One of the earliest mentionings of the vampire in English literature, albeit short, is in
the poem The Giaour , which translates as ‘infidel’, in 1813 written by Lord Byron. It tells the
story of a Venetian man (the infidel) who falls in love with a Muslim woman Leila who is
then accused of adultery and, as used to be the custom in such cases, as a punishment she was
drowned in the ocean. The infidel seeks revenge and kills Hassan (the man who wanted Leila
to be his alone and therefore killed her). The narrator however prophecizes that the infidel
will be sent to hell for his actions, but before that sent to earth as a vampire doomed to drink
the blood of all the women in his family, however much he will hate to do so:
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse:
Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
But one that for thy crime must fall,
The youngest, most beloved of all,
Shall bless thee with a father's name -
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That word shall wrap thy heart in flame!
Yet must thou end thy task, and mark
Her cheek's last tinge, her eye's last spark,
And the last glassy glance must view
Which freezes o'er its lifeless blue;
Then with unhallowed hand shalt tear
The tresses of her yellow hair,
Of which in life a lock when shorn
Affection's fondest pledge was worn,
But now is borne away by thee,
Memorial of thine agony! (761-780)
This early example of the vampire does consider the vampire to be a demon who is doomed to
commit these horrible acts in order to survive, however the remorse for what he does and hate
for what he is are clearly expressed as well. The very worst crime the vampire has to commit
is to kill his youngest daughter; this is clearly shown by the fact that he keeps a lock of her
hair, which would normally in life be a sign of love and affection but instead becomes a
symbol for his horrid state, his guilt and the horrible things he has done. This only shows that
the vampire in The Giaour does not have any shred of free will left, it does not however mean
that he is thoroughly evil, especially because the poem constantly reiterates the terrible inner
turmoil and horror the infidel will feel as he commits his horrible acts, as if he is not in
command of his own body. This is a very different image from for example the vampires in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the tv series, who are, without their human soul, mostly relatively
evil creatures who are definitely in control of their own bodies. This becomes especially
evident after Angel looses his soul and starts taunting and terrorizing Buffy. He does not just
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want to kill her yet, he wants to make her suffer and he tries to scare her by leaving pictures of
her sleeping in her bedroom.
The Vampyre written in 1819 by John Polidori is one of the earliest literary vampires
in English literature (Carol A. Senf, 75). As with most (vampire) literature, each new creator
adds his own elements to the myth, Polidori for example was the first to have his vampire be
aristocratic and he also added eroticism to the vampire story by having his vampire
necessarily feed on “a lovely female” (75). Polidori was the first to create an “erotic
attachment between vampire and victim, having Lord Ruthven woo Aubrey’s sister and marry
her” (75). Lord Ruthven not only drinks the blood of his victims, but he also feeds off
destroying them financially and socially, thereby resembling eighteenth-century “Gothic
villains and the Byronic hero” (75). Although “Lord Ruthven is directly responsible only for
the deaths of Ianthe and Miss Aubrey. The men he ruins at the gambling tables and the
women whose reputations he destroys are largely responsible for their own fates” (75)
Thereby showing that the vampire mostly only forces humans to show who they really are,
thereby doing society a favour. Thus we already see a duality of the personality of the
vampire here. Unlike the vampire in The Giaour Lord Ruthven seems to have a sense of will,
even though he has to drink the blood of a young woman every year otherwise he will not stay
alive, because he seems to mostly target people who deserve to be villified and shown for who
and what they are. But he still remains a vampire and kills for his sustenance, luring the
innocent Miss Aubrey into her death. Elizabeth Miller explains that “Polidori’s story focuses
on the seductive powers of his vampire rather than the attempts to destroy him, as no remedies
are presented. What Polidori gives us is a Byronic hero endowed with supernatural powers”
(“Getting to Know the Un-dead”, 7). The Byronic hero is close to being a villain, but is only
just a hero because his evil actions are mostly felt to be comprehensible on the part of the
reader, “that he is not wholly evil any more than society is wholly good” (Northrop Frye, 31).
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Thus even though Lord Ruthven’s actions would be deemed evil, they are rather more
considered amoral because through most of his evil deeds he reveals the evil in others, so that
they will no longer harm the innocent. In doing society such favours, he somewhat redeems
himself.
Another example of early vampire fiction, and one vampire who more clearly redeems
himself, is Varney the Vampire; or the Feast of Blood written first in serial form and
thereafter published as a book in 1847. It has been written reputedly by James Malcolm
Rymer, since it is not completely clear whether he wrote it or Thomas Preckett Prest did
(Carol A. Senf, 77). In this novel the main character is a vampire who manipulates his human
friends in order to gain blood but also financial status. Manipulation does seem to be a step
removed from merely creeping into victims bedrooms in order to drink their blood and stay a
living corpse. Manipulation takes a lot more action and could be considered more evil,
especially since it is not only blood he seeks to sustain his undead life, but he also seeks riches
and does so over the backs of the people who call him friend. However, even he cannot stand
who and what he is, for he eventually kills himself by jumping into the Vesuvius, ultimately
showing that he too did not have free will but was driven by his vampiric nature which he
hated but could not escape from. The complication with Varney is that he was already violent
and evil in his human life, for he killed his own son in a violent outburst of rage, thus it is not
necessarily his vampire nature that makes him behave the way he does, except for the feeding
on blood, there was no need for him to grab his first victim, the first scene described in the
book, so violently where:
[he] seized the long tresses of her hair, and twining them around his bony hands held
her to the bed … He drags her head to the bed’s edge. He forces it back by the long
hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like
teeth—a gush of blood and a horrible sucking noise follows. (Rymer, 30)
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This scene is much more violent than any of the feeding scenes in Dracula, yet Clements does
agree here with most critics that Varney is a “conflicted vampire”, whereas she also argues
that Dracula is the epitomy of evil , whereas he is not so violent for no reason (4). However,
whether Varney was already evil or not, he at least tries to redeem himself by giving his
immortal life away to expunge his sins.
Carmilla written in 1872 by Sheridan le Fanu is one of the few literary works in which
the main vampire is a woman. She is one of those early literary vampires whose focus is not
on feeding but more on love and friendship. She is also much more gentle than her male
counterparts who also search friendship in humans:
[Carmilla] relies on seduction rather than on the male vampire’s brutal direct attack.
By day she woos Laura with words and actions, behavior that Laura describes a ‘like
the ardor of a lover’ Indeed, Carmilla’s actions are consistently described as loving,
not violet. Carmilla, however, is definitely a vampire, not a human who resembles the
supernatural creature; thus she is responsible for her victim’s deaths, not just the
destruction of their reputations or fortunes. (Carol A. Senf,79)
Despite her more gentle approach, Carmilla is just as dangerous as the male vampires that
preceded her. She does have a different effect on her one special victim Laura; where male
vampires only feed on beautiful young women and seek some sort of friendship with men,
Carmilla seeks more than a friendship with Laura. She wants them to be one:
[I]t embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she
drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would
whisper, almost in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall me mine, and you and I are one
forever. (J. Sheridan Le Fanu, 90)
Hung-Jung Lee argues that this insistence of Carmilla on her and Laura being one and the
same “threatens existing cultural ideologies by suggesting that self and other – and by
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extension good and evil … – are constructed from the same originary material” (33). This
suggests, according to Lee, that these oppositions are fluid and transgressable and able to
shake off the boundaries placed on them (33). This is in accordance with my arguing that it is
not only the vampire who is morally ambiguous but the humans in vampire novels as well.
Carmilla herself even says “I don’t know which should be most afraid of the other … If you
were less pretty I think I should be very much afraid of you” (Le Fanu, 87). Moreover, the
monstrosity of early vampires, especially before Dracula, was not so black and white as
Clements has made it out to be. Hung-Jung Lee also argues that in Carmilla the vampiric
‘other’ “has yet to become fully monstrous”, because Carmilla is much more attractive and
captivating to Laura than she is gruesome and revolting. “Thus the text never quite commits
to demonizing her heterogeneous, mutable identity or the self-divesting, self-extending
impulses she elicits in Laura” (33).
Dracula written in 1897 by Bram Stoker, has produced and still does produce many
different readings. Maurizio Ascari argues that “Stoker presented Dracula as a freak of nature
and as a criminal rather than as a devil to be ‘excorcised’” (74). We could also even read
Dracula as a Byronic hero, just as Elizabeth Miller in Getting to Know the Un-dead: Bram
Stoker, Vampires and Dracula reads Lord Ruthven as a Byronic hero. A lot of the events that
could be called evil and that are instigated by Dracula, are ambiguous through Stoker’s use of
narrative technique and different view of the scenes of events. This could well mean that
Dracula is closer to the Byronic hero, like Lord Ruthven, than he has been thought to be and
not simply a demonic creature. Ken Gelder remarks that especially the events surrounding
Mina, having been discovered drinking blood from Dracula’s chest, are very ambiguous
because of the different narrators and their different views on the effent (71). The first
ambiguous note is brought about when Dr. Seward, Van Helsing, Arthur and Quincey storm
into Mina’s bedroom while Dracula is making her feed off him. Dr. Seward first describes the
Schellekens 19
scene as follows “with his left hand he held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away
with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her
face down on his bosom” (300). This first description is a violent one, where Mina is forced to
commit this sexualized act. Yet, further on Dr. Seward likens their attitude to that of “a child
forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink” (300). This addition to Dr.
Seward’s first description of the event makes the scene seem less violent. A child does not
understand that it should not force its will upon the kitten, as well as that, the comparisons
between Dracula and a child and Mina and a kitten soften the impact of the scene because
they are two sweet images. Furthermore, when Dr. Seward relates what he has seen of the
event to Jonathan, he rethinks his first statement and thinks to himself “it interested me, even
at that moment, to see, that, whilst the face of white set passion worked convulsively over the
bowed head, the hands tenderly and lovingly stroked the ruffled hair” (303). Thus unlike
Gothic villains but more like a Byronic hero, Dracula’s actions are not all evil but more
misguided. Especially concerning the analogy between the scene of Dracula and Mina and
that of a child forcing a kitten to drink, it shows that even Dracula’s enemies seem to realise at
some level that he is not the evil demon they make him out to be, but rather a creature with
the innocence of a child, thinking he is doing the right thing. Van Helsing draws more
connections between Dracula and the image of a child, when he says “there I have hope that
our man-brains that have been of man so long and that have not lost the grace of God, will
come higher than his child-brain that lie in his tomb for centuries, that grow not yet to our
stature” (361). He furtermore states that “the Count’s child-thought see nothing” (362) and
that “his child-mind only saw so far” (364). Van Helsing likens Dracula’s mind to that of a
child because he believes it to be on par with selfishness and imperfection. Van Helsing thus
does not think very highly of Dracula’s intelligence, whereas the reader already knows that
Dracula is well learned since he has a great volume of books, has taught himself English
Schellekens 20
through books (which we know through Jonathan to be at a high level of proficiency) and has
studied at least England in great detail; its inhabitants, culture and landscape, for Jonathan
admits Dracula to know more about England than he does. This ambiguous and flawed
construction of Dracula runs throughout the novel, making the reader wonder whether the
crew fighting Dracula are all unreliable narrators. Something that reinforces this feeling is the
lack of Dracula’s perspective on the occurences in the novel, for as Nina Auerbach argues
“Dracula has no voice: he leaps in and out to make occasional florid boasts, but his nature and
aspirations are entirely constructed—and diminished—by others, especially Van Helsing”
(82).Even though Dracula never tells his own story directly to the reader, the reader does
realise, even through the framework of the supposedly unreliable narrators, that Dracula
definitely is no saint. However, there is clearly still something inside his posthuman body that
clings to his human self, especially when he proclaims that he is capable of love. When the
three vampire women living with Dracula try to feed on Jonathan Harker, Dracula appears in
the room and sends them away telling them “beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll
have to deal with me” (Bram Stoker, 46). One of the girls laughs at him and says “You
yourself never loved; you never love!”, whereon Dracula softly whispers “Yes, I too can love;
you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so?” (46). Moreover, Mina argues that the
Crew of Light should take pity on Dracula as they did with Lucy. She asserts that “that poor
soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy
when he too is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality”
(328). Mina thus also believes that Dracula already has a good side in him at the surface level,
not a side that will only resurface once he has been killed. On top of that, notice the way Mina
uses the term ‘worser’ rather than ‘evil’, implying she does not actually think he is really evil,
just a creature cursed to live off blood. Milly Williamson preposes that a great amount of pain
that the vampire has stems from “its misrecognised identity”; that there is a long line of
Schellekens 21
vampires who are “sympathetically constructed” because they do not want to be seen as
epitomy of evil but that their good side is hidden from view as people only see the exterior as
“essence of evil” (2). Many cinematic reproductions and literary criticisms of Dracula have
mostly ignored Dracula’s human spark and mostly focused on Dracula being the epitome of
evil. Therein besides referring to the use of Christian symbols and artefacts to destroy Dracula
in the novel, many critics also refer to the name Dracula and how it is said to mean devil.
Elizabeth Miller explains however that many critics have not done Dracula justice in their
exploration of the novel, because they did not consider Bram Stoker’s full notes in which he
for example included the following excerpt from William Wilkinson’s An Account of the
Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia:
Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. The Wallachians were at that time,
as they still are at present, used to give this name as a surname to any person who
rendered himself conspicuous either by courage, cruel actions or cunning. (as quoted
in “Getting to Know the Un-dead, 12)
All three uses of the name can be used in connection to the Byronic hero, they cannot
however all be used in connection to the description of villains, criminals or our
understanding of the word devil today. A Gothic villain would not be classified as
courageous, a Byronic hero on the other hand might be.
There are those reproductions of Dracula, especially those of the late 20th and of the
21st century, that have focused more on Dracula’s humanity that is shown in the original book
but is mostly ignored or missed by critics and readers alike. Francis Ford Coppula’s film
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of the earliest examples of this, where Dracula is portrayed as a
man devastated by grief when he learns his wife has committed suicide because she falsely
learned of his death, this news causes Dracula to renounce his faith in God and take on
powers of evil whereby he becomes a vampire. When he finds Mina who is the reincarnation
Schellekens 22
of his wife he is overjoyed and tries to win her back. He is still relatively evil, but there are
goodness, empathy and love in his heart. Coppula’s Dracula has the means to gain sympathy
from his viewers because he gets his own screentime and is thus not only viewed through the
others in their diary entries. Dracula first evokes sympathy when he says to Jonathan after
seeing his picture of Mina: “my life at best is misery”. And after Jonathan has been attacked
by the three vampire women, Dracula repeats the phrase from the novel “Yes I too can love”,
but this time he adds “and I will love again”, putting more emphasis on the fact that he is the
way he is because he has lost love. Coppula shows more of Dracula’s emotions than we ever
saw in Bram Stoker’s novel. Because we only read Dracula through his nemises, we do not
get any other emotions from him than hatred, since that is the way the Crew of Light mostly
see him. Coppula however focuses on Dracula’s lost love and appeals to the viewer’s feelings
of sympathy when he shows Dracula crying with joy when Mina suddenly remembers shards
of her past life as Dracula’s wife and crying with heartbreak when she tells him she has
received word from Jonathan, that she must go to him and that they are to be married. It is
therefore relatively understandable for the viewer that Dracula acts in rather devious ways to
get rid of Jonathan, and anyone else keeping him from Mina, in order to get the love of his life
back whom he had already lost once and therefore cursed his own existence. Another
powerful moment in the film that shows Dracula’s inner Byronic hero, is when Mina wants
Dracula to turn her but he does not want to do so, because he does not want to be responsible
for her being cursed for eternity, he loves her to much to do so, even if it means that he cannot
spend eternity with her. This shows his selfless side. Furthermore, Coppula seems to convey
the idea that Dracula is not the spawn of the devil but that he was cursed by God himself
when he renounced him as Dracula says to Van Helsing “look what your God has done to me”
when he is in one of his monster forms. As well as that, when he lays dying he calls out
“where is my God? He has forsaken me”. In the end he asks Mina to “give him peace”, thus
Schellekens 23
she pushes the sword deeper into his heart and then cuts off his head. Her love for him lifted
his curse.
Another reading of Dracula which shows the Count’s better side, is the supposed
sequel to Dracula, namely Dracula: The Un-Dead written by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt.
Dacre Stoker states that he “had seen so many film versions of Dracula and was terribly
surprised that very few of the films had any resemblance to Bram's original novel” (quoted by
Alison Flood). Stoker and Holt therefore decided to stick relatively close to Bram Stoker’s
notes on characters, themes and plot lines in order to “give both Bram and Dracula back their
dignity” (Flood). I agree with Leslie S. Klinger when he argues that Dracula: The Un-Dead
cannot properly be called a sequel to Dracula for it is rather far-fetched in its explanations for
the turn of events in the original novel by Bram Stoker. However, I do not believe that, as
Klinger argues, this sequel “baldly claims the original got the story wrong”. On the contrary,
Stoker and Holt try to get the story right and show a side of Dracula that can be found in the
original novel but that many readers and film makers have missed or chosen to ignore. The
original novel is composed of parts of the journals of the people who hunted and killed
Dracula, in which Dracula gets no chance like Louis for example does in Anne Rice’s
Interview With the Vampire to explain himself or to make himself appear more empathisable.
Another similar type of story is The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen, where Dracula
finally gets the chance to tell his side of the story, in the style of Anne Rice’s Louis, on a
taperecorder. This time the whole story is told completely from Dracula’s perspective and his
sympathetic side is more visible.
A further, more recent, adaptation is the tv series Dracula (2013) by Cole Haddon. In
which Dracula is in London to exact revenge on the secret society of vampire hunters who
had ruined his life, but he falls in love with a woman who strongly resembles his dead wife.
Even though Dracula has come back to exact his revenge, the vampire hunters themselves
Schellekens 24
seem to revel in violence, whereas Dracula only seems to use it as a necessary means to
punish them.
Thus with these adaptations of Dracula, showing the Count as a violent and cruel, but
at the same time also cursed and haunted sympathetic figure, it might seem surprising as to
why many people, such as Clements, believe Dracula to be the epitomy of evil and a
metaphor for evil, but nothing more than that. But I believe this is largely to do with the fact
that eventhough it is on the one hand obvious that the Count’s own memoirs are not included
in the original novel, it is on the other hand easy to overlook and the Crew of Light seem,
superficially, relatively reliable narrators, including newspaper clippings for example in their
story. Another reason is that, as I have already mentioned, many filmmakers have focused on
the evil side of Dracula. They might hint at Dracula’s condition as a curse, such as in the film
Dracula by Tod Browning and Karl Freund where Dracula says “to die, to be really dead, that
must be glorious. There are far worse things awaiting man than death”. But they do not linger
on it for long and focus on his evil doings instead. These movie adaptations focusing on
Dracula as evil range from Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, where there is a lot of focus on
Dracula as ugly scary vampire, in 1922 to Van Helsing in 2004.
The image of the vampire as epitomy of evil is lastly called into question by Elizabeth
McCarthy, in her argumentation that the “central action and primal sense of the vampire myth
is not the vampire’s consumption of blood but its own destruction and mutilation. … [The
vampire is thus] far more the victim of atrocious acts of bodily violation than the perpetrator”
(189). Moreover, especially the killing of female vampires such as Lucy is very violent and
graphic; many critics have remarked that the staking of Lucy and her squirming and
screaming has “all the resonance of a gang rape, and a warped depiction of the female
orgasm” (McCarthy, 199). This points again to the interpretation of vampires as not
necessarily the epitomy of evil, but amoral and that they are hardly any worse than the men
Schellekens 25
who hunt them. Since long before Dracula has been knifed down by the vampire hunters, Van
Helsing has already had his coffins destroyed and stolen his money “As he spoke he put the
money remaining into his pocket; took the title-deeds in the bundle as Harker had left them;
and swept the remaining things into the open fireplace where he set fire to them with a match”
(Bram Stoker, 327). In doing so, Van Helsing becomes a criminal and therefore less of a
reliable narrator.
We have seen that Clement’s arguments about the vampire being rooted in Christianity
and therefore the embodiment of evil and sin are not so black and white as she makes them
out to be. But if the vampire is not completely evil, even in the earliest vampire stories, who
exactly is the vampire who shows up at the end of the twentieth century, how is he different
from earlier vampires, and how did he become this way?
3. The Journey of the Romantic Paranormal Hero
One of the things I discussed in section two was the argument against Susannah
Clements that evil and Christian values do not necessarily go hand in hand. Clements however
claims that they do, she also seems to argue that being human is based on Christian values
when she states “If the vampire represents for us aspects of ourselves that make us human,
then the spiritual and theological aspects are necessary for a fuller, richer picture. If Christians
can understand the vampire better, we can discuss, create, and inspire a respiritualized figure
of the vampire” (164). In light of this, it seems as if Clements would argue that what makes us
human is being Christian and what makes the vampire other and evil is that he is also
connected to Christian beliefs, but therein believed to be the work of the devil. Clements
however also discusses the romantic paranormal hero in her book and how he is so different
from, mainly, Dracula. If the romantic paranormal hero is so different to Dracula and not so
very different from the humans he comes into contact with, then should he not, in Clements
line of argument, be Christian? This complication is however ignored by Clements, she
Schellekens 26
merely argues that “as the vampire figure has lost its spiritual potency, it has lost much of its
metaphorical power” and therefore lost its fangs (164). A big change in the vampire hero is
that he became more and more part of a secularized society. Clements claims that Charlaine
Harris’ vampires in The Southern Vampire Mysteries are “secularized” because the Christian
worldview of the main character Sookie Stackhouse is unable to “fully encompass a world
where the supernatural is reality” and because Harris emphasizes “secular manifestations of
the vampire figure, focused on sex and social difference” (10). But if every age creates or
needs its own vampire, which Clements herself also even argues, then this age definitely
needs a vampire figure that reflects a society where we feel that ‘the (Oriental) Other’ such as
in Dracula, should no longer exist. We are all equal and there should be no social difference
based on race or ethnicity. Therefore, I do not believe secularization to be the dirty word
Clements makes it out to be.
According to Clements, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga goes a step further by
exhibiting ‘defanged’ vampires, “making them capable of free will and thus little more than
glorified humans with a penchant for drinking blood” (10). Clements also argues that Meyer’s
has stripped the vampire myth of its “fundamental themes of sin, temptation, and spiritual
guilt” (10). Clements claims that “the vampire in Dracula is used for spiritual and theological
reflection in a way that is gradually secularized as the vampire genre develops throughout the
twentieth century” (14). The term ‘spiritual’ is not necessarily connected to religion,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary the term can also be used to discuss supernatural
beings or intellect. Therefore even though the vampire might not be used much anymore these
days for theological reflection, Clements cannot rule out the fact that the vampire figure is
definitely still used for spiritual reflection, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the
author. The vampire may have been secularized, but Clements seems to use the term in a
rather negative way. Vampire fiction has merely adapted to the changing worldviews of
Schellekens 27
society and it just happens to be that less and less people feel very strongly about religion,
therefore this is reflected in the image of the vampire. It does not however mean that people
do not reflect on life, their purpose in life, death, and their spirit, soul or essence. Therefore
we do see a certain spiritual reflection in contemporary vampire fiction, although it is not as
theological as it may have been. As Clements asserts, religious symbols, especially the cross,
have been used so often in vampire fiction that they are now barely more than clichés. She
argues that the cross in Dracula had a proper theological purpose but that “the most recent
vampire stories have eliminated the vampire’s traditional fear of sacred objects entirely” (14).
This is however not an indication of the vampire supposedly ‘losing’ his fangs. I do not agree
with Clements on her idea that the vampire can only have fangs and be a promising metaphor
in connection to a Christian worldview. On the one hand because Clements seems to confuse
Christian with being human and moreover, vampires can be connected to religions that are not
Christian, such as in the tv series Being Human. Some contemporary vampire fiction such as
tv series Being Human does retain the religious elements, used in Dracula and other vampire
stories afterwards, of the vampire being afraid or harmed by religious objects. However,
present-day vampire fiction includes different kinds of religions, not just Christianity but also
Judaism for example, meaning that any religious symbol of any religion only works on a
vampire when he was, during his human life, a practitioner of that specific type of religion.
Thus a cross would only work on Roman Catholics and the Star of David would only repel a
Jewish vampire for example. In conjunction with claiming that the vampire “has lost its
spiritual potency” (164), Clements only connects ‘spirituality’ to Christian ideas of
spirituality, there are nevertheless other ways of finding spirituality especially nowadays.
Victoria Nelson argues in Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New
Supernatural that as Christianity receded into the background towards the end of the twentieth
century, people started to search for new ways of finding spirituality and many found this in
Schellekens 28
fantasy fiction and the supernatural (16). Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, for example,
explained that “believing in supernatural things allows you to actually have a spiritual
experience in a time when you cannot do that in … [an] uplifting way without sounding
somewhat foolish” (quoted by Victoria Nelson, 71). Susannah Clements claims that the
vampire can only be a strong metaphor for us if he is connected to spiritual and theological
aspects, she thereby also insinuates that the twentieth- and twentyfirst-century secularized
vampires do not have the “power [they] once had and that they have lost their fangs (164).
Veronica Hollinger however argues secularism and postmodernism go hand in hand and that
the vampire is an especially potent metaphor in postmodern times. She states that:
This deconstruction of boundaries helps to explain why the vampire is a monster-ofchoice these days, since it is itself an inherently deconstructive figure: it is the monster
that used to be human; it is the undead that used to be alive; it is the monster that looks
like us. For this reason, the figure of the vampire always has the potential to jeopardize
conventional distinctions between human and monster, between life and death,
between ourselves and the other. We look into the mirror it provides and see a version
of ourselves. (201)
In contrast to Clements, Hollinger does not view secularism as something bad that kills the
potential for the vampire figure to be a powerful metaphor.
Besides the new potential of the Gothic Romance to fill the spiritual gap that we miss
in contemporary secular society, the most important difference between twentieth/ twentyfirst century vampires and older vampires is that contemporary vampires have a larger degree
of free will and there is yet more focus on their sympathetic side rather than their amoral side.
Even though the older vampires might not be completely evil, they are still mostly forced to
drink blood and kill because it is in their supposedly cursed nature, no matter how much they
despise it and themselves for it. Varney the Vampire for example does not want to continue
Schellekens 29
living the way he does and thus takes his own life by throwing himself into Vesuvius in order
to end his cursed existence; for him to take such drastic measures in order to not kill anymore,
definitely prooves that he does not want to do what he does but that he does not have a choice
and therefore no ,or at least very little, free will. This focus on free will in contemporary
vampire fiction allows for more focus on the redemption of the vampire; such as on Klaus’
redemption in The Originals tv-series and Damon’s redemption in The Vampire Diaries tvseries. Both characters generate a certain amount of empathy with the viewer, however just
before the viewer could potentially view either of them, in this case particularly Klaus, as a
sympathetic hero, they do something horrible to completely override that image again. And
yet the other characters never seem to give up on the possibility of their atonement, and
neither does the viewer. Redemption in these cases does not seem to have anything to do with
religion, but more with doing good to make up for bad things in their past, and with making
amends with the people who love them.
Current vampire literature focuses, according to Clements, more on current fears and
the “breakdown of the family” (5). This is not completely true, because although Victorian
English men feared the Oriental outsider because they were afraid he would take their women,
and this was translated into the vampire ‘other’ who invades the country and infects the
English women with his amoral ways, these are not current fears. Contemporary vampire
fiction does mostly not conform to the image of the traditional nuclear family, but that is not
viewed as problem. Thus the new paranormal Byronic hero is, unlike vampires such as
Dracula and Lord Ruthven, no longer viewed as a threat to the nuclear family. Even the one
vampire couple who do end up like a traditional nuclear family, Bella and Edward in the
Twilight saga, did not intend to do so. Bella never wanted to get married and only did so
because otherwise Edward would not change her into a vampire. And neither of them ever
planned to have any children or even thought of the option, since Edward is a vampire and did
Schellekens 30
not believe he could reproduce, and Bella wanted to become a vampire so badly and so
quickly that she never even mentioned being sad about not having children. In fact when
Rosalie tells her about her own wishes to have been able to live a long life with children and
grandchildren, and she says to Bella that she is to young to understand what she is giving up
without thinking it all through properly, Bella feels absolutely confident thinking to herself
that she will gain more than she is giving up (Eclipse, 150). Sookie does melancholically list
all the things she will never be able to do with Bill because he is a vampire, such as never
being able to have children (Dead until Dark, 161). However, she quickly starts to list all the
positive things that come from having a relationship with him, namely she can feel protected
and she can be herself, not being burdened by her ‘curse’ of mind reading, which she values
most of all (162). As well as that Sookie does not just have one relationship, she dates several
men consecutively, and is not very preoccupied with marriage. Furtermore, several vampires
in The Southern Vampire Mysteries entertain different types of relationships, both with men
and women, which are never condemned in the novel. Thus the threats the paranormal
vampire hero poses to the nuclear family are not important, because the nuclear family is no
longer an ideal. The only potential threat is that of a lack of reproduction, which is solved
only in the Twilight Saga, where Bella is still human when she becomes pregnant.
3.1 Monstrous Heroes
According to Elizabeth Miller, the literary vampire was based on the villains in Gothic novels
such as those by Ann Radcliffe, it however also drew many characteristics from the Byronic
hero “a complex, aloof aristocrat whose past is shrouded in secrecy; who, driven by some
inner force, travels far and wide in search of oblivion; who leads women into disastrous, even
diabolical affairs”. It is these characteristics that gave the literary vampire its appeal(Bram
Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Journey Into Vampire Country and the Dracula
Phenomenon, 60). Earlier in the thesis I already compared Lord Ruthven and Dracula to the
Schellekens 31
Byronic hero, but they remained mostly without free will, or at least any options to exercise
that free will. The contemporary Byronic vampire hero is described with greater emphasis on
his free will. For example, because of the existence of the synthetic True Blood, the vampires
in The Southern Vampire Mysteries can choose not to drink human blood. Furthermore, the
vampires in The Vampire Diaries and The Originals can choose to live off blood bags. It is
not known if any of the vampires in the above mentioned series could live of animal blood,
but that is what the vampires in Twilight do. What is interesting in comparison to Clements
argument about these so-called de-fanged vampire heroes, is that these vampires do not all
choose to live and eat the same way, yet can all still be called sympathetic, but not necessarily
morally good, heroes.
Vampire Bill, especially in Dead Until Dark ,is a good example of a vampire of the
paranormal romance genre who is not necessarily a morally good hero. When I use the word
‘moral’ I mean it in a non-Christian way, commonly accepted by humanity regardless of their
religion. Bill does save Sookie’s life when she is attacked by the Rattrays and he gives her his
blood to heal her. Sookie however does not always trust him because she realizes that
vampires are killers and he himself explains that vampires have no human values. He explains
his way of living to Sookie; “ ‘I had been a good man when I was alive—I mean, before I
caught the virus. So I tried to be civilized about it, select bad people as my victims, never feed
on children. I managed never to kill a child, at least’” (Dead until Dark, 49). So even though
he tried to be civilized about choosing his victims, he actually was not. Sookie often does not
even trust Bill and is afraid of him because he sometimes wants her blood or have sex with
her when she does not want to and he basically forces himself upon her. This happens for
example after the scene in Fangtasia where Sookie gets vampire blood all over her and Bill
nearly rapes or eats her “his tongue began licking the blood from my face. I was really scared.
I was also really angry. I grabbed his ears and pulled his head away from mine … His eyes
Schellekens 32
were still like caves with ghosts dwelling in their depths. ‘Bill!’ I shrieked. … ‘Snap out of
it!’ (Dead until Dark, 208). In The Southern Vampire Mysteries drinking blood and having
sex seem to almost always go hand in hand, which makes some situations very dangerous for
Sookie, even if Bill is her boyfriend. When Sookie and Bill discuss his potential soullessness:
‘Do you really believe you’ve lost your soul?’ That was what the Catholic Church was
preaching about vampires. ‘I have no way of knowing,’ Bill said, almost casually. It
was apparent that he’d brooded over it so often it was quite a commonplace to thought
to him. ‘Personally, I think not. There is something in me that isn’t cruel, not
murderous, even after all these years. Though I can be both.’ ‘It’s not your fault you
were infected with a virus.’(53)
Bill basically admits that he can control his vampiric urges, but sometimes chooses not to.
Another monstrous hero is Damon Salvatore from The Vampire Diaries. In this case I
mean the tv series, because strangely enough the same character in the books only seems evil
at first because everyone assumes he has committed several murders that have occurred, but
he actually has not and is just a very misunderstood character. The same character in the tv
series however, does commit all the murders that are attributed to him. He is very different
from his brother Stefan who is also a vampire, but tries to live a life without taking human
blood, or at least not drinking it straight from the source but from blood bags. Damon kills
humans and supernatural beings alike far too easily. He kills Alaric for example because he
knows too much about the supernatural and what Damon is, and he blames the murders that
he has committed on Stefan’s best friend Lexi and then executes her. Damon commits several
acts that make it very easy for the other characters and, by extension, the viewers to hate him,
but then he does several selfless things as well, such as risking his own life to safe that of his
brother which then seems to wipe away any evil he has done. The fact that he has a very
tormented soul also helps in understanding his lack of respect for other people’s lives because
Schellekens 33
people in his past have never shown much respect for his, especially the people from the
Augustine society. Yet everytime the viewer thinks Damon is turning good, he does
something evil again to turn him away from the path of redemption.
Klaus from the The Originals tv series is very similar to Damon. At first he appears
completely evil, without any respect for anyone’s wishes, not even those of his own family,
but his own. However, after a while Klaus’ horrible childhood is revealed, which makes his
character more understandable and sympathetic. Yet, the same as with Damon, as soon as
Klaus seems to be redeemable he goed back to his scheming ways and kills or tortures
without remorse. Thus even though these so-called vampire heroes have bountyfull options to
redeem themselves, several of them decide not to take these roads to redemtion, at least not
without a female heroine in their lives, making them if anything more monstrous than the
vampires before Buffy.
3.2 Re-humanizing the Posthuman
After the widespread appeal of Anne Rice’s sympathetic vampire hero Louis, there came
more and more vampire heroes who retained even more of their humanity than Louis did.
Vampires such as in the tv series Kindred: The Embraced, where the vampires are not
allowed to kill humans, even by the vampire law. Further examples are the tv series
Moonlight and Blood Ties. The main vampires in these series, Mich and Henry respectively
are ‘good guys’, they work together with human lawinforcement and use their supernatural
abilities to do good rather than evil. They do not feel the guilt of past sins or evils that they
have committed, because there are none to feel guilty about. These vampires did not need any
re-humanizing because they retained their humanity in their posthuman form. Where with
‘posthuman’ I mean the kind of body that humans long for, namely whether it is technological
or biological, as long as it is better than our own bodies, more resistant against age, disease
and decay. And with re-humanizing I mean putting the human consciousness, with its value of
Schellekens 34
morals, back into the posthuman body. Posthuman and paranormal are not interchangeable
terms. The posthuman body is something that can be used as a vessel for the human
consciousness, and also, for now, resembles the human body and carries with it a departure
from anthropocentric thinking (Neil Badminton, 13-14). It could also be seen as a next step in
evolution, away from humans as they are today. In this sense robots, vampires and even
zombies are posthuman. In several contemporary supernatural romance stories, where the
romantic relationship between the supernatural man and half supernatural/ human woman is
foregrounded and the heroine is a very important character, mostly the main character, the
supernatural man acts much less morally appropriate when he is not loved by a heroine. The
love of the heroine however has the power to change him. As I argued in the introduction;
love is the cure to the disease. The most obvious occurrence of this happens in the film Warm
Bodies. R is a rather mindless zombie who attacks people, eats their brains and wanders
around an airport all day. When he meets Julie however, things change. He has killed Julie’s
boyfriend and eaten his brain which makes him in possession of his memories. He is
intregued by Julie whom he saves from his fellow zombies. There is a connection between
them that grows and as it does, R becomes more and more human again. In the idealization of
the posthuman body it is odd that R looses his, but on the other hand also logical, seeing as
they are the undead that do rot. Where love completely cures R, it does not do so completely
for vampires. Vampire Bill tries to somewhat cure himself at first: “ ‘For a while I taped soap
operas and watched them at night when I thought I might be forgetting what it was like to be
human. After a while I stopped, because from the examples I saw on those shows, forgetting
humanity was a good thing” (57). When this does not work he does not really bother
anymore, which is evident from the way he acts towards Sookie in the beginning of their
relationship; talking about human life and death as if it means nothing, showing no
compassion for Sookie even after she has found her grandmother dead on the kitchenfloor.
Schellekens 35
Sookie seems to believe, even if she does not say so, that she can change Bill, because at first
she accepts him for who he is but as the relationship progressess somewhat further she starts
to dislike his taste for blood when it comes from other sources than herself and she starts to
have trouble with his lack of a moral compass when he kills her uncle. Sookie is however
never really able to completely remove all these issues. This changes when Eric’s memory is
erased in Dead to the World, Sookie briefly gets the chance to mold Eric to the perfect
vampire boyfriend who is not evil at all. However, this does not last because Eric gets his
memory back and does not remember his being good.
Damon Salvatore is, unlike Bill seems to be, not devoid of human emotions, but he
does mostly lack sympathy for other people. As mentioned before, he terrorizes Stefan and
Elena and countless others, before Elena and he become a couple. As Damon starts to love
Elena he tries to do the right thing for her, even though he often only pushes her away because
he forces his own will upon her instead of letting her decide her own fate and make her own
choices. When they are united in their search for Stefan, who has gone bloodcrazy, they both
fall in love completely with one another and develop a relationship. It is only however, when
they are really together as boyfriend and girlfriend that Damon becomes more concerned with
Elena’s wishes and becomes less selfish. However, as soon as they break up Damon kills one
of Elena’s friends, showing that without the heroine the posthuman monster remains
monstrous and does not regain his humanity.
It is the same with Klaus, who first seems the epitomy of evil; showing no regret,
sympathy or remorse. It is only when he meets Caroline and falls in love with her that he
starts to behave differently. He even does not exact revenge on Tyler, who has betrayed him,
just because Caroline asks him not to. Later on it is the same when Klaus meets Cammie. As
soon as they develop somewhat of a bond, Klaus behaves more like a Byronic hero, rather
than the villain. These supernatural Byronic heroes however, do not regain all of their
Schellekens 36
humanity, simply because they do not seem to want to, they are too set in their ways. The
women who play a part in trying to redeem/cure them, therefore have to undergo change
themselves in order to “make the romance work” (Clements, 150). For the “typical romance
formula is based on a conflict between the hero and heroine—a conflict that is strong enough
to keep the two characters apart until it is overcome as they are reconciled in love” (Clements,
150). Normally in order for the romance to work, “the nature of the … vampire has to be
significantly altered”, but in these cases it is the heroine who changes as well (Clements, 150).
4. Romantic Heroines Who are not Afraid of Bending the Rules
Nina Auerbach in Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (1982)
describes “three men lean hungrily over three mesmerised and apparently charcterless women
whose wills are suspended by those of the magus/master. The looming men are Svengali,
Dracula, and Freud; the lushly helpless women are Trilby O’Ferrall, Lucy Westenra, and (as
Freud calls her) ‘Frau Emmy von N., age 40, from Livonia.” (16). These lushly helpless
women have changed over time from damsels in distress to damsels who can rescue
themselves. The Gothic and Romantic novels had fairly stric boundaries set for the heroine.
Everything men were afraid of, such as the New Woman were not portrayed, or indeed as
madwomen. Anne Radcliffe’s Gothic heroines faint at “every crisis in the plot” and the only
thing their sensibility is good for, is that it “puts them close to superior forms of
consciousness and perception, which are reflected in their fragile and exquisite appearance
and their affinity with trance and tears” (Northrop Frye, 29). But she is also a female detective
(Tamar Heller, 3) Mina is not necessarily a far cry from the nervous but curious heroines from
Gothic and Romance novels, but she is definitely a lot stronger mentally and functions neither
as a seductress nor as a victim, unlike the more singular characters of the heroines that have
gone before her, throwing off that duality that has haunted women in fiction. Mina often acts
as a metaphorical crutch for her husband to lean on. It is not Mina, but Jonathan who has
Schellekens 37
nervous fits and is mentally the weaker one in the relationship, this is evident from remarks in
her diary entries, such as Mina saying “I am always anxious about Jonathan, for I fear that
some nervous fit may upset him again” and “the poor dear was evidently terrified at
something—very greatly terrified; I do believe that if he had not had me to lean on and to
support him he would have sunk down … I drew him away quietly, and he, holding my arm,
came easily” (Dracula, 184). This reversal of the contrast between men and women in the
novel undermines the predominant notion of men as saviours of young, nervous women, it
shows a positive disregard for the ‘rules’ of Gothic Romance literature. What pushes this idea
further is the fact that hysterics, originally primarily connected to women, is not mentioned in
connection to the women in the novel, but it is in connection to Van Helsing. Dr. Seward
mentions in his diary that after Lucy’s funeral “the moment we were alone in the carriage he
gave way to a regular fit of hysterics. He has denied to me since that it was hysterics … I tried
to be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the circumstances; but it had no effect. Men
and women are so differen in manifestations of nervous strength or weakness!” (185-186).
Mina is also basically the only one of the Crew of Light who actually comes up with
structured plans for finding and destroying Dracula. The men seem to mostly blunder about,
for example when they go to Dracula’s house and only realise when they are there that they
should have thought about “some plan of attack” (325). Furthermore, when it comes to killing
Dracula, they fail to follow Van Helsing’s full instructions and do not decapitate Dracula.
Mina also forms the idea of Van Helsing hypnotising her so that they may find out where
Dracula is headed (331). Furthermore, Van Helsing seems to say that Mina is the best of men
and women combined in one; “when we want all her hope, all her courage; when most we
want all her great brain which is traned like man’s brain, but is of sweet woman” (361). As
Buffy is the next important female figure in vampire fiction to break with a male tradition of
fighting and monster slaying heroes, there seems to be a bit of a gap between Mina and Buffy.
Schellekens 38
This could simply be due to the duality that existed within Gothic writing, where on the one
hand patriarchal values were opposed and on the other hand they were adhered to, in the same
novel. Therefore it could have taken a long time before another female role model stood up.
Before Buffy becomes the chosen one she is a rather shallow girl who only cares about trivial
things, however once she receives her powers and slays her first vampires, she feels
empowered and starts to grown into her duty as protector.
4.1 Death Drive
Mina and Buffy both grow as characters once they have come into contact with death, seeing
as vampires are dead, they are a safe means to exercise their death drive. For Buffy the death
drive is made explicit when in the episode Fool For Love, Spike says to Buffy when she asks
him how he killed two slayers in the past, that all slayers actually want to die, they want to
know what it is like. Another interpretation of the death drive explains that:
Frustration in love … is very apt to turn into a death-wish. Thus the highest and most
intense aspects of life, which love represents, are not the opposite of death, but part of
the drive towards death which is the momentum of life itself. The complete identity
with nature, which is the fulfillment of life, is achieved visibly only by death; hence
death is the most accurate symbol of the ultimate meaning of life. (Northrop Frye, 52)
Since vampires are dead,loving one is the ultimate death drive.
Mina not so much, but for Buffy this drive towards death and dealings with the dead changes
Buffy’s moral compass as well. For she begins to assert that she is the law, seeing as there is
no one who can fight supernatural beings like her. Buffy is the one authority and executioner
in the ‘Buffyverse’.
5. The Flight of the Heroine
Since Buffy more and more vampire fictions of the 20th and especially the 21st
century shift more of their focus to the female heroines in these stories, mostly because a
Schellekens 39
significant amount of vampire fiction is part of the paranormal romance genre. This genre
takes its bits and pieces from all kinds of genres, therefore, the same as with regular regular
romance novels, “they can be humorous, historical, futuristics, contemporary, mystery,
fantasy, urban fantasy, scifi, gothic, erotica—basically, if the romance is front and center, then
it’s labeled a paranormal romance, regardless of the genre” (Keri Arthur).
As Buffy already shows, when coming into contact with the supernatural, and in this case
especially vampires, the ethical values of the heriones in urban fantasies and paranormal
romances change dramatically. Where we find Buffy claiming that she is the law, we find
current heroines such as Sookie Stackhouse in the The Southern Vampire Mysteries and in the
TV series True Blood going a leap further and killing people and covering up deaths as if
human laws and ethics do not apply anymore once death, through vampires and the death
drive, has left its mark on the heroine. Most current heroines grow much darker once they
have come into contact with the paranormal, and especially vampires. As Elizabeth McCarthy
argues “it seems that the most dangerous infection the vampire killer is open to is not
vampirism but the infectiousness of violence itself” (198). Richard Matheson already
“explores this infection of violence and perversion of moral authority” in I am Legend
through Robert Neville who is the only human left in the world after an epidemic that turned
the entire population of humans on earth into vampires (198). This exploration has thus also
extended towards the female heroine in vampire fiction.
Sookie Stackhouse, for example, in the first book of the Sookie Stackhouse series
Dead Until Dark, does not appear as morally lacking at first. Yet as soon as she meets
vampire Bill, her life changes and with it, her actions concerning and sense of what is right
and wrong. The first instance of this is when she is not sure whether to warn Bill about Mack
and Denise Rattray’s history of vampire draining, but then only decides to go after them
because she “was goaded by the look Mack had given [her]—as if [she] was negligible” (7).
Schellekens 40
Thus she does not necessarily go after them to potentially save Bill, but to seemingly get even
with Mack for making her feel like she does not matter, just like everyone else does because
they think she’s crazy since she can read their minds. Sookie tried to make a good impression
on the first vampire she had met in her life and the Rattrays made a fool out of her, this
angered her to the point where, Sookie then goes after the couple with a heavy chain and
explains she’s never been in a fight before, but that she is “positively looking forward to it”
(9). Most people would not try to go up against two other people, thereby Sookie already hints
at her being driven towards death. Contrary to other paranormal romances, where the
relationship between the heroine and the vampire is usually strained or broken off because of
the fact that the vampire is not human, Sookie is drawn towards Bill even more because he is
not human which makes him so far the only person she could actually consider dating since
she cannot read his mind: “I turned fully to him and put my hands on both sides of his white
face, and I looked at him intently. I focused with all my energy. Nothing. It was like having to
listen to the radio all the time, to stations you didn’t get to select, and then suddenly tuning in
to a wavelength you couldn’t receive. It was heaven” (12). Sookie seems to be on the one
hand very naïve when it comes to vampires, especially Bill, and on the other hand she is half
paranoid most of the time thinking Bill might have committed this or that crime. Her naïve
side is what makes her death drive more obvious, such as when Bill asks “ ‘Aren’t you afraid
to be alone with a hungry vampire?’ he asked, something arch and yet dangerous running
beneath the words. ‘Nope.’ ‘Are you assuming that since you came to my rescue that you’re
safe, that I harbor an ounce of sentimental feeling after all these years? Vampires often turn
on those who trust them. We don’t have human values, you know.’ ‘A lot of humans turn on
those who trust them,’ I pointed out” (12). Despite her death drive however, Sookie does not
want to become a vampire “ ‘You will die unless you do as I say,’ Bill told me. ‘Sorry don’t
want to be a vampire,’ I said (31). Even though the heroines in vampire fiction love their
Schellekens 41
vampire boyfriend, most of them do not actually want to become a vampire themselves. Like
Sookie, Elena for example from the tv series The Vampire Diaries does not want to become a
vampire. In season 2 episode 20 entitles The Last Day, Elena is to be a blood sacrifice for
Klaus to lift a curse that has been placed upon him, the only thing that might save her is a
special potion of which they do not know if it will work. Elena has however accepted the fact
that she might have to die for the greater good, in order to save innocent lives. Damon
Salvatore, her vampire boyfriend Stefan’s vampire brother, loves Elena as well and even
though she says it is her choice to make because it is her life, he disregards her emphasis on
free will and forces his blood on her so that if she dies, she will come back a vampire. Stefan
and Elena are horrified at Damon’s actions because it should have been Elena’s choice not
his. Later when Elena and Stefan discuss her becoming a vampire, she breaks down and says
she never wanted to be a vampire, she wanted to be able to make the choices everyone makes
in life, such as deciding whether to have a family or not, but making those choices as they
came. She emphasizes the fact that she is only seventeen and does not know what choices she
would have wanted to make but she knows she would have wanted to grow up. Buffy
definitely does not want to become a vampire either. Eventhough she has Angel as her
boyfriend for a long while, which would have meant that she would have been the only one
growing older, her worst nightmare is to become a vampire, which is something the viewer
realises in the tenth episode of the first season of the television series Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, entitled Nightmares. Everyone’s nightmares come true during this episode and one of
Buffy’s worst fears is becoming the thing she hunts. Thereby implying she is afraid to be
tainted by the violence and amorality that the vampire spreads. A stronger instance of when
the reader realizes that Sookie’s morals have changed is when Sookie asks Bill about the
Rattrays “ ‘Are they dead?’ To my embarrassment, my voice sounded squaky. ‘Oh yes.’ I
gulped. I couldn’t regret that the world was rid of the Rats. But I had to look this straight in
Schellekens 42
the face, I couldn’t dodge the realization that I was sitting in the lap of a murderer. Yet I was
quite happy to sit there, his arms around me. ‘I should worry about this, but I’m not,’ I said”
(33). Sookie is more aware of the fact that vampires are killers, and that their prey is human,
than any other heroine in paranormal romance. Bella in Twilight for example does not even
believe Edward is capable of being evil, she compares him to an angel even when he himself
admits he has not always been a ‘vegetarian’ (only drinking animal blood). Sookie is very
much aware of the reality of what being a vampire means and that they can be dangerous, she
even does not completely trust Bill when it comes to her own life, yet she does not care about
the fact that he is a murderer. This is a big contrast to her constantly talking about what good
manners are and how her grandmother raised her to do the right thing. Not only does Sookie
not care that Bill is a killer, she also makes herself an accomplice by not telling the police
about how the Rattrays really died when their dead bodies are found among the debris of their
trailer which seems to have been destroyed by a tornado. Sookie’s constant dismissal of her
suspicions towards what Bill is capable of, but herself in danger as well:
Maybe he was thinking of Maudette? I had a moment of deep unease, wondering if in
fact Bill had known her, if she’d invited him to come home with her. But I rejected the
idea because I was stubbornly unwilling to dwell on the odd, awful, nature of
Maudette’s life and death; I didn’t want that horror to cast a shadow on my little bit of
happiness (35).
“ ‘I feel very…hmm. Fragile. When I think about the trailer.’ ‘You knew I was strong.’…
‘Yes, but I didn’t realize the full extent of your strength,’ I told him. ‘Or your imagination.’
‘Over the years, we get good at hiding what we’ve done.’ ‘So. I guess you’ve killed a bunch
of people.’ ‘Some.’ Deal with it, his voice implied. … ‘Were you hungrier right after you
became a vampire?” (49). This is again one of Sookie’s contradictions, she is a little afraid of
Bill on the one hand because she does not know exactly what his intentions are and what he is
Schellekens 43
capable off, but she likes him (also because he is basically the only one she can be herself
around) and is somehow not bothered about him killing people. “At that moment I felt that no
matter what this creature beside me had done, this peace was priceless after a lifetime of the
yammering of other minds inside my own” (50). Thus Sookie’s reasoning is that it does not
matter how many people Bill has killed or how he has done the killings, or the fact that he is
not even human (which she herself keeps reiterating), he is her only chance of having a
relationship and find love, which is traditionally the one thing in a gothic novel that the
heroine has been taught to want according to Michelle Massé “in whatever guise, above all
else” (4). However, even though Sookie feels like it is the reasonable thing to do to excuse
Bill the deaths of the people he had killed in the past and the deaths of the Rattrays since they
would have killed her otherwise, when she finds out he has also killed her Uncle Bartlett after
she told him he had molested her when she was a child, she feels different and confused:
“Hadn’t I been relieved, even pleased, to hear he’d been found dead? Didn’t my horror at
Bill’s intervention reek of hypocrisy of the worst sort?” (165). She decides they need a break
“ ‘I have to have a little time.’ … ‘Before I decide if the love is worth the misery’” (167). At
this point the crisis starts, which is part of “the typical romance formula”, where a conflict
arises between the hero and the heroine, which “is strong enough to keep the two characters
apart until it is overcome as they are reconciled in love” (Susannah Clements, 150). The
problem Sookie and Bill at this point still have is that Bill’s nature is too foreign to Sookie’s
at this point, which can, according to Clements, only be overcome by a significant alteration
of the “nature of the traditional vampire” (150). However, throughout the Sookie Stackhouse
series it is not Bill’s nature that changes, but Sookie’s as she becomes less attached to her
grandmother’s life lessons and views of correct behaviour when she acts first and then thinks.
When a house ,including vampires who Bill knows, has been burned to the ground, Sookie is
afraid Bill might have been among the burned vampires. Then when a fireman makes a joke
Schellekens 44
about “Southern fried vampires” Sookie attacks him “I was screaming like a banshee and
would have gone for him again if Sam had let go. … I had a sudden vision of how ashamed
my grandmother would have been to see me screaming at a public servant, to see me
physically attack someone. The idea pricked my crazy hostility like a needle puncturing a
balloon” (176). However, the clearest instances of Sookie being affected by the love of death
(dead creatures), changing her moral compass is first when she finds a body in the closet of
her hotel room, rather than going to the police she decides to hide the body in the woods.
Another even more serious incident in Dead to the World is when Sookie shoots Debbie out
of self-defence, yet makes Eric get rid of the body rather than going to the police and
explaining how Debbie had threatened her with a gun.
Elena is less death driven than Sookie, but she is also deeply affected by her love for
vampires. First of all, all the attempts on her life start after she has met Stefan and Damon.
They literally bring death her way. Furthermore, she becomes less and less shocked by
vampire atrocities committed around her. Moreover, when Damon is attacked by Jesse,
Caroline’s crush who has been injected with a toxin that will only make him want to feed on
vampires, Elena does not hesitate or think of any other options, she immediately stakes Jesse
to death. This is something Caroline holds against her, for Caroline and the viewer know that
if it had been Stefan or Damon who had been poisoned, she would have found another way to
save them rather than stake them.
Thus the flight of the new heroine is a flight away from human values and morality,
towards a new set of values in a supernatural world of death, where the heroine is pulled
towards death by her love of a vampire .
6. Conclusion
In my discussion of Clements I have shown that the early vampires such as Lord
Ruthven, Varney and Dracula were all relatively evil Byronic heroes, but that they were not
Schellekens 45
the epitomy of evil that Clements makes, mostly Dracula out to be. As well as that, The
vampire in these earlier works has no voice of his own, which makes it easy for unreliable
narrators to warp the events to their advantage. Van Helsing for example continually makes
Dracula out to be some simpleminded evil thing. Furthermore I have refuted Clement’s
arguments on the idea that the vampire can only really mean something to us significantly if
he is connected to Christianity, because for one humans are not all Christians thus Christian
symbols would not always mean something to every human. As well as that, paranormal
literature does fill a spritual gap that has been left by Christianity because people still want to
believe in something and choose rather to believe in the excitement of fear and its harbingers.
Later on I have argued that unlike Clement’s reasonings about the modern vampire
having lost its fangs and in the case of Edward being nothing more than a superhuman who
drinks blood, postmodern vampires still convey powerful metaphorical messages, especially
because they blur boundaries between the monstrous and the human. As well as that, modern
day vampires are not as sweet as Clements makes them out to be, especially Damon and
Klaus with their highly ambiguous moral standards, may actually be more monstrous than any
of the early literary vampires. Since they do not seem to want to be redeemed or are too
blinded by their hatred and lack of respect for the lives of others, they are especially difficult
to re-humanize. This re-humanization process works on zombies because they return to their
full humanity, however the purpose of the posthuman body is to be able to transcend
humanity, an aspect that is then lost. There are many vampires who do not need to be rehumanized by their heroines because they already seek or sought redemption. It is the
vampires who do not want to feel guilty about their dark side, that are the most difficult to rehumanize for the heroine, which is why it is mostly the heroine who needs to change in order
for the romance format to work. This is why heroines today are more morally ambiguous and
are driven towards death by their love for vampires. Thus the monstrous other is slowly
Schellekens 46
becoming the monstrous self. These supposed role models are neither completely good nor
completely evil, but their ambiguous moral standards make them dangerous. If every age
creates the vampire it needs, then with the heroine so closely connected to the vampire, do we
not also create the heroine we need? If so, then apparently we need a reinforcement of the
patriarchal society in this age where one would expect equality. These heroines reach back to
Gothic modes of dualistic representation; as they are damsels who rescue themselves on one
hand, but women who let their moral compasses be steered by their morally ambiguous men.
They are therefore questionable role models in this day and age.
Schellekens 47
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