come into these arms again and set this spirit free

[freckles_and_doubt]

So, vampires. I teach 'em. (And, may I add, for the record, that no fewer than three members of my flist did yesterday start their posts with "So, ...", which is probably expressive of something important, I'm not sure what.) I hasten to add, before you all obligingly imagine rows of little five-year-olds with pasty complexions and pointy teeth sitting attentively in a midnight classroom while I hold forth, I teach undergrad students about vampires rather than trying to teach vampires anything. (A bit difficult to maintain teacherly distance and mystique when pardon me, your teeth are in my neck). Also, I teach vampires and the erotic to strictly third-years, who presumably by this stage of their development are capable of reacting sensibly and without giggling, or at least without too much giggling, to explicit discussions of sex and phallic imagery and Freudian what have you. In the course of this epic teaching quest, currently filed under Department of Things That Keep Me Sane, I naturally get to be very, very rude about Twilight, and yesterday came to a quite sizzling and spontaneous insight which added about fifteen minutes to the lecture by way of digression and interesting debate. I shall now inflict it upon you, whether you like it or not.

See, in a broadly narrative sense vampires morph. They mutate. They are as all symbolic as all get-out, and thus are quite beautifully dense and layered reflections of their context - social, moral, historical, cultural. What vampires have mostly done for about two hundred years is provide us with powerful myths through which we can talk about sex, because the act of biting is a particularly explicit metaphor for sexual penetration, but the nature of the sex has changed over time. They fill, if you want to keep with the Freudian imagery, gaps - they're about desire, and desire is about something missing. Victorian vampires explore sex and seduction and intimacy, in a relatively simple way, because sex and seduction and intimacy were not OK as topics of ordinary literary representation, but were OK when you slithered them off sideways into the symbolic. They were particularly powerful as a vehicle for women to vicariously experience sex, and for men to vicariously work through all their anxieties about homo-eroticism, or women nicking phallic authority. Victorian vampires rock some serious repression.

These are not the concerns of the late twentieth century, which got progressively more open-minded about representing sex; post the sexual revolution of the 60s and the feminist movement, simple sexual freedom or women with fangs were not the major source of anxiety. Which isn't to say there weren't anxieties, and the last few decades of the 1900s saw a huge upsurge in the popularity of vampires - often angsty, interior, half-sympathetic monsters of maximum attractiveness. They kept the vampire power, though, the qualities of strength, mind control, shapeshifting, and were thus a beautiful vehicle to talk about the aspect of sexuality which wasn't OK in these particular times, namely the pleasures of submission. In a feminist and post-feminist age it's somewhat frowned upon, other than in the fringe of BDSM, to enjoy the jolly old stereotypes of an explicitly heterosexual dominance/submission relationship: gosh your fangs are so big, I'll just relax and enjoy it, shall I? So more modern vampires are powerful, dominant, with a swing towards violence (Buffy, Blade), but a subtext of seduction and desirability nonetheless. They're deeply non-PC in all sorts of ways, and we lap them up, hence the ridiculous success of Anne Rice, Laurel K. Hamilton and the rest of the heaving bosoms.

Twilight, though, Twilight is something different. Of course its attitude to sex is all up the pole, being as how it's a thinly-disguised (and badly-written) Mormon abstinence tract; Edward is all desirable but horribly dangerous because SEX! is DANGEROUS! and you SHOULDN'T HAVE IT! no matter how much you want it, cue yearning, repression and smouldering stalker behaviour. He could snap you like a twig, you know, and you're only allowed to get off on the idea because he's not actually touching you.

But I realised yesterday that that's only half of it. Meyer is plugging straight into the American zeitgeist, namely the religious right's frothing hypocricies about sex, but she's also allowing her vampires to morph yet again into another reflection of their context: celebrity culture. Edward glitters. He's a beautiful, powerful, distant, shiny object that you desire hopelessly but can't have. Bella's response, and the response of any screaming Twihard who wants him, is identical to their response to poor Robert Pattinson - it's a fan relationship of the more obsessive kind, desire for a distant ideal which is always unattainable. The first three novels are emotional porn for exactly this kind of relationship, spiced up with the unbelievable, wish-fulfilling fact that the iconic object of affection, in all his unreal beauty, actually reciprocates. Meyer's also not alone in exploiting this fact of modern media life: if you look at the fang-bangers in True Blood or the Sookie novels, they're basically groupies to the celebrity cult of vampires in general. Dracula had his gypsies, but in this day and age he has hordes of teen and post-teen idiots conditioned by media cultures into slavish and often self-destructive devotion to a powerful object of desire.

We get, in short, the vampires we deserve. I can only hope to goodness we grow out of them soon. I also have to say, I didn't realise how incredibly overt with all this Annie Lennox is in Love Song for a Vampire. I should totally have shown that to the class, if only for its lovely concentration of vampire symbolism. Also, does anyone have The Vampire Diaries? Half my class seems to be obsessed with the show, which means I should probably watch it. Sigh.

Comments

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

When I write, I often start with "So, " or "Well,". This is a good way to get writing, but seldom survives the first draft. It's surplus verbiage.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

It's not surplus verbiage: like any additional words, it's there for a purpose. In this case it completely changes the register of the text from formal to informal. The "So..." or "Well..." is a mimicry of oral rather than written speech, and tries to create the impression that you're starting in the middle of a conversation or oral presentation. It's folksy, homey, chatty. In this particular post I suspect it's part of the semi-conscious toolbox of techniques I use to render academic analysis sufficiently accessible that my unfortunate readers don't run screaming into the night.

If you often start with it and then delete it, it suggests that you consciously try to elevate your discourse when you're writing. Which is interesting.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

My writing is not the same as speech, nor should it be, even if it does start as internal speech. There's more opportunity to go back and edit, develop trains of thought ... and more opportunity to pare down.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Of course it's not the same as speech, but written language can quite cheerfully play games when it wants to, to mimic speech and persuade the reader to relax into a conversational register. Shadows of our oral traditions are everywhere in our written ones. Get me drunk and ask me about the folk voice in literary fairy tale sometime.

I obviously didn't express my thought clearly - I find it interesting that you consciously make the choice to avoid any of the folk echoes in writing, in favour of a deliberately more formal tone. Other bloggers are determinedly informal. I seem to range quite happily up and down the tonal register as the mood strikes me. We are an infinitely various race.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Written language can play games or mimic speech, but starting a piece of writing with a phase that is entirely superfluous to what I am going to say, e.g. "So, " or "well, " is a particular tic that I seem to do regularly. It works very well in the context of your post above. for me, it seems to act more like a starter motor.

[grumpyolddog.livejournal.com]

I rather enjoyed True Blood; it resonated nicely for me.

Let me explain - I am, in large part, Romany. As such, there's an odd dichotomy of perceptions about "my" people which the show reflected beautifully.

On the one hand, there's the typical "bunch of evil, thieving, untrustworthy bastards" thing, which is - if I'm completely honest - not without merit. To an outsider, this is an accurate perception.

On the other hand, there's the "dashing, romantic, spiritual, in-touch-with-NAYCHERR" myth which is... totally false. I suppose we are (and, importantly, we look) a bit different which can be both exotic and erotic depending on your insularity but the Barbara Cartland Gypsy does not exist and never has.

I saw the fang-bangers as yearning for that romantic and imaginary ideal and the reality of vampires to pretty much reflect the reality of the Romany. An awful lot of bastards who use pretty words and lies and a few of us trying to do the opposite.

It was... interesting, to me.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Heh ... fang-bangers

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

That's an extremely interesting parallel. It's also one of the things the vampire symbol is good at expressing which is quite separate (mostly) from the erotic - the other. Stoker's language in Dracula is rife with late Victorian fears of the "barbaric" races of Eastern Europe, and part of the horror of Dracula's threat is that he effectively colonises and penetrates the more civilised West. (And, of course, he traditionally has tribes of gypsies to serve him). But of course otherness is always attractive as well as terrifying, or perhaps attractive because it's terrifying - that push-pull tension between fear and desire is at the heart of the vampire appeal. Buffy is particularly good at ruthlessly pillorying the kind of idiots who go overboard on the "oooh different primitive wow" sort of thing - they tend to end up dead.

I also enjoy True Blood rather a lot, mostly because of the extreme self-consciousness with which it plays with the vampire myth.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

part of the horror of Dracula's threat is that he effectively colonises and penetrates the more civilised West ... and has tribes of gypsies to serve him

Aha! Eastern Europeans! Flocking!

Vampire Diaries

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

We watched the first episode. It's terrible, set in high school where the new guy is from Seattle and a vampire. It's a bit My So-called Life meets Dawson's Creek. I have asked Philip to burn it to disk for you. I think we have the first series.

Re: Vampire Diaries

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Wheee! thank you. I confidently expect it to be terrible, but I do really need to be able to refer to it as well as Buffy. All my references are starting to date! Woe is me!

Re: Vampire Diaries

[(Anonymous)]

I've also watched one episode. It is pretty terrible but I probably would have watched more if I had the time. Guilty pleasures and that. I have no doubt there'll be plenty of Material for you in it.

Thanks for this celeb insight - verrrra interesting.

scroob

Re: Vampire Diaries

[xavierxalfonso.livejournal.com]

I've watched a couple of episodes in German. It was entertaining froth, if you disengage your brain, which was exactly the reason for turning the TV on in the first place.

I liked the analysis in your main post - as scroob says, verrrra interesting. Perhaps nobody's put it in peer-reviewed print yet...

Re: Vampire Diaries

[herne-kzn.livejournal.com]

Your commitment to your students awes me. I watched the first episode and a half before sighing about the youth of today and binning it.

Re: Vampire Diaries

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

It's the entirely self-gratifying moment when you draw a parallel that they suddenly get because they know the text, and their eyes light up. I'm going to be able to do it with fanfic and Supernatural, about two-thirds of the class seem to watch it. Memo to self: Sam/Dean vote-off.

"Pardon me, your teeth are in my neck"

[mac1235.livejournal.com]

I had to google that phrase to work out where I had seen it before. Hah!

Re: "Pardon me, your teeth are in my neck"

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

My work here is done. I've never actually seen the film, but it's such a deliriously happy-making title I couldn't resist. God, I had completely forgotten it was a Polanski. I have to acquire a copy forthwith.

*brief pause* R49 on Loot. Mine, mine, mine and never leaving. Done.