Vampires:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Thursday 22nd May - Saturday 24th May 2003
Budapest, Hungary

Session 5B: Vampire Themes in Literature and Art
Benson Saler and Charles Ziegler - Dracula and Carmilla: Mythmaking and the Mind
Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University

In 19th and 20th century treatments of vampire themes in novels, short stories, plays, and films in English, Stoker’s Dracula (1897) takes pride of place. As various commentators have pointed out, in Dracula the intrusion of the supernatural into the natural is successfully resisted and, by the end of the novel, loose ends are tied and boundaries are restored. In Dracula and in many similar works vampire behaviour is rule governed, particularly with respect to various constraints that authors impose on the undead.
Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), as some have noted, is a foil to Dracula in that loose ends are left dangling and the narrative ends in an ambiguity that hints at sinister possibilities. We contend that Carmilla, in effect, is a truncated myth whereas Dracula fully conforms to a mythic structure that is warranted by the evolved architecture of the human mind-brain.
Experiments undertaken by cognitive scientists indicate that early in life children are able to distinguish between living things and artifacts and that they soon manifest metarepresentational skills for divining the mental states of others and predicting behaviour. Living things are credited with rule governed behaviour., constraints on that behaviour., and, quite often, will and purpose. Classical myths about monster-slayers, we argue, typically express intuitive ontologies and metarepresentations about living things that are relevant to the press of daily life, along with some dramatic and memorable counter-intuitive elements. Dracula includes all of the major elements that we associate with such myths whereas Carmilla does not. Because of that failure, Carmilla, despite its literary merits and its temporal precedence vis-à-vis Dracula, never became a best example or “prototype” of vampire stories whereas Dracula did.

David Cole- Anatomy of a Literary Vampirism
Buenos Aires. Argentina
David Cole Web Page

This paper shall concern the way in which literature has elements that define a type of vampirism. These elements have the intention of positing truly ‘a-social’ fixtures into the communal host. One might say that this type of literary vampirism is contra Bram Stocker or Anne Rice or most renderings of contemporary film vampires. I shall demonstrate that literary vampirism separates individuals and consequently preys on their singular energies. To illustrate literary vampirism, I shall use three texts:

1) Frankenstein: the creation of monsters.

The death machine is sonorous, and makes sounds throughout the novel; such as the romantic dance of death in which Elizabeth is caught, or the tale of the cottagers that is the story of betrayal and the inevitable confrontation with fear and displacement, as their unknown pupil reveals his presence. Death circles and resonates through every cavity of the book, it is joyfully and hopefully presented as the only escape from the obsessive quality of explanation, and the brutal nature of love.

2) Heart of Darkness: the journey into the abyss.

Kurtz was a living dead. As Marlow drew towards him in his floating coffin, death filled the ensuing environment. Perhaps this was enhanced and controlled by the immanent power of the ivory. Just as an elephant’s graveyard is a reverent and serene place, the inner station, filed to the brim with ivory, was thick with the death of elephants. Kurtz stood in the middle of it, “it was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at the motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze.”

3) Wide Sargasso Sea: the rendering of the shadow.

This section deals with how a fictional character, in this case, Antoinette, may be transformed from an excluded vampire (the madwoman in Jane Eyre), into an included seductress, or positive vampire in Wide Sargasso Sea. I shall also explore the connection between the West Indian practise of Obeah and vampirism.

Lois Drawmer- Sex, Death and Ecstasy: The Art of Transgression
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

Tales of the vampire, ghosts, witches and occult proliferate in the nineteenth century, and provide and enduring theme for artists of the period. This paper will explore the ways in which evil, sexuality and religious ecstasy are conflated in 19th century British and European art, primarily through the locus of the female form and mapped out onto fears and fascinations with female sexuality. I will draw upon scientific research about female sexuality in the 19th century, which considered that women were (or should be) devoid of sexual desire, except those who were physically or mentally deviant, and contrasting this with the social and cultural progression of the women’s movement.
I will focus on works by Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist artists, including Rossetti, Jean Delville, Evelyn De Morgan, Fernand Khnopff, and Simeon Solomon who produced challenging representations of occult phenomena, psychological states, addiction, deviancy and occult. De Morgan’s role as both an artist and spiritualist medium will be discussed in the light of her paintings of witches, demons and ghosts, and her highly personal interpretations of life-beyond the grave contrasted with the dominant patriarchal representations of women as the matrix of vampiric evil and occult repository produced by her male contemporaries. I will be drawing on her automatic writing transcripts in which she communicates with spirits, angels and demons to demonstrate the way in which spiritualism offered a new orthodoxy on death and the undead. I will refer to De Morgan’s friendship with Bram Stoker in which they shared interests in concepts of spiritualism, phrenology, Egyptology and life after death.
The bohemian lifestyles of artists of the period is legendary, with Rossetti’s predilection for laudanum, guilt over the overdose of his first wife and subsequent obsessive fascination with Janey Morris, providing striking works of art which are inscribed with increasingly monstrous aspects of the feminine. Other artists such as Khnopff, Moreau and Munch, for example, later develop these themes with overt reference to the females as the axis of evil, and vampirism in particular, expressed through transgressive, deviant sexual desire.

© Wickedness.Net 2003