Vampires:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

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

Session 7: Vampires, War, Depression and the Law
Terry Phillips- Between Death and Life: The Influence of the Vampire on Representations of the First World War
School of Humanities, Liverpool Hope University College, Liverpool, United Kingdom

This paper will examine commonly perceived characteristics of the vampire and the ways in which it informs some of the literature of the First World War. It will argue that while the figure of the vampire serves to represent a number of fears, including anxieties about gender and sexuality, the primary fear which it represents is the fear of death itself, the ultimate non-being. The vampire problematises the boundaries between the living and the dead and foregrounds blood as a site of abjection. Since the conditions of the First World War brought both men and women face to face with corpses in a manner previously unparalleled, it is not surprising to find what may be described as a vampiric discourse emerging in some of the fictional and non-fictional accounts of experiences both in the trenches and behind the lines. Paul Fussell has dismissed another example of such war writing as a ‘Gothic fantasia’ but to do so is to underestimate the power of Gothic in expressing humanity’s deepest fears. The paper will draw on the autobiographical and fictional accounts of life in the trenches lived literally alongside corpses in texts by Ford Madox Ford, Patrick MacGill and others, which by their use of the grotesque and the macabre portray reanimated corpses, thereby evoking horror in their readers. In addition it will examine texts written by those engaged in nursing near the Front, especially the part fictional/part factual text of Mary Borden, the suggestively named The Forbidden Zone, an account drawn from her nursing experience behind the French lines, which draws heavily on the language of vampire tales and casts the narrator herself in the role of vampire.

Peter Remington- ‘You’re Whining Again, Louis’: Anne Rice’s Vampires as Indices of the Depressive Self
Dept. of Radio TV and Film, Communications Faculty, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazimagusa, Northern Cyprus.

My title, taken from the film version of the first Vampire Chronicle, points to a common reading of the chronicles themselves. Louis Pointe du Lac is depressive as a result of his inability to square his human feelings with his vampire existence. Lestat represents the opposite extreme: a heroic drive towards full realisation of his vampire nature.
However, the major parameters of all Rice’s vampires in fact bear a remarkable resemblance to symptoms of clinical depression. We might list the most applicable of these as:

Major and Chronic Depression
• feelings of hopelessness
• diminished interest or pleasure
• too much or too little sleep
• feelings of worthlessness or guilt
• low self-esteem
• poor appetite or overeating
• poor concentration or inability to
• make decisions
• thoughts of death or suicide

Bipolar (manic) Depression (manic phase)
• over activity
• increased talkativeness or pressure of speech
• flight of ideas or racing thoughts
• inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
• decreased need for sleep
• distractibility
• indiscreet behaviour with poor judgement

These lists are an amalgam of diagnostic criteria, as quoted by Lewis Wolpert, to be found in DSM – IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed.) I have also been somewhat selective. Not all symptoms need to be simultaneously present for a positive diagnosis. Whilst the first list seems to apply most consistently to Louis, and in a different way to Armand, Lestat frequently meets all the criteria of list two. He moreover experiences the depressive phase when he “goes underground”.
Drawing mainly on the earlier chronicles, my paper shows these symptoms to be distributed amongst Rice’s entire cast. The question is not, then, whether any one vampire may be successfully diagnosed as depressive according to DSM – IV. It is rather two questions: whether Rice’s version of vampirism itself represents the depressive state and what implications may we derive from this for our reading of the narrative. Significant here is the continuity between the characters’ vampire and mortal identities; the difference being that their vampire selves appear within the context of an eternity that mirrors the seemingly interminable perspective of the depressive episode. Little wonder, then, that older vampires frequently despair and end their own existence.

Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan - Piercing the Corporate Veil - with a Stake? Vampire Imagery in the Law
Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia, Canada

We propose to offer a legal perspective to this interdisciplinary conference. Specifically, our paper will examine vampire imagery in legal judgments and commentary. While reference to the occasional gruesome crime with elements of vampirism (typically blood drinking in association with crimes of murder and rape) may be located by any quick search of legal databases, it is perhaps more interesting to examine the surprising number of vampire images appearing in cases and legal commentary having no connection with physical enactments of vampiric behaviour nor claims of mental illness including visions of vampires. Take for example the following quote from a case in the corporate law context: "When it comes to piercing corporate veils, courts are loath to act like Vlad the Impaler. Indeed, the stakes are too high for courts regularly to disregard the separate legal status of corporations." Such references occur with such frequency in the caselaw that it begs the questions of how and why vampire imagery is used in the law. What characteristics of vampires are connected in the minds of judges and legal scholars with various areas of the law? And why? We propose to analyze the use of this imagery in the literature of the law and to demonstrate that a variety of vampiric traits are so firmly ensconced in popular culture as to find expression with increasing regularity in the work of legal scholars.

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