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Session 12: The Classics
Chair: Paul Yoder

The Eternal Changeling: Dracula’s Transformations In the 1970s
Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin

This paper highlights the transformations that Dracula endures through the watershed of vampire postmodernity in the 1970s. In Dracula, we encounter a vampire that is consistently changing through re-interpretation, historical revision and romanticism. The Draculas of the 1970s, in the post Hammer world, develop through a series of individualised concepts from authors and filmmakers, who are keen to revise the vision and representation of Stoker’s Count.  Through the character of Dracula, these filmmakers and authors draw together a cohesive narrative on politics, the body, the postmodern world, and the cultural anxieties that were felt during this period.
Drawing from a wealth of Dracula variations during the 1970s, this paper focuses on three specific re-interpretations of the character; Paul Morrissey’s Blood for Dracula (1974), Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975) and John Badham’s Dracula (1979).  These three ‘texts’ explore various themes which Dracula’s character has symbolically intertwined with, including ethnic invasion, historical inaccuracies, secret confessions, the breakdown of social and sexual morality, the incompetent father and, by extension, the failings of the Church. Through these three versions of the Dracula tale, I shall explore the shift which transforms Dracula from an invasive monster to a sympathetic vampire. This significant shift in vampirism is paramount in understanding the new wave of vampire revisions we have witnessed in the past thirty years. By reshaping the paradigm of vampirism that Dracula has embodied throughout the Twentieth Century, these texts bring him from the shadows of his iconic status into the foreground as the narrator of our darker selves.
Within this extensive framework, I wish to highlight that Dracula has become a culturally sensitive figure. He reflects our own failings, through his capabilities as a ‘cultural mirror’. As with other Postmodern Vampires who emerge in this period, our vampires are always reactionary and reflective figures for specific cultural moments. Our vampires, our Draculas, are essentially an extension of ourselves. 

Bill Condon’s Mutable Monsters
Duane Kight
Haverford College, Haverford, PA, USA

Dr. Pretorius, in James Whale's 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, greets the decision to create the Bride with a toast to "a new world of gods and monsters!"  When Bill Condon came to film Christopher Bram's Father of Frankenstein--a conjectural treatment of the last days of Whale's life--he preferred not to adopt the title of Bram's novel as his own, choosing instead to recall Pretorius' toast by entitling his film Gods and Monsters.  The choice is apposite, given the film's emphasis on The Bride as the main intertext of the narrative, but is by no means a simple one, and in fact points to Condon's shaping of the film into a complex, layered reflection on monstrosity.
On the most evident level, Condon present us with a world of clearly delineated, dichotomous categories, one defined by gods on the one hand and monsters on the other.  From this perspective, Whale is the creator-god, on the one hand molding his stars like so much clay, on the other shaping his gardener, Clay Boone, through the exploitation of Boone's homophobia into a monstrous killing machine who can give the director the death he desires.  Yet this cannot be Condon's whole intent; the plural--godS and monsterS--suggests very clearly that his film is meant to depict a multiplicity of roles occupied by the characters, rather than a simple dichotomy.  Thus, the "and" of the title is not a divider of categories so much as an indicator of their interchangeability and fluidity; the equation can be easily reversed, and monsters become gods.
This is logical, for three reasons.  First, the nature  of Hollywood itself suggests this mutability.  Star monstres sacrés can assert creative control to which the director must submit, and directors are only godlike in Hollywood as long as they are successful--divinity and monstrosity are easily reversed.  Second, the Bride  of Frankenstein intertext necessarily invokes a second intertext, Mary Shelley's 1831 Frankenstein; while unacknowledged directly by Condon as a source, Shelley's novel, which works to make Victor Frankenstein monstrous and his Creature divine, yet allows neither character to be wholly defined as one or the other, points beyond Whale's film treatments  of the novel to a blurring of categories. Finally, the film's theme of homsexuality underscores the implications of Condon's choice of title. Whale's unconcealed homosexuality is one explanation adduced for his fall from grace in Hollywood.  In the eyes of th conservative studio system, homosexuality was clearly monstrous.  Yet the definition of one's sexuality, whether hetero- or homo-, is crucial to one's self-creation, to becoming a god (at least in the confines of one's own body). Thus, in a film about Shelley's Frankenstein, Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, the Hollywood studio system, and the conundrum of sexuality, Condon's choice of title points clearly, not to a simple dichotomy of categories, but to a complex mediation of them through a reflection on the nature of monstrosity.

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Monsters of Distorted Vision: The Poetics of Flannery O’Connor
Ilana Shiloh
The College of Management, Israel

Monstrosity is usually defined as a grotesque deviation from the norm. But what if the norm itself is deviant? This apparent paradox is at the core of Flannery O’Connor’s world-view and fiction. O’Connor, a religious author writing for a secular audience, a devout Catholic living in the Protestant South, an ailing and physically deformed human-being surrounded by the healthy, was a perennial misfit. So are her fictional characters. The gallery of her protagonists conjures up “an image of Gothic monstrosities and the idea of preoccupation with everything deformed and grotesque.”
Her preoccupation with the deformed and the grotesque cannot be accounted for only in terms of her affiliation with what she ironically calls “the School of Southern Degeneracy,” whose notable members include William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Truman Capote. O’Connor’s sense of the grotesque derives from her conception of the norm, and the norm, for her, is man’s Redemption by Christ. Everything she sees in the world she sees in relation to that. From this absolute perspective, the normal and the aberrant exchange places – the grotesque is domesticated and the mundane is revealed as monstrous. This is the case in O’Connor’s short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” which is the focus of the present paper.

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