Transference of the Monstrous: Heroic Monsters and Heroines as Questionable Role Models

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

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 36

4.1 Death Drive 38

5. The Flight of the Heroine 38

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)

(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

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 re-humanization 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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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” (150-151) 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

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 -

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

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).

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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-of-choice 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/ twenty-first 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

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 series and Damon’s redemption in The Vampire Diaries tv-series. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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