II. Psychoanalysis and Eating Disorders
So far my arguments have been applicable to vampire fiction as a whole, what I want to consider now is the significance of certain rituals and emotions around food and feeding that are specific to modern vampire literature.
Many critics [Carter, M (1997), Gordon & Hollinger (1997b) and Zimmerman, G. (1997)] choose to date modern vampire fiction from the 1970’s using Anne Rice’s critically and commercially successful novel Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976, to mark the beginning of the modern era. However, for the purposes of this essay it is perhaps more useful to provide a brief description, where the categories of ‘modern’ and ‘early’ are discriminated on the basis of a set of characteristics rather than a specific date.
In early literature [Le Fanu (1872), Stoker (1897)] vampires are what might best be described supernatural presences in a human form. That they are ‘not human’ is exemplified by their ability to change into animals or mist at will, and the fact that they cast no shadow or reflection. Though physically stronger than humans, early literary vampires are weakened or destroyed by sunlight and often sleep in coffins during the day. Narrated by the vampire’s victims or other human observers these stories revolve around the struggle between good and evil where the vampire is always evil - hence its aversion to holy objects - and must be destroyed. Usually by a stake through the heart and/or beheading. Finally, unless stopped, the vampire always kills, sometimes draining the victim over period of several visitations, and at others, in a single attack. Here the bite itself is ‘infectious’ - turning its recipient into a vampire after their death.
Modern vampires are what I should like to call ‘anorexic absences’; here the portrayal of the vampire is that of a ‘near-human’ being; holy objects have no effect upon them
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, they possess reflections and while they prefer the dark it is usually only newly-made or weak vampires that are killed by sunlight. They remain physically stronger than humans and often possess supernatural powers, in particular telepathy. Modern vampires do not always have to kill their victims to in order to obtain enough blood to sustain them, though many choose to, and the bite itself is no longer a source of infection, with reproduction taking place by a (normally consentual) process of mutual blood exchange. However, perhaps the most significant change has been the shift in narrative focus where the use of an impartial third party or the vampire itself to tell the story has foregrounded the vampiric experience, bringing to light elements of the myth that were previously overshadowed by the monolithic presentation of the vampire as a monster. Of particular interest to me is the way in which the certain rituals and emotions surrounding the feeding experience have come to dominate many modern texts as a result of this change in narrative style.
In order to explain my choice of the phrase ‘anorexic presences’ to describe the modern vampire I should like to consider two areas in more detail, firstly the modern vampire’s relationship to food and feeding, and secondly, psychoanalytic understandings of eating disorders.
One of the most startling features of modern fiction is the contemporary vampire’s reluctance to feed. Frequently framed as an act of conscience, the sustained refusal to feed from the body or to drink human blood occurs in several novels. Louis in Interview with the Vampire spends a large part of the novel subsisting off rats in order not to take human life, describing his need for blood as a "vile unsupportable hunger" (1976, 128). P. N. Elrod’s vampire detective Jack lives near the Chicago Stockyards so that he can feed on the doomed cattle in the pens (1990). Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Holder, 1998), a previously ferocious killer who has had his soul restored by a Gypsy curse subsists exclusively on blood from blood banks. Titus in Those of My Blood (Lichtenberg, 1988) lives on cloned blood. While in The Vampyre (Holland, 1995) the Pasha has devoted his entire vampiric life to the quest for what he calls "true immortality" - the freedom from the need to drink blood.
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In addition to these abstentions we can see that these immortal beings are threatened by food and feeding in a way which they never were before; Anne Rice’s vampires die if they continue to drink once their victim’s heart has stopped beating. In Poppy Z. Brite’s novel Lost Souls (1992) the vampires Twig, Molochai, Zillah and Nothing all suffer ‘food poisoning’ after drinking from a victim who is in the advanced stages of cancer. In fact, this phenomena where the vampire is affected by the condition and quality of the victim’s blood, often with negative consequences, is found in the work of almost all modern vampire novelists.
Further, I would like to suggest that we can also see feeding emerge as an issue thorough the some writer’s attempts to marginalise it. The novels of Jewelle Gomez (1991), Suzy McKee Charnas (1980), S. P. Somtow (1984) and Todd Grimson (1996) all feature vampires who feed from humans but do not need to kill them. Anne Rice adopts a similar direction in her later novels (1985 onwards), by inventing a device where age withers appetite in vampires, with very old vampires feeding rarely, if at all. However, it is noticeable that even in these cases there are still ‘binges’ of violent feeding and/or killing, as Grimson describes it; "Now and then, however, she must kill. It is an imperative of her being, an imperative of this strange species she has been for so long." (1996, 2) Suggesting that vampire can never be entirely free of its hunger and the conflicts that surround it, that what is found in these novels is a merely a domestication and not an eradication of appetite.
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The recent introduction of this characteristic can of course be seen as symptomatic of growing human anxieties about food, alongside vegetarianism and diets which mobilised guilt as a factor in eating, recent food scares have served to introduce a rhetoric of fearfulness around food and consumption. Here the vampire as the ultimate carnivore, a being who violates the taboo on flesh to an unbearable degree, becomes a site of renewed interest, fear and philosophical discussion. However, like the anorexic with whom I have already compared the modern vampire, the phenomena is longstanding, here public interest serves to ‘recreate’ and revive interest at particular moments in history, rather than to explain their original existence. This is not to belie such explanations12,
but, for the purposes of this essay I am more interested in the psychoanalytic roots that link these two areas.
Anorexia and Other Disorders of Eating
Anorexia nervosa "...is a misnomer; anorexia means loss of appetite. Only in certain cases or at certain times is this true. Usually the anorexic feels ravenous." (Boris, 1984a, 315) The most sensational feature of the anorexic is of course her
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extreme thinness, as E M Farrell expresses it; "An anorexic is instantly spottable....She is starving." (1995, 7). In addition to this there is a disturbance in the way in which the anorexic experiences her body and, even when emaciated, patients will claim that they ‘feel fat’ or that a particular area of the body is ‘too fat’, from which the anorexic derives her characteristically intense fear of gaining weight. The clinical diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa also includes the absence of at least three consecutive menstrual cycles when normally expected to occur (primary or secondary amenorrhoea).
As well as the restricting of certain food groups and the quantity of food eaten, the anorexic may exhibit other behaviours that are not commonly associated with the condition. These include practises such as bingeing, self-induced vomiting, the taking of laxatives and diuretics, rumination (the chewing of regurgitated food in the mouth), and ‘spitting’ (where food is chewed but not swallowed, being spat out). Yet, what is consistently seen in all of these behaviours is the dominance of the oral cavity, and that the actions of taking in, rejecting and/or spitting out all function as a means of articulating conflicts.
Earlier I discussed how the significance of the vampiric bite was rooted in the infantile experience of feeding and the child’s desire to possess/consume the breast. This notion of the mother as a ‘primal feast’ for the infant is foremost in Kim Chernin’s (1986) study of eating disorders. In her book, The Hungry Self she suggests that eating disorders are directly related to the guilt associated with overconsuming and draining the maternal body in childhood;
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Chernin sees the usually adolescent onset of eating disorders as significant because it marks a a point of separation from the mother
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- a circumstance under which the child’s original trauma of separation from the breast is relived. However, the anorexic fails to surmount the guilt that arises from this destructive phantasy of having damaged the mother through the force of her oral aggression, with the debilitating effects of the illness often forcing her to return home. A regression that ‘undoes’ the trauma of separation ; "I was back to the condition of a tiny infant. I woke, I sobbed, I waited for my mother to come. She sat on the edge of my bed. She fed me and I ate" (ibid., 70)
Chernin’s argument is particularly pertinent to my discussion of contemporary vampires because it places the feelings of guilt and remorse so prominent in literary portrayals of the vampiric feeding experience. In this context I would like to suggest that the guilt over feeding suffered by contemporary vampires, though almost exclusively framed as an acceptable remorse over murder, is in fact more specifically shame at the crime of matricide, with each victim serving as a reminder of original crime of overconsuming the maternal body.
However, as before, it is important to note that the feeding experience is marked by ambivalence, that co-existent with the phantasy of omnipotence and possession there exists one of retaliation and destruction. Hence; "...once the food enters the body...she's panic stricken by what she has done, she feels stuffed and bloated, invaded by her own rage and by the mother’s imagined suffering and retaliatory wrath." (ibid.,137)
One patient talks of feeling "full of my mother - I feel she is in me - even if she isn’t there." (Bruch, 1979, 12). While another says "...that’s when I throw up, when I become like my mother" (Farrell, 1995, 49)
An interesting example of how the feeding experience can be transformed in this way is one of Hanna Segal’s patients who had an inability to eat food that had been prepared by his wife, believing it to be contaminated or poisoned; "It soon became clear that the woman who fed him, even when she was gratifying him, was such an object of envy that her food was immediately attacked with urine and faeces and therefore was contaminated as soon as it came into touch with him." (1988, 43)
In vampire fiction I would like to suggest that this phantasy where anger and hostility towards the mother’s body find their expression through the perception of food/the feeding body as poisonous can be seen in those cases where the victim is polluted by drugs, alcohol or disease, or when humans drink from vampires in order to become vampires themselves. In such cases we see the maternal/feeding body portrayed as a site of danger, infection, and the very source of vampirism. A clinical example of this can be found in Stephen Grosz’s paper ‘A Phantasy of Infection’, where his analysis of an HIV-positive man reveals that the patient, "experiences the source of his infection as being his mother." (1993, 969)
Orality and the Oedipus Complex
Although the dynamics of the oral phase and the feeding experience go some way to explaining the anorexic conflict, I should like to argue that there is a relationship between ‘orality’ and the oedipus complex in anorexics. An illustration of the regressive nature of anorexia can be seen in the reversion to infantile foods and patterns of eating: "Many anorexics develop enormous anxiety about eating solid food." (Bruch, 1979, 103) and often avoid red meat altogether (Schwartz, 1986). While, "A frequent choice for beginning and/or ending the binge are soft, milky, fluid foods like ice cream...which are easy to swallow and gulp down without much chewing and are easy to regurgitate..." (Reiser, 1990, 242). Why these food choices should be seen to indicate a regression from specifically oedipal conflicts is illustrated by the following;
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"In the first phase of his oral-digestive stage, the child sucks the breast and takes milk, and then foods derived for this, such as custards, cereals, etc. Later on, in his second oral-digestive phase, the child cuts his teeth, while his stomach and duodenum now secrete more potent juices which bite and digest more adult foodstuffs, such as meat. At the same time, his oedipal genitality begins to gain strength. This instinctive simultaneity is of far-reaching importance, since it creates deep connections between the activities of digesting adult foodstuffs, like meat, and genital activity." (Garma, 1960, 446)
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Although writing on the treatment of peptic ulcer patients, Garma’s article is useful because she arrives at the conclusion that certain food treatments (soft food, based on milk and cream in frequent feedings in the case of the acute ulcer patient), do not provide digestive, but psychic, relief: "the diet is favourable to the patients because it makes them regress to the situation of the very first infancy in which genital conflicts do not yet exist." (ibid., 448).
This idea of a specific diet or food ritual as ‘psychically nourishing’ explains the countless statements by anorexic’s claiming that they do not need to be cured, or that they do not believe themselves to be ill at all. Here it has been found that, "...for the anorectic his or her anorexia is a solution and not a problem." (Boris, 1984b, 435, my italics)
Other ways in which the oedipal origin of the conflicts experienced by the anorexic can be seen is in the presence of oedipal phantasies, in particular those of castration and the primal scene.
It has been observed that early and frequent exposure to primal-scene stimuli occurs with great frequency in eating-disordered patients, and that this is often responded to by a turning away from genital fantasy to a secondary superimposed schema of nursing mother and child (Schwartz, 1986). Here "Intercourse and conception are assumed to take place orally; eating and copulation are almost identical." (Boris, 1984a, 318) or has Angela Carter’s Countess in The Lady of the House of Love puts it; "It is dinner-time. It is bed-time." (1979b, 104) This phenomena where the primal scene is perceived in oral terms is most marked in binge-purge scenario common to both anorexics and bulimics; |
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"...the stereotyped ritual of gorging on food and forcing one’s finger down the throat to induce regurgitation represents in part a simultaneous identification with both parents of the primal scene with an acting out on one’s own body of the imagined role of the sadistic phallic father and castrated suffering mother. This defensive bisexual identification denies the humiliation of the primal-scene exclusion, undoes ‘castration’ and reverses passive (masochistic) Oedipal impregnation wishes.’ (Schwartz, 1986, 449) |
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What can be perceived from the above is a phantasy of being integral to one’s own conception, of self-creation without gestation.
I have already discussed how the vampiric attack defines its victims as consumable and therefore aligns them with the maternal body, but now I would like to suggest that this desire to possess the maternal body for oneself is infused with oedipal as well as oral desires. This can be seen in the notorious portrayal of the vampire’s bite as fulfilling for the victim, where the desire to incestuously possess the mother is exhibited by the sexual exhaustion of the victim’s body; "He clasped the boy more tightly, and their bodies locked together in a final wash of ecstasy, Christian’s belly warming and filling, the boy beginning to die. The boy’s sperm flooded warm over Christian’s fingers. Christian brought his hand up to his lips and sucked at that too." (Brite, 1992, 67).
This desire to supplant the father and and sexually possess the mother becomes even more explicit in the process of vampiric reproduction. Here, the vampire drains his human partner to the point of death before the human then drinks from the vampire, in some cases (Gomez, 1991) the process is repeated several times. This act of gorging on blood and then passing it on or spitting it out, clearly replicates the binge-purge scenario I considered earlier. However, while the anorexic acts out the scenario on a single body, here the primal scene really does consist of child/lover and mother. The most extreme example of this takes place in The Vampire Lestat when Lestat turns his own mother into a vampire; |
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"And jetting up into the current came the thirst, not obliterating but heating every concept of her, until she was flesh and blood and mother and lover and all things beneath the cruel pleasure of my fingers and lips, everything I had ever desired. I drove my teeth into her, feeling her stiffen and gasp, and I felt my mouth grow wide to catch the hot flood when it came." (Rice, 1985, 174). |
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Alongside those of the the primal scene, castration phantasies also emerge both directly in the "...frequent presence of tooth-prominent animals in dreams fantasies, associations, and preoccupations.."(Mintz, 1992, 340) of anorexic patients, and indirectly, as is the case in the following examples.
Earlier, I spoke of how for the vampire the genitals were superseded by the mouth to form what might be called a ‘physically’ bisexual body, I also talked about the one-sex model of anatomy were males and females were thought to possess the same bodies - a multiplicity of gender identification that is also common to those suffering from eating disorders; "....many bulimics and anorexics attempt to postpone indefinitely the realisation of which sex they belong to, as though it was a decision that could be made by choice alone." (Farrell, 1995, 26). Here we can see castration anxiety is expressed as the denial of, or wish to deny, sexual difference. This is also evident from the anorexic’s physical manipulation of her body through starvation which leads to the disappearance or retardation of secondary sexual and reproductive characteristics. The definitive example of this in vampire fiction is Claudia in Interview with the Vampire (Rice, 1976), who, turned into a vampire when only five years old is permanently arrested not only at childhood, but what Doane and Hodges refer to as "the oedipal moment" (1990, 424)
Further, if we consider the intensely close bonds that are widely reported to exist between the patient and their mother, for example; "When very young Paula took pride in being so close to her mother that they both knew at all times what the other was thinking." (Bruch, 1979, 37) I would suggest that castration anxiety is also seen in the form of separation anxiety. Here the anorexic’s phantasy of complete union with the maternal body offers a possible explanation for the refusal to eat, for; "...To eat food is to acknowledge the fact of separation and of one’s mortal being." (Farrell, 1995, 32)
This desire to exist in a symbiotic state of fusion and fulfilment with the mother can also be seen in the anorexic's use and experience of language; ‘Words are useless, I want to make you feel what I feel, words are no good.’ (ibid., xiv). Here language is experienced as a point of disjuncture, an interruption to the anorexic’s phantasy of a state of fusion and non-differentiation. Of particular interest here is one of Helen Malson’s patient’s refusal to say ‘food’ or ‘eating’: |
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"Cathy: You’ll find that I never say f-double-o-d uh. There are certain words...that are just taboo uhm such as e-a-t-i-n-g as well. I wouldn’t say that to save my life. Uhm.
H: What is it that you dislike about all those words?
Cathy: Cos they connote nice things. And the whole process is horrible. I don’t like having, I look at these things (indicates the Ribena carton she is holding) as being poison and I don’t want poison in my body and I want to be cleansed inside. Even if I have water I get really paranoid, you know." (Malson, 1998, 128) |
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What is notable about the above exchange is the disjuncture/loss between what Cathy means by food as a word and her experience of it as a physical object, between what she feels e-a-t-i-n-g should be and what it as an action. Here the distance between desire, language and the object are so great that the object is experienced as poisonous. That is to say Cathy blames language for breaking circuit of desire and fulfilment that is found in the early mother-child dyad.
This is of course found in Lacanian psychoanalysis where entry into the symbolic world of language and order is predicated upon the acceptance of loss, that is to say a symbolic castration. Hence, as Farrell has observed; "words are as, if not more, problematic for women with eating disorders than their relationship to food." (Farrell, 1995, xiv) Or, as Boris expresses it, "The anorectic will not be found wanting" (1984a, 318).
The Anorexic and the Body
However, in her refusal to acknowledge separation from the maternal body the anorexic is unable to distinguish or comprehend her body as her own. This becomes clear through the perception of feeding experience where hunger is felt to be a bodily desire separate from the mind; "my body was just eating before my mind...was awake enough to stop it from doing it." (Malson, 1998, 125) In vampire fiction this is seen through the presentation of vampirism as a biological impulse; "....I am I and yet not I, as if I haunted my own shape and am condemned to watch with shame and rage its beastly doings." (Carter, A., 1997, 28) Sometimes this dichotomy is so extreme as to be experienced as the sense of two-people occupying and fighting over one body - this phenomenon is found in both vampire fiction [Collins(1989), Neiderman (1992)] and medical case studies (Bruch, 1979)
One solution to this mind/body battle can be found in the anorexic’s fantasies of bodily absence where her pursuit of extreme thinness might be seen to express the desire for "the impossible fiction of the non-body" (ibid.). Here "...the ideal is not merely a thin body...not just a reduction but an eradication of the body." (ibid., 186). Offering a possible explanation for why, no matter how emaciated she is, for the anorexic, there is always a desire to lose more weight.
Also of interest here are the feelings of omnipotence and immortality experienced by many anorexic patients, where despite this suicidal desire to dispense with the body they frequently preserve the fantasy of a continued existence; ‘She believed her body was indestructible, that death meant peace and contentment and still being alive. Her body could die. She would not’ (ibid., 46). This phantasy where death does not exist, yet it does, leads us once again to the vampire myth, where death conversely leads to eternal life.
One of the biggest modifications of the vampire myth in contemporary fiction is seen in the ‘density’ of the vampiric body. No longer able transform or transcend its corporeal presence, the vampire body has become a body that has ceased to exist, yet it will not die. Here the vampire’s lack of bodily functions are not a form of freedom, but of restriction; in The Gilda Stories (Gomez, 1991) and Vampire Junction (Somtow, 1984) the central characters are unable to express their grief because, as vampires, they cannot cry. Or, as Louis bluntly describes the limits of the vampire body in Interview with the Vampire; "I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was dead." (Rice, 1976, 345)
Hence we find the anorexic desire to be free of the body also manifesting itself in vampire fiction. Either through thought; |
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"Chase talks to Sabrina as if he will master all systems of philosophy, as if living for hundreds of years must eventually bring perfect wisdom, as if he’ll be a living Buddha, a prophet...As though eventually, as one of the living dead, he will transcend his body, his flesh, he very form. He will become God. All he needs is more time. Unlimited time." (Grimson, 1996, 106) |
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Or, more commonly, through the destruction of the vampiric body, what Gomez’s (1991) vampires call the ‘true death’; |
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"I tried to starve myself. I thought I could starve myself to death....I stayed in a cave, and every night was a torment, the pain and the hunger were so awful....Another time, I tried to linger in the morning sunlight, but it hurt too much. I couldn’t make it anywhere near the true dawn." (Grimson, 1996, 108) |
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This phenomena of vampiric suicide or ‘going to ground’
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features in the work of Charnas (1980), Somtow (1984), Rice (1985), Gomez (1991), Holland (1995) and Grimson (1996). In addition, there is an increasing desire amongst contemporary vampires to become human, here the human body seems to promise to reconcile the conflict between mind and body that causes contemporary vampires so much grief.
To conclude, the key features shared by anorexic and vampire are; an ambivalent relationship to the mother, seen in the desire to posses/destroy her and the fear of retaliation for these wishes. An inability to separate from mother, as is seen in the denial of sexual difference, the status of language and the inability to discern one’s body as one’s own which is articulated through the perception of appetite as alien to the self and phantasies of surviving the death of the body. Finally, the vampire and the anorexic share not only the same psychic background to their behaviour but arrive at the same conclusion - the destruction of the body.
Footnotes
9. In the current, more secular climate, holy objects no longer have the power they once commanded over vampires. As it appears in Vampire Junction; "He has wanted to drive a stake through Kitty’s heart; he knows that this will kill her, because she is still young enough to believe. The belief in the stake, Timmy realises, is like mortal children’s belief in Santa Claus; it is a magic vampires cling to as long as they can, as if to keep at bay the bitter cynicism of immortality." (Somtow, 1984, 98) ^
10. There is also the children’s character Vlad the Drac (Jungman, 1988), a vegetarian vampire who faints at the sight of blood. ^
11. As it appears in S. P. Somtow’s novel Vampire Junction; "He has longed learned that he cannot choose victims blindly, without fear of discovery. Only anger can release that feeding frenzy." (1984, 79) ^
12. Significant work has been written about the social background of both anorexia [Orbach (1998), Malson (1998)] and the vampire [Creed (1994), Zimmerman, B. (1984)], and there is obviously a social investment in my distinction between modern and early literature, however, my interest here is in what has been revealed by the changes in literary style rather than the social circumstances that may have instigated them. ^
13. Since up to 95% of anorexic patients are female (Farrell, 1995) I shall use the pronoun ‘her’. ^
14. Anorexia most commonly occurs at the onset of puberty or at a time of separation such as going to school, camp or college. ^
15. The phrase ‘going to ground’ is used to describe an extended period of sleep when the vampire will retreat to nature, burying itself in the ground or sheltering in a cave. This ‘hibernation’ forms a break between the vampire's various lifetimes. It is often undertaken in state of despair, when circumstances or feelings threaten to overwhelm the vampire or expose its true identity. ^
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Index | I. The Vampire | III. Angela Carter’s ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ | Bibliography
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