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Introduction In this thesis I concentrate on understanding certain aspects of the vampire myth. I have limited my discussion to vampire literature; for example, I have set aside the vampire in folklore, comics, photography and filmic sources. In particular, I examine the vampire’s relation to food, blood, biting and sexuality as shown in various texts. To do so, I use some psychoanalytic concepts to shed light on some previously undiscussed aspects of this genre. In part one I shall propose a psychoanalytic model to inform an understanding of the vampire; here I look at modern and nineteenth-century accounts of the vampire, examining the role of food, blood, biting and the oedipus complex. There are distinct differences between the fiction and poetry of early vampire writers, such as Coleridge, Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, and modern works by authors as diverse as Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite and Todd Grimson. Therefore, in the second part, I focus exclusively on modern fiction, examining the relationship between the contemporary vampire and psychoanalytic understandings of eating disorders, in particular anorexia nervosa. By doing this I draw attention to recent developments in the vampire myth and provide some explanation for them. In part three I analyse Angela Carter’s short story, The Lady of the House of Love and show how the central themes of the vampire myth as they appear in this example echo some of the unconscious phantasies and conscious ideas of the anorexic. Of particular interest here is the bond between mother and daughter, how this is experienced, and what the consequences of breaking this bond are felt to be. I. The Vampire First, it is important to consider what is meant by the term ‘vampire’. For myself, the defining characteristics are; a character with a human form who possesses immortality or a greatly extended lifespan which is sustained by feeding off humans in some capacity, most usually by taking their blood. A sustenance that is nearly universally received orally. In proposing a psychoanalytic model for vampirism, I would suggest that aside from a vampire’s immortality or physical arrest there exists a psychic or developmental fixation. Which, through a consideration of the dominance of the oral cavity and the vampire’s preoccupation with hunger and food, I shall argue can be understood as a regression the oral level. The exclusivity of the mouth as site of pleasure and satisfaction for both vampires and readers alike is perhaps best demonstrated by fact that descriptions of eating/feeding in vampire fiction replace almost entirely those of sex between both human-human 1 and even vampire-vampire characters. Although vampires are "socially, both men and women" (Hendershot, 1995, 379), they all ‘psychically’ posses the same body with the genitals being superseded by the mouth. |
| "As the primary site of erotic experience...this mouth equivocates, giving lie to the easy separation of the masculine and the feminine. Luring at first with an inviting orifice, a promise of red softness, but delivering instead a piercing bone, the vampire mouth fuses and confuses....the gender-based categories of the penetrating and the receptive.....Furthermore, this mouth, bespeaking the subversion of the stable and lucid distinctions of gender, is the mouth of all vampires, male and female." (Craft, 1989, 218) |
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The frequent choosing of both men and women for prey suggests that the vampire is ‘bisexual’. While the vampire-human axis around which feeding revolves can be seen to demarcate the participants solely into categories of the consuming and consumable. From which we might conclude that sexual activity for the vampire is both polymorphously perverse and inseparable from the ingestion of food.
Food Alongside this dominance of the mouth, it is necessary to consider what the vampire’s experience of feeding and its exclusive food choice might represent. |
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"I used to fancy that life was a positive and perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of live things, no matter how low in the scale of creation, one might indefinitely prolong life. At times I held the belief so strongly that I actually tried to take human life. The doctor here will bear me out that on one occasion I tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood - relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, ‘For the blood is the life.’" [spoken by Renfield] (Stoker, 1897, 206) "The torrent of blood washed over Nothing’s face and bubbled into his mouth...This was the taste of life, its very essence. More than that - he was actually drinking a life, swallowing it whole." (Brite, 1992, 160) |
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What is immediately apparent from the above examples is the cannibalistic nature of vampiric feeding. This assimilatory aspect of the feeding process can also be seen in the physical characteristics that the vampire acquires after eating. Most usually these consist of bodily heat and a warmer pallor; "When she looks up at Keith it’s as if she’s drunk, and he feels pleasure for her, that she has sustenance, nourishment....it puts roses in her cheeks," (Grimson, 1996, 26), but in Tom Holland’s book The Vampyre (1995) following feeding the vampire actually acquires a pulse. While in Dracula, the Count is able to regain his youth "when his special pabulum is plenty." (Stoker, 1897, 211)
In Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles the ability to experience the victim’s ‘humanity’ is preeminent to the act of feeding; |
| "‘Killing is no ordinary act,’ said the vampire. ‘One doesn’t simply glut oneself on blood.’ He shook his head. ‘It is the experience of another’s life...the experience of the loss of that life through the blood, slowly...It is again and again a celebration of that experience; because for vampires that is the ultimate experience.’" (1976, 34) |
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"...Nothing had never minded swallowing come. Something about it settled his stomach and made his whole body feel good. ...The taste of the man’s sperm, still fresh and raw, reminded him of something Laine had once told him. Did you know...that come has almost exactly the same chemical makeup as human blood?" (Brite, 1992, 123-4) |
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In this passage semen is not only attributed to the same source as blood, as is consistent with pre-18th century concepts of the one-sex body, but with the same qualities as milk - settling the stomach. On commenting on the scene where Mina is forced to drink blood from Dracula’s chest, recorded in Dr. Steward’s diary as follows; "[He] seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the - Oh, my God, my God! What have I done?" (Stoker, 1897, 252). Cyndy Hendershot has observed that Mina’s inability to name the substance suggests "that she perceives it as more than blood" (1995, 380). However, it is important to note that these accounts, and the many others like them, do not present blood as being like semen or milk, but as simultaneously being blood, semen and milk. This is also evident from the use of vampiric blood for both procreation and nursing, indicating that in the vampire novel the meanings of blood are always multiple. Biting Given these multifarious meanings of blood in vampire fiction, the vampiric act of feeding from the body will always carry a connotation of breast feeding. While early writers such as Coleridge (1798-1800), Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) and some folkloric sources 4 did in fact made the breast the initial site of the bite, it is the biting of the neck proximal to the shoulder that has come to predominate; |
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"...the breast is for feeding, while the shoulder is for burping, for the interruption of feeding. Being held against the shoulder can be comforting, but does not necessarily remain so for the hungry or colicky infant, when it can acquire the meaning of frustration.....The shoulder can therefore conceivably be experienced by the infant as a frustrating anger-inducing breast. Rosemary Balsom reinforced this by telling of a hungry baby in the second year of life and in the process of being weaned who regularly bit her mother’s shoulder." (Shengold, 1993, 963) |
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Here we can see that the child who experiences anger at the interruption of, or, what is otherwise perceived as inadequate feeding, is led to attack the maternal body at the site of frustration. Hence I would argue that the vampiric bite comes to represent a sustained attack on the maternal body because it has withheld its contents from the infant. This notion of the vampiric attack as originating the denial of the maternal breast in infancy is foremost in Andrei Codrescu’s (1995) fictional account of the life of Countess Elizabeth Bathory 5 , one of the historical sources of the vampire myth; "She wanted to know why the withered bosom that lay dying in the great canopy bed had not held her close when it was firm and full of life. Battling back the tears, Elizabeth whispered in her mother’s ear, "Why didn’t you nurse me, Mother?" (271) Elsewhere this aggressive desire to possess the breast can be evidenced in the violent and exhaustive nature of vampiric feeding; "I took every drop from her that she could give...I closed my fingers around her heart and brought it to my lips and sucked it...until no blood was left in any fiber or chamber..."(Rice, 1998, 10). Although the vampire’s victim can be either male or female the consuming/consumable divide I spoke of earlier means that all victims are aligned with the maternal body, which from earliest infancy is defined as consumable. This is made explicit in Poppy Z. Brite’s novel Lost Souls where the vampire’s first victim is always its mother; "Our babies are born without teeth, but even so they manage to chew their way out. Perhaps they have a set of womb-teeth. Perhaps they claw their way out with their tiny fingers. But they kill, always they kill. Just as I ripped my mother apart." (1992, 277). Therefore, I would like to suggest that every vampiric attack figures as an envious attack upon the mother, repeatedly performed by the vampire as its only means of sustaining both physical and psychic existence 6 . However, it is important to note that co-existent with the child’s desire to possess for themselves and therefore enviously destroy the breast there is a phantasy of reprisal for these desires; "They, like her [the mother], want to produce babies and milk and contain the father’s penis, but also fear that their wish to destroy the things of which they are envious in their mother will provoke her retaliation." (Mitchell, 1991, 69) This notion of the vampiric attack as maternal reprisal is clearly seen in Andrew Neiderman’s novel The Need (1992), when knowing the man (the androgyne Richard) he has let into his house intends to kill him, Gordon not only accepts death, believing he deserves it; "...I take from others and give little or nothing in return. Every morning...I feel guilty I’m alive." (126). He actually asks his killer, "...do you mind if I call you Mother?" (ibid., 127). 7 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) also provides several examples of this phantasy of maternal retaliation; firstly while being seduced by the vampire women at Castle Dracula and waiting, "in a languorous ecstasy" to be devoured, Jonathan remarks of one of the women "I seemed somehow to know her face and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where." 8 (42) Secondly, there is the incident when Lucy is found clutching a child to her breast who, when challenged, "...growls over it as a dog growls over a bone..." (ibid., 188) - a clear articulation of the phantasy that the child at the mother’s breast might not be being fed, but fed upon. Finally, there is the moment when Dracula, seeking to turn Mina into a vampire opens a wound in his chest and forces her to drink his blood, where again we see the nursing relationship explicitly portrayed as destructive, as one which kills rather than sustains. To conclude; the significance of the vampiric act of biting and its site clearly originate in the infantile experience of breast feeding, being either an attack upon the mother for the withholding of the breast, or a feared retaliation by her for the desire to destroy/consume it. Oedipus Complex While we have seen that the vampire’s psychology is clearly expressed at the oral level and that conflicts around feeding and the denial of/separation from the breast have led to a fixation at this stage, it must be noted that the conflicts that emerge through vampire fiction are not solely oral conflicts. We also find castration anxieties and primal scene fantasies - that is to say oedipal conflicts. As Maurice Richardson has remarked of Dracula , "...[it is] a quite blatant demonstration of the Oedipus complex....a kind of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match." (1959, 427). The incestuous nature of the vampire is, however, by no means exclusive to one text. In The Vampyre (Holland, 1995) the central character, a vampiric Lord Byron is told "it is the doom of your nature...that those who share your blood are most delicious to you" (229) Here not only is the vampire irresistibly drawn to incestuous feeding, but it is necessary for its survival - Holland’s vampires continue to age until they have drunk "the golden blood" of their own family. Incestuous dynamics also feature strongly in the work of Anne Rice with the central relationship of Louis and Claudia in Interview with the Vampire being described as; "Father and Daughter. Lover and Lover." (1976, 112) While in Poppy Z. Brite’s novel Lost Souls, on discovering that his lover is also his son, the vampire Zillah simply says, "Well. That changes things, doesn’t it? That makes things even better. Lovely." (1992, 224) Alongside these incestuous desires, castration anxiety can be seen in the symbolism of the vampire teeth and the figuring of the vampiric attack as both a wounding and a draining. In some texts, the use of ‘it’ (Stoker, 1897) or ‘creature’ (Holland, 1995) above a gendered pronoun to describe the vampire indicates that the vampire bite and its consequent vampirism function to ‘unsex’ its victims. As is clearly evident in Jonathan's comment on escaping from Castle Dracula; "At least God’s mercy is better than that of these monsters, and the precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleep - as a man." (Stoker, 1897, 55). Finally I would like to suggest that primal scene phantasies are present in the construction of the vampiric attack where we find that they, "are connected with oral destructive phantasies." (Friedman, 1953, 305), dramatising "...the child’s view of intercourse insofar as it is seen as a wounding and a killing." (Roth, 1977, 119). Footnotes 1. As Cyndy Hendershot has observed of Dracula, "...heterosexual sex seems unthinkable in the novel as long as the vampire body haunts the text." (1995, 382) ^
2. The vampire’s lack of reflection can be seen to function in a similar way. In the TV drama Ultraviolet (Ahearne, 1999, Episode 6), when asked how it feels not to be able to see yourself, the vampire replies; "There’s an incredible sense of self. And it works both ways, when I’m this close to you and I look in your eyes, I can’t see myself, only you." Again speaking of this lack of distinction that the child makes between itself and the maternal body during the early stages of development. 3. See Laqueur (1992) for fuller discussion of one-sex model. In relation to vampires in particular there is Cyndy Hendershot’s article ‘Vampire and Replicant: The One-Sex Body in a Two-Sex World’ (1995) ^4. "The Wends say that vampires return from their graves and suck the breasts of their relatives until they have sucked out the life blood....The word, vampire, itself (upir, pjawica) means drinker, sucker." (Róheim, 1952, 102) ^5. The Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1613) is said to have tortured and murdered 650 virgin girls in order to bathe in their blood, which she believed would sustain her youth. ^6. This notion of food and feeding habits as a means of sustaining psychic health will be considered in more detail consequently. ^7. Gordon’s death is likewise described as a maternal experience, a return to childhood; "In the end I embraced him to me and did feel as if I were holding an infant in my arms. He died with a baby’s smile on his lips. I left him naked on the couch, his knees up, his arms bent, his small hands cupping imaginary breasts." (Neiderman, 1992, 129) ^8. As Phyllis Roth has observed of this scene, "...Jonathan never recollects, but we should be able to understand that the face is that of the mother (almost archetypally presented), she whom he desires yet fears..." (1977, 119) ^ |