Auerbach & Vampires

book Reviews Auerbach & Vampires Nina Auerbach. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. vii + 231pp. $22.00 ENCOUNTERING the mind of Nina Auerbach is generally a distinct pleasure, and the recent Our Vampires, Ourselves is certainly no exception. An occasionally quirky work that defies usual categories, Our Vampires, Ourselves combines literary criticism, cultural studies, and personal confession in a way that is consistently informative and provocative though sometimes irritating as well. Auerbach herself describes the book as "a history of Anglo-American culture through its mutating vampires" and adds that the work took shape between 1989 and 1992. Noting that the years of George Bush's presidency were years "when impalpable fears afflicted America," Auerbach observes that she intended originally to write about everything that our culture fears but finally chose to restrict herself to the vampire, that most mutable of horrific creatures whose changing nature makes their appeal "dramatically generational." Unlike other monsters, including ghosts, werewolves , and manufactured monsters, "vampires blend into the changing cultures they inhabit." Because they are both like human beings and different from us, vampires reveal a great deal about the cultures in which they reside. Readers of ELT are likely to be most interested in the second chapter, which focuses on Stoker's Dracula, a work that Auerbach characterizes as "a compendium of fin-de-siècle phobias," including homoeroticism, non-English behaviors, and practically everything that was unfamiliar. In fact, Auerbach presents Stoker's title character as a transitional figure who is distinctly different from earlier nineteenth-century vampires —Coleridge's Géraldine, Keats's Lamia, Polidori's Lord Ruthven, Rymer's Varney, and LeFanu's Cannula. While these earlier vampires desire intimate relationships with humans, Stoker presents Dracula not as friend but as conqueror. Thus he is, in Auerbach's analysis, "harbinger of a world to come, a world that is our own." While Auerbach examines other turn-of-the-century vampires (Ariadne in Hume Nesbit's "The Vampire Maid" and Sarah in F. G. Loring^ "The Tomb of Sarah" both appear in 1900; and both personify unleashed female energy), she is most interested in examining Dracula in the context of Oscar Wilde's 1895 trial. In addition, she examines the relationship of Dracula to other fin-de-siècle personalities, including Stoker's employer, Henry Irving, whose knighthood came on the same 491 ELT 39:4 1996 day (24 May 1895) as Wilde's conviction; Joseph Merrick, the elephant man; and Mowgli, the human protagonist of Kipling's Jungle Books (1894). Finally, the chapter on Dracula includes Auerbach's analysis of several early film interpretations, including Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula and Murnau's silent Nosferatu (1922). Auerbach's study begins, however, earlier in the nineteenth century with Lord Byron and with vampires who were "not demon lovers or snarling aliens" but "singular friends." The chapter begins with PoIidori 's The Vampyre (1819) and Planche's melodrama, The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles (1820), which was based loosely on Polidori's version, and includes brief discussions of Varney the Vampire (serialized in the 1840s). She is most interested, however, in the female vampires in Christabel and Carmilla, characters whom the next century would label homosexual . In fact, the rest of the first chapter examines twentieth-century film interpretations of these works: Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), a loose adaptation of Carmilla; Vadim's Et mourir de plaisir (1960; released in the United States in 1961 as Blood and Roses); The Vampire Lovers (1970); Daughters of Darkness (1971); and The Hunger (1983). The conclusion to the first chapter clearly spells out Auerbach's preference for the loving vampires of the nineteenth century who "offered an intimacy, a homoerotic sharing that threatened the hierarchical distance of sanctioned relationships." Chapter three, which examines the vampires of our own century, begins with a discussion of several relatively obscure turn-of-the-century vampires: George Sylvester Viereck's American novel The House of the Vampire (1907); Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Parasite" (1894), and Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman's "Luella Miller" (1903). From them, Auerbach moves on to scrutinize film versions of Dracula, noting that "Dracula's changes are manifest in his movies...