In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Vampire: A Casebook
  • Felicia Faye McMahon
The Vampire: A Casebook. Ed. Alan Dundes. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Pp. viii + 182, preface, selected bibliography, index.)

One of Alan Dundes' more recent works is the eighth in his casebook series. It is a specialist's book aimed at folklorists rather than a book with general appeal. Dundes is to be commended for his attention to the subject of vampire folklore, which suffers from a dearth of scholarly research. Nonetheless, his latest casebook is far less compelling than his earlier casebooks, and it is not without limitations.

This edited work consists of 11 essays, the last of which is written by Dundes himself. In his "The Vampire as Bloodthirsty Revenant: A Psychoanalytic Post Mortem," he admits that "the final essay in this volume is an attempt by a folklorist with a confessed Freudian bias to interpret the vampire as a creature of legend" (p. 159).

Unfortunately, in a preceding chapter, "The Greek Vampire: A Study of Cyclic Symbolism in Marriage and Death" by Juliette Du Boulet, the reader has already suffered through a similar structural approach. This lack of variety in interpretation literally sucks the life from vampire lore.

The organization of the casebook, however, is fully adequate. The first chapter by Katharina M. Wilson, "The History of the Word Vampire, " is followed by early, published articles on vampires such as Agnes Murgoci's "The Vampire in Roumania," published in 1926 in the journal Folk-Lore. Surprisingly, Dundes does not discuss Norine Dresser's American Vampire: Fans, Victims, Practitioners (W. W. Norton and Company, 1989), although he includes her book in his select bibliography. Dresser provides significant current information in chapters such as "Vampirism Today," in which she discusses the impact of diseases such as AIDS on living vampire lore in America, an insightful stance that could have improved Dundes' book.

Of the essays that are included in this volume, Paul Barber's "Forensic Pathology and the European Vampire" is by far the most intriguing. Although the folklorist may take issue with Barber's attempt to demystify the vampire, Barber, nonetheless, provides an alternative explanation to the historicity of the vampire image offered by Dundes. Other readers may find the inclusion of Philip D. Jaffé and Frank Dicataldo's "Clinical Vampirism: Blending Myth and Reality" somewhat novel but problematic. The authors confuse the issue by claiming that "cases of clinical vampirism are sufficiently rare" (p. 148) and further that "the relationship of vampirism to psychopathology is complicated by the low incidence of this behavior" (p. 152). Inclusion of this chapter, then, only reminds the reader of the paucity of serious published scholarly research available to vampire scholars.

The stark realism of the cover design for The Vampire: A Casebook comes to represent the reductionist nature of the structural interpretations of vampire folklore. Rather than understanding vampire lore past and present, the reader is left with the notion that belief in vampires is a long-dead tradition. From my own limited first-hand experience with vampire traditions, this is untrue. When I think of my own experience with Romanian friends, I find Dundes' structural interpretation of their rich belief system sadly lacking:

They [vampires] are thirsty because death is debirth; the transit to the other world is the reverse of the birth process, that is, the movement through the birth canal. To be reborn, the deceased must undo death, that is, be born again. If death is truly debirth, then reversing the death process would be equivalent to rebirth. It is almost mathematical. Death is the negative of life, but the negation of death is once again life. Minus a minus equals a plus!

[p. 170]

One wonders how Dundes would apply his Freudian Oedipal framework to non-Western peoples, some of whom also have vampire folklore. Yet, maybe his attempt to bring attention [End Page 487] to what he calls "a remarkable living legend" will generate a renewed interest in collection and interpretation of this ancient and complex tradition.

Felicia Faye McMahon
Syracuse University
...

pdf

Share