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Chapter Six Making Sense of the Changes This study of the vampire has focused on the changes the literary character has undergone in the past two hundred years, especially as those changes relate to an evolving sense of self and of one's relationships with others. Despite its necessary interest in the individual (the reading and writing of fiction being intensely individual pursuits-far more so than the writing or hearing of drama or epic), it is closer to the kind of social history practiced by Lawrence Stone (especially The Family, Sex and Marriage In England 1500-1800, which I used extensively as background material) and to the psychohistory written by Peter Gay in The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, which I also consulted extensively,l than to the fixed psychological principles expressed by Freud or Ernest Jones. My choice of orientation has a sound rational basis-including the fact that psychological explanations do not explain either the vampire's popularity at particular historical periods or the changes in the motifbut I should admit openly that focusing on the relationship between literature and the culture that influences writers is also the result of my own interest in recent history, especially as that history has affected the lives of individual men and women. Like Claire Kahane, who makes a similar observation in her study of Gothic literature, I recognize that critical attitudes are often the product of very personal factors: Central to that network is my sex, the gender in which I locate myself and am located by others; and which circumscribes how and even what I see. Yet precisely for that reason, I may be sensitive to an aspect of a text either not yet perceived by others, or given a different configuration.2 Similar conditions exist in my own study, for what I have seen in the various works is literally determined by who I am and by everything I have experienced. For example, my interest in vampires began in the late I960s, when a student recommended that I read Dracula. At the same time, I was becoming interested in the women's liberation movement, and I initially became interested in women vampires in nineteenth-century literature because of what I perceived as hostility to women in that literature. A greater awareness of historical conditions 140 Making Sense of the Changes 141 has made me change my mind-partially-and has enabled me to see that writers like Stoker, Dickens, and Eliot are not necessarily antifeminists or anti-women even though their ideal women are very different from twentieth-century ideals. Understanding the social conditions that influenced such writers has not caused me to wish to adopt a nineteenth-century standard of values-or behavior-however. In addition, my study has also centered on the vampire in nineteenthcentury English literature-primarily because that is the period with which I am most familiar-although I have also tried to provide a sense of the vampire's origins in folklore as well as an overview of some of the literary vampire's offspring in popular culture-from Count Chocula to Jerry Dandridge (in Columbia's Fright Night, 1985), from Valan to Faustine in Cornell Woolrich's "Vampire's Honeymoon." Two of these twentieth-century vampires-Count Chocula and Valan-are lighthearted treatments; and even Jerry Dandridge, who ultimately reveals the horrifying truth, is initially presented as a light and debonair figure a la Langella or Hamilton. Faustine, however, has the eerie power associated with the vampire in earlier centuries, when it was taken seriously by nineteenth-century writers and by the primitive peoples that formulated the folklore that preceded. Only in the twentieth century has the vampire become a "camp" figure-often a mere parody of its former self-and even now one runs across highly original formulationsoccasionally even figures of power. Previous chapters have looked at individual works-at twentiethcentury popular culture, folklore, Gothic literature, realistic literature, and works that combine realism with Gothic materials. Although the vampire certainly has no "cookie-cutter" uniformity, nineteenth-century vampires appear in roughly three kinds of literary works: those in which living-dead characters suck the blood of victims and in which characters identify "real" vampires within their fictional world; those in which one of the characters suspects another character of being a vampire, and the author neither confirms nor denies this possibility; and those in which one of the characters deliberately uses the term "vampire" as a significant metaphor to focus the...

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