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Chapter Two: The Origins of Modern Myth
- University of Wisconsin Press
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Chapter Two The Origins of Modern Myth In the last chapter we saw that the vampire is such a familiar character today that adolescent readers of comic books, devotees of serious literature, and watchers of late-night "Creature Features" can all recognize the family resemblances in vampires as diversified as Dracula (played as an urbane eighteenth-century gentleman by George Hamilton) in Love At First Bite, the hauntingly beautiful Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) in The Hunger, or the misunderstood punster Sterling O'Blivion of I, Vampire. Returning to the nineteenth-century, readers discover that the ancestors of these familiar figures, though no less common to people, were somewhat different. Sir Frances Varney in the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (originally printed in parts in the early 1840s), for example, is much less urbane than Hamilton's version. His face-not to mention his courtship-is dreadful: It is perfectly white-perfectly bloodless. The eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeththe fearful looking teeth-projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like. It approaches the bed with a strange, gliding movement. It clashes together the long nails that literally appear to hang from the finger ends.... He drags her head to the bed's edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teetha gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast! (Vol. I, Ch. I, Rymer's italics) Here is none of the playful sensuality of Hamilton or Langella or even Lee's raw eroticism. Indeed, the reader's first glimpse of Varney reveals something more bestial than human, a creature with fangs and claws who comes in the night to drink the blood of his unwilling victim. The following excerpt from "Carmilla" (first published in the magazine The Dark Blue in 1871) reveals a being slightly more recognizable to twentieth-century readers: The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened: and the General and my father recognized each his perfidious and beautiful guest.... Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the promoter of the inquiry, attested the marveleous fact, 17 18 The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature that there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed. Here then, were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. (Ch. XV) Earlier sections of LeFanu's "Carmilla" reveal a being who, like the beautiful Miriam, is cultivated-even genteel. However, when LeFanu reveals that Carmilla's natural habitat is the crypt, not the drawing room, he also gives her characteristics that distinguish her from most twentiethcentury vampires. Ranging from the Count on Sesame Street to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain, the twentieth-century vampires that were introduced in Chapter One are often more human than their predecessors. No one describes this phenomenon better than Anne Rice whose vampire Lestat announces: "Try to see the evil that I am. I stalk the world in mortal dress-the worst of fiends, the monster who looks exactly like everyone else."1 Rice continues to take the vampire seriously although she does not really present it as an evil force. However, many of her contemporaries create vampires so benign that they are often camp figures-mere parodies of the vampire's horrifying former self. What the reader sees in the vampire in nineteenth-century literature is the result of writers combining at least three broad strands: folkloric treatments of posthumous magic, earlier literary characters-such as the rake and the villains and temptresses of the Gothic novel, and (later in the century-as Chapters Three, Four, and Five will demonstrate) responses to genuine changes in social roles for men and women. The beginnings are, of course, in folklore; and writers who have studied the phenomenon (two of the best-known are Montague Summers in The Vampire in Europe and The Vampire: His Kith and Kin and Anthony Masters in The Natural History of the Vampire)2 observe that almost no culture is free of the...