Women's love affair with the vampire

 

Helen Chandler and Bela Lugosi as Mina Harker
and Count Dracula in Dracula by Ted Browning, 1931.

Women's love affair with the vampire – archive, 1993

2 January 1993 The vampire, continually being re-interpreted and renewed, can be incorporated into almost any sexual fantasy

Steven D Wright
Thu 2 Jan 2020 05.30 GMT

Francis Ford Coppola has underlined the peculiar timeliness of the Dracula myth in the Aids era, but a newfound interest in vampirism was already well-established – especially among women. Why? “Well, quite a lot of women like horror, you know,” explains horror aficionado, Anne Billson, film critic and now author of Suckers, a vampire novel. “But,” she admits, “it is the romantic image of the vampire, as seen in the novels of Anne Rice, that is really responsible for lots of other women being attracted to the vampire.”

Anne Rice, a gothic novelist from New Orleans, or “Queen of the Fanged” as one horror magazine titled her, is easily the most important figure in the modern mythology of the vampire. Her first novel, Interview With The Vampire, a classic of the genre, re-invents the legend and puts the vampire’s side of the story. Louis, a 200-year-old vampire from New Orleans, is a highly moral character who cares deeply about his victims and is unhappy with his immortality.

This sympathetic approach won a huge audience. According to research done by US academic Norine Dresser in her American Vampires: Fans, Victims, Practitioners (1987), the vampire does indeed have a romantic appeal for young women. She quotes one fan, who describes how she always fell in love with the vampire type, “mature, worldly, articulate, gentlemanly, powerful, hypnotic and tragically unattainable for more than a short period of time.” This fascination is apparent among the membership of The Velvet Vampyre, a British vampire appreciation society. The genre is a hot bed of “haemosexuality” as one wit termed it. The vampire, continually being re-interpreted and renewed, can be incorporated into almost any sexual fantasy. And vampirism is a paradigm of wild sex that doesn’t actually involve “real” sex. There is no guilt, no genitals and no grim promises to call you later. As another female fan explained, “our commonest complaint about mortal man is lack of foreplay and a vampire’s lovemaking is all foreplay.”

The “vamp”, a dangerously alluring woman who drained men of their lifeblood, was a popular figure in early movies: a feminist image in the pre-feminist times and now again in the “post-feminist” age. This re-think makes perfect sense to Carole Bohanan of The Velvet Vampyre: “Men are fascinated by the thought of a woman who could also destroy them and to retain glamour and beauty while being deadly at the same time – that is something else. That is a really powerful image.”

David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger by Tony Scott, 1983. Photograph: Allstar/MGM

A variation appeared, ironically, in the teen vampire movie, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Although primarily a light comedy/romance concerning Californian teenagers, the film does present a strong feminist message: Buffy, a blonde shopaholic cheerleader, undergoes a radical transformation to become a fearsome fighter, a slayer of vampires.

More traditional feminism has embraced vampire culture with The Gilda Stories published by Sheba Press. Written by Jewelle Gomez, a black lesbian feminist from New York, The Gilda Stories tells of a runaway slave girl in Louisiana, circa 1850. Forced to kill a rapist, she is found and looked after by a lesbian brothel-keeper, Gilda, who also happens to be a vampire – and one with a Native American vampire girlfriend, too. In Gomez’s politically correct vampire novel, vampires no longer kill – they merely drink a little blood and, most radical of all, give their victims a positive, pleasant thought whilst doing so.

Linking lesbianism and vampirism is nothing new. From the early days of cinema to the present day, the bisexual bloodsucker has been seized on by film-makers. This ranges from the hard-core porno, Gayracula and Dracula Sucks, via the early Seventies Hammer horrors to the elegant sophistication of The Hunger, an Eighties vampire movie starring Catherine Deneuve as a chic vampiress living in New York.

But perhaps the most influential image of the lesbian vampire, predating film, comes from Sheridan Le Fanu’s Victorian novel Carmilla (1871). Written some 25 years before Dracula, the story describes how Carmilla, Countess Karnstein, reappears 150 years after her death and finds herself drawn towards young girls. Like Anne Rice, who grew up reading Carmilla a century later, Le Fanu describes a sensitive vampire who cannot help herself.

Even Carmilla was not the first of the genre. Most notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, Christabel, written in 1797, features a proto-lesbian vampire, Geraldine. The 1790s, like the 1990s, were suddenly awash with books, plays and paintings detailing the horrible, the fantastic, the sublime – and most were female-dominated. There were then, as now, numerous female authors and a huge female readership – the tales of terror allowing women to subvert and enjoy the various erotic, moral and social taboos of Georgian society. And like the present day, too, the 1790s allowed women to take some control of their lives in a time of uncertainty. Plus ça change. . .

So, after 200 years, it seems the vampire is more popular than ever. To the point where we are in danger of forgetting the essential truth of vampires – they exist by killing others, by taking the lifeblood of innocent victims.

Even the Queen of the Fanged realises that she has maybe made too good a job of rehabilitating the vampire. Rice admits her latest vampire novel, The Tale Of the Body Thief, is an attempt to redress the balance. “The book is a commentary on the way evil is treated in all these books,” she says. “He (the vampire Lestat) is really indicting the books saying, ‘You know, we’ve made this look really attractive to you – take another look’.”

Of course some critics would argue this personification of blood and death is the very reason women have an affinity with the vampire. By menstruating and symbolically bleeding away the lifeblood of the human race, they say, women are the source of the vampire myth. Before dismissing this as Freudian psycho-babble, observe how the Kogi tribe of Columbia inquire whether a woman has begun her period: “Has the bat bitten you?”

The Tale Of The Body Thief, by Anne Rice, Chatto, pounds 14.99. Suckers, by Anne Billson, Pan, pounds 4.99.

THE GUARDIAN