Vampire Defanged , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Susannah Clements

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104 pages

English

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Vampires first entered the pop culture arena with Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula. Today, vampires are everywhere. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Twilight Saga to HBO's True Blood series, pop culture can't get enough of the vampire phenomenon.Bringing her literary expertise to this timely subject, Susannah Clements reveals the roots of the vampire myth and shows how it was originally immersed in Christian values and symbolism. Over time, however, vampires have been "defanged" as their spiritual significance has waned, and what was once the embodiment of evil has turned into a teen idol and the ultimate romantic hero. Clements offers a close reading of selected vampire texts, explaining how this transformation occurred and helping readers discern between the variety of vampire stories presented in movies, TV shows, and novels. Her probing engagement of the vampire metaphor enables readers to make Christian sense of this popular obsession.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Folclore

Folklore

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 mars 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441214003
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0432€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2011 by Susannah M. Clements
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
E-book edition created 2011
Ebook corrections 1.20.2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1400-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture marked NIV is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
1. Why Vampires Matter
2. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sin and the Power of the Cross
3. Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles: Eternal Guilt and Transcendent Love
4. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Sin and Sacrifice, Postmodern Style
5. Sookie Stackhouse: Sex and the Socialized Vampire
6. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga: The Vampire as Teenage Heartthrob
7. Vampire Sinners
8. Vampire Saviors
Conclusion
Timeline of Referenced Vampire Texts
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
1
Why Vampires Matter
I don’t think Jesus would mind if somebody was a vampire.
Sookie in “ First Taste” ( True Blood , season 1)
T he vampire is a hit.
In 2009, “Twilight Parties” were held around the world to celebrate the midnight DVD release of the film based on Stephenie Meyer’s young adult vampire novel. Teens, “tweens,” and adults gathered in living rooms, bookstores, and funeral homes to watch Twilight by candelight, drink blood-red punch, and use napkins secured by plastic vampire-teeth rings. Once a creature from our nightmares, the vampire has become a teen idol and can sell books and DVDs by the million.
The popularity of the Twilight books has led to an abundance of imitators, as a quick scan at the young adult shelves of any bookstore will indicate. Teenaged vampires, usually attractive and brooding, run rampant in young adult fiction. And the phenomenon is not limited to the young adult market. Vampires star in a broad range of adult fiction from mysteries to romance to erotic novels. Best-selling authors like Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, Christine Feehan, and Sherrilyn Kenyon have popularized the vampire as a sex object and romantic hero. Adaptations of well-known book series have been hitting the theaters and networks. Vampires have filled our televisions, our movie screens, our bookstores, and our computers in online discussion boards and blogs.
Why has popular culture recently been overrun with vampires, and how are Christians supposed to understand it? Vampires would not have become as popular as they have if they didn’t mean something to us as a culture. They represent something to us something that matters and that is one of the questions this study seeks to explore. Vampires are more than just monsters to us. They have recurred as a figure in literature and Western culture for the last two centuries, and they go back much further in lore and myth. It is over the last hundred years or so, however, that their portrayal in our culture has morphed from monster to lover, from single-minded villain to complex antihero. The vampire was once held up as the embodiment of evil and temptation, but has now become the ultimate romantic alpha-hero. The Vampire Defanged explores how this transformation occurred and what it means to Christians.
Vampire History
To understand how vampires are portrayed today, it helps to know how and where the legend originated. Anthropologists and historians trace vampire lore back to ancient cultures from all over the world. Cultures as far-ranging as Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, and pre-Colombian have their own version of myths and stories featuring blood-sucking or life-sucking demons, evil spirits that can animate dead bodies, and bat gods. The characteristics of what the Western world specifically understands as a vampire come primarily from the folklore of southeastern Europe the Balkan and Slavic cultures specifically. Bram Stoker pulled from a number of different traditions in writing Dracula , but focused on the history and culture of Transylvania. Since Dracula has been so central to our understanding of vampires in the Western tradition, the way we understand the vampire is heavily influenced by folklore from that region.
Because of the wide range of cultures with vampire myths, it is difficult to come up with a universal set of vampire characteristics. The two characteristics that seem to be most common, and the two that are usually sustained in contemporary vampire depictions, are these: vampires drink human blood and vampires are animated corpses, not truly alive. Some of the other common additional characteristics that came from southeastern European folklore are the vampire’s fear of sunlight, shape-shifting capabilities (often shifting into a wolf or a bat), hypnotic powers, the need to return to their native earth or grave during the day, and death by a wooden stake through the heart. Vampires are also often understood to be afraid of garlic and unable to cross running water.
Once the Catholic Church tradition was integrated into the earlier folklore, the Christian elements were added to the vampire myth, such as aversion to the cross and other holy objects, and the connections between vampires and Satan or his demons. Many scholars speculate that the stories developed in part because of early peoples’ inability to understand concepts like decomposition and infection as well as less common phenomena like premature burial. Burying someone who wasn’t truly dead might easily convince people from previous centuries that vampires really exist. So the vampire legend as we understand it today is a mixture of primitive beliefs, European folklore, and Christian influences.
Once the stories were developed in folklore, they began to make an appearance in literature. The vampire appeared in a number of eighteenth-century German poems, and those were the inspiration for the nineteenth-century English literary depictions of vampires, like Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), perhaps the first genuine vampire story written in English. Other nineteenth-century vampire stories include Varney the Vampire , which was first released in inexpensive pamphlets called the “penny dreadful” in the 1840s and featured one of the first examples of a conflicted vampire. A final nineteenth-century example was Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), describing a female vampire. As the vampire myth was first turned into fiction, the associations of the vampire with evil and temptation were established, characteristics that have been diminishing gradually since.
Vampire as Metaphor
While a particular contemporary subculture might believe in literal vampires among us those individuals who identify themselves as vampires in real life most people who study or are engaged with vampires do so in a metaphorical sense. We find vampires in our mythology and our fiction, in our film and television. In those contexts, we are attracted to the vampire as metaphor.
Vampires represent something to us as humans. They represent our fears and our desires. The reason they have recurred in our stories over the last hundred years is that vampires are rich enough a metaphor to adapt to culture’s changing worldview and interests. We can make a vampire mean what we want it to mean. We can use it for any number of purposes. In her important study of vampires, Our Vampires, Ourselves , Nina Auerbach says that “every age embraces the vampire it needs.” [1] There is something about the figure of the vampire that attracts us in this metaphorical sense. As a metaphor it hits at the heart of what makes us human. A vampire is a monster that has a human shape, and so it becomes a picture through which we can explore the human condition.
In the last twenty years, scholars and other thinkers have started to study the vampire as a legitimate topic for intellectual inquiry. While some of these studies focus on the cultural origins of the myth itself and some explore the “literal” manifestation of the vampire, other scholars have tried to trace a history of the appearance of the vampire in popular books and media. Usually, this is done by focusing on the vampire as metaphor. [2] Vampires can represent such a variety of concepts for us that it is impossible to make a comprehensive list, but two of the most common in popular culture connect vampires with our fears and our sexual desires or experiences.
Traditionally, the vampire was an evil, frightening figure. Thus, early portraits of vampires tended to represent a culture’s fears. In nineteenth-century vampire literature like Coleridge’s poem “Christabel” or Le Fanu’s Carmilla , a vampire was often associated with sexually aggressive females, one of the fears and obsessions of Victorian culture. More recent vampire stories represent more contemporary cultural fears like the AIDS epidemic and the breakdown of the family. Because the vampire is that monster with a mostly human face, a creature that perverts traditional values and feeds on human blood, it becomes a rich representation of what we fear as a culture.
From the beginning of vampire fiction, the figure of the vampire was also associated with sex. We can see this in the early nineteenth-century stories and poems, and the trend continues through contemporary fiction, film, and television. So another kind of metaphor we find in the vampire is that of sexual experience. The vampire act of drinking blood is a f