In his book Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo In Modern Culture, James B. Twitchell argues that the gothic romance, and particularly the vampire story, is built upon the fascination/titillation/horror of the incest taboo. Twitchell points out that the vampire is typically an older, powerful man who attacks a younger, often virginal woman, forcing upon her an intimate encounter which involves a sex-like, perverted mingling of blood. Twitchell also reminds us that:
The most startling aspect of the folkloric vampire is that he must first attack members of his own family. This prerequisite has been lost in our modern versions, but it is clear in almost every early story in almost every culture. We may have neglected this because we find it too dull and predictable, but it may also be…because this familial tie makes all too clear the vampire’s specific sexual design.
The most popular current version of the vampire story is, of course, Twilight. Twilight differs from Dracula in many ways — but it definitively retains the gothic fascination with inbred family structures. Bella, notably, calls her father “Charlie” — his first name — and when she moves back in with him, she cooks for and takes care of him more like a wife than like a daughter. Bella’s surrogate vampire family is even more flagrantly incestuous; Carlyle’s “children”, turned vampire by him, all live together as brothers and sisters — and, at the same time, as paired husbands and wives. Even Carlyle himself, and his wife appear no older than their “kids” — who they create not by having sex with each other, but by having sex with the children themselves. Father/mother/brother/sister — the familial roles are all, for the vampires, arbitrary, interchangeable, and interpenetrated with sex.
If vampires are both daddies and lovers, Edward is certainly no exception. In fact, much of Meyer’s incomprehensible plotting is suddenly clarified once you start to view Edward as a father surrogate. Edward is, of course, much, much older than Bella (while still being, also, magically, 19.) And his relationship with Bella is defined by his overwhelming desire to protect her…not merely from others, but from himself. His stalkery behavior is often specifically explained as a paternal desire to keep her from harm — he disables her car, for example, to keep her from being hurt by Jacob. Meyer also is oddly fascinated with scenes in Bella’s bedroom — scenes in which Edward does not have sex with Bella, but rather spends hours watching her sleep…like a doting father. Edward’s continual refusal to have sex with Bella, and/or to turn her into a vampire, are also consistent with his fatherhood; he loves her, but incest sex would be so right wrong.
Obviously, incest is definitionally squicky, and it’s no surprise that Twilight’s flirtation, and more than flirtation, with the taboo have repulsed many, feminist and otherwise. At the same time, Twitchell notes that the gothic — incest and all — has long appealed strongly to young women. Why should this be? Twitchell doesn’t have any very good explanation — he mutters something vaguely about false consciousness, stammers about symbolic representations of hymens breaking, waves his hands, and scurries on by.
Gale Swiontkowski in Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life With Daddy provides a somewhat more convincing explanation of the appeal of incest narratives for young women (if not of vampires per se.) Looking at American women poets, Swiontkowski argues that for daughters incest with the father can be a kind of symbolic grasping of patriarchal power — a repudiation of passivity in favor of the phallus. Obviously, this is a fraught and potentially damaging transaction, especially in the not-nearly-infrequent-enough-cases where there is actual incest and abuse. Still, Swiontkowski argues:
An advocacy of incest by men, as in pornography, is a regressive move toward social and psychological hoarding that enslaves women to men’s desires, especially if it is taken as a literal enactment of the right of males in patriarchy. The advocacy of symbolic incest by women is an enlightening and advancing move because it breaches the social restrictions on women that determine their subservience in a patriarchy.
This does seem to be in large part what Meyer is trying to do in Twilight. Meyer’s world is one in which the incest taboo is destabilized; fathers are brothers are husbands; siblings are lovers…and, as a result, ultimately, daughters are fathers. Edward is Bella’s lover and her father — and he is also Bella’s self. Edward’s paternal desire to keep Bella safe is ultimately accomplished by making Bella into Edward — by turning her into a vampire who is (the text is careful to note) stronger than Edward himself. Marrying her father makes Bella her own father, and she has the phallus/fangs to prove it.
Bella’s fatherhood is achieved by giving birth; it is tied into, and comes out of, her motherhood. Twilight, in other words, wants to allow Bella to retain her gender even as she grasps the phallus; being a vampire does not unsex or transex her, but actually reinscribes her femaleness. Bella can be structurally father without being male, just as the vampires can all be structurally siblings while sleeping with each other. Instead of incest leading to horror as in the traditional gothic, for Meyer it opens up onto a utopia of sexy, happy families and sparkly vampires.
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While writing this, it suddenly occurred to me that there’s a vampire in the Hunger Games too. President Snow, with his breath that smells like blood, surely functions as a Dracula surrogate — the older, powerful, seductive patriarch. One of the creepier moments in the book is when he leaves a rose for Katniss in her house; a symbolic and squicky father/daughter rape.
Katniss, of course, has lost her own father — which perhaps explains the intense personal relationship she develops with Snow. Certainly, Katniss’ hatred of Snow in the book seems weirdly unmotivated. Snow does many horrible things, of course…but those horrible things seem almost too much, the personalization of the evil of the regime almost too intense, as if Suzanne Collins is desperate to find an excuse to place Snow at the center of Katniss’ mental and emotional world.
Given Snow’s role as demon/father, and given the series’ fascination with intensely gruesome and macabre violence, I think it’s possible to see The Hunger Games as itself an example of the gothic. In many ways, too, it’s a much more traditional gothic than Twilight. Incest leads to horror — and to punishment, not just for the father, but for the daughter as well. Katniss’ punishment is precisely that she doesn’t get the phallus; repudiating the incest storyline means that she must also repudiate personal power and agency. She can’t actually admit to her love of dressing up (good girls don’t do that); she can’t admit to an investment or interest in politics (good girls don’t do that); she can’t even really enjoy the denoument of her romance storyline (the boy is nice enough…but he isn’t daddy.) As with Mina Harker, the dull live with the socially acceptable doofus can’t quite compete with the rush of the blood, the horror, and the power — the violent daddy things you’re not allowed to say you want.
The incest angle certainly works for Angel in Buffy.. He’s vamped and in turn, decimates his family. And though he doesn’t really play into familial relationships, he ends up vamping Dru, who certainly becomes paramour, sister, and lover with Angel, with her dolls, and with Spike.
Speaking as someone who’s always been drawn to vampire tales, I think a lot of the appeal is in a dynamic other who brings you out of complacency and status quo. Vampires are usually smart and clever, they’re worldly and understand the world due to centuries of “life,” they often exist outside of usual societal norms and structures (which certainly makes them appealing, historically, to women fighting for power), there is knowledgeable passion rather than fumbling, and ultimately it’s a power that’s shared. Becoming a vampire isn’t patriarchal domination but becoming an equal, almost letting someone in to a larger truth. There’s a sort of enlightenment, especially in works like Rice’s vampires who have a much more progressive idea of companionship and sex.
This is just a coincidence, but I read Dracula and Carmila recently. The latter is more interesting in some ways, since I think it started the lesbian vampire cliche(?).
I think the lesbian vampire ties into your discussion, because that character exists as a cautionary tale of what happens to women who crave the blood/power – they become demonic-men. Of course, readers (especially straight men) enjoy stories about lesbian vampires for reasons that have nothing to do with traditional morality…
Hey Monika. That’s an interesting take…which I think more or less dovetails with mine? The shared power from an (older) taboo-breaking figure seems to fit into Twitchell’s suggestion about incest. I see what you’re saying about the distinction re patriarchal domination…but I think that has to be a question of emphasis. It’s obviously patriarchal domination with Dracula, even as there is (even there) the suggestion of escaping from that insufferable drip, Jonathan Harker….
Don’t they even refer to creating a vampire as “siring” a vampire in Buffy? They’re also quite nervous in Buffy about siring same-sex vampires, aren’t they? Less so in Twilight….
Dracula is pretty bad, is the sort of sad truth. There are some great ideas, but Stoker’s not a very good writer and is deeply unwilling to follow through on most of his best ideas. The film Nosferatu is better…and probably the Coppola film is better too.
It’s sort of funny that people are upset about Twilight ruining vampires, because of course the protoype is also basically mid-drawer pulp.
I haven’t read (or even heard of?) Carmila…it sounds kind of interesting….
Noah-
In Dracula you see the patriarchal domination as fleeing Harker? I also wonder if we can apply it to the overall work – that a woman shouldn’t be tantalized by seductive power and must stay close to home?
Yes, in Buffy it’s called siring, but I don’t recall any nervousness about same-sex siring. In fact, Angel is known for having sired two men to one woman.
I thought they initially had Angel sire Spike, and then backtracked on it?
In terms of Dracula…it’s been a while since I read it, but…. Dracula’s the evil uber-daddy, whose incestuous desires keep all the daughters from fulfilling their exogamous monogamous destiny. So there’s not really a non-patriarchal choice imagined in that text; you’re either staying with daddy or going with the (more socially acceptable) daddy-surrogate of the husband.
There’s also maybe a reading that, yes, women shouldn’t be seduced by (daddy’s?) power, and should fulfill their destiny in marrying and obeying some healthy specimen of (non-related) British manhood. The thing is, Dracula’s so much more interesting and appealing than Harker that it’s easy to read the book against itself, so that you end up sort of rooting for Mina to go with the sex and power and be a vampire and dump that boring idiot she’s supposed to marry. That also ends up being about the attraction of incest, though, since Dracula is still the uber-daddy….
The Hunger Games has a lot of the same tensions, though it’s in general more on top of them, I’d say. President Snow is never as interesting as Dracula; you’re never really rooting for him. And, of course, Katniss expresses her power (which is connected to her father through the hunting…) more straightforwardly. But I think the daddy issues are still pretty visible….
“Dracula’s the evil uber-daddy, whose incestuous desires keep all the daughters from fulfilling their exogamous monogamous destiny”
I haven’t read the book in a long, long time, but I’m pretty sure the daughters were extremely bit roles to the extent there were any daughters at all?
I’m not really feeling an incest dynamic in Dracula (though I’m sure you could make the case that there is a little). I haven’t read it recently, but Stroker isn’t really interested in what the characters will be like after turned by Dracula, he basically just kills off that proto-Mina character right after she’s turned, I seem to recall. (She arises in a coffin and Hellsing stakes her to death)
Dracula is more easily characterized as a foreigner or outsider than a daddy figure, i’d think. In fact I recall some critics argued there was an antisemetic reading.
“The thing is, Dracula’s so much more interesting and appealing than Harker that it’s easy to read the book against itself,”
I think I latched on to Hellsing as an alternative to Dracula more than Harker. Hellsing is a doctor who uses knowledge and rationality to diagnose and destroy the vampirism like a common disease. And Dracula is the ultimate manifestation of irrationality, a foreign peasant superstition arrived in the flesh to destroy victorian england.
Hey Pallas. There aren’t “real” daughters; I think Mina and her friend and the vampire wives…basically, all of the women get figured as both daughters and sexual partners, though. It’s in the nature of vampirism, right; biting and turning is *both* sex *and* creating a child (siring.) And, as Twitchell says, the original vampire legends were all about interfamilial killing — the later versions therefore end up seeming like they’re displacing that, but not getting rid of it.
I don’t think that negates the other issues you talk about though (i.e., foreign/English; irrationality/rationality.) On the contrary, I think those binaries get mapped onto the incest trope fairly easily. It’s evil irrational foreigners who participate in these foul practices, which must be swept away by the rational English and our civilized (incest) taboos….
Angel sired a Puritan and a submarine dude. As for siring Spike, Whedon considers siring a matter of lineage (http://buffy.wikia.com/wiki/Sire). So, since he sired Dru, he then sired Spike. But oh, how soap opera-messy it gets Darla sires Angel who sires Drusilla who re-sires Darla who then gets pregnant by Angel.
As for Dracula, I’m more wondering if Dracula being framed as the evil uber-daddy could be seen as the patriarchy framing him that way to keep her in line? I always loved the setup of the story. There’s so much not said that can lead to many interpretations.. Then again, my head is full of the film version with the greater look at Dracula as a man.
As for HG – the final book certainly makes for an interesting familial reading of Katniss and mother-father dynamics.
Carmila is a short story by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu. It was published around the same period as Dracula, but was overshadowed by the latter. It’s a pretty quick read, and fairly interesting. I enjoyed it more than Dracula, though that’s mostly because (as you said) Stoker isn’t a very good writer.
I still haven’t read any Twilight, been meaning to watch the first movie at least. But I have to ask, how does Twilight deal with blood drinking? Do the good vampires still drink human blood, or did they find an alternative? Cuz it seems like any positive portrayal of a vampire family (incestuous or otherwise) would be compromised by this predatory behavior.
The good twilight vampires drink animal blood (bears and such.)
” It’s evil irrational foreigners who participate in these foul practices, which must be swept away by the rational English and our civilized (incest) taboos….”
So vampirism is basically a mixed metaphor then? To have someone be a daddy figure and a foreigner seems a contradictory thing to me (incest implies you are from the same place and culture)
It actually makes sense that it would be a mixed metaphor, given Dracula’s influence, popularity and longevity. Each generation or individual writer can latch onto the parts of the vampire metaphor that speak to them, and ignore the stuff that doesn’t…
Maybe mixed…but I think also perhaps repressed or denied in some ways? The filthy uncivilized habits are someone else’s problem…not things that good englishmen (and women) desire. But of course the evil foreign habits do get a purchase among the anglos after all….
I’ve read other stories where vampires could drink animal blood as an alternative, and while I understand the moral dimension, and it always seemed like cop-out to me. Wouldn’t every vampire drink animal blood if that was an option? It isn’t even a moral question, animal blood is just much easier to obtain (especially with modern, industrial slaughterhouses), and you can drink it without fear of detection or persecution.
Drinking HUMAN blood is a critical part of the vampire myth for me, if you can opt out of that then you’re basically opting out of being a vampire (but you still get all the vampire perks!).
Meyer’s vampires much prefer the taste of human blood…and I think it increases their strength too, though she seems at least a little inconsistent on that….
Anyway, the point is that for her giving up human blood is a real loss, which is why most vampires aren’t willing to do it.
Richard – In many of the stories I’ve read, there seems to be an increase of abilities with human blood, so the choice becomes embracing what you’ve become and all its perks, or taking a moral stand and accepting a weakened, yet still crazy-strong form. And I imagine the idea of self-preservation comes into play. If you drink animal blood and you’re weaker than a human-blood-drinker, you’re in trouble.
Meyer also likes to add in toxicity, which removes the idea of blood play, and the option for the “victim” to survive. You’re bit, you’re turned, unless you die first. I imagine this plays into her religion since giving blood is often framed as a sensual act.
*cough* Let the Right One In *cough*
Jones, I haven’t seen it! It’s in my cue….
The point at the end of this piece about The Hunger Games is right on, I think.
The only thing I want to add on that tangent is that it seems to me that the point of the books is that all of that “bad daddy” stuff — political power, violence, etc., — are solely the province of bad people. Katniss doesn’t miss out on her rewards as punishment for her victimization — at least not as a punishment we’re meant to approve of, even subconsciously — she misses out on them because the work is deeply pessimistic about human nature. That’s the meaning of Prim’s death and Katniss’s reaction to it — Prim is basically her morality doll, reminding her that it’s all worthwhile as long as innocence somewhere can be preserved, and her death — at the hands of the putative good guys — disabused Katniss of any illusions she has left about humanity.
If I really wanted to stick my neck out, or put my Camus hat on, I’d use this to argue for the inferiority of The Hunger Games as a work — it’s a book about suffering that essentially says the rational response is withdrawal, a PTSD prescription for for the human condition.
I don’t disagree with that…but I think it is linked to the deep ambivalence about power, which is also tied metaphorically to incest.
That is…the bad daddy is absolutely bad and evil; political power and violence and even agency are rejected. But part of that rejection is about refusing to acknowledge the appeal of all those things. The Hunger Games is a book that loves violence, that loves dressing up in fabulous clothes, that loves the rush of politics. But it also sees all of them as corrupting, incestuous, and so Katniss has to deny her own investment in them, or interest in them.
I’ve been reading Tania Modleski’s book about Harlequin romances, and she argues that there’s a similar dynamic there; the heroine has to appear innocent and powerless even though the reader knows what is happening in the plot/knows she has power. Modleski argues that it’s symptomatic of a patriarchal society in which women aren’t supposed to have power, or even want power. It’s odd to see Katniss as a Harlequin heroine, because she’s obviously very competent and has power in a lot of ways — but there is a way in which she’s similarly distanced from her own desires and agency….
Without spoiling anything, suffice it to say that Let The Right One In would provide tons of grist for this mill.
Yes, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN … (and this is a case where both versions are of almost equal interest). But I can’t let this “Stoker is a bad writer” claim stand! DRACULA was for many years dismissed by serious critics despite its vast popularity. That view was set aside decades ago, however, and the book has been the subject of significant critical re-assessment (see the essays in the Norton Critical Edition of the novel, for instance, for a sample). Some of this work examines the book, which proves to be a rich source, in terms of feminism, queerness, post-colonialism, and other theoretical approaches, but there’s also a much greater appreciation for its style and innovative structure (the multiple narrators using different media to tell the story). At this point, it’s a Victorian novel with as rich a critical response as much of Dickens — but that’s all from the past 20 years or so, when the view of Stoker as a mediocre writer was put aside (for his most famous novel anyway, not the stuff he wrote later when he was half-crazy). Coppola’s film tries to imitate the novel’s complex textuality for a while, but gives up on this. No film adaptation has ever really known what to do with Stoker’s structure. That said, “Carmilla” is indeed a crucial text in the vampire genre — actually pretty well-known despite the claims here that it isn’t — but as a text it has little of the stylistic complexity of Stoker’s novel. It might be sexier, however…
I mean, I guess everything is reevaluated these days, and I can certainly see a lot of interesting things in Dracula…and I haven’t read it for a while, so perhaps I would like it more on a second go round. But…my memory of it is some brief flurries of weird, vivid, dreamlike scenes, interspersed with a lot of banal pulp slogging. Not unlike Frankenstein, for that matter.
Surely, even if there’s been an academic reassessment, there must still be some hold-outs who think it’s not very good? And if the critical consensus now is that it’s a great work, it seems like *that’s* the easy opinion to hold. I didn’t think I was being contrarian in thinking Stoker wasn’t all that, but if it has to be….
Maybe we could do a dracula roundtable some day…
Frankenstein is a much tighter work, though. Dracula sprawls.
I tend to view the status of a writer as good or bad as a historical claim in any case, not a transcendent value, and never just reducible to personal taste (which I think is always in fact cultural, not personal). So is Stoker a good writer compared to his contemporaries (not just the high water marks of Eliot or Dickens, but Wilkie Collins or George Gissing, perhaps), or to current vampire novelists like Anne Rice and Chairlaine Harris? In any case, both FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA have — as a couple of generations of literary critics have demonstrated — brilliant plots (by which I mean structure, in the Russian distinction between plot and story). By current standards both probably seem over-written, but as Romantic and Victorian novels go, both are pretty stunning as both prose and as virtually unprecedented works of imagination. The fact that neither has ever gone out of print attests to something, I’m guessing.
Well, they’ve obviously captured people’s imagination…and I like things about both of them very much. And of course they’re very historically important.
I don’t think either is necessarily a ton of fun to read all the way through, though…and I’d definitely question how brilliant Frankenstein’s structure is. That book is a mess.
I think in a lot of ways neither quite lives up to its hype. They’re both so influential…but you go back to the originals, and in a lot of ways, they’re pretty pedestrian genre fare with flashes of brilliance. In terms of horror, there are just lots of films and books I prefer to those two…for example, I think you could make a case that Salem’s Lot is as thematically complex and as well written as Dracula…and a lot less chary of following through on its vision. I find Lovecraft’s best work a lot more interesting as well (so we’re not talking about overwriting obviously)…and certainly Stevenson and Wells, not to mention Poe.
I haven’t read Rice or Harris. Twilight seems not entirely dissimilar in quality; some nifty ideas embedded in a mess of a book. Stoker’s prose is probably better than Meyer’s, though.
But like I said, I haven’t read Dracula in a long time, so perhaps I’d feel different if I read it again.
The latter part of Dracula is too conventional once the final chase sequences get underway. It’s just a capitulation after all that time building up the main character. On the other hand, the early scene were the girl is looking out the window and sees those twinkling lights is quite marvelous.
FRANKENSTEIN a mess? It’s a perfectly symmetrical, mirror structure:
Walton’s letters / Frankenstein // the monster // Frankenstein / Walton’s letters.
And that’s just the large structure — it’s otherwise constructed out of a whole series of rhymes and repetitions. As critics have noted, it’s organized more like a poem than a conventional novel.
But it’s also got those senseless melodramatic sections crammed in the middle for basically no reason except that Shelly can’t free herself of the genre conventions.
I like Frankenstein…but yes, it’s a mess in a lot of ways.
That’s funny; I just realized your comment isn’t as emphatic as I thought; you’re capitalizing Frankenstein as a title, not as italics….
This is also a great argument! I’ve always found the explanations for the popularity of incest narratives fascinating but a little lacking. I plan on discussing it a fair bit in my dissertation so I put both those books on my Amazon wish list. Are they both worth a read/buy?
They’re both interesting. Twitchell is more fun to read (especially if you pretty much hate all the poets covered in the other book.) They’re definitely both worth getting out of the library at least if you have access to one….