The American
V
ampires were popular phenomena in Victorian Britain and it can’t have escaped your notice that they are rising again in today’s American popular culture. Peter Logan, Professor of English at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, believes that vampires reflect parallels between the two cultures. Victorian Britain, he points out, was the world’s first industrialized society, and the UK was the undisputed superpower of the nineteenth century world, much as the US is now. At the height of the Victorian period, one quarter of the world’s population were British subjects. “It was the beginning of the world as we know it today and it was beset with some of the same problems associated with being a world power that we are currently facing,” Logan says. Vampires were hugely popular in Victorian novels and magazines, just as in the hit HBO TV series True Blood
18
(pictured below) and the Twilight books and movies. The cult did not start with Dracula. Vampires came, out of middle European legends but the first vampire character to chime with the wider public in the English speaking world was Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood written by James Malcolm Rymer and published in ‘penny dreadful’ pamphlets between 1845 and 1847, then as a book in 1847. Varney was an aristocrat who could walk around in daylight, but needed the moonlight to survive. Bram Stoker’s most famous creation Dracula appeared in 1897. The Count reflects a changed social environment in which the British Empire was at its height and conflicts with the colonies in Africa and Asia were a major concern. “For these changed times, Count Dracula is still an aristocrat, but he is also an outsider from the fringe of Europe, and he brings his mysterious ways to London, the heart of England and the center of the empire,” says Logan, adding “Some critics view this as a reflection of English fears of being ‘contaminated’ by a colonial culture that is very different, in which case the story warns about maintaining the imagined ‘purity’ or homogeneity of England.” The vampire legend evolved through cinema, with the blood-sucking character famously played by Max Schreck in Nosferatu in 1922, Bela Lugosi in a series of 1930s movies and later Christopher Lee in the rather camp Hammer Horror films of the 1960s and 70s. After a hiatus they have risen again, and this time, they’re sexy. “In the past, vampires could feel rage, but not romantic love, and they didn’t have sex,” says Logan. In fact
that’s not strictly true; the Hammer films were full of sex, but it was never shown explicitly, and other movies have gone further. But Logan continues, “The fact that they do now accounts for this recent surge in popularity. They are not just metaphorically erotic – in True Blood, it’s standard sex; but it’s between human and a paranormal. It’s the same in Twilight. Although, it’s never fully acted upon, Twilight is still a typical Boy meets Girl story,” he said. He notes that now vampires are able to love, it leads to an overt civil rights theme, as played out in True Blood. “This change in the vampires and the story lines may be a reflection of our changing attitudes toward heterogeneity. Instead of fearing contamination, we are learning to accept differences,” Logan argues, adding “In True Blood and Twilight, the vampires are a projection of our cultural hopes and fears onto the figure of a person who is very different than us. The vampire is a good figure for capturing that”. H