vampire

vampire The predatory aristocrat whose blood-lust leads him to drain the blood of peasants, usually young women, is the stock figure of the vampire as represented by the cinematic Nosferatu, John Polidori's Lord Ruthven, and Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. For the ‘undead’, this exsanguination is a reproductive act, that conflates both food and sex. The most effective means of reproduction for the vampire, however, has been textual. Novels such as Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872), Stoker's Dracula (1897), and Prest's Varney the Vampire (1847) have perpetuated an image that continues to replicate itself throughout our culture rather like a virus. Vampirism is encoded within popular culture through a complex nexus of literature, folklore, and fantasy.

Traditionally the revenant, or undead, is a mouldering corpse dragging itself out of graves to feed off the life-blood of the living. Premature burial arising from times of plague is one explanation for the prevalence of the vampire phenomenon at certain periods in history. The mecca for vampires is Eastern Europe. The word itself is believed to be of Magyar origin, possibly derived from the Turkish uber, meaning witch. The term was first used in English in 1734, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, where vampires are described as ‘The bodies of deceased persons, animated by evil spirits, which come out of the graves in the night-time, suck the blood of many of the living, and thereby destroy them’.

In contrast, Stoker's eroticized and glamorous cloaked Count is a hybrid of the Wandering Jew and his hypnotic gaze, the libertine Lord Ruthven, who is based on Byron, and at least two notorious historical figures, whose careers were drenched in the blood of Eastern European peoples. These were Vlad Tepes, impaler and Romanian Prince, and Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian aristocrat, who was known as the Blood Countess of Cachtice. A sixteenth-century mass murderer whose sadomasochistic practices included biting off the flesh of her victims, Báthory's cruelties towards her servants escalated into capturing women and young girls who were then tortured and killed. Estimates of the numbers range from from thirty to over seven hundred. Their blood was drained for the Countess's rejuvenating bloodbaths, by such torturous contraptions as the cruelly spiked Iron Maiden. The horrors of Báthory's necro-sadism were written out of criminal history into fairy-tale, where she is represented as the wicked queen in Snow White, who contemplates her beauty at her looking-glass for hours on end. As this pathological behaviour suggests, vampirism can be a clinical phenomenon within which folklore, fantasy, and deviant behaviour converge.

The ingestion of blood can complement necrophilia, which consists largely of sexual satisfaction derived from physical contact with a dead body. Auto-vampirism can include self-induced bleeding, or auto-haemofetishism, which is a condition whereby sexual pleasure is derived from the sight of blood.

The most well-known association of pathological conditions with vampires and werewolves was with the rare group of diseases called porphyrias. Caused by the body's over-production of porphyrins — a normal component of haemoglobin (due in fact to an inborn error of metabolism), one type of this condition caused George III to produce blue urine and to collapse, foaming at the mouth. More obviously vampiric forms of the illness present themselves as an intolerance to light, wherein the skin cracks and bleeds, the gums and upper lip recede, and there is redness of the eyes, teeth, and skin. Seclusion from daylight and, ironically, drinking blood were prescribed remedies.

anaemia has also been attributed to the vampire. During the nineteenth century, sufferers on this side of the grave were treated with animal blood, which they were expected to imbibe. In Joseph-Ferdinand Gueldry's painting, The Blood Drinkers, of 1898, a line of pale and languid women queue up in an abattoir for a glass of warm ox's blood. It is likely that their anaemia had been caused by menstrual losses.

A link between menstruation and vampirism is made by Freud in his essay ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ (1918). Again, among the myriad ways in which Dracula may be read is as an anti-menstrual subtext, which pathologizes femininity and constructs female blood as polluted and male blood as pure. From the writings on menstrual taboo of Stoker's contemporary, James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, we can infer similarities between vampires and menstruating women. Both are condemned as unclean, agents of pollution, and instigators of corruption. Sharing an avoidance of mirrors and crucifixes, they have been barred from many churches, temples, and synagogues. Some pre-industrial societies believed that a man could die from having contact, particularly intercourse, with a menstruating woman — and to make love with a vampire was potentially lethal. In such cultures, after menarche, a young girl would be kept out of the sun lest she, vampire-like, shrivel up into a withered skeleton. Frazer explains that for their own protection these adolescent girls were kept in tenebrous seclusion, where they were suspended between life and death, heaven and earth, until marriage. Likewise, the vampire exists in a bodily state that is between life and death and in a spiritual limbo betwixt heaven and earth. The coffins to which vampires retreat in the day serve, like menstrual huts, as places of seclusion and safety. For both vampires, their victims, and menstruating women, it is normal for blood to flow outside the body. Mythologized as transgressing the natural order, menstruating women in some cultures have a kinship with vampires.

Psychic vampirism is an affliction that, according to the Victorian physician Jules Michelet, affects young girls: ‘A hysterical girl is … a vampire who sucks the blood of the healthy people around her.’ The female vampire is a species of the femme fatale, whose deadly vampiric embrace can be seen as a metaphor for the transmission of syphilis — a potentially lethal, sexually transmitted disease. Not just young female patients but also the male doctors, too, who are known as leeches or blood-suckers and who practise blood-letting, partake of the nature of vampires.

In his vampire-hunter's manual, called Traité sur les Apparitions des Ésprits et sur les Vampires (Paris 1746), Dom Augustine Calmet provides case histories of how he set out to ‘cure’ the supposed plague of vampires that was infecting eighteenth-century Europe. His first resort was decapitation, staking out the heart, and then incineration. The overkill of this zealous Benedictine monk was presumably due to the ambivalent attitude towards death which characterized the average vampire. More apotropaic methods (techniques for turning evil away) included stuffing objects into the orifices of corpses or confronting the ambulatory blood-sucker with a crucifix. The latest breed of fictional vampires, such as Ann Rice's androgynous vampires in her Vampire Chronicles, which began publication in 1976, have proved to be a strain resistant to such apotropaics, while Poppy Z. Brite's vampires are immune to the deleterious effects of religious symbolism. For them vampirism is drained of signification. In Lost Souls (1992), which is an appropriate title for the vampire entering post-modernism, the sexual significance of vampirism is no longer a means of reproduction but a sadomasochistic diversion.

The vampire is a sublimation of our fears of death and disease, articulating our resistance to an acceptance of the process of decomposition. Human decay involves discolouration, bloating, and leaking of blood-stained fluid from the mouth and nostrils — which have been misinterpreted as the superfluities of a blood-satiated cadaver. The taboos surrounding putrefaction and funereal rights, which can involve the second burial of the exhumed undead, suggest that it is not until a corpse no longer resembles the living, and only when it resides in its skeletal state as a momento mori, that the living can truly rest in peace.

Marie Mulvey-Roberts

See also sadomasochism; torture.