• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 510 0

certainly not dashing. Some of the potency of Stoker’s myth-making is that he combined the terror and loathing of the folkloric vampire with the melancholy elegance of the Byronic vampire; so that his Count may be by turns charming and terrifying. Recent versions of the myth have split up that inspired union, so that Edward Cullen is charming, aloof, melancholic, pretty — in a word, Byronic — but not even remotely frightening to most grown-ups; while the 30 Days of Night mob can be rather chilling if you’re in the right mood, but you definitely wouldn’t want to go on a date with them. It would be interesting to see if writers and artists in the near future can combine the two, as they were combined in, say, the Christopher Lee Dracula series — well, the first couple of them.

The fact that so many people dream about these beings suggests any number of things. One appeal — a very potent one, I’d guess — is that the most fervent audiences dream of a life less ordinary. And an undead life, presented in sufficiently glamorous lights, is an attractive version of such an existence.

What do you make of Stephenie Meyer’s defanged vampires? Do you see an agenda at work?

Ah, the Meyer phenomenon and its “agenda.” The latter, I take it, refers to the whole biz about Stephenie Meyer being a Mormon and the books being propaganda for sexual abstinence or postponement? Well, it doesn’t sound wholly implausible, though I have a hunch that there must be something at least a touch theologically wobbly for the Church of JC and the LDS about vampiric heroes. What, for instance, would Edward do if you waved a crucifix at him? (I haven’t read past the middle of the second book; perhaps Meyer has written this scene? Though I doubt it.) One of the reasons why he is not frightening is that, whether or not you have religious faith, a vampire has to be unclean as well as undead. (Again, the Park Chan-Wook film plays an ingenious set of variations on this theme, not least because its hero becomes a vampire as an indirect result of seeking Christian martyrdom.)

My almost complete lack of ability to answer this question appropriately may be due to the fact that I JUST DON’T GET IT. Had I been the publisher’s reader who had first received the manuscript, I would have binned it within 20 minutes. On the rare occasions when I have spoken to young girls who love the series, they have unanimously used the word “romance”; my hunch is that the vampiric component of the tales, though not negligible, is more like the wrapping paper than the present itself. Emma P., the 16-year-old daughter of my friends, explained to me with remarkable self-insight that she loves Edward, the character, not Robert Pattinson, the cute actor. And she emphasized that one of the things that makes her dream of Edward as a beau is that he has Nice Manners. Question: is one of the motors of the Meyer phenomenon a mass craving on the part of teenage girls that teenage boys would stop being oafish, childish idiots?

Now, Bella as a feminist? Well, I suppose if I were pretending to be a media studies lecturer, I might say something to the effect that the ideological positioning of the character is as much, or more, a question of how she is consumed as how she is produced. (Stripped of bibble, I mean that if her fans think she is a feminist heroine, then she is. End of argument.) I’d like to add that the young actress who plays Bella is terrific, I think; so inward-turned and troubled and subdued that she almost risks monotony, but sheers away from it at the last minute. A lesser talent would have done more scenery tearing. I haven’t heard much about boy Bella fans flocking to the films to swoon over her — but I suspect that, at 17, I would have done just that.

If you’ve had a chance to see any of season 1 of True Blood, what do you make of vampires mainstreaming? Do we need our vampires to remain subversive, or is this precisely what the series is pointing to, that visibility exposes everyone’s subversions?

I speak cautiously here, as I have only seen a few episodes; it struck me as