In the popular culture of paranormal romance, it seems that audiences have come to accept that vampires and lycanthropes are lovable even though early myths about them were gory, frightening, and bizarre. Count Orlok from F.W. Fernau’s brilliant, haunting German auteur film, Nosferatu, comes to mind when I think of visual representations of ancient supernaturals: anemic-looking; dark circles around the eyes; long, sharp teeth; gnarly, twig-like fingers; and a bald head with a twisted grimace.
Paranormal romance turns the scary stuff into erotic stuff. But let’s forget our undead pretty boys for a second and instead figure out how we got from ghouls to gods? How in the world did these blood-sucking, evil creatures become such lauded centerpieces of paranormal romance? Why is it that we love to love the vampire? What turns seemingly dangerous and feral elements such as feeding off other people into something that turns us on?
I think it may have to do with the way literature over the years has gradually transformed hideous creatures into sentient, empathetic beings.
Tracing this transformation back to its roots, I found myself looking into archives from the 1700s and 1800s, where I unearthed myths of Romania’s Strigoi. It seems that the Strigoi are the earliest link to characteristics found in our modern/contemporary vampire literature because the Strigoi were, at some point in their lives, human. The idea of the Strigoi dates back to Ancient Greece and the Dacian people, a prolific tribe who referred to themselves as a people who ran with the wolf; stories about the Dacians shape-shifting into wolves were common, and the god they worshipped was the wolf.
Not coincidentally, Dacians populated the region of Romania now known to us as Transylvania, where tropes about vampires and ‘the Dracula connection’ (think Bram Stoker’s Dracula (read for free here; the film Nosferatu is its adaptation), are often made, according to Lonely Planet’s tourism description about this spooky region along the Carpathian mountain range. Romanian lore suggests that the Strigoi possess certain traits: the seventh consecutive birth of the same sex in the family; red hair; a life of sin; or having been cursed by a witch. Once a Strigoi dies, he is reanimated and comes back to haunt the living, sometimes possessing the ability to shape-shift. Then he searches for blood.
Visual representations of Strigoi are, for lack of a better word, freaky; they’re like a sort of winged zombie. They look how we expect someone to look after they’ve been reanimated after death: terrifying. An Authenticated Vampire Story, written by Franz Hartmann in 1909, perfectly portrays the malevolence and terror of Strigoi. Peasant children from a region in the Carpathian Mountains mysteriously begin to die. The villagers suspect the deceased count haunting his old fortress (rumored to be a Strigoi), and so they burn the castle to stop the deaths.
Killing little children for food, or even for pleasure? This doesn’t sound very lovable or sexy at all!
But wait. I read a fascinating article about the in Travels in Romania: Myths of Origins, Myths of Blood, which can be read here for free or on JStor as a free download for all of you scientific journal readers out there. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897, a milestone piece for paranormal romance because of the introspective yearnings of a monster that we to whom could relate.
The 1890s were recognized as the birth of self-conscious embarrassment over others’ displays of decadence, the declination of the Victorian era, and ultimately, the declination of Britain. David Glover posits in Travels in Romania that Dracula is a reactionary myth that embodies the eternal struggles—of good and evil, of modest and immodest, of simple and decadent—in fears of sexual possession, where “scenes of seduction are just a breath away from rape, and a defenselessness is a precondition of pleasure.” As people were turning to modesty, their natural urges to splurge, to incite envy over their wealth, to dress provocatively, and to be liberal and licentious became “underworldly desires.” People in Britain were beginning to struggle with the concept of sin and salvation, of being a monster or being human.
Dracula is characterized by Glover as a “claustrophic” tale because the sexual conflicts are uncanny to the sexualized bloodlust desires that lurk beneath the calm surface of each of us. Glover calls this sexual and cultural uncanny an “unsettling otherness which is hauntingly familiar, insinuatingly intimate but somehow always deeply foreign.”
A bit much, maybe?
This is a provocative idea. I’m not saying that we identify with the ugliness of the monster (at least not on a literal level) but more with the imaginary stakes involved with associating ourselves with the monster, or likening our sins to his, or her sins. We identify with the ideologies of a sympathetic creature struggling to be… human. Unlike the myths of old where humans transformed into ugly, inhuman creatures, contemporary authors have created transference from less human to more human. The seemingly foreign, supernatural concept begins to familiarize itself until we use descriptions such as “more human” as positive affirmations.
In light of a monster’s “new humanness” (think Frankenstein’s monster, or Angel the broody, gorgeous vampire with a soul from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or more recently Bill and Eric from True Blood) we begin to make connections between the “bad” desires of the monster and his conscientious struggles to become “good.” We lend our hearts out to the struggles of these troubled, often morally ambiguous, and more often than not male leads, who transcend the primal stage to emotional and intellectual sophistication. The monster turns into an intimate figure of transformative hope, and in this respect, begins to resemble something lovable and sexy.
Paranormal romance embraces the uncanny, foreign, feral aspects of human beings and anthropomorphizes them into supernatural heroes and heroines. These supernaturals then flirt with the concepts of falling in love with their human counterparts and struggle with becoming more human. We get to experience the dark and the feral and the erotic through them; but also, we get in their struggle to find reception to a deep love, the kind that elevates the primal to the sentient empathetic. They are the ultimate lover: complex, dark, and fighting for love.
The post How Does Paranormal Romance Make Loving Vampires Normal? appeared first on Jane Morrissey.