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Lucy agrees with me, Caitlin
March 31st, 2009 Posted in UncategorizedI confess that whenever I get my copy of The Atlantic and see that Caitlin Flanagan has an article in it, I forge ahead with added vigor, so I can get to her. There’s nothing preventing me from going directly to her piece, but I like the anticipation of knowing her work is lingering in the back of the magazine, especially when I am neck-deep in one of Christopher Hitchens’s anecdote-within-an-aside-tucked-inside-a-literary-allusion things that he does so excruciatingly well.
The point is, I heart Caitlin Flanagan. Except that she doesn’t know squat about vampires. I’ll be more precise. She may know plenty of other vampires quite well, but Caitlin doesn’t know Bram Stoker’s Dracula from George Hamilton. This becomes apparent in her delightfully snarky reply to my recent National Review piece on our modern bloodsucker fetish.
I was delighted to see Caitlin engage the actual text of Dracula, but one can proof-text just about any claim with carefully chosen snippets, which explains more than a few religious sects, come to think of it. It’s worth considering, therefore, the text surrounding the sentences which Caitlin employs to make her case for Dracula as man-about-town.
Caitlin offers an account of Lucy after the first assault by Dracula, for example, which implies that far from being damaged, the little vixen thoroughly enjoyed it. Heck, she was probably asking for it, wandering about in a graveyard at night in her gauzy gown. But consider how Stoker sets up this scene, in a passage Caitlin conveniently omits: “There was undoubtedly something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure. I called in fright, ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ and something raised a head, and from where I was I could see a white face and red, gleaming eyes.”
Now granted, all the gasping and shuddering Caitlin notes in the subsequent passage can easily, taken out of context, be used to suggest a sexual experience. But it’s quite clear that Stoker intended no such thing. Most shudders and gasps are not, in fact, orgasmic. People shudder and gasp, after all, when they are dying, or when they find a snake in the basement. Taking words like that out of context is akin to using a description of someone in a Victorian novel as “gay” to conclude that he’s really a closet homosexual.
But why let the text itself obscure a good sex story? Acontextualism is the only way Caitlin can accomplish her goal with another passage, regarding Lucy’s “dreamy state” upon seeing Dracula. The surrounding text tells us that Lucy is looking at Dracula’s red eyes. Caitlin wants to put the weight of this encounter on the word “dreamy,” because she has invested that word with a romantic connotation. In 1897, however, situated alongside the description of Dracula’s darkness and red, glowing eyes, it’s clear that “dreamy” doesn’t mean Lucy is thinking, “Oh my god I didn’t know old dudes could be so hot!” She is entranced, rather, by the monster’s demonic power. And a few sentences later we see that the effect has been to make her sad, not giddy.
Caitlin likewise infers from a passage describing Lucy as “languid and tired” that she’s had yet another delicious tête-à-tête with the man in black. But immediately after he has assaulted her we read that she is pale and clutching her throat. “There is a drawn, haggard look under her eyes which I do not like,” writes her friend Mina.
If we are not to descend entirely into misogyny for the sake of blinkered Freudianism, perhaps we can afford the last word to Lucy herself. This from her diary, after the ministrations of Van Helsing have temporarily retrieved her from Dracula’s oppression:
“It is as if I had passed through some long nightmare, and had just awakened to see the beautiful sunshine and feel the fresh air of the morning around me. I have a dim half remembrance of long, anxious times of waiting and fearing, darkness in which there was not even the pain of hope to make present distress more poignant. . . The noises that used to frighten me out of my wits, the flapping against the windows, the distant voices which seemed so close to me, the harsh sounds that came from I know not where and commanded me to do I know not what, have all ceased. I go to bed now without any fear of sleep.”
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19 Responses to “Lucy agrees with me, Caitlin”
By Maclin Horton
on Mar 31, 2009
Yes, yes. I followed the exchange on NRO, and was disappointed in CF’s response because, like you, I’m a very big fan of hers. She’s uncharacteristically taking the conventional sex-culture point of view here.
Back when the grossly misnamed Bram Stoker’s Dracula came out, I was much offended, and wanted to review it making some of your same points. Not wanting to be unfair or inaccurate, I re-read the book (for the first time since my teens) and found that the very best that could be said for the vampirism-as-sex interpretation of it is that it was enormously exaggerated. At most I think one could say that there might have been some superficial allure–hardly a new observation about evil. But even if we go that far, overall the Count’s attentions are about as welcome as, and comparable to, date-rape followed by AIDS.
By Jared
on Mar 31, 2009
I followed the exchange on NRO as well, but I’m less interested in whether Dracula was or was not sexually arousing and more interested in the larger point you were making about the meaning of vampires turning good in pop culture.
What has happened here (and happened in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the True Blood series on HBO and the books that spawned it, all of which you also take issue with) is that some of the vampires are good, and take great pains to be good, and some are bad. It’s not about moral equivocation or a community letting its guard down out of some oversimplified drive towards “multiculturalism.” It’s about not painting the world in broad strokes with one brush. Rather than a vampire being defined by the group to which he belongs, he is defined by his actions. The thinking that would require us to consider all vampires villains for the safety of the community is the same thinking that would cast all Muslims as terrorists because of Osama Bin Laden, all gays as pedophiles because of NAMBLA, all blacks as rapists because of Kobe Bryant (or would that be all professional basketball players?), and so forth. The world of Twilight is not one where villains don’t exist and are welcomed into society out of some sense of liberal-minded tolerance, it’s just a nuanced view of the world that shies away from what amounts to a kind of racism. It is the sought-after “entertainment that draws a line between good and evil.” It just draws the line around actions, not group affiliations.
By Paul A'Barge
on Mar 31, 2009
“http://cache.gawker.com/assets/resources/2007/06/caitlin.jpg”
Looking at Caitlin and thinking over and over of the eponymous vampire activity (suck), I really don’t care about anything else.
By Marc Giller
on Mar 31, 2009
Ah, the postmodern vampire! Personally, I’m much happier with the old-fashioned creatures of the night: driven by bloodlust rather than the carnal kind, manifestations of pure evil that recoil at the sight of a crucifix and scald to the touch of holy water. To me, the modern incarnation–from Edward Cullen back to Anne Rice’s Louis–are sadly hollow, as they’ve been stripped of that epic vibe. They’re not evil–they’re just misunderstood.
That said, I think the sexy parts of Dracula do exist–they’re just found in Jonathan Harker’s encounters with the vampire sisters, not Lucy’s forays with “the man himself.” One can’t help but read those passages and marvel at how Victorian sensibilities dealt with such racy prose. It still gives me goosebumps. Lucy getting bitten seems more like a young girl being propositioned by a dirty old man by comparison.
By Jenniferwhatnot
on Mar 31, 2009
I think Jared has it right: The whole Twilight story is centered around this “vegetarian” clan of vampires (they only drink animal blood, rather than human blood) that is extraordinary precisely because their “family” bonds are so strong that they can form true, deeply loving relationships with each other – and with humans – in a way that the non-vegetarian vampires can not. A major plot point in the last two novels centers around the connection this vegetarian clan has with its northern (also veg) neighbors, again a deep bond that occurs only because they are more loving and humane than the villian vampires. There are plenty of bad guys in the Twilight books, too – the non-veg vamps. I’d think conservatives would be celebrating books that not only overtly emphasize waiting until marriage for sexaul activity, even if that means getting married right out of high school if you know it’s “the one” but also has this subtle message about your choices and associations dictating the limitations – or lack thereof – on one’s life.
By susan Smith
on Mar 31, 2009
I’m confused a little bit. Maybe I’m just not reading this correctly, but there is really a lot of scholarship being produced right now that deals with this very issue. At the last conference I attended, there was a whole section about this. The point has been made (and so well that it isn’t really being disputed too much) that Mary Shelley’s idea of the vampire was modeled on Lord Byron. Which would make the sexy vampire case very strong indeed. (Being that Byron was pretty much pan-sexual.)
By LisHanberry
on Mar 31, 2009
Sorry, but necrophilia is a tad more nuance than I want my teenage daughter to deal with right now. Give me clear distinction between good and evil anytime.
By Tari
on Mar 31, 2009
The idea that Stoker’s Dracula was poorly disguised Victorian p0rn was around when I was an English major (far too long ago to mention when); the arguments for it seemed pretty thin then, just as they do now. “Scholarship” (especially in the Humanities) can say a lot of things, but that doesn’t make those things true. More often than not all it means is that said “scholars” are bored, out of ideas, or both.
By susan Smith
on Mar 31, 2009
How many recent arguments are you up on Tari?
By Tari
on Mar 31, 2009
None. But unless there’s evidence such as a diary of Stoker’s discussing the subject, I’m afraid my lawyerly instincts kick in and lead me to think it’s pretty prideful of people to say they “know” what an author was thinking when he/she wrote something.
By susan Smith
on Mar 31, 2009
Well, in all fairness you’d pretty much get your teeth kicked in for making an assumption like that. (intentional fallacy.) Nevertheless the Mary Shelley’s model for a kind of Byronic Vampire is pretty accepted. Wherever that gets you.
By Tony
on Mar 31, 2009
Susan,
Now I’m confused, because The Vampyre was produced by Byron and Polidori, not Mary Shelley. And you seem to be engaging in the intentional fallacy yourself when you put the weight of its interpretation on Polidori’s intent to model the bloodsucking seducer on Byron, no? In any event, you are right that this first vampire of British literature was a seducer.
Still, insofar as the archetypal vampire for modern literature is Dracula, I think there’s room to argue that the monster by that name has been reinvented by a Freud and transgressive-sex besotted gang.
By Sigfried
on Apr 1, 2009
I concur with Marc. The scenes with Jonathan Harker and the trio of lady vampires, where they are licking their lips in anticipation and discussing which will “have him first”– just wow. That context does lend hints of sexuality to the later scenes with Lucy (and Mina). YMMV
By Leo Grin
on Apr 1, 2009
Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I’m with Tony Woodlief: Bram Stoker’s Dracula is far more evil than eros, Caitlin Flanagan’s agreeably impish chiding notwithstanding. The various cherry-picked passages she presents to buttress her argument that an orgasmic “satisfaction” enthralls Stoker’s women — “there came a little shudder through her…she was in a half-dreamy state…languid and tired…” — can only be seen as erotic by ignoring the beastly outcomes of the vampire’s trysts:
The horror of Dracula lies in the monstrous corruption of virtue, love and life into fraudulent, Satanic doppelgängers of same. Lucy’s lengthy, inexorable wasting away is one of the great tragic portrayals in American literature. Her anticipation of the Count’s nocturnal visits is not “female desire” but the debased, soul-killing lust of a heroin addict for the needle; her languid, “half-dreamy” repose is not post-platelet bliss but the feeble writhing of a doomed fly in the throes of a spider’s web. By the grim end of her struggle (“She was very low in thought and spirit, and wept silently and weakly for a long time…The poor child cannot rally. God help us all.”) her descent into the netherworld of the undead has become about as romantic as watching a cancer victim wither into oblivion.
I’m honestly glad that Caitlin and millions of other readers love Twilight — I’ve had enough scorn heaped on my faves over the years to make me loathe to disparage the genuine delight others find in theirs. But Tony is absolutely right to say that the post-mortem assigning of genuinely erotic overtones to Dracula says more about the assignors and their “Freud-besotted culture” than about the true content of Stoker’s masterwork of horror. It’s no slight of Stephenie Meyer and her runaway bestsellers to admit that, where Twilight elicits flushed cheeks and sighs of “I’ll have what she’s having,” Dracula answers with a sinister “You better get some ice on that.”
By Lisa R.
on Apr 2, 2009
Leo puts it beautifully:
Stoker’s title character is Evil personified, no question. Though I’ve long thought that there was an underlying sexual aspect to Dracula’s M.O., Lucy is his victim, not his lover. There’s no love here. He means to feed his bloodlust until his victim is used up.
I finally read “Dracula” last summer after having seen more film versions than I can count over the years. Those films run the gamut from pretty decent entertainment to really dreadful rehashings. But more and more through the years, these postmodern versions have played the “eroticism” card, and too many have attempted to get their audiences to sympathize with the poor, misunderstood Dracula. I was, therefore, pleasantly surprised to find that the Bram Stoker novel is remarkably “Christian”.
By the gripping hand
on Apr 6, 2009
I may be coming late to this tea party, but I had some thoughts about the postulated equivalency of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight. If you’re interested, I posted it on my blog. Feel free to comment.