Ep 70 - Gothic Literature and the Rise of the Vampire

Crumbling abbies, usurped castles, secret crypts, graveyards, antiquated ruins haunted by the sins of the past. Welcome to the Gothic. And we're talking about Gothic literature today as the rain crashes down outside and the chill days begin to darken. Because the spooky season is upon us. And there are many readers who will be spending Halloween weekend this year immersing themselves in some classics of horror and Gothic literature. One of my old favourites that I've personally been fervently thumming through recently is Brahm Stokers, Sensational, Bloodsoaked and Incredibly Influential, 1897 Vampire Story Dracula. And so today I would like to talk to you about the Gothic and frame our discussion as an entrance into this classic because a background understanding of the Gothic form leads to a greater appreciation of this quintessential horror novel. So you might find it useful to consider this discussion as an introduction to the work. And if you would like to go deep into the text specifically, then in addition to a video version of today's discussion we have a guided read through and long form lecture series on Brahm Stokers Dracula over at the Hardcore Literature Book Club at Patreon.com/HardcoreLitriture. Now, when it comes to influential works of horror literature and Gothic literature, there are two works that reign supreme. They are Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Brahm Stokers Dracula. And when it comes to Dracula, the proliferation of film adaptations, the flourishing of stage spin-offs and television serials, the fact that we have thousands of inspired narratives, narratives inspired by the book. And what Brahm Stoker did with that myth, this profusion of narratives really speaks to the vampire being an archetype that our collective unconscious simply cannot shake. Why are we so obsessed with the vampire? To begin to clarify that obsession, we must pop back a little over a century or so before Brahm Stoker brought out Dracula. And we must begin to talk Gothic. An understanding of the Gothic takes us back to 1764 and the very first, ostensibly, the very first, horror novel, with Horace Warpoltz, the Castle of Attranto. Three decades later, we see an explosion of works, born out of, and reacting to the Woll-Polyan mode, we can call it, Warpolt gifted us the castle as an iconic architectural feature in Gothic literature. And then in the 1790s, with an explosion of the Gothic form, we see works like, and Radcliffe sublime, 1794, the mysteries of Adolfo. We see Matthew Lewis's, 1796, the monk. And these works of the 1790s didn't only have a debt to Horace Warpolt, but they had a debt to the French Revolution. These works had a keen eye on what was happening across the channel in France. Now we say that Warpoltz, the Castle of Attranto, is the first horror novel. And of course, we can see elements of horror and Gothic even further back. But this is the first work to call itself Gothic. Warpoltz would subtitle his work, a Gothic story. Warpoltz sought to blend two kinds of romance. Because indeed, the Gothic is born out of romance. The two kinds of romance are the ancient and the modern. And we'll see that the Gothic form, while stealing with antiquated spaces and old, tottering, crumbling structures, always has things to say about the contemporary. About today. And the Gothic gives us attention between the old and the new. Now ancient romance, according to Warpolt, is all about imagination and improbability. Whereas modern romance is very much governed by the rules of probability. So we see attention between romance and realism. Gothic writers want to give us these supernatural tales and these really far-fetched adventures in far-flung locations, but they also want to give us the uncanny sense that they could happen. Maybe they could happen. And that's the difference largely between romance and realism. Romance is that which could never happen. Whereas realism is that which may happen. And so we see a blending in the early Gothic novels of the incredibly improbable and common life. Now the word Gothic, even though Warpolt uses it to describe his story, is an anachronistic term or an anachronistic descriptor. That means that we use Gothic as a term years after the movement. During the time in which these Gothic stories were coming out, they weren't really referred to as Gothic. They were referred to as romance. If you said the word novel, then many would think romance. And when they think romance, they would probably think Gothic. And around the turn of the 18th century, novels generally were seen as rather frivolous silly things. "Mirror escapism without much literary merit or redeeming moral value, either. We see that critique emerge in Jane Austen's North Hangar Abbey." And it's really interesting to note that the Gothic form, or those who pin Gothic romances, they are aware, or they were aware, that they are between two worlds. Very much like the undead that would go on to people, some of the later Gothic tales. They're between two worlds, the high literary world, and the low, the popular entertainment. And they were very much underscored by the intelligentsia of the day. And so what we see in the Gothic, if you pick up a story like, and Radcliffe's The Mysteries of the Dolpho, you see the high and the low form blended together, sitting side by side. So you see these brilliant sublime descriptions of landscapes, mountains, valleys. And you also see snippets of Shakespeare, and snippets of different esteemed poets. Littered throughout in epigraph form. And so you have elements of high literature, sitting alongside the supposedly lower form of literature. And what is that? Well, that includes the very topics, the bread and butter that make up the Gothic form, the sensational events, murder, incest, intrigue, secrets, locked doors, crypts, graveyards, evil priests. And so in the Gothic form you have a tension between the high and low, and you also have a tension between romance and realism. And Walpole really wanted to break away from realism. At the time we have Samuel Richardson's Clarissa being discussed and still read voraciously. And that's very much the model for realist fiction. And not only realist fiction, but moral fiction. We still have this lingering idea that art is supposed to have a moral purpose and make us better. But when it comes to the Gothic writers, they didn't want that. Horace Walpole didn't want to instruct, didn't want to redeem. What we get is an enriching of the imagination and some brilliant escapism. Of course it's no wonder why the writers of the Fandiceaercler at the end of the 19th century, the decadent writers, the writers concerned with decay, the rejectors of art as having moral value. It's no surprise why they would be the ones to run with and riff upon the Gothic form. Now when we talk about Gothic springing out of romance, what do we mean by romance? Well today when we say romance we might think of romantic comedies. We might think of love stories. But romance as a form isn't holy or solely preoccupied with love. Though it does surface as a theme. Romance springs from folklore and legends and mythology. We can see romance in the old Breton Lays and similar folkloric legends across the European continent. The tales of King Arthur for example are romances. They're the kinds of stories that sent Don Quixote mad, tales of chivalry and magic and monsters. Think quests, going on a quest, a quest narrative. And indeed Dr James Methven who I had the great privilege of studying under in my first year at university. He was something of an expert when it came to the Gothic form and vampires. He called the Gothic a kind of perverted male quest romance. And yes of course if we're talking late 19th century, late Victorian Gothic tales then it most certainly is a perverted male quest romance. But those early Gothic's actually had heroines at the centre of the adventure. Perverted yes but in those early narratives we see female protagonists come to the fore. Now we see that the Gothic seems to flourish around the turn of the century. We see that at the tail end of the 18th century and of course we see that at the tail end of the 19th century. A period of decay, decadence and degeneration with works like Oscar Wilde's, the picture of Dorian Gray, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's, the yellow wallpaper, Robert Lewis Stevenson's, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Henry James is the turn of the screw and of course, Bram Stoker's Dracula. Indeed, Sigmund Freud would publish the last great Gothic text of the century, of the 19th century, the interpretation of dreams, published in German in 1899. Freud knew his Gothic. In fact, he knew his literature generally, but he definitely delighted in the Gothic form and he knew that the Gothic writers were exploring ideas around the unconscious mind, repression, fear, desire, guilt, dreams and nightmares and symbols and also the uncanny. What Freud would call the Unheimlich. We see Freud discussing the Unheimlich or the uncanny in a 1919 essay on Gothic writer E.T.A. Hoffman's The Sandman. Freud writes that the uncanny is that which is concealed and kept out of sight. Everything is Unheimlich, that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light. Now, let's talk generic hallmarks of the Gothic form. You are likely already aware of them. When I say Gothic, there are certain iconic images that immediately spring to mind. You already have a familiarity with the Gothic, let's run through them anyway. We're going to talk about the recipe for a Gothic story. If you want to write your own Gothic story, you need to sprinkle in some of these generic markers. Let's start with physical locations, antiquated spaces and architecture. So, of course, we have castles and we have wallpull to thank for giving us the castle as a Gothic icon. We have abys, we have crypts, convents, nunneries, towers, agrariaards. If any of these locations are set abroad and by abroad, I mean abroad from England, say in a Mediterranean climb, in France or Italy, yeah, if they are set on the European continent, so much the better. Many of the quintessential Gothic texts take place in the Mediterranean. Indeed, we see that wallpulls early work tries to pass itself off as an Italian piece, translated from the Italian and supposedly written during the Crusades. Why? Well, one of the reasons, and this is another preoccupation that runs through the Gothic, is the fear of or the anxiety of Catholicism. Many of the early Gothic tales were English and England was predominantly Protestant and Catholics were second class citizens. The Christian denomination that is Protestantism is a denomination that emphasizes a more spiritual side of religious devotion. A more loving emphasis on developing a personal relationship with one's God. If you put that up against the older side of the faith, if you put that up against Roman Catholicism, Catholicism is a lot more strict. The rules are more severe, they're more rigid, and there is a lot of hypocrisy in Roman Catholicism. I feel as though I'm allowed to say this as one who has been raised Roman Catholic and thoroughly indoctrinated into the faith. I have sit through many a hellfire sermon in my time. Roman Catholics were considered second class citizens, and when one said Catholicism, one typically thought hypocrisy. One also thought of greed and power, or the power of hungry. So in the Gothic of the late 18th century, we see a break away from a sin-filled Catholic past. The Catholic stereotypes at the time were the "letcherous monk", the "obespe worship", and the "fornicating priest". Catholicism was a heavy word, weighted with ideas of sin, guilt, seduction, rape, abortion, madness, suicide, and Catholic structures were thought to house the mall. So returning to this idea of antiquated spaces, here's another formula for the Gothic. Those antiquated spaces must contain secrets or sins. The hidden secrets of the past haunt the protagonists of Gothic fiction. You might find it useful to apply a biblical formulation. This idea of the sins of the fathers being visited upon the next generations. And so the Gothic is all about the old and the new. This generation, dealing with the sins of the previous generation or the generations before us. And that's why we see these old structures in decay and ruin. They are crumbling and tottering and breaking down. In addition to the crumbling architecture, other markers of the Gothic include the geographical features of valleys, rocks, ruins, recesses, the Alps, generic features include historical details. So you'll very likely see historical figures and historical dates and events mixed up in the Gothic tales. You'll also see that the tales are influenced by and referenced legends and traditions. And of course, it wouldn't be Gothic without a heavy foreboding sense of the supernatural. Think ghosts, phantoms, apparitions. Think sorcerers, magicians, and weird sisters. An anonymous writer at the tail end of the 18th century put together this recipe, this formula for terrorist novels. That's what they were referred to. Terror novels or terrorist novels. The recipe is this. Take an old castle. Half of it ruin us. A long gallery with a great many doors. Some secret ones. Three murdered bodies, quite fresh. As many skeletons, in chests and presses, mix them together in the form of three volumes. To be taken at any of the watering places before going to bed. Now, in addition to all of this, the Gothic is also sublime or it gives us the sublime. This is a hallmark not only of the Gothic, but the English romantic poets too. Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron. If you want a really extraordinary ballad that shows you what the sublime can really do, how powerful the sublime is, then I would highly recommend you read Coleridge's "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" one of my favourite poems. You can also see the sublime in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and indeed it's no surprise that she wrote this story in company that included her partner, the English romantic poet, Percy Byre Shelley. And so we get the sublime in the Gothic and we also get an engagement with Shakespearean tragedy. The supernatural scenes in many Gothic tales are influenced by Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet. And again, that engagement with the Shakespearean is one way that the Gothic form seeks to elevate itself. Whilst simultaneously presenting its readers with the low, the terrible, the horrible. Now, we owe most of our conceptions of the sublime to Edmund Burke, who differentiated the sublime from the beautiful. The beautiful is small and delicate and dainty and pretty. The sublime is very different. The sublime is that which inspires fear and terror and awe. The sublime is vast. It's also obscure. Art keeps the sublime at a delightful distance, but we know that if we were to confront that which is sublime in our real lives, it would overwhelm us. What is sublime? Misty mountains are sublime. You look up at a misty mountain and it's so huge and it makes you feel so small and you say, "That's sublime." That's the right way to describe a huge or inspiring mountain. What else is sublime? Well, violent sea storms are sublime. Waves crashing against rocks. Dark forests and the wild animals that stalk them. That's sublime. That which inspires terror, which is the ruling principle of the Gothic, is sublime. Now, let's talk terror because we can see a split between terror and horror. They're kind of similar, but they're a little bit different too. And we can see this split when we evaluate the explosion of Gothic tales in the 1790s and explosion is the right word because Gothic tales at their peak represented 38% of the publishing market. The reading public loved these stories and devoured them. And these stories were born out of a time of terror, the reign of terror, the French revolution. Unspeakable atrocities were happening across the channel and there was a fear that revolution and the torturous scenes that were going on would come over here. There was an intense anxiety about that. This was a time in which the old structures, the Ancien Régime of France, were crumbling and tottering and being brought down. So you can see the Gothic parallels. I would like to read you something from Robert Miles on the relationship between the French Revolution and the early Gothic tales. Miles writes that after 1794 the Gothic became a way of speaking the unspeakable. We see the September massacre of 1792. The execution of Louis the 16th in January 1793 and the fall of Robespierre in 1794. The first event in which citizens took it upon themselves to butcher the revolution's enemies in the streets of Paris, exemplified the point that a people brutalized and infantilized by the Ancien Régime regime were bound to act accordingly once their shackles were burst. The execution of the king revealed that violence within the new regime was institutionalized rather than simply mob-related. The episode of Robespierre and the Terra in turn raised the possibility that the revolution ate its own and was itself an out of control monster. We see the Marquis de Sard, influenced by and an influence upon the Gothic, you may recognise the name and associate it with 120 days of Sodom, would say that the Gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis were the necessary fruits of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe. William Haslitt, a romantic critic that I personally value, speaking of Anne Radcliffe, who would prove to be a mega best-selling author of her day, said that her romances derived part of their interest from the supposed, tottering state of all old structures at the time. And so in the Gothic we see the tottering of these old structures under the sins of the past and in desperate need of renewal through collapse and revolution. Now Anne Radcliffe wrote about the difference between Terra and horror. Anne Radcliffe, who John Keats would call Mother Radcliffe to Sir Walter Scott, she was a mighty magician and the first poetess of romantic fiction. To Nathan Drake she was the Shakespeare of Romance writers. And Radcliffe was the writer responsible for giving us lengthy, sublime poetic descriptions in her stories. Terry Castle would say that the mysteries of Adolfo has a capacious strangeness, a sense of the uncanny. And indeed we have Anne Radcliffe to thank for reawakening our imagination and presenting us with the idea that that which scares us the most is a product of our imagination. Radcliffe would say that Terra and horror are so far opposite that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life. The other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. Horror is more likely to give us a direct encounter with physical mortality. Think coming across a decay in corpse and touching it. Terra is much more mental. Now let's roll it forward about a century and let's talk about Bram Stoker's Dracula. Now of course at the turn of the 19th century, the Fandice Eichler, a period of decay and decadence, a period that would see a flourishing of Gothic tales. This era of course didn't have their minds overtly on the French Revolution. That was old news but was still born out of it because they had a heavy indebtedness to those early stories. There wouldn't be a Dracula for example if not for those early stories that very much were tinged by an anxiety of the revolution. But that doesn't mean that the late Victorian Gothic works weren't tinged by their own anxieties. The Gothic is always a contemporary form, remember, even when it's dealing with antiquated spaces. It's attention between old and new. And so the anxiety in a work like Dracula isn't the anxiety of a bloody revolution. It isn't a response to the toppling of the Ancionrae Jean but what are the concerns? What are the anxieties? Well towards the end of the 19th century we can see that the era had become increasingly disillusioned with empire, colonialism and imperialism. We start to get a proliferation of invasion narratives, a fear of invaders and Bram's Stoke of Dracula is in a sense an invasion narrative too. We can also look to the end of that era and see it as one that felt a strong need, a fervent desire for female suffrage. Towards the end of the 19th century we see the emergence and the rise of the new woman, a loose body of feminists that sought to break away from the old paradigms of gender and gender norms. Indeed the voice of the new woman is everywhere in Bram's Stoke as Dracula. We hear Lucy Westenra lament why can't a woman marry more than one man? Why can't she marry three men? We get this increasing awareness of the injustices that women are facing and this issue strides hand in hand with issues of public health too. Civilis was a common disease one that caused a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear. We see the Contagious Diseases Act in the second half of the 19th century which gave the newly created police force a body of men license to apprehend prostitutes, women and force examine them for diseases, sexual diseases and if they were to be found to have any they were confined in a lock hospital. We also towards the end of the century have Ripper fear. Jack the Ripper was targeting female prostitutes in London. But the interesting thing about Ripper fear is just how thoroughly stoked it was by the media, by the newspapers, sensational newspapers relished in lurid tales of crime in very much the same way that we are obsessed today with true crime narratives. The Victorians were obsessed too and so they would eat up these tales of murder and crime. And so we see that the serial killer becomes a stock villain. Another stock villain or archetype we see in the 19th century is that of the dodgy doctor. We have these enormous strides forward. These enormous advances in medicine, healing, science. This is the age of progress and indeed James Methven would say that the Gothic gives us male protagonists who are unmanned by progress. This was the age of science but it was also an age of anxiety and anxiety about those medical advancements. And so we see a proliferation of dodgy doctors. We see Dr. Moro, we see Dr. Jekyll, we see of course Dr. Frankenstein. There's that fear that you when you're with a doctor, that doctor is in a position of authority and power and it's quite an intimate relationship. And there's that fear that the wrong person with the wrong morality or no morality could abuse that position of power. And so we get a fear of doctors too, a fear of serial killers and a fear of doctors. And in addition to all of this, we also get this unnerving sense that maybe the monster isn't just out there, isn't just external. Maybe the monster is lurking within us. We get this idea, best exemplified by soldier Nitsen, that the line separating good and evil runs right through every human heart. If you want two stories that deal with that perfectly then I highly encourage you to read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. And in the 1880s, we also get sexologists. And suddenly sexual preferences and behaviors are starting to be analysed and categorised, homosexuality, heterosexuality, nymphomaniac. These are terms that start to come into common parlance. And sexuality and sexual behaviour starts to be linked to identity. And mixed into all of this in the late Victorian Gothic stories like Bram's Locust Dracula, we continue to get that sense of an old religious past, they perverted past, and the sins of that past coming back to haunt us. We get a lot of Christianity, Catholicism mixed in there too. Think about the ritual of transubstantiation when it comes to the Eucharist. What do we do? We have bread and wine and they become the body and blood of Christ and we drink the blood of Christ and we eat his body. We all become cannibals, hoping to have something of that life force within us. We are the parasitic vampires, clinging to life through death, hoping to be reborn. One of the extraordinary things about the Gothic is just how much of our contemporary, how many of our contemporary concerns can hang off it. And I think Mord Elman puts it best when she discusses Dracula. She says in regards to the vampire, if the vampire can mean so many different things, does he really mean anything at all? Dracula has been interpreted as a figure for perversion, menstruation, general disease, female sexuality, male homosexuality, feudal aristocracy, monopoly capitalism, the proletariat, the Jew, the primal father, the anti-Christ and the typewriter. But Dracula is all these things and more. He stands for the return of the repressed, the contents of which are forever shifting. For this reason, he can never be pinned down. He continues to change shape beyond the covers of Bram Stoker's book in the minds of his insatiable interpreters. So when we come to Bram Stoker's Dracula, we are all insatiable interpreters and we're reading the same book but we're all going to see different things. And that's one of the many things that is to me so exciting about this work. And you can return to it year after year and you'll always see something a little bit different in this book. Where did Bram Stoker get the idea from? Well, Dublin, Bourne and Oxford educated Bram Stoker. He went up to Trinity College. He had a great love of Shakespeare, all of his life, further stoked by his relationship with Henry Irving, theatre, owner and great Shakespearean actor. So we have that tragic link mixed in. We have that proclivity towards the tragic and the sublime, but he was also a great lover of poetry too. He was a real fan of Walt Whitman and would write letters to Whitman. And on top of that, he had a love of vampiric law. We know that he read his fellow Irishman Sheridan Le Fanou, he read the 1872 Carmilla, which features lesbian vampires. And after reading that, found himself compelled to turn his own pen to horror or terror or the gothic or the vampire. He would stay up late into the night reading legends about Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracula, the bloodthirsty king of 15th century Romania who got his name from, as you might guess, impaling his enemies. He would fight against the Muslim troops of the Ottoman Empire and would impale his enemies on these big stakes. And so again, we get that link to the old, to old Europe and old religion. Vlad the Impaler would have been Orthodox Christian. Now supposedly the story for Dracula came to Bram Stoker as a nightmare. As all great gothic tales do and indeed the gothic is filled with nightmares and nightmare landscapes. Apparently Bram Stoker had eaten too much beef and indeed he would have been aware of the fact that Anne Radcliffe, who penned the mysteries of Adolfo, she would have a little technique for inspiring nightmares that would then turn into stories. She would feast on beef and then go to sleep and she found that the beef would disturb her sleep. And so Stoker did the same thing. He had a beef heavy meal and went to sleep and the story of Dracula, supposedly having red Sheridan Lefanooh and different legends, legends about Vlad the Impaler came to him in a nightmare-ish, unconscious mix. And indeed this makes me think a little bit of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" Dickens who definitely loved to indulge in a little bit of the gothic. I think of Scrooge, who says to Marley's ghost that there is more gravy about him than grave. We get this idea that what we do in our waking life affects our dreaming life or the life of our dreams. If we eat too much, we eat the wrong thing too close to bed, it's going to surface in what we see when we close our eyes. But we also have a sense that there's something more to it than that. That our dreams aren't just due to our digestion. There are dreams really do contain something of our fears and also our desires too. Again, you can see why Freud would have a bit of a field day when it came to the gothic. Now speaking of Vlad, the Impaler, whilst he did battle across the Transylvanian border, he wasn't overly linked to vampirism. We also see that Stoker was inspired by a Hungarian noblewoman called Elizabeth Barthroy, who lived from the late 16th to early 17th century, and she would provide some inspiration for the female vampire. She was allegedly a serial killer who tortured young girls on her household staff and she would run these sexualized torture games with her husband. It was also rumoured that she bathed in virgin blood, a witch hunt trial was brought against her and she was locked up in a Slovakian castle. Stoker read about her in an 1865 book called The Book of Werewolves. Despite these isolated stories definitely being part of the inspiration for Bram Stoker's story, the idea of vampirism runs deep in folklore. There is vampirism in all legends and myths of the world. Now it's interesting to consider what Carl Jung would say about the concept of reincarnation or rebirth and apply it to vampirism. Because vampirism and the vampiric is an omnipresent concern, it's an archetype, the vampire is an archetype that manifests over and over again in all cultures, just like rebirth. And Jung said about rebirth, the very fact that it is so omnipresent, the very fact that we have words for it and we have the ideas of it means that it must in some capacity exist. And I believe the same could be said about vampires. Do we really have blood suckers who can shape shift and turn into bats and fly around and suck our blood? No, not literally. But on some level, we do have the vampire. The fact that it is so ubiquitous across every tradition means that it must in some form exist. Now the vampire simply put in most folklore is a demon or fantastical entity that leaches onto living hosts, bites them and then drains them of their life force. Blood. We see in a lot of traditions a conflation of the vampiric and the sort of femme-fatale seductress figure, some early vampire figures seem to be a perverted blend of even and satan or the mother and the serpent. We see Lamiya in Greek mythology, a child killer and kidnapper with serpentine qualities. We see the succubus in classical folklore, another beautiful but dangerous seductress, the male counterpart being the incubus. The succubus looks beautiful at first but is deformed upon closer inspection. In folklore, this figure would evolve into or develop into the sirens, the sirens who would lure men to their deaths. In the mystical Jewish treatise of Zohar, we see that the succubus was Adam's first wife who left the garden of Eden and mated with the adversary, the accuser figure, one of four succubus who did so. We see similar figures, seductress women in all cultures. We see stories of them in African folklore, Asian folklore. Of course we see it all across Europe too. Bram Stoker was particularly fascinated with the Romanian Sturigoy. Now one psychological explanation for our fascination with the vampire is the fact that they point to us not quite being able to reconcile with others passing away. And they seem to contain a complicated mix of arousing feelings of lust in us but also feelings of aggression and hatred and contempt. There is not a single tradition across the world that doesn't believe in some sense or have some stories of the undead of ghosts. Every tradition has this concern about the dead returning back to us to claim a debt or to tell us something or to haunt us, to remind us. And indeed if we're reading the vampire in Freudian terms then there are incredible similarities between the ghost and the vampire. The vampire points to our disbelief that there is finality when it comes to life that we simply die and pass on. Like the ghost the vampire is trapped between two realms, the living world and the world of the dead. And the vampire very much like the ghost could represent our dearly held desire to reunite with the departed. Somebody died and they left us too soon and we still love them and we still want to connect with them. We cannot let them go. It could represent that. It could also represent the opposite. It could represent our desire to punish the dead. Again somebody's died and we didn't get to say everything that we wanted to say to them. And so it comes back and we can now say what we wanted to say to them. Indeed this idea makes me think of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" and I won't spoil anything for anyone who hasn't read that story but there is most certainly a thoroughly gothic scene, one in which we could say that Bronte clearly took the darkest aspects of Richardson's Clarissa or those dark aspects lurking between the lines and cranked them up a few notches as did later gothic writers. There is a really gothic scene and tragic scene in that novel that best encapsulates this idea. And if we continue to apply a Freudian reading to Dracula and actually Dracula is very much primed for a Freudian reading we might consider what Ernest Jones, a disciple of Freud said in his essay on the nightmare. Jones saw the vampire bite as a way of simultaneously imagining and denying sex. Essentially displacing responsibility for it onto a nocturnal intruder. And so what we see throughout the gothic and the folklore that inspired it is sex and death sitting side by side. Sex and death and sleep. Again no wonder Freud loved the gothic so much. Freud who would go on to talk about death drives and the libido, the sex drive. In the gothic sex is decayed, is corrupted in a hazy, druggy, necrophiliac mixture. Now we've mentioned sex a lot but why is the vampire so inextricably bound up with sex? Well it has something to do with the development of the vampire into an aristocrat. So we need to ask when and why did the vampire become aristocratic? And we have Lord Byron and his physician Dr. Polodori to thank for that. Byron along with Percy Byshelli and Mary Shelley in the year without a summer were spending some time on Lake Geneva confined to their abode as wind and rain buffeted the countryside. So they were confined indoors and they challenged each other to write some horror stories. This was the fertile environment that would give life to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. But it also gave life to the aristocratic vampire too. We see Byron and his physician come up with vampire. And there would be vicious disputes and charges over plagiarism who really came up with this new aristocratic vampire figure. And in addition to these disputes, we also saw a proliferation of inspired stories, staged spin-offs, and the periodicals were a wash with vampire narratives. Now my opinion is that Lord Byron was definitely the model for the vampire in this story. And Byron certainly had a strong hand in it along with Polodori. The charges of plagiarism would kill off Polodori's writing career, but only strengthened Lord Byron's notoriety. And so we see a new vampire, the aristocratic vampire. Now why did the vampire become aristocratic? Essentially, it meant he could move around. He could go on a European tour. He could go across vast distances. He now had the money, the means to do so. The vampire no longer needed to be just a creature feeding on rural livestock. The vampire could mix in among the rest of us. The vampire could walk the streets. The vampire was now mobile. And when the vampire became aristocratic, the vampire also became more overtly sexualised. And many today lament that the vampire has been corrupted by sexualisation. But the vampire being sexy is definitely not an invention of the 20th or the 21st century. What's changed is simply how explicit we're allowed to be and how much we can get away with. So the proliferation of sexy vampires is simply part of the natural trajectory. Although in recent times we have been seeing a reaction to this inundation of sexy vampires, a reaction to it, a reaction pivoting away from it. An emphasis on the vampire as a fearsome entity. But of course we will cycle back and forth on this. I'm sure as contemporary trends dictate and what our collective unconscious hunger's for. Now why is the vampire sexy? Now I don't think it's reductive to say that the vampire is a manifestation of our craving for the dark side. Yes, we can acknowledge that so much more than that hangs upon the vampire myth. So much more than just sex. The vampire can be today seen as a parable of mass culture, consumerism and capitalism and so much more. But when it comes to the sexualisation of the vampire, we must acknowledge that there is a part of us that is pulled to the dark side, to the monster and the monstrous both within us and without us. Perhaps the thing we find so darkly alluring is the fact that we are confronted with the sexual predatory dominance of a narcissist. The vampire could very easily be read as an archetype for the narcissist. We will all deal with narcissists in our lives across the course of our lives, whether we know it or not. Narcissists mesmerise us, they hypnotise us, they pull us under their sway. And we end up liking them, dare I say, loving them, even when we know we shouldn't. And very frequently we are not aware that we are dealing with somebody who is narcissistic. Narcissists are predatory, they pray upon the unsuspecting. And what do we commonly call narcissists? Vampires, bloodsuckers, energy vampires, parasites, leeches, they leech onto us and drain us of our life force and then dispense with us. Perhaps that's one allure when it comes to the vampire. Another allure, potentially, is the image of the gravity that goes hand in hand with the vampiric. I think of Stephen King's appreciation of Dracula in his wonderful dance macabre, King who would further express his love of Stoker in Salem's lot. King said, referring to the three women early on in Dracula in Harker's narrative, three women who go down on Harker, go down on their knees. In a passage that would have been incredibly sensational and erotic and naughty in its day, even if we might miss those erotic tones today, although I don't think we do. King says a woman who went down on her knees wouldn't be the sort of woman you would bring home to meet your parents, your mother. And so we have that split of desiring, a woman who's more sexually open and experimental and adventurous. But also we have that that's oppressive sense of sin and guilt, the cultural norms keeping us confined, saying we shouldn't want that either. We can't have that. And that's what we mean when we say that the gothic is a form of repression. We see a lot of repression running through the gothic repressed desire. And the Victorians generally, when we're talking about Victorian narratives, have an unfair reputation for being repressed. But this has been disputed. It was long thought that the Victorians covered their piano legs, their bare piano legs, because they would faint otherwise. They had a reputation of during sex lying back and thinking of England. This isn't true. And Judith Butler and Foucault discussing the repressive hypothesis overturned this and showed us that sex was everywhere in the Victorian period, particularly towards the end of the century. And we see a ton of sex in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Blood drips from every page and sex steams off from every page. Now, all of us, every single one of us, have ghosts and demons. We have fears and dark desires. We have our own vampires. And we can play with those dark desires and those fears. We can wrestle with them, wrangle with them when we read the gothic. We can either choose to succumb to literary succubi, or we can choose to fight back against the blood suckers. And that's what we're doing when we read gothic narratives. And that's also what we're doing when we read Bram Stoker's Dracula. It's a portal into our unconscious. And it's also a rip-roaring adventure to boot. So, we've only just scratched the surface of the vampire and the gothic. But I hope that was a good primer or a good little introduction to one of my favourite areas of literary study. And now, if you would like to continue the discussion and if you would like a thorough deep dive and read through of the sensational gothic novel that is Bram Stoker's Dracula, then please navigate over to patreon.com/hardcoreliterature. And we can tear through Dracula together. You can find the entire lecture series in the contents page. When you become a member of the Hardcore Literature Book Club, and indeed we would absolutely love to have you reading along with us. And I would like to end by saying thank you very much for listening today. I appreciate you and I hope you have a lovely day. And a happy Halloween. Bye bye for now.