Sex and Vampires
Dracula, True Blood Portray Myth of Charismatic Blood-Drinker
Nov 5, 2009 Dominic von Riedemann
Vampires and sex: they're inextricably linked. Whether it's Dracula or True Blood, vampires have always been associated with duende and the forbidden. Given that orgasm has been referred to as "the little death," it's not difficult to connect vampiric assault to sexual activity.
The act of vampirism is an intimate one: the mouth (one of the largest erogenous zones) pressed against the victim's skin, biting and sucking. It's no surprise that it would be linked with forbidden acts, especially in Victorian England where sex was strictly constrained and the female orgasm virtually unheard of. Young brides-to-be were frequently told, "When he does it to you, lie back and think of England."
Although some may bemoan the hyper-sexuality in True Blood, or the only-slightly perilous Edward Cullen in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, vampires in books, film and television are indelibly associated with sex.
The Origin of Vampires, And How Droit de Seigneur Might Have Spawned the Aristocratic Monster
Vampire legends have been around since the dawn of myth. Graveyards at night are disquieting places, and it isn't hard to wonder sometimes if the dead are really dead. Whether it was the fear of burying someone alive, misunderstandings about post-mortem decomposition, or the way diseases carried off entire families, it's easy to imagine an unquiet revenant tormenting the living.
The traditional vision of the vampire was of a bloated creature with a ruddy complexion: decomposing bodies often appear plump and full-blooded due to expanding gases, which could also cause blood to trickle from the nose and mouth. It's easy to see why medieval folks – not knowing how human decomposition worked – thought that these seemingly healthy corpses might still occasionally walk the earth.
Linking vampires with the aristocracy was also easy: the excesses of the feudal system often lead peasants to wonder if the nobles were actual bloodsuckers, living off their hard work and toil.
Add Jus primae noctis or droit de seigneur: the tradition that the lord of the manor had first crack at deflowering a peasant bride. The formal existence of this practice has been disputed, but it's easy to see an authority figure abusing his power to obtain sexual favours. Many a peasant girl was deflowered by her local lord; given widespread resentment over the practice it's easy to imagine the aristocrat as vampire, taking an innocent girl's virgin blood. Thus the link between blood and sexuality was born.
The aristocratic sexual predator is also a staple of fairy tale. The character of the Wolf in Charles Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood was a thinly-disguised caricature of Louis XIV's younger brother the Duke of Orleans, who ruthlessly seduced men and women during his lifetime. Maximilian Robespierre often used lurid descriptions of aristocrats violating helpless virgins to get peasants riled during the French Revolution.
Lord Byron, Elisabeth Báthory and the Aristocratic Vampire
Many scholarly treatises of the 1800's, such as Dom Augustin Calmet's Treatise on Vampires and Revenants, and Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Were-wolves, treated the existence of the undead as fact. Gothic and Romantic writers, including Sheridan Le Fanu, John Polidori and Bram Stoker, devoured those books for inspiration, along with Baring-Gould's accounts of real-life serial killer Countess Elisabeth Báthory (1560-1614).
Called "The Bloody Lady of Cachtice," Báthory was convicted in 1610 of murdering 80 young women. Many sources – who couldn't understand why a woman would become a serial killer – claimed that she killed her victims in order to bathe in their blood, so to maintain her health and beauty. Báthory's story has formed the basis of at least 30 films and six stage plays.
Dr. John Polidori's 1819 book The Vampyre established the blood-drinker as an attractive, charismatic villain. Written during that infamous get-together of Romantic literati that also saw the creation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Polidori based the vampire Lord Ruthven on one of his patients: Lord Byron.
Byron's former lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, also called the villain of her novel Glenarvon Lord Ruthven. Given that she had once described Byron as "mad, bad and dangerous to know," it's widely believed that both she and Polidori were settling a score with the famous poet.
The Vampyre was extremely successful, and spawned many imitators, including James Malcolm Rymer's Varney the Vampire series of "penny dreadfuls" and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. Second only in popularity to Dracula (and its first-person narrative influenced Stoker's book), Carmilla also established the vampire's as Central European aristocrat, its shape-shifting power (Carmilla became "a catlike-beast" when hunting), and was the first lesbian vampire.
Bram Stoker Serves up a Modern Vampire
Bram Stoker's novel Dracula created the image of the modern vampire, although the book's influence only grew in the Twentieth Century, when it was translated to stage and film. Stoker clearly used Carmilla as inspiration; it's also believed that his Voivode Dracula was based on the infamous Prince of Wallachia, Vlad III Drakul (1431 - 1476), nick-named The Impaler for his choice of punishment.
Dracula also laid clear the allegory between blood transmission and sex. As Leonard Wolf wrote in the foreword to the 1992 Signet Classic Edition, ". . . (Dracula's) power has its source in the sexual implications of the blood exchange between the vampire and his victims... Dracula has embedded in it a very disturbing psychosexual allegory whose meaning I am not sure Stoker entirely understood: that there is a demonic force at work in the world whose intent is to eroticize women. In Dracula we see how that force transforms Lucy Westenra, a beautiful nineteen-year-old virgin, into a shameless slut."
Dracula's assaults on Mina Harker, forcing her to drink his blood, have sexual overtones. In essence, he asserts his droit de seigneur over both Lucy and Mina, giving them their first experiences of sexual ecstasy.
(In Part #2, we explore the vampire in film, and the evolution of vampire as anti-hero and finally hero.)
Sir Christopher Lee as Count Dracula
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