Vampire Literature Gothic novel

SUMMARY

The current thesis analyses Gothic conventions and the figure of the vampire in fiction. For the mentioned purposes two outstanding works of fiction were selected: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. Bram (short for Abraham) Stoker 1847-1912 was born in Dublin, Ireland. He worked as a critic, editor and also as Henry Irving’s representative at the Lyceum Theatre for as long as 27 years. Living enclosed in this literary circle, Stoker produced a famous novel based on the historical character of Vlad Dracula also known as Vlad the Impaler, a fifteenth century Prince of Wallachia notorious for cruelty and sadism. It is also assumed that Dracula’s mannerisms and gestures had a model person, namely the above mentioned Henry Irving. The novel Dracula (1897) features a centuries old vampire who decides upon moving to England to spread vampirism and also the novel tells about the brave English people fighting this evil. It also represents the anxieties of the Victorian era and numerous points of view of other main characters presented through the medium of journals and letters. Elizabeth Kostova b. 1964 is an American writer who was affected by Stoker’s novel and who was interested in the theme of the vampire for years. Her novel resulted from 10 years of intensive study and depicts real historical events and characters. Her debut novel The Historian (2005) is a story about a 16 year old girl who goes in search of her father and her father’s mentor only to find herself entrapped in a complicated history which has been going on for generations and was mainly caused by a vampire – Dracula.
The goal of the present paper is to analyse what are the characteristics of the Gothic novel as well as to look at the archetype of the vampire and to find the reasons why they have been so popular since their emergence in the eighteenth century. In addition to the Gothic and the vampire characteristics, the psychoanalytical perspective is taken into consideration. The study uses the terminology developed by Sigmund Freud and is based on his concepts of the id, the ego and the super-ego.
The paper is divided into five sections and has 14 Appendices. Section One introduces the main topics, the problem and the goals. In Section Two the focus shifts to the theoretical approach where the conventions of the Gothic fiction and the characteristics of the vampire literature and the figure of the vampire itself are explained. Section Three offers some terminology developed by the prominent early twentieth century psychoanalytic Sigmund Freud. Section Four examines the previously mentioned novels in accordance to the provided theory. The last Fifth Section, the conclusion, generalizes the major ideas discussed in the thesis. Appendices offer some additional information which may help to perceive the thesis on a fuller degree.

1 INTRODUCTION

There are subjects in the world upon which the interest of people never ceases. These subjects touch upon the essential spheres of human life including religion, politics, culture, social structure/status, health, relationships and, of course, life and death in general. All of the above have been the topic of interest since the beginning of time. Some of the mentioned issues are continually discussed since they deal with self-preservation. Consequently, what threatens it, what stands against people’s happiness and order, produces fear. It is widely recognized that fear is encountered among the most intense feelings and is much stronger than happiness. It was primarily recognized by the eighteenth century philosopher Edmund Burke who in his famous treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) announced that “no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear; for fear being an apprehension of pain and death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever, therefore, is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime too” (Burke 72, 73). This statement proves that fear stands among the most intense emotions.
Gothic literature usually deals with the topics that produce fear in the reader’s mind. Thus, many stories are mysterious, full of things and wonders that people cannot perceive. A considerable amount of literary works addresses the complicated puzzle of life and death. It seems that the question of mortality has been interesting to all generations which makes death a universal fear. Therefore, it is only natural that there exit many myths, tales and stories all around the world about the creature that embodies and brings death, i.e. a vampire.
It is interesting to note that vampire belief is universal since “[v]ampire accounts exist in completely separate civilizations, where any direct borrowing would not have been possible” (McNally and Florescu 117). Otto Penzler claims that the vampire myth could be met in ancient Jewish legends (Lilith), Ancient Greece (Lamia), China (Kian-si), India (Kali), Brazil (Jararaca), Russia (Vurdalak), to name a few (Penzler xvii, xviii). The custom to spread the knowledge of each culture’s beasts is called by Montague Summers “world wide and of dateless antiquity” (Summers vi). Thus Penzler reasonably concludes that “[i]t is safe to say that there do not appear to be any cultures in which the myth of the bloodsucking creature with supernatural powers has not existed”, especially in the popular literature (Penzler xviii).
The present thesis attempts to analyse why the figure of the vampire is so popular and attractive in literature. Nowadays Gothic genre and vampire literature has yet again conquered the market with new books that gain worldwide popularity and rank as bestsellers. For example, Ann Rice and her Vampire Chronicles (1976-2003), the Twilight Saga (2005-2008) by Stephanie Meyer which is a fantasy-based vampire romance for young adults produced a real craze. There appeared movies based on the novel, numerous blogs in the internet and countless spin-offs. Similar effect was achieved with Charlaine Harris’s books about Sookie Stackhouse, the main character of the so-called Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001-2010) which is now going to be as big as 10 books. While Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), an American supernatural television drama is already passé, a new series about vampires called True Blood (aired 2008 and ongoing) occupies its place.
Movies, books, posters, games, internet sites, records, toys and other paraphernalia force the vampire to stay embedded in society’s subconscious. To use Katherine Ramsland’s words, vampires have become so pervasive in the contemporary culture that the real vampire communities were formed as a consequence. It turns out that in the United States of America, fascination with vampires resulted in the appearance of subcultures. In her book Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today, she tells the readers how she had infiltrated an underground society in order to understand such way of thinking. Ramsland comments that she “watched as increasingly more people assumed the vampire identity” and “adopt[ed] this unusual lifestyle” (Ramsland 1998, ix-x). She dealt with people who “claimed to live by a vampire’s code” in order to investigate “how the image and mythology of the vampire has been translated into contemporary culture” (Ramsland 1998, x, xiii). According to Matthew Bunson, “[v]ampire societies and organizations are thriving” (Bunson ix). He argues that “the late 1980s and early 1990s have witnessed an eruption of interest in the undead greater than any other vampire craze of modern times: larger than epidemics of vampire fascination in America and Europe during the 1970s or in Paris during the 1820s” (Bunson ix). At this point, there is no wonder why so many writers, critics and consumers together with Ken Gelder ask: “why vampires?” (Gelder x). Or wonder in a manner of Leonard Wolf: “What is there about the image of the vampire that makes it such a singularly attractive genre to twentieth-century readers and moviegoers? If we look at popular culture fiction, what do we see?” (Wolf 1999, 2). The current thesis will try to find answers to why the image of the vampire is so universal, pervasive and durable and what possible meanings may lie under the image of the vampire. To discover some answers to the latter question, the paper will draw on the psychoanalytical perspective.
For the mentioned purposes, two works of fiction as representatives of the genre have been selected; namely Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker and The Historian (2005) by Elizabeth Kostova. The first novel hardly needs introducing. Stoker was the one who formed the image of the vampire that remained pervasive in human imagination. For Matthew Bunson, Dracula is “one of the foremost pieces of horror literature, it is also considered the final achievement of Gothic writing that established forever the vampire as part of the popular folklore in the West” (Bunson 73). According to Wolf,
[s]ince its publication, the book has never been out of print and its title character, Count Dracula, has become an icon of terror familiar to many millions of people. The entire world knows the count’s name and for what he is famous. He has lost his status as a character in a work of fiction and has become instead a figure embedded in our subconscious (Wolf 1999, 1).

Ken Gelder confirms that Dracula is “the most influential of all vampire narratives. […] Few other novels have been read so industriously as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Indeed, a veritable ‘academic industry’ has built itself around this novel, growing exponentially in recent years and, in effect, canonizing a popular novel” (Gelder 1, 65). To give the novel even more credit, Kim Newman assumes that “[i]t’s possible that without Stoker’s book, vampires would never have gained the dominance in the field that they now command” (Newman xii). Therefore, Dracula was chosen for analysis because it is the novel that brought the vampire into fashion. The book has influenced many other writers after its publication and its character stands out as an icon.
Kostova’s book was selected since it is a version of Dracula. For this reason, The Historian serves as a good book for comparison. First, it deals with the same subject matter: the phenomenon of the vampire in general and Dracula as a character in particular. Second, the book was written in the twenty-first century while the original work was created in the nineteenth which gives some room for analysis of historical and cultural changes. That is, there is a gap of more than 100 years that allows tracing many similarities and differences between the novels. Lastly, since both novels focus on the same subject, it allows to conveniently investigate what has been ciphered under the image of the vampire now and then. Besides, Kostova’s novel was positively received by the critics in various newspaper and internet reviews. (The novel is too young at the given moment to be discussed in the academic literature.) Therefore, since vampire literature is a subgenre of the Gothic literature, it is useful to start from the latter.

2 OVERVIEW OF THE GOTHIC FICTION

2.1 Genesis and Meaning of the Gothic

The continuing academic interest in the genre produced many hypotheses and speculations as to when, how and why the word ‘Gothic’ appeared and what connotations it had. To scrupulously research the term, a variety of sources has been consulted. Despite that, the term ‘Gothic’ still remains difficult to define. In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s words, the ‘Gothic’ “has not been the most supple or useful of critical adjectives” (Sedgwick 3). To start, an encyclopedia definition may be considered. According to Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, ‘Gothic’ refers to “a late 18th and early 19th century style of fiction characterized by the use of medieval settings, a murky atmosphere of horror and gloom, and macabre, mysterious and violent incidents” (Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature 480). The next source, The Vampire Encyclopedia states that Gothic literature had a “decisive role in the formation of the vampire image. Called Gothic because of its reliance on medieval ruins, castles, and monasteries, it was distinguished by its use of mystery, gloomy atmosphere, and touches of the supernatural” (Bunson 110). This definition revises the main ideas of the previous one associating the Gothic with the medieval times and eerie atmosphere. However, this does not cover the full meaning and implications of the word. Thus, another kind of sources must be checked. These consist of varied critics’ views.
According to Maurice Levy, the term’s “development over the centuries has not, it is true, always been consistent or homogenous. As we all know, for a long time it served the regrettable purpose of vilifying medieval architecture, medieval literature, medieval manners and medieval superstition” (Levy 1). This goes in tune with Angela Wright’s view who notes that the term ‘Gothic’ “has been used in many contexts throughout history and culture” (Wright 2007, 1). Here the critics imply that the notion of the Gothic is a complicated matter and may be associated with several different meanings depending on the certain period of time. For example, as Wright explains, the term was used to “refer to a specific tribe of people, the Visigoths who invaded and defeated the Roman Empire. […] As an adjective [it was] used to describe a people, then, Gothic came to signify barbaric association continued throughout the Renaissance” (Wright 2007, 1). In the same vein, E. J. Clery acknowledges that “for Walpole’s [1717-1797] contemporaries the Gothic age was a long period of barbarism, superstition, and anarchy dimly stretching from the fifth century AD, when Visigoth invaders precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire, to the Renaissance and the revival of classical learning” (Clery 21). Therefore, it may be inferred that due to the perceived barbarism of the Visigoths the Gothic was seen in association with the negative, the primitive, the fall and the superstition. In other words, the Gothic “signified anything obsolete, old-fashioned, or outlandish” (Clery 21). It was very important at that time to stress the distance of medieval Gothic past and the enlightened progressive present.
The understanding of the Gothic changed in time. In Wright’s account, in the eighteenth century the “ ‘Gothic’ enjoyed a more positive revival. Its connotations moved from the historical accounts of barbaric Visigoths to a more fluid aesthetic association with medieval chivalry. One of the ways in which this revival was affected was through architecture” (Wright 2007, 1-2). The quote reveals that the shift in meaning happened due to a general inherent human tendency to idealize the past (from barbarism to chivalry) and to explain it in comparison to the present. This is also characteristic in Gothic literature. It is interesting to note that Jerrold E. Hogle claims that the term ‘Gothic’ “was first used by early Renaissance art historians in Italy to describe pointed-arch and castellated styles of medieval architecture, as well as medieval ways of life in general – but to do so in a pejorative way so as to establish the superiority of more recent neoclassic alternatives” (Hogle 2004, 16). In any case, it is generally agreed that the positive side of the Gothic was noticed because of the medieval architecture.
The meaning of the word ‘Gothic’ developed yet new meanings. In addition to those already acquired, it also denoted political standing. In the mid-eighteenth century the term was adopted by the Whig and Tory parties. Tory party represented the classical monarchical order while the Whigs brought new political ideology (Spector 1045). The Whig understanding of aesthetics corresponded to the Gothic architecture which signified a rebellion against the established order. According to Robert D. Spector, “the term Gothic initially bore a derogatory meaning when it was applied to the Whig party in the century, but it also conveyed the notion of political freedom, an unwillingness to remain subservient to established authority” (Spector 1045; italics in original). Therefore, Gothic political views signified reform, rebellion and subversive character of the party members while the opposing conservative Tory party was against liberating parliamentary order. Fred Botting notes that the Gothic was “a term of abuse in other political positions” (Botting 1996, 42). That is, to say that someone was an advocate of the Gothic views was a way to insult and humiliate. The change of the word to the positive meaning may have started because of the Walpole’s Gothic novel. Maggie Kilgour claims that “during the eighteenth century both positive and pejorative connotations co-existed” (Kilgour 14). Despite the shifts in meaning, the Gothic endured and adapted itself to the twenty-first century. For this reason, to use Wright’s term, it may be stated that the Gothic is “culturally amphibious” (Wright 2007, 5).
At the end of the twentieth century, the Gothic gained yet another significance. It now was applied to music and certain style of life. J. Gordon Melton believes that the origins of the Gothic movement started in 1970s with the appearance of a number of musical groups (Melton 264). From Melton’s viewpoint:
Gothic music, as all counter-cultural forms, articulated an explicit nonconformist stance vis-à-vis the dominant establishment. It opposed narrow sexual mores and traditional established religions. High priests, churches, and congregations were replaced with rock musicians, night clubs, and fans. The music celebrated the dark, shadowy side of life and had a distinct fascination with death. Its slow, driving sound was frequently described as melancholy, gloomy, even morbid. Those enthralled by the new gothic culture found the vampire the single most appropriate image for the movement. (Melton 265)

This time the term ‘Gothic’ was extended to music and the subculture which eventually was named the Goths. According to the quote, once again in history non-conformists have gained the reputation of the Goths. The aesthetic taste of the movement of the period well resembled that of the Gothic architecture with its ruined shadowy medieval buildings. Goths also displayed fascination in and imitation of the Gothic characters from literature such as the vampire:
Men seem to be perpetuating vampiric images from Anne Rice novels, while women perpetuate what, at first glance, seems to be the persona of Morticia Addams of The Adams Family, Vampira, and Elvira, although some aim for a more Victorian funeral style or a modern vampish look. […] Dark clothing combined with pale make-up and dark lipstick present[ed] the overall image of death. (Melton 265, 267; bold and italics in original)

Thus, the Goths are known as a cult distinct with its peculiar taste for music, dress code, sexual looseness and admiration for death.
To summarize the section, there are many ways to look at the phenomenon of the Gothic. Some literary critics choose to look back at the eighteenth century making attempts to find reasonable explanations for the roots and origins of the term while others are more interested in its socio-historical development and the effect it had (and still has) on society and literature in general. Gothic has proved to be a powerful resource to express human anxieties. Yet others investigate why people love reading the Gothic fiction and what meanings are so comfortably hidden in between the lines. The latter attitude led the scientists to the psychoanalytical view of the genre which developed in the twentieth century. To finally subvert the already controversial matter, Hogle argues that in general “gothic fiction is hardly ‘Gothic’ at all. It is an entirely post-medieval and even post-Renaissance phenomenon” (Hogle 2004, 1). The critic probably means that the word “Gothic” was in fact scarcely if ever used in the real Gothic times. The concept appeared only later on. Thereby, all taken into consideration, it is now more or less clear why the Gothic literature has attracted such an attention from scholars as a distinct genre worth investigating on its own right.

2.2 Rise, History and Principles of the Gothic Literature

The current section of the thesis provides a brief sketch of the conventions of the genre, historical (including religion, aesthetics, culture, economics and politics) background and the most prominent representatives of a certain period. To begin with, Gothic fiction as a genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Many critics agree that Horace Walpole (1717-1797) can be acknowledged as the originator of the Gothic fiction. Walpole is often credited with such names as “the founder of the Gothic tradition” (Botting 1996, 21) or the “father of the Gothic novel” (Hogle 1994, 23). According to Clery, twentieth century literature and critics “routinely identified Walpole as the progenitor of a genre” (Clery 21). His Gothic story The Castle of Otranto (subsequently, Otranto) (1764) with a subtitle ‘A Gothic Story’ in the second edition was designed as an experiment. As Clery puts it, Walpole “carefully presented the ‘rules’ for ‘a new species of romance’. […] The story was ‘an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’ ” (Clery 24). In order to understand why the story mentioned was such a sensational and rebellious event, one has to consider the existing social conventions of the Enlightment period, where all kinds of romances were condemned due to their unreality and mainly because they were associated with French heroic romances. France, in turn, was then associated with revolution and degradation. Walpole was the first to produce a story that had the qualities of both the romance as well as those of the novel. Being “a truly eccentric individual, who hovered on the class border between bourgeoisie and aristocracy”, Walpole “rebelled against the aesthetical standards of the times to produce an original narrative” (Kilgour 16, 17). That is, as Clery notes, Walpole combined “the unnatural occurrences associated with romance and the naturalistic characterization and dialogue of the novel” (Clery 24). Even though Walpole may be accounted as the father of the genre, “the most successful of Gothic writers was undoubtedly Ann Radcliffe” (Botting 1996, 63). Her Mysteries of Udolpho (subsequently, Udolpho) (1794) and The Italian (1797) were well received both by the critics and well enjoyed by the public. In other words, “critics were generally pleased by Radcliffe’s novels” since the woman managed to include adequate moral and the explained supernatural events that fitted in with the expectations of the time (Botting 1996, 66). In order to understand why the writers needed a new genre of literature for the depiction of actual events, it is essential to appreciate the underlying socio-historical situation of the era.
2.2.1 Romance vs. Novel
First, Wolf suggests to take into account that “Gothic fiction, an early manifestation of the Romantic Movement, appeared in England after nearly 150 years of the Neoclassical Age, when the decorum and Right Reason, formality, balance, and the heroic couplet held sway” (Wolf 1997, 75). The message in this implication is that novelties were normally greeted with distrust and suspicion, especially if they did not correspond to the established values. Moreover, “[c]lassical precedents had nothing to offer that was directly relevant to the new form, which was, partly for that reason, generally thought to be beneath the consideration of men of taste” (Dutton 41). That is precisely what happened to the Gothic because it failed to propagate the classical (Roman and Greek) way of life in architecture as well as in literature. Thus for the neoclassical people the Gothic signified the opposite to the eighteenth century beliefs. “Used derogatively about art, architecture and writing that failed to conform to the standards of the neoclassical taste, Gothic signified the lack of reason, morality and beauty of feudal beliefs, customs and works” (Botting 2001, 3). Despite this dissatisfaction, the Gothic was merely a reaction to the changing society. Or, in Botting’s opinion, the Enlightment invented the Gothic (Botting 2001, 3).
In Maggie Kilgour’s opinion, there was a shift on the literacy level in society. The critic explains that “[f]rom the seventeenth century on, with the rise of literacy and the increase of the press, reading became a focal point in debates over authority and self-determination” (Kilgour 6). Logically, ever spreading literacy level and cheaper printing made the texts available for the broader audience. In addition to the aristocracy, the middle class and especially women comprised the reading public. Moreover, the Protestant belief that every man had a right to read the scripture contributed strongly to both the literacy level and to the effect literature was allowed to have on people (Kilgour 6). However, the effect might not have always been the desirable one. “With its cast of extreme characters, unnatural settings and perverse plots, the gothic played a significant part in the late eighteenth-century debates over the moral dangers of reading” (Kilgour 6). For example, the suspicion of the romances and novels arose from the disadvantageous fantasies these readings may have inspired and which may have lead to socially subversive behaviour. Furthermore, Botting points out that “urbanization, industrialization, revolution were the principle signs of change. Enlightment rationalism displaced religion as the authoritative mode of explaining the universe [...]. Gothic works and their ambivalence can thus be seen as effects of fear and anxiety” (Botting 1996, 22-23). With its strict rules and norms, the Age of Reason produced pressure for the society and overstressed the reason. Even buildings, gardens and texts had to conform to the principles of proportion, order and symmetry; virtue, propriety and domestic order were the goal values of the period (Botting 1996, 22). A clear division between good and vice was established as well as categorization of works of art into useful and useless. Therefore, in the Age of Rationalism, it is of a major importance to distinguish romance from novel.
Romances usually dealt with “wildly extravagant and fanciful tales of knights, giants, fabulous entities and marvelous incidents” (Botting 1996, 27). For this reason the genre was seen as outdated, medieval, serving no moral purpose, leading to moral degeneration and a real time-waster. At this time, most associations with the medieval were still negative. From the point of view of Clery, “when critics and writers condemned romance, they had in mind above all the French Heroic romances […]. Most of these in fact contained no supernaturalism, but were characterized by artificial diction, numerous coincidences, the promiscuous mixing of history and fiction, absurd idealism, and over-the-top heroics” (Clery 22). This did not correspond with the strict English sense of reason, morality and propriety. The novel, meanwhile, was seen in a different light. The novel, as defined by Clara Reeve, “is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written” (Reeve as quoted in Botting 1996, 29). Therefore, the novel was seen as contributing to the enlightening process of daily life. Clery comments on this view indicating that “the ‘novel’ means literally ‘the new’, and it marked itself off as a new, more credible and progressive genre of fiction for an enlightened age by denigrating ‘the old,’ the romance. […] Only if a fiction is true to life can it become the vehicle to useful instruction or moral improvement” (Clery 22). However, the two genres while treated separately did not produce the effect on the reader that people wanted. According to Kilgour, “prose fiction was particularly suspect: romances, for giving readers unrealistic expectations of an idealized life, novels for exposing them to the sordidness of an unidealised reality” (Kilgour 6). Neither way was good enough for exciting emotions while at the same time remaining in the reasonable realm of reality. As a consequence, it is now transparent why Walpole’s story was quite a successful risk. It was a good time for blending the two genres to produce a gothic novel/romance. On the other hand, Walpole’s story was criticized since it did not have a clear moral. What is more, it was not realistic. In fact, Otranto has widely earned the name of a counterfeit story. As a result, since Walpole was the representative of the genre, the situation led to the view of the Gothic genre in general as very self-conscious of its artificiality. Therefore, it seems to be easier to fragment the novel into its conventional parts in order to investigate its properties.
2.2.2 Characteristics of the Gothic Novel
It is commonly accepted that the Gothic novel cannot be separated from other genres. According to Kilgour, the Gothic novel “feeds upon and mixes the wide range of literary sources out of which it emerges and from which it never fully disentangles itself: British folklore, ballads, romance, Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy (especially Shakespeare), Spenser, Milton, Renaissance ideas of melancholy, the graveyard poets, Ossian, the sublime, sentimental novelists […], and German traditions” (Kilgour 4). Thus being not a homogenous genre, it entangles characteristics of many other traditions. That is why this branch of literature is so problematic to define. Despite this, it may be assumed that Walpole together with other celebrated Gothic writers like Radcliffe, Maturin, Reeve, Lewis, etc. managed to establish a distinguishable model for the Gothic novel. Because of its counterfeit composition, the inner structure is not homogenous as well. It is agreed by the majority of literary critics that a real Gothic novel should include the following elements: terror, obscurity, sublime, some mystery, medieval setting, supernatural events, gloomy atmosphere, Gothic hero/heroine/villain, and, preferably, a mingle between past and present.
2.2.2.1 Terror
Chris Baldick defines the Gothic novel or the Gothic romance as “a story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle or monastery (hence ‘Gothic’, a term applied to medieval architecture and thus associated in the 18th century with superstition). [It] flourished in Britain from the 1790s to the 1820s” (Baldick 92). Baldick suggests that the Gothic novel should have the qualities of terror but not those of horror. In her turn, Wright states that “[o]ne of the first words that we associate with Gothic fiction is ‘terror’ ” (Wright 2007, 36). In Botting’s opinion, “what is important is that terror activates the mind and the imagination, allowing it to overcome, transcend even, its fears and doubts, enabling the subject to move from a state of passivity to activity”, or, in other words, “[t]error was the order of the day” (Botting 1996, 62, 74). The impact of terror on human psyche was discussed by Edmund Burke. In response to his influential work A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Radcliffe explains that “terror 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” (Radcliffe as quoted in Botting 1996, 74). Thus, terror and horror were perceived as different. Wolf argues in this connection that “the aim of the Gothic fiction is limited to the arousal of terror” (Wolf 1997, 76). According to Hogle, “holds characters and readers mostly in anxious suspense about threats to life, safety, and sanity kept largely out of sight or in shadows or suggestions from a hidden past” while the horror is described as “confront[ing] the principle characters with the gross violence of physical or psychological dissolution, explicitly shattering the assumed norms (including the repressions) of everyday life with wildly shocking, and even revolting, consequences” (Hogle 2004, 3). Thus, the writer should avoid horror because of its excessive negative effect on emotions. Also, explicit brutal scenes displayed in the novel overstep the acceptable line of aesthetics and pleasure principle. The mortal subject, the hero or the heroine, then, would not able to recuperate. In that case, the story would reach a dead end because the state of the hero/heroine would be that of passivity. Terror unlike horror allows escaping the danger.
A quality that benefits greatly to achieve terror is obscurity and darkness. Burke himself emphasizes that “[t]o make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems, in general, to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes” (Burke 74). This goes in the same line of thought with the above mentioned Hogle’s explanation that the object that causes terror must be kept out of sight or in shadows. Then, there is enough space left for the imagination to activate. Moreover, Burke argues that night also is a source to our dread, especially when someone confronts danger (Burke 74). He reasons that
in utter darkness, it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand; we are ignorant of the objects that surround us; we may every moment strike against some dangerous obstruction; we may fall down a precipice the first step we take; and, if an enemy approach, we know not in what quarter to defend ourselves: in such a case strength is no sure protection; wisdom can only act by guess; the boldest are staggered; and he who would pray for nothing else towards his defense is forced to pray for light. (Burke 178)

In this passage Burke argues that darkness is a source of fear. Logically then fear is aroused through sight. Obscure objects, shadows and darkness being the opposite to light and the ability to see are related to the danger of self-preservation. Then, whatever is not safe or is about to cause pain or death (enemy attack or falling down the precipice) creates tension to the nerves which is productive of the sublime.
2.2.2.2 Sublime
The sublime is a very significant element in Gothic fiction. It was the topic most discussed in the eighteenth century with regard to aesthetics. As Clery notes, “the concept of the sublime originated in a classical text, the treatise On the Sublime (Peri hupsous) attributed to Longinus. In 1674 this text was translated into French by Boileau, and the resulting account of the “grand style” of writing which provokes powerful emotion became immediately influential” (Clery 27; italics in original). Burke, the next authoritative figure in the field after Longinus, describes the sublime in the following way:
WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger; that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”. (Burke 51; capitalization and italics in original)

Primarily, sublimity is associated with the notions of danger and terror. Terror in its turn, as discussed above, “expands the soul”, “activates the mind and the imagination” producing the feelings of awe mixed with fear and, consequently, culminates with the “strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”. Further, sublime is connected to the notion of danger, either in nature or in a form of art. Botting, drawing on Burke’s ideas of sublimity, discusses the change in taste in the eighteenth century:
Mountains, once considered as ugly blemishes, deformities disfiguring the proportions of a world that ideally should be uniform, flat and symmetrical, began to be seen with eyes pleased by their irregularity, diversity and scale. The pleasure arose from the range of intense and uplifting emotions […]. Mountains were the foremost objects of the natural sublime. […] Objects which evoked sublime emotions were vast, magnificent and obscure. Loudness and sudden contrasts, like the play of light and dark in buildings, contributed to the sense of extension and infinity associated with the sublime. […] Sublimity presented an excess that could not be processed by a rational mind. […] Sublimity offered intimations of a great, if not divine, power. This power was experienced in many objects and not only in the grandeur of natural landscape. (Botting 1996, 38-39)

Here one can trace how the perception of the sublime, which is a philosophical view on aesthetics, reflects the change of mind. Once mountains were seen as monstrous figures with their irregular, unsymmetrical and disproportionate appearance. Now, conversely, mountains were transformed into places where the sublime was met. Perceived with a positive attitude, mountains produced a setting for most of the Gothic stories. Other places in nature that aroused sublime emotions such as steep precipices or vast fields or dark forests were also considered as sources of sublime and grandeur.
In addition, the sublime was also experienced in the Gothic architecture. Gothic buildings overwhelmed the sight with their vastness that suggested divinity and infinity (Botting 1996, 40). Hugh Blair specifies that “a gothic cathedral raises ideas of grandeur in our minds, by its size, its height, its awful obscurity, its strength, its antiquity, and its durability” (Blair as quoted in Botting 1996, 39). Here he suggests that age was one of the elements producing sublime. That is why many of the stories (e. g. Radcliffe’s Udolpho, Lewis’s The Monk, Stoker’s Dracula) are set in or by old ruined castles, monasteries or other medieval buildings. Thus, without further expansion, the elements that are most productive of the sublime, according to Burke are: astonishment, terror, fear, obscurity, vastness, infinity, power, pain, darkness and sound whereas the weakest are smell and taste.
2.2.2.3 Setting
In terms of setting, Botting stresses the significance of the labyrinth metaphor. To summarize Botting’s point of view, labyrinth or maze at first signified complexity which was regarded as a positive term. However, in the Gothic romance a labyrinth was transformed into a place of darkness, horror or desire. A person in a maze was alienated from the society, separated from the outside world and helpless. Often it was a Gothic heroine who was rendered passive in the underground labyrinthine corridors. Another way of looking at the metaphor is that narratives themselves are labyrinthine, complicated and devoid of order. They may, like novels, confuse and disturb or lead the reader on “fatal paths”, spin “a web of deceit” (Botting 1996, 80-84).
2.2.2.4 Supernatural
In addition to the setting, another important Gothic convention is the supernatural. As Cuddon notes, Gothic novels
[c]ontain a strong element of the supernatural and have all or most of the now familiar geography, sites, props, presences and happenings: wild and desolate landscapes, dark forests, ruined abbeys, feudal halls and medieval castles with dungeons, secret passages, winding stairways, oubliettes, sliding panels and torture chambers; monstrous apparitions and curses; a stupefying atmosphere of doom and gloom; heroes and heroines in the direst of imaginable straits, wicked tyrants, malevolent witches, demonic powers of unspeakably hideous aspects, and a proper complement of spooky effects and clanking specters… (Cuddon 381, 382)

Thus, according to Cuddon, besides the familiar geography which provides the effect of authenticity and credibility to the novel, it should include such elements as the supernatural, the mysterious and the unexplained. Then, the desired result would be “to chill the spine and curdle the blood” of the readers (Cuddon 381). Gothic fiction, after all, likes excesses. Therefore, the supernatural may take the forms of a ghost, poltergeist, demon, succubae, incubi as well as “devils, wizards, magicians and witches, trolls, hobgoblins, werewolves, vampires, doppelgängers – and what not?” (Cuddon 385; italics in original). All of this, if situated in the setting of the obscure buildings or dark forests will most likely create the sublime emotion as well as uneasy atmosphere of suspense. Hogle states that in antique places or in a combination of them “are hidden some secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters, psychologically, physically, or otherwise at that main time of the story” (Hogle 2004, 2). As it turns out, the haunting may be disturbing both psychologically and physically. Moreover, the ancient places frequently have some secrets that are indistinguishable from the supernatural events. Hogle discloses that ghosts, monsters and specters “rise from within the antiquated space, or sometimes invade it from alien realms, to manifest unresolved crimes or conflicts that can no longer be successfully buried from view” (Hogle 2004, 2). This is the point where the reality and supernatural can be blended into one.
2.2.2.5 Gothic Hero/Heroine/Villain
Another important constituent in the formula of the Gothic novel is the Gothic hero, heroine and the Gothic villain. Since Walpole is the pioneer of the genre, it is assumed that with his novel Walpole set a pattern for later writers and that later major Gothic characters are constructed according to Walpolean example. However, the characters may not undergo a significant change or their personalities may not necessarily be well-developed. Kilgour observes that “gothic’s main concern is not to depict character but to create a feeling or effect in its readers by placing them in a state of thrilling suspense or uncertainty” (Kilgour 6). The effect on the readers would probably be that of delight and pleasure since, according to Burke’s philosophy, danger is only delightful at a certain distance. Otherwise it is simply terrible. Wolf notes that the stereotypical image of the protagonists which we inherited from Walpole is the following:
Characteristically, they [novels] featured tall, dark, Italian villains who pursued beautiful young women of refined sensibilities, with intent to do them harm. Often the young women were saved from a fate worse than death by the providential arrival of a handsome – but sexually unthreatening – young man with whom they lived happily ever after” (Wolf 1997, 76).

This holds true of Otranto where the Gothic heroine Isabella is persecuted by the evil aristocrat Manfred. Since Manfred’s son Conrad dies on the day of his wedding (which coincides with Conrad’s birthday and, consequently, death day), the tyrant decides to leave his faithful wife and marry young Isabella instead as he wants to have heirs with her to continue his line. Scared and afraid to be raped, the maiden flights to the labyrinthine dark dungeons of the castle. Thus, Manfred corresponds to the stereotypical image of the Gothic villain and Isabella, accordingly, to that of the heroine in distress. As far as the Gothic hero is concerned, Isabella is saved by a young attractive peasant Theodore who later turns out to be the true heir of the castle. In the end, the couple gets married and lives “happily ever after”.
In Kilgour’s account, conventional Gothic characters are described as follows: “a passive and persecuted heroine, a sensitive and rather ineffectual hero, a dynamic and tyrannical villain, an evil prioress, talkative servants” (Kilgour 4, 5). Although running away and hiding are active engagements, the heroine is passive in respect to the situation which she is not able to change. The hero, for Kilgour, seems ineffectual in comparison to the villain. It is always the villain who drives the plot and triggers the action. In addition, Wolf argues that the heroine is sometimes imprisoned in supposedly safe places. He also reasons that the villain may not always be a malevolent aristocrat:
It [Gothic] finds its expression in places where the heroines were oppressed – convents and monasteries – and in the frequency with which priests, monks, and sometimes nuns are villains. […] It must have been soothing to British self-esteem to read about villains, all of whom were tall, dark, handsome and Italian. As for the persecuting priests, there is nothing that will put a better aura of eroticism around a villain than to make him be a priest who has taken a vow of chastity. (Wolf 1997, 77)

It is interesting to notice that often the villains are not presented of the British origin but rather someone from the South or the East. For instance, Montoni in Udolpho is an Italian nobleman, Ambrosio in The Monk is from Spain and Dracula comes from Romania. All of them are depicted as strong, charismatic and wicked.
Summarizing the section, it is important to remember that the Gothic literature appeared as a reaction to The Age of Reason and gave way to imagination to a neoclassical society. It evoked strong feelings in the reader by using such conventions: terror, obscurity, sublime, closer or labyrinthine spaces, the supernatural, mystery and predictable Gothic characters. With all the rules mentioned, the Gothic genre is then “extremely self-conscious of its artificiality” (Kilgour 4). As Clery puts it, “originality, not a medieval setting, is the vital component of the evolving literature of terror” (Clery 35). The original illustrations of more or less prescribed plot or places are the reasons that arouse unique emotions and involve the reader to experience suspense or thrill. However, Botting correctly notices that familiar plots, settings and protagonists “became formulaic to the point of ridicule” (Botting 1996, 71). If that is true, then what is it that makes the Gothic genre so popular and time resistant? The answer is that the Gothic personifies society’s anxieties of the time. It plays with the association of past and present to disguise real fears with metaphorical representations of them. One of Gothic’s most persistent images, an embodiment of society’s concerns is that of the vampire. The next section will discuss vampire literature as a branch of Gothic fiction.
2.3 Vampire Literature as a Branch of Gothic Fiction
2.3.1 General Situation of the XIX Century
In the nineteenth century or the so-called fin de siècle the Gothic reemerged with new qualities. As in the eighteenth century, the Gothic now was also linked to the changes and anxieties of the time. With Victoria’s ascension to the crown, the political agitation of the people was heightened to a considerable degree. It pertained to the fact that Victoria was, first of all, a woman and, secondly, people were worried if she would be able to build her authority as a leader of the country. Britain’s imperial power was already facing decline. The country was experiencing hard times of dissolution in practically every sphere. Alienation and corruption was strongly encouraged by a divided lifestyle. Botting states that with the appearance of factories, the formation of the capitalistic society, the division of class and labour made individuals parasitic upon each other (Botting 1996, 137). Thus hypocrisy, unmoral corrupt bourgeois society, crime and disease thrived.
Moreover, mainly because of Queen Victoria’s situation, a typical woman in the Gothic fiction was depicted as entrapped and incarcerated in her domestic sphere. Conventionally, women were seen either as Angels in the House or otherwise as fallen women. Milbank notices that conversely to the previous Gothic, the “royal Gothic of the early Victorian era brings the setting of this genre to British shores” and current times (Milbank 147). For example, Charlotte Brontë purposefully dramatized, as in Milbank words, “with Gothic metaphors a given social reality” and using this devise she sought “to expose social hypocrisy, even to provoke society into declaring its true nature” (Milbank 153). Or taking to the extreme, Le Fanu in his Uncle Silas equates “the enclosure of woman in the house with live burial” (Milbank 160). Thus, the problem of female domestic powerlessness was well-known and discussed in society.
The literature of the time mostly employed the following “Gothic plot: the terrorizing system and the woman threatened by this system” (Milbank 152). The most outstanding representatives of the Gothic fiction of the early Victorian era are G.W.M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London (1844-1856), Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-38), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), Bleak House (1852-53), Little Dorrit (1855-57) and Great Expectations (1860-61), the Brontë sisters with Jane Eyre (1847), Villette (1853), Wuthering Heights (1847), William Harrison Ainsworth’s The Lancashire Witches (1848), Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), Windsor Castle (1843), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860-61), Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), Carmilla (1872), Byron’s The Giaour (1813), John Polidori’s The Vampire (1819), Thomas Preskett’s Varney the Vampire (1847), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) (Milbank 145-164).
Many of the works mentioned consider oppression, social hypocrisy and imprisonment. Milbank assumes that the “trope of the Gothic prison has been extended to cover an entire social system, indeed a nation” (Milbank 148). Another thing was the relationship between public esteem and true moral worth. David Daiches states that
middle classes, who rose so spectacularly in wealth and power in the Victorian period, were […] committed to respectability, to a surface show of conformity and decency, which lends itself easily to hypocrisy. Much Victorian fiction investigates the limits of hypocrisy, the ways in which and the degree in which vice can achieve the reputation of virtue by manifesting virtue’s outward signs” (Daiches 3).

Depressed by the present situation, writers turned more and more on the supernatural side depicting “social order as coercive, spectral, and deathly” (Milbank 154). Increased reliance on the supernatural and spectral helped to develop such strategies as naturalized supernatural and supernaturalized natural (Milbank 161).
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), C. R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – all of the above signal that the theme of the supernatural was pervasive throughout the century. Milbank notices that a “pessimistic naturalized supernatural can be traced […] through another Gothic protagonist, the vampire” (Milbank 162). Thus, not only the trapped Gothic heroine was the centre of attention but also the supernatural creatures such as the doppelganger and the vampire took the central place in Gothic fiction.. Here the thesis has arrived at a crucial point. Now, that a general understanding of the Gothic is formed, rules governing it explained, the circumstances for the creation of both the genre and the monster given, it is finally the right time to clarify what exactly that vampire is.
2.3.2 Etymology and Definition of a Vampire
According to Montague Summers, “there is no figure so terrible, no figure so dreaded and abhorred, yet dight with such fearful fascination, as the vampire” (Summers 1). In his academic study he deems the vampire terrible and yet fascinating which justifies the never ceasing interest on the matter. Alan Dundes opens his casebook in a similar manner. He introduces the vampire as “one of the most fascinating but at the same time fearsome of all the creatures of folklore” (Dundes vii). Since the notion of a vampire did not originate in literature, it is worth to see in passing what has folklore to say about the creature.
As to the origins of the word “vampire”, one may agree with Peter Mario Kreuter who says that “one of the most annoying matters […] is the fact that we do not know the etymology of the word” (Kreuter 57). In his opinion, the word came from inner Slavonic development (to final upir) or was borrowed from Turkic language (Kreuter 57).
Despite the popular belief that vampires came from Transylvania, Katharina M. Wilson states that “both linguistic studies concerning the etymology of the term vampire and the first recorded occurrences of the word in major European languages indicate that the word is neither Hungarian nor Romanian” (Wilson 3; italics in original). Instead, Wilson singles out four schools of thought. The first one, the Turkish school, was advocated by the nineteenth century linguist Franz Miklosich and his followers including Montague Summers and Stephan Hock. They argued that “the word vampire and its Slavic synonyms upior, uper, and upyr are all derivatives of the Turkish uber (witch)” (Wilson 4; italics in original). Here Wilson differently from Kreuter does not differentiate between Turkish and Turkic that are, in fact, separate languages. In either way, following her lead, the second school is said to represent the Greek origins while the third one advocates for the Slavic. Wilson observes that the Slavic version “has now gained almost universal acceptance” (Wilson 4). In her research, many dictionaries including Oxford English, German, Spanish and Swedish indicate the Serbian origin of the word “vampire” (Wilson 5). Other theories go for Polish, Serbo-Croatian or even Lithuanian explanations. In his Vampire Encyclopedia, Bunson suggests that “the word may have come from the Lithuanian wempti (“to drink”), or from the root pi (“to drink”), with the prefix va or av” (Bunson 262; italics in original). In addition, he also suggests Turkish and Serbo-Croatian origins. Generally though, Bunson seems to hold the view that the Slavic version is the most believable one and that the term was later adopted by Russians, Polish, Byelorussians and other southern Slavs through the cognate words. The fourth school of though discussed by Wilson argues for the Hungarian origin. This school consisting notably of English and American writers believes that “undoubtedly the source of “vampire” is the Hungarian word vampir” (Raymond McNally as quoted in Wilson 4). Wilson disagrees with this opinion arguing that “[t]heir speculations, however, seem utterly unfounded, for the first appearance of the word vampir in Hungarian postdates the first use of the term in most Western languages by more than a century” (Wilson 5; italics in original). Therefore, it can only be stated that the etymology of the word “vampire” remains controversial and open for new theories.
There are many different ways of defining the vampire. Definitions may vary in accordance to geographical location, period in time or culture. Majority of critics (Dundes, Barber, Summers, Melton, Wolf, to name a few) agree that vampire is a universal cross-cultural phenomenon. Even so, in spite of investigating the previously mentioned problematical issues, the thesis will provide a very basic definition. The benefit of so doing is a clearer reflection of the current understanding of the word which is most entrenched in society’s psyche. Thus, according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, the vampire is “a dead person who leaves his or her grave at night to suck the blood of living people” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary CD). Although this is a pretty basic definition, it provides a general image of a vampire. This creature is depicted as a human being or a “person” who, primarily, is already dead. Nonetheless, a vampire is attributed with the qualities of a living person in the sense that it is able to leave the grave and go searching for the fresh blood. Under such circumstances, it is implicitly stated that a vampire is an animated corpse, a living dead or rather the undead or the so-called nosferatu. He is neither dead nor alive but living in death. The fact that a vampire rises from the grave to suck the blood, shows that s/he is a menace for all the living beings since the blood is essential to maintain life. Therefore, simplistic at first sight, the definition successfully characterizes the notion of a vampire.
Ramsland states that vampire is “a preternatural predatory creature in apparent human form that thrives off the resources of others in a way that weakens or kills them. It may be an animated corpse, the person’s own soul trapped in an immortalized form, or a demon spirit acting and appearing human” (Ramsland 2002, xiii). Besides the usual animated corpse definition, Ramsland goes further and adapts the term to the most recent manifestations of the vampire as a spiritual being, a soul or an evil spirit. Though this definition is relatively new, it is in good terms with the pervasive vampire concept to culturally adapt as times go. Or, to put it in James B. Twitchell’s words, definitions are problematic “for the artists freely altered the myth to support artistic ends” (Twitchell 5). This flexibility allows Ramsland to reason that “both its permanent traits and its elasticity may be the reason for its enduring power” (Ramsland 2002, xiii).
2.3.3 Psychic vampires
In the nowadays society, at least four major groups of vampires can be distinguished: psychic, folkloric/historical, fictional and cinematic. It is worth taking a brief notice of every kind. Energy or psychic vampires are the least relevant to the present thesis thus they will only be dealt in passing. In his Vampire Book: the Encyclopedia of the Undead, Melton differentiates between astral vampirism and magnetic vampirism. The former one holds view that a person has a physical body as well as a ghost-like astral body. This belief explained the fact why the exhumed bodies did not show signs of corruption. It happened because “blood or life force swallowed by the astral form [was] passed immediately to the organs of the physical body lying in the tomb” (Melton 490). Magnetic vampirism, on the contrary, is performed by alive physical person in a manner of taking energy away from other people. The idea is based “on the commonly reported experience of a loss of vitality caused by simply being in the presence of certain people” (Melton 491). Thus, Kris Steaveson comments that the psychic vampire is “as mortal and graceless as any” (Steaveson 3). Today, there is a wide ranging variety of literature that awakens awareness about the psychic vampires and provides advice of how to protect oneself. For example, Konstantinos, a published occult author, lecturer and Neopagan, warns that psychic vampires, intentional or not, are dangerous: “[t]hese are the darkest creatures. […] Also, while the undead of fiction are often created against their will, the psychic vampires […] freely choose to become what they are” (Konstantinos 143). However, his opinion is contra argumented by another famous person.
Michelle Belanger, a very prominent figure in the modern vampire community and magickal subculture, a founder of vampire household called House of Kheperu, the author of widely accepted and acknowledged book The Psychic Vampire Codex, founder of the literary magazine Shadowdance, creator of the International Society of Vampires (ISV), co-author of the famous vampire code of ethics the Black Veil (2000), describes and raises awareness about various vampire identities. Herself being a “psi-vamp”, she observes that “individuals involved in the modern vampire community identify with the figure of the vampire because that word “vampire” is one of the few words we have in the English language to indicate someone who feeds upon life” (Belanger xxix). And psychic vampires are persons who feed upon the energy of other people, their life force. Sedona further specifies that “most people who study vampirism divide it into two main categories: sanguine and pranic. Sanguine vampyres are individuals who meet their needs by drinking blood. Pranic vampyres take living energy instead” (Sedona 7). Belanger warns that the most dangerous of the vampires may be the reluctant unintentional vampires who simply cannot resist and as a result take the energy without donor’s or random person’s consent. That is why she undertook the obligation to educate society about such beings. Belanger herself was once at a lost and “kept searching for people who had answers about how vampirism worked, and what caused it, and why we were the way we were” (Belanger xxv). She also states, in contrast to Konstantinos, that to be a vampire is not a choice: “no one had made me a vampire, and I was almost certain that my vampirism was an inborn quality. It was not something one could “catch” like a cold, or pass on as fictional vampires did” (Belanger xxiv). Rather, it is an identity. Belanger depicts vampires as the ones needy for understanding and support rather than predators:
Psychic vampires, as well as some blood-drinkers, believe that their very health depends upon the act of taking another person’s energy. That belief has been formulated through repeated experiences during which, abstaining from energy, the vampire’s health has gone into decline. It is worth noticing that many vampiric individuals were, like myself, born with serious health conditions and birth defects” (Belanger xxx).

This opinion is shared by Steaveson too. In her eyes, “[t]he average person by right of birth has the ability to generate and process their [sic.] own energy” (Steaveson 3). The quote demonstrates that psychic vampires see other persons’ energy as a cure for their condition. The situation also illustrates how this perception is shaped by quite a pronounced tendency born in the late twentieth century literature to depict vampires as tragic heroes. However, it seems that there exists a significant distinction between a folklore and fictional vampire although one cannot be completely separated from the other. The next section will elaborate on this idea.
2.3.4 Folklore and Historical Vampires

Undeniably both mythic and fictional portrayals of vampire have had a significant impact on the vampire archetype. But simply because the folklore vampire predates the fictional one, it is useful to closer examine those old superstitions and characteristics of the undead. These superstitious beliefs describe vampire’s origins, appearance, predict its behaviour patterns, instruct about protection and, finally, advise the ways to kill the monster. Based on the mentioned qualities, the image of the literary vampire was formed and subsequently embellished with certain additional supernatural qualities.
Vampire in fiction appeared as late as the nineteenth century when the vampire frenzy was in decline. As Twitchell notes, “[b]efore the nineteenth century the vampire seems to have only folkloric existence” (Twitchell 7). Probably vampire reality was all too real at the time to depict it as an imaginary (thus not dangerous) character in literature. Indeed, the things people believed in and the things they did may even surpass current imagination. Premature burial, exhumation, mutilation and “killing” of the dead were aspects of morbid reality. In his influential book Vampires, Burial and Death, Paul Barber reveals that
when we read these reports carefully and compare their findings to what is now known about forensic pathology, we can see why people believed that bodies came to life and wreaked havoc on the local population. The vampire lore proves to be in large part an elaborate folk-hypothesis designed to account for seemingly inexplicable events associated with death and decomposition (Barber 3).

The dissolution of the body was severely misconceived and natural phenomena markedly misinterpreted which in turn created mass hysteria. Even though vampires have been known for centuries, the peak of the vampire craze is thought to have been the eighteenth century. Nigel Suckling states that “[i]n Western Europe the native vampire tradition largely died out around the fifteenth century, but in the east [sic.] people kept right on believing in the undead from medieval to modern times. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this belief threatened to get completely out of control and caught the worried attention of many academic, Church and legal authorities” (Suckling 57). Felix Oinas, professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literature, supports the fact by stating that “[i]n about 1730 a real “vampire epidemic” broke out in Europe, especially in the Slavic countries. There was a flood of works relating cases about alleged vampires that sucked the blood of people and animals” (Oinas 49). Laurens A. Rickels also notes that the eighteenth century was “the time when professors at German and French universities began addressing an outbreak of vampirism sighted back East and reported in the newspapers and journals out West” (Rickels 2). It seems that vampirism was often a problem of the East; however, it was usually the West that talked and analysed the issue. Although vampires were spread all over the world, their population was the densest in the East Slavs like Ukrainians and Russians; West Slavs represented by Czechs and Poles; also in South Slavs like Macedonians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Romanians and Hungarians (Oinas 48).
At this point it seems reasonable to consider with Manuela Dunn Mascetti if a vampire is “a human being, and therefore a “he” or a “she,” or truly an “it” – a monstrously evil and hideously ugly creature that happens to bear a human form” (Mascetti 11). For the sake of convenience, the vampire will be treated here by a generic form “he”.
Mankind has collected quite an amount of information regarding real life vampires. Most of this was done not out of fascination with the creature but rather to document the gruesome occurrences and prevent further disasters. In addition to peasants, educated Europeans became aware of the vampire reports through press and scholarly attention. Barber claims that Westerners eyewitnessed “a peculiar local practice: that of exhuming bodies and “killing” them. Literate outsiders began to attend such exhumations” (Barber 5). Among the best known and meticulously documented accounts of supposedly real life vampires is the case of Peter Plogojowitz and a report known as Visum et Repertum (Seen and Discovered). Peter Plogojowitz’s case dates back to 1725 and was recorded by German officials in the Serbian village of Kisilova where people complained that after Plogojowitz’s death in a week nine other people both young and old died after 24 hour illness. (Mascetti 14). All of them declared that it was Peter who came to throttle them so they had to “give up the ghost” (Mascetti 14). Since “Plogojowitz has a place of honor in any book on vampires, since his case is remarkably complete and shows most of the classic motifs,” a full account of the case is provided in Appendix I: Peter Plogojowitz. Another instance, Visum Et Repertum documents mass vampirism where the whole village was affected. After Arnold Paole, an ex-soldier from Serbia, fell off a haywagon and died, he became a vampire and allegedly terrorized the village. As a consequence, all people who died afterwards had to be exhumed, inspected and their bodies mutilated to ensure their final death. According to Rickels, real life encounters with vampires
always started with rumours that would circulate among the villagers about a particular dead person who was said to have returned. The officials would then go to the grave, dig up the corpse, and determine whether it had shown sufficiently advanced signs of decaying: if not, it was beheaded or burned or the heart was removed (Rickels 17).

These events, however terrible, are absolutely true: witnessed, signed and sealed by officials and doctors. It is peculiar that all of this happened at the Age of Reason, the height of rationalism, and that such practices were actually justified and deemed necessary.
Even more so, exhumation seems to had had reached a hysterical degree. Barber tells that the wearing of mourning then functioned not as much as mourning itself but as a way to make oneself unrecognizable to the diseased. In his account, he notices that mourning coincided with the period from burial to exhumation: “After the remains are exhumed and found to be inert – the flesh completely gone - the need for a change in appearance no longer exists. […] That is, the wearing of black continues until the body is thoroughly and incontrovertibly dead, whereupon the threat ends and life returns to normal” (Barber 194). Thus, exhumation became an every day event and vampires – every day gruesome reality. Exhumation also served as a way to make sure that the dead were really dead. The bare skeleton became a symbol of death, final and safe. Perhaps then it is correct to listen to Suckling that from “the earliest times people have feared the dead, however much they may have loved them in life” (Suckling 98). Therefore, once again, Burke’s notion comes to mind that fear is the strongest emotion and overshadows love.
Faced with such distress, almost everyone was suspected to become a vampire. McNally and Florescu indicate that “criminals, bastards, witches, magicians, excommunicated people, those born with teeth or a caul, and unbaptized children” were candidates to become vampires as well as “the seventh son of a seventh son” (McNally and Florescu 121). Orthodox priests would add a curse to the excommunicated by saying “and the earth will not receive your body!” meaning that the body will not corrupt and decay after death (McNally and Florescu 119). Non decaying body became a sign of evil except for the cases when a person was considered a saint. Oinas replenishes the list claiming that sorcerers, werewolves, drunkards and those who died unnatural death like suicides are also likely to become revenants (Oinas 48). One may be destined to become a vampire if, for example, one has contiguous eyebrows or is born on a Christmas day. Or there is still hope to turn to a vampire after death if, for instance, an animal steps over the dead body, a bird flies over or a man’s shadow falls on (Oinas 48). As a result, constant vigil must have been kept. Murderers, unbaptized children, people who died of sudden deaths and the ones with unconfessed sins or curses, the ones who were bitten or troubled by a vampire when alive would become undead as well. Just about anything slightly out of ordinary was suspected as an omen. Many of these superstitions derived from the belief that under the above mentioned circumstances the soul could not part the body completely. Suckling suggests that the understanding of the soul and body relationship was
probably much more ancient than Christianity because archeological digs in prehistoric graveyards, in Greece particularly, often reveal corpses that have been nailed to their coffins, had their heads removed and garlic stuffed in the neck, wooden stakes driven through their hearts, their bodies eviscerated and filled with vinegar and so on – all measures taken against vampires much later” (Suckling 73).

The quote supports the idea that even before Christianity people believed that if the normal relationship between body and soul is damaged in some way, a person turns into vampire and certain precautions must be taken. Mascetti points out that the soul of the vampire “is in delirium, suffering, unable to extricate itself from the earthly, mortal knot” and, therefore, “the condition of vampirism is loathsome and torturous to the vampire itself” (Mascetti 210). The soul may also be captured in mirrors, standing water, photographs or even memory. Because the shadow and the reflection were associated with the soul, vampires were believed to possess no reflection.
Over the centuries peasants experimented with certain methods preventing or killing the vampire. Sometimes these techniques were contradictory and varied from region to region. But in most cases, the prevalent ones were as follows: garlic (it also protected from all epidemics), driving a wooden stake or a silver dagger through the heart, burning of the heart and the corpse, and scattering of the ashes. For more methods and superstitions, please see Appendix J: Superstitions Regarding Vampires. With regard to vampire hunters, anyone could be a killer. Notwithstanding, a word of caution must be offered here: a “vampire who has only been half-killed because the killer has run away in panic is a thousand-fold more dangerous than an ordinary vampire” (Mascetti 224). Usually it was a group of people who would undertake the task of destroying the monster.
Luckily for the vampire hunters, there are certain common features indicating that a person has turned into a vampire. Folklorists and anthropologists are especially clear to make distinction between fictional and folkloric vampire. Barber warns that
we must rid ourselves of a burden of false data from the fiction industry. If a typical vampire of folklore, not fiction, were to come to your house this Halloween, you might open the door to encounter a plump Slavic fellow with long fingernails and a stubby beard, his mouth and left eye open, his face ruddy and swollen. He wears informal attire – in fact, a linen shroud – and he looks for all the world like a disheveled peasant (Barber 2).

The folklore vampire with regard to appearance was mostly seen in terms of flesh and decay. For Suckling, vampires from folk tales are “simple horror of the marauding undead; there is little glamour in most of the tales” (Suckling 52). Indeed, the view must have been appalling. Rickels also defines vampiric giveaway signs: “the ruddiness and healthy bloatedness of the corpse, the loss of old and growth of new skin and fingernails, the blood around the mouth, nostrils and ears” (Rickels 20). All of the above are argued to possess logical medical explanations. Then, it is useful to know what human putrefaction in stages which in part corresponds to the findings in the graves. Thus the shedding of epidermis and nails were wrongly interpreted as “new skin” and “new nails”, escape of blood from mouth as the blood of victims, bloatedness and ruddy complexion as freshness and healthiness. Moreover, swelling of scrotum was also seen as the sign that the body was still physically active. In the case of Peter Plogojowitz, the officer mentioned the “wild signs” meaning erection. It follows thence that vampires are sexually potent. Barber explains that “vampire of folklore is a sexual creature, and his sexuality is obsessive – indeed, in Yugoslavia, when he is not sucking blood, he is apt to wear out his widow with his attentions” (Barber 9). However, the sexuality is only one sided as in contrast with the fictional vampire.
Some vampires were described as swimming in blood in their coffin which can be explained by bursting of bodily fluids. Other signs like growing of the hair and beard, uncoagulated blood or the absence of rigor mortis, open eyes or mouth, lack of stench, blood at the lips and nose or ears, turning in the coffin, eating of burial shroud, bleeding or groaning when staked may be given reasonable medical explanations as well. In any case, the peasant description, nonetheless, confirms that they have been exhuming bodies for sure. Their findings and descriptions “match up, detail by detail, with what we know about dead bodies that have been buried for a time” (Barber 118). However, when the peasants described a body as not decomposing, they usually provided evidence that in fact bodies were undergoing decomposition just at a slower rate (Barber 109). “The sloughing away of the outer layer of skin […] is also a normal event, known as “skin slippage,” and the skin underneath is not “new” but simply raw-looking. The same is true of the nails that were said to have fallen away, leaving “new” nails. […] Sometimes the revenant is believed to have chewed on his nails – causing them to fall off” (Barber 109). Once again, incorrect interpretation of natural phenomena entrenched a stereotype of vampiric features. Moreover, the tendency of blood to reliquify after death is common in people who died sudden deaths. And it is the suddenness not the timing that is relevant (Barber 114). Many other factors influence dissolution: air, moisture, microorganisms, temperature, etc. Glaister and Rentoul point out a general principle that “a body decomposes in air twice as quickly as in water, and eight times as rapidly as in earth” (Glaister and Rentoul as quoted in Barber 110). From this follows the inference that if a body undergoes change, it was seen as a vampire transformation whereas if the body remains unchanged and displays no signs of corruption, the person must also be a vampire. Both being evidence of vampirism, many dead people were killed again as vampires.
In addition, vampires were also said to have an extremely foul smell. Rickels points out that “a certain vampire stench had been sniffed out for centuries as the whiff of a contaminant […]. The memento-mori smell, which found its double and antibody in what garlic had to offer, announced and accompanied the plague before there was a concept of circulation of air” (Rickels 18). It is worth noting that outbreaks of vampirism often occurred in times of plague and came to be associated with the contagious diseases and death. Vampires usually came “to the attention of the populace at a time of crisis and [were] taken for the cause of that crisis” (Barber 125). To fight or neutralize the smell, peasants used strong smelling materials like garlic and incense. As a consequence, aversion to garlic indicated a possible vampire. Since corpses smelled bad and people did not know the true origin of the smell yet, bad smells were linked with death. In general, vampires were held responsible for hardships: “bringing on a drought, causing storms, crop failures, livestock plagues, and diseases” (Oinas 49).
Barber justifies the peasants indicating that “[l]acking a proper grounding in physiology, pathology, and immunology, how are people to account for disease and death? The common course […] is to blame death on the dead. […] To prevent this we must lay them to rest properly, propitiate them, and, when all else fails, kill them a second time” (Barber 3). As a consequence, vampirism was seen as deliberate epidemic, something one could catch and spread on like a disease. The belief justified sudden deaths. Syphilis and plague were the two major epidemics which coincided with the appearance of the vampires. Actually, plague was a disease of rodents afflicting Europe in periodic waves. This metaphor of illness continued quite into the twentieth century. The emergence of the omnipresent virus AIDS in the 1980s targeted at the marginal groups like drug addicts and prostitutes. The bright side, however, was noticed in the 1989 by Weekly World News that “AIDS is killing off the world’s vampires! […] This virus scares the ‘undead’ worse than a sunny day” (Rickels 106). Since vampires feed on blood and human race was infected with AIDS, vampires are now prognosticated to greet their final doom.
It can be assumed that belief in vampires was promoted by many factors. Twitchell, for instance, names Christianity, documented accounts and deviant people behaving like the undead, medical symptoms of certain diseases and the discovery of the vampire bat (Twitchell 16). By analogy, if vampire bats existed, human vampires can exist too. Furthermore, many other factors arising from the ignorance promoted beliefs in the undead. Premature burial, tuberculosis, paralysis, catalepsy, anaemia, haemophilia and porphyria only strengthened the suspicion in the existence of nocturnal creatures. In the times of recurring plague, premature burial and noises from the graves were especially provoking hysteria. “[I]t is quite likely that many people were buried over-hastily and quite a few probably did struggle from the grave and wander home in a confused rage, giving rise to stories that mingled fact with superstition” and promoted vampire notion (Suckling 87). Noises from the coffins were most probably caused by people buried alive which only fostered peasant ignorance and affirmed presumptions in vampire immortality. “With the dread of premature burial one could no longer be certain that the dead were dead or dead enough. […] Death was growing uncanny: unburiable, unframeable, unrepresentable, unmournable” (Rickels 22; italics in original). Thus people wanted to be sure that the dead rested peacefully in their graves.
Such real life occurrences prepared a fruitful ground for the so-called historical vampires. Vampires have always had somewhat active life and legends, folkloric, archeological and even legal proofs of their existence. For example, besides Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole, other notoriously famous historical vampires are Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory. The real Dracula otherwise also known as Vlad Tepes was a fifteenth century prince of Wallachia famous for his cruelty and sadism. Although known as “a true crusader, a subtle diplomat, and an extraordinary leader in a battle”, Dracula became known mainly for his atrocities (McNally and Florescu x). Even his name reveals his terrible character since “Dracula” means son of the devil or son of the dragon in Romanian. There are abundant stories surrounding this personage. Radu Florescu, who claims to be a descendant of Dracula’s family, states that Vlad Dracula spilled an enormous amount of blood of infidel Turks as well as that of Christians. It is assumed that he may have speared as many as 100,000 victims (Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature 344). As McNally and Florescu note,“[h]is ingenious mind has devised all kinds of tortures, both physical and mental, and his favorite way of imposing death earned him the name “the Impaler” ” (McNally and Florescu 8). Maud Ellmann tells that “[a]ccording to legend, he [Dracula] once impaled the whole population of a town in concentric circles leading up a hill with a major, like a cherry, stuck on top” (Ellmann 2008, xiv). Further on, “Dracula dipped his bread in the blood of his victims, which technically justified Stoker’s use of the word “vampire” ” (McNally and Florescu x). However, according to Ellmann, “the historical Vlad Dracula had no association with vampires, and little connection with Transylvania. […] But Transylvania was supposedly the home of the female prototype of modern vampires, Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614), who was notorious for torturing her household staff, particularly young girls” (Ellmann 2008, xiv). She killed young female servant in order to bathe in their blood to maintain her own beauty. She butchered about 650 girls for this purpose (McNally and Florescu 126). Rickels explains that her murders “converged with the onset of this turn-of-the-eighteenth-century vampirism epidemic” (Rickels 15). As a consequence, she came into history as a living vampire. These, although not proved to be blood drinkers, became personifications of vampires. Such vampire hysteria from the Middle Ages with its ancient beliefs and practices gave grounds for the appearance of vampire in literature.
To summarize the section, vampires of current popular imagination originated from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Revenants were thought to bring death and were accused for various hardships and illness. Without understanding of natural processes, peasants engaged in the exhumations letting the smell of the rotten bodies linger. The most characteristic features standing out in an unholy corpse were the presence of blood, a swollen body and an entrapped soul. Many real life vampire cases have been documented and remain for the present day.
2.3.5 Fictional Vampires
As it was mentioned before, literature vampires have folklore predecessors which go back to the beginning of the recorded history. Literature vampires inherited much of the vampire legacy but at the same time fictional vampires formed their own aesthetics, practices and philosophy. Twitchell in his book The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature assures that “vampire is far more important than any of the other nineteenth-century archetypes […]; in fact, he is probably the most enduring and prolific mythic figure we have” (Twitchell ix). For consideration, the other monster archetypes are: werewolves extending to all metamorphoses like Dr. Jekyll, Frankenstein monster extending to cyborgs, ghosts and their haunted houses, mummies, zombies, serial killers, etc. (Newman xi). Vampires outnumber them all.
In fact, it took centuries for the fictional vampire to develop. In the English literature the vampire made his entrance only with John William Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre” (1819). Lord Ruthven was the first vampire who resembled a gothic villain rather than a dead corpse. “He isn’t the muddy, repulsive Middle European peasant zombie of Dom Augustin Calmet’s treatise, but a coldhearted, sophisticated, aristocratic fashion plate who indulges in a style of melodramatic villainy old-fashioned even in 1819” (Newman xii). Twitchell states that with the introduction of this demon to “the worn-out Gothic novel” the vampire in thirty years alone became a “stock character” (Twitchell 6). Since vampires act as personifications of their age, the appeal of them lies in that it applies to certain periods and most prominent problems. For example, in the nineteenth century, a fictional vampire represented a close relationship and intimacy. Depicted as a close friend, he yearned for immoral relations. Lord Ruthven or Varney, who was the first vampire able to transform his victims into his own kind, were romantic Byronic style vampires who were “only incidentally interested in blood” (Auerbach 1995, 14). Auerbach reveals that “intimacy and friendship are the lures of Romantic vampirism” (Auerbach 1995, 14). Mostly it was men who needed such sort of companionship. However, the picture was not full without the female counterpart. In 1871 Sheridan Le Fanu created Carmilla who was the first female vampire. Carmilla was also looking for close relationships of homosexual kind. She represented the Victorian anxiety in that the female vampire, unlike the male vampires who served as traveling companions, invaded the domestic sphere.
Besides the Byronic, Auerbach distinguishes a Puritan vampire. She explains that
[p]uritan vampires embody not only entrenched social parasitism, but also the revolutionary self-sufficiency, the integrity of will, the repudiation of aristocratic privilege […]. They resurrect in the 1840s […] in a decade whose inherited authority was undermined by expanded suffrage, a newly organized working class, the unprecedented economic and political vulnerability of the landed aristocracy (Auerbach 1995, 34).

In the times when history was scarier than a horror novel, Puritan vampires strangely did not fancy blood as much as the moon. For instance, for Varney the life force and restoration was delivered by the moon. Thus in the early nineteenth century the erotic relationships aroused vampires more than blood. However, with the creation of Dracula, vampire stereotype changed forever.
Stoker’s novel made the name Dracula synonymous to a word vampire. William Hughes argues that the “novel has become the reference point to which the characteristics of other vampires are judged to have adhered, or to have departed from. […] It appears seemingly impossible, therefore, to talk about the vampire without making at least tacit reference to Dracula as a pivotal text” (Hughes 2001, 143, 144; italics in original). Since Dracula’s life sustenance is blood, this theme is worth considering.
Any post Stoker vampire novel has a recurring metaphor of blood. Twitchell claims that “[b]lood, as both a fluid and symbol of life, seems forever imbued in man’s consciousness with mystic importance” (Twitchell 13). In fact, the refrain “For the blood is the life” “has been the most quoted Biblical phrase in the vampire literature” (Melton 54). Since blood is a symbol of life, Wolf noticed that overtime it has acquired a variety of meanings:
The Bible memorializes the first shedding of human blood in the story of Cain and Abel. A bond of blood, as between members of different clans, stands for close relationship, for brother- or sisterhood. We say of particularly cruel people that they are bloodthirsty. […] Folk tradition has it that pacts with the devil must be signed in blood. In the Catholic Christian tradition, there is the profound mystery of the salvational power of wine transubstantiated into the blood of Christ. Blood can also represent our identity. […] blood exchange represents every variety of sexual union. (Wolf 1997, 2, 3)

It is now clear that a vampire, since he consumes blood and thus life itself, may be labeled a real monster. He mercilessly sheds the blood of the living to carelessly waste human lives and to appease his appetite. Furthermore, by mixing his own and victim’s blood the vampire develops close relationships, creates his brothers and sisters of inhuman species and grants them immortal life in that manner multiplying the number of bloodsuckers. As Wolf suggests, vampires may rightly be called bloodthirsty both metaphorically and literally. In the twentieth century blood thirst was interpreted as a symptom of a disease and “novelists and screenwriters toyed with the idea” (Melton 54). Melton indicates that “some believed that by drinking the blood of a victim the conqueror absorbed the additional strength of the conquered” (Melton 51). That is, not only did vampires drain life but they also partook some of one’s identity. This goes in line with Twitchell’s observation that Christ encouraged “us to drink his blood as a way of sharing his power” (Twitchell 13). However, fictional vampires stand as antidotes to Christ: while Christ gives his blood to save people, vampires may share theirs to condemn. In general, except for Christ’s, the bible warns against drinking blood of any living creature. Nonetheless, “[v]ampire drank blood in direct defiance of the Biblical command” displaying their monstrosity (Melton 53). Further, every vampire bite is said to carry connotations of sexual adventure. It is worth noting that vampires create their “babies” not through semen as humans but through the exchange of blood. Therefore, vampire’s kiss may be sometimes interpreted as intercourse. Once bitten one may be granted immortality and vampire identity but in return the person will have to suffer inexorable blood thirst.
Although both folklore and fictional vampire types usually agree that they must live on blood, the perception of vampires as beings is quite opposite. To attest the plausibility of this claim it seems necessary to quote Barber who finds it absolutely necessary to distinguish between fictional and folklore vampire. For him,
the former sucks blood from the neck of the victims, for example, while the other – when he sucks blood at all – attacks the chest area of the victim, in the vicinity of the heart […]. The fictional vampire tends to be tall, thin, and sallow, the folkloric vampire is plump and ruddy, or dark in color […]. The two would be unlikely to meet socially, for the fictional vampire tends to spring from the nobility and to live in a castle, while the folklore vampire is of peasant stock and resides (during the day at least) in the graveyard in which he is buried (Barber 4).

Dracula being a stereotypical vampire perfectly matches the features of a fictional vampire outlined above. He is tall and thin, lives in a castle and comes from the aristocratic background. In addition, Auerbach notices that Dracula “is the first vampire we have met who is not visibly a corpse” but who has “animal affinities” instead (Auerbach 1995, 95). Furthermore, Ellmann relates that the figure of Count Dracula is said to possess:
Aristocratic bearing, his Middle Eastern ancestry, his nocturnal habits, and his predilection for young virgins. All these features contrast sharply to folk superstitions, in which vampires are usually peasants, recently deceased, who return to torment their immediate relatives. The vampire of folklore is pale, sad, drooling, and smelly, and dressed only in a burial shroud. It is also easily hoodwinked and distracted, indeed rather stupidly brutal, like the cinematic ghoul. The literary vampire, by contrast, is a magnetic figure of sexual power, lordly authority, and deep cunning, who lives for centuries and travels far wide in search of victims. This has many effects, including the possibility, not present in folklore, of some element of sympathy for the vampire as a tragic outcast. (Ellmann 2008, xvii)

The quote explains that the folklore vampire resembles a living corpse and is easily recognized by its specific appearance. It has a pale skin and is poorly dressed. This kind of a vampire is neither charming nor erotic but rather repugnant both physically and, perhaps, intellectually. However, the second type, the Count Dracula vampire type, is much more intriguing. The facts that the vampire is aristocratic and has some interesting past suggest of his intelligence. His preference for young virgin blood shows that the vampire has a “good taste” and knows means how to get what he wants.
Moreover, the image of Count Dracula is said to be somewhat magnetic which means that he possesses a strong personality and may even be viewed, in some cases, as an authority figure. In this way people, then, do not recognize or alienate themselves from this nocturnal creature. However, certain limitations of a vampire cause him to be an outcast in society. It is not fully clear if the vampire himself feels pity of not being as everyone else or does he feel higher than any human being since he is immortal.
This understanding of a vampire as being an outcast conjures up the impression of a Byronic hero, especially in the twentieth century. Auerbach points out that “Dracula is the most solitary vampire we have met. He is, as far as we see, the only male vampire in the world” (Auerbach 1995, 81). In terms of Byronic hero, the vampire may be attributed such qualities as intelligence, ability to adapt, authority, moodiness, rebellion on social norms and disrespect for other authority figures. He would possess good as well as bad qualities like cynism, arrogance or sexual looseness. At this point, the discussion arrives at another important moment. Fictional vampires are usually depicted as very sexually attractive and erotic beings and it surely involves more than appearance.
To follow the idea proposed by Hughes, even the blood sucking may be sexualized: “described frequently as a ‘kiss’ but carrying with it pain and blood analogous to those of defloration or violent intercourse, the vampire’s bite is at once oral and yet penetrative. As such, it blurs the boundaries between foreplay and coitus, between the violent and the erotic, between the prelude and the consummation” (Hughes 2001, 145). Bodily liquids like blood, saliva or semen are associated with sexuality. A vampire being, enabled to suck the blood, then, was viewed as a real libertine carrying more connotations. The leading of a loose life and seductiveness were linked with the threat of syphilis and other venereal diseases in the nineteenth century and HIV in the twentieth. Furthermore, Victorian period was very socially repressed and the image of a vampire was dangerous since the female vampires exhibited aggressive sexuality. At those times, women were perceived either as Angels in the House or as the fallen women. In a similar vein, Botting adds that “decadence, nocturnal existence and indiscriminate desires distinguish vampires as a particularly modern sexual threat to cultural mores and taboos: they are modern visions of epidemic contagions from the past, visited on the present in a form that, like venereal disease, enters the home only after (sexual) invitation” (Botting 1996, 148). Not only does the vampire bring death (in either form) but s/he also denies moral values. For example, Lucy a decent virgin girl, is made a vampire whore who “seems to revel in this penetration, writhing and foaming in a grotesque parody of orgasm” when the stake is driven through her heart (Ellmann 2008, xxvi). In the twentieth century the vampire was further frequently eroticized and depicted as youthful, handsome, romantic, sensuous, mysterious, graceful and dangerous. The danger was connected to the sexually transmitted diseases like HIV which re-emphasized the relationship of blood, sex and death. Thus, the eroticized quest for blood denied society’s established censorship and taboos.
One more theme which is closely related to the vampire is religion or, to be precise, Christianity. Being a creature of the devil, it was supposed to “inflict grievous harm on mankind” (Bunson 47). The vampire was perceived as a fallen angel who denied the order proclaimed by God and neglected the boundaries of mortality. Here, Ellmann’s insightful idea may be shared:
Vampires pre-date Christianity, but the Church did much to ensure their immortality. Many elements of vampire-lore find their counterparts in Christian theology: the idea of bodily resurrection, for example, or the drinking of the blood of Christ in the Eucharist service. There is a homoeopathic logic in the use of Christian talismans, like crucifixes and communion wafers, as prophylactics against vampires; for the vampire itself is the demonic double of the blood-guzzing Christian, whose body is destined to rise again. The Church also exploited the belief, born in folklore, that the souls of the unbaptized, of suicides, and of the excommunicated would linger on as the Undead. (Ellmann 2008, xv)

The very idea that a vampire may be compared to Christ is heretical. Nevertheless, these two figures may indeed be understood as the opposing doubles. While Christ is a positive and admired embodiment of eternal life, vampire’s possession of immortality seems more of a doomed kind. His soul is destined to wonder somewhere in between heaven (as the person was a human being) and hell (for his undead deeds) and never be accepted by either of these. Furthermore, a vampire, in turn, can not endure seeing a crucifix or any other holly objects since they remind him of his doom. Therefore, at least in early fiction, a consecrated church was a sanctuary where a human being could hide from vampires. The situation changed in the twentieth century. Because of secularization, some of vampires were no longer affected by the Christian symbols and could walk in churches and handle crucifixes. Melton assumes that this could happen because “increasing number of novelists [did] not have a Christian heritage” (Melton 105).
Wolf interestingly observes the tendency of literary vampire fiction to fall into six categories. Although the categories are arbitrary, nevertheless, it is comfortable to distinguish among the types. The categories follow a certain formula and are the following:
1) The Classical Adventure Tale where Count Dracula is the role model. Vampires here are depicted as entirely evil creatures who threaten the innocent and against whom the courageous brave men triumph. These stories tap into the primal fear of the dead who rise to suck the blood of the living. (Wolf 1999, 8, 11)
2) The Psychological Vampire where the figure of the vampire is more of the metaphorical kind and feeds on energy rather than on blood. The category developed in the mid-twentieth century and is defined as a uniquely post-Freudian genre providing grounds for the psychological analyses on parasitic relationships. (Wolf 1999, 8-9,67)
3) The Science Fiction Vampire where vampires are depicted as alien species. Other times vampires are seen in light of mutation or evolution since the modern age looks for scientific justifications of old horrors. (Wolf 1999, 9,135)
4) The Non-Human Vampire fiction where the main characters are dog-vampires, plant-vampires, etc. The category inspires little reader sympathy or interest. (Wolf 1999, 9)
5) The Comic Vampire where a sarcastic point of view is presented. Comic vampire fiction depends on distortion and excess; it also depends on punch lines and tricky endings. (Wolf 1999, 313)
6) Heroic Vampire fiction is a latecomer and is a real opposite of Dracula model. Heroic fictional vampires are transformed from seducers and killers to tormented souls with uneasy consciousness. They are often depicted as exiles in society. Here the reader is meant to sympathize with the creature. (Wolf 1999, 9, 325)

The most prominent category in the mid-twentieth and twenty-first century is that of the heroic vampire. It is evident in Anne Rice’s character Louis, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germain or Stephanie Meyer’s vampire family who are seen as vegetarian vampires since they suppress their thirst for human blood. Many literary as well as cinematic vampires have undergone what Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger call domestication. They explain that it is
a shift in the perspective from which the horror tale has conventionally been told. […] many writers now narrate their horror stories from the inside, as it were, filtering them through the consciousness of the horrors that inhabit them. […] the impact of this shift from human to “other” perspective works to invite sympathy for the monstrous outsider at the same time as it serves to diminish the terror generated by what remains outside our frame of the familiar and the knowable (Gordon and Hollinger 2).

Therefore, vampires now are perceived as heroes which contrasts sharply with the ideology of the Victorian period. From the Byronic hero seeking friendship, the vampire metamorphosed to the unholy evil and then to an appealing hero. Instead of being monstrous or horrible, vampires are now not even scary. Carol Margaret Davison notes that
the most fashionable vampire of the twentieth century is a vampire in touch with his/her "inner child," a marginal creature capable of incredible love and intense sexual intimacy. Many recent vampire creators — notably and especially women — have exhibited a strong sympathy for the devil-vampire. In certain instances, they have effected a momentous narrative shift by granting access to the vampire's innermost thoughts, a viewpoint significantly absent in Stoker's Gothic classic. (Carol Margaret Davison 31)

Thus, in recent decades the stories concentrate on vampire’s point of view. According to Milly Williamson, “vampire is no longer an expression of terror, it is the expression of the outcast and this helps to explain its enormous popularity” (Williamson 183). Vampire’s endurance in the beginning of the twenty-first century can be explained due to their inability to fit into societal norms, their alienation and nostalgic or even depressive attitude to life. By showing their inability to fit in, they, in fact, adapt to the current age where “contrary to the old legends that tell us that vampires have no reflection, we do indeed see many diverse reflections-of ourselves-as the vampire stands before us cloaked in metaphor” (Gordon and Hollinger 3).
According to Newman, there are three major books that reestablished the image of the vampire in our vampire obsessed era and they are the following: Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975), Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975), and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) (Newman xiii). It seems that in the dawn of the twenty first century, Elizabeth Kostova with her The Historian (2005) is arguably another vampire mother. Harry Ludlam argues that "[t]he surest thing is that Dracula will outlive us all" if he will further maintain the continuous interest of new writers (Ludlam as quoted in Davison 36).
2.3.6 Cinematic Vampires

Many critics agree that vampires after Dracula for more than a hundred years have been a good source of inspiration for many kinds of adaptation. Joanna Kokot states that Dracula especially “was adapted for the stage and gave birth to numerous film versions” (Kokot 75). This goes in tune with Andrzej Weseliński’s claim that “Bram Stoker’s Dracula appears to have established an all-time record in the history of the cinema” (Weseliński 434). The number of films Stoker’s novel inspired is as profane as cheap novels on the same subject matter. In Newman’s version, “[g]radually, with stage and then film adaptations, Dracula became a standard, then a classic, then an all-pervasive cultural phenomenon” (Newman xiii). As such, Dracula and vampires on the broader scale came to be depicted in a similar manner. In other words, film industry developed the idea of how Dracula and other vampires should look like. Barber comments that “a cartoonist allowed to use only two vampire-markers would demand a black cloak and long canine teeth. With these the artist could transform any figure into something vampirelike” (Barber 39). The cloak and the canine teeth is the invention of the fiction and cinema since original folklore vampires did not possess such features. Rickels too tries to describe the image that comes to his mind first: “the primal scene or portrait of vampirism: the corpse with bloodied mouth and nails, whose contortions of clawing, of banging on the lid, of struggling to get out complete the picture” (Rickels 22). Usually cinematic vampires were depicted with a trickle of blood in the corner of their mouth. Auerbach points out that “Post-Stoker vampires are vulnerable to human products: rosaries and holy water, garlic, sharpened stakes” (Auerbach 1995, 36). This situation would be often depicted in the movies when vampires are deterred with a crucifix necklace or a symbolic cross. Further, Barber suggests that the
vampires of the movies, too, are usually tall and thin, with pale, usually narrow faces, which sprout a pair of very prominent canine teeth. […] when found in their graves, both lie quietly, in a kind of trance, awaiting their fate. They are not dangerous in this condition, at least until attacked. […] fictional vampires age with astonishing speed at their death, turning into mummified corpses within moments, or even disappearing […]. In folklore the body does not self-destruct after its second death, but must be got rid of by a variety of methods (Barber 40, 44, 45).

Indeed, in many movies vampires turn into dust when staked or, in the older versions, simply crumble and disappear. One of the very first famous film adaptations was a disguised version of Stoker’s Dracula called Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror 1922) directed by F. W. Murnau. Produced without authorization, the silent film outraged Florence Stoker who sued the filmmakers and all copies were ordered to be destroyed. Luckily, the movie survived. Murnau’s vampire was the first “to be destroyed by the sun under which Stoker’s Dracula paraded vigorously, he inaugurates an important twentieth-century tradition” followed by many writers and film directors afterwards (Auerbach 1995, 74). Brian W. Aldiss mentions that the “vampire has come to the city. It was a country-dweller. Now it lives among the great urban masses and, like them, is inclined to take on the mantle of civilization” (Aldiss ix). Therefore, many films and books about vampires are also travelogues.
Another influential movie on the vampire archetype was Universal’s Dracula (1931) directed by Tod Browning and starring a now iconic actor Bela Lugosi (See Appendices for the pictures). Wolf argues that with “this film began the mythologizing of the name Dracula. Who can ever forget Lugosi’s magisterial “I do not drink… wine,” or his “Listen to them, children of the night. What music they make” ” (Wolf 1997, 7). The phrases have been quoted since. By now, many know where the quotes come from without actually having read the book or watched the movie.
Naturally, countless other movies were produced. None of them achieved such popularity as the afore mentioned, however. In the recent decades, film industry has employed the position of parody. Examples of such movies could be Blacula (1972) or Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). The most recent movies which gained wide acceptance and praise from the critics are the famous Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998). In the end, it can be stated that this terrifying yet alluring creature has been resurrected numerous times. Davison jokes that gossips about Dracula’s “death have been greatly exaggerated. Judging by his countless literary, celluloid, and cyberspace offspring, the Count is certainly alive and sucking” (Davison 35).
To summarize the section, vampires have been known for centuries in as widespread as the entire world. However, the origin of the word “vampire” is not clear. In any case, many critics advocate for the Slavic roots. In literature vampires appeared as late as nineteenth century. The first vampire story is entitled to be John William Polidori’s “The Vampyre” but it was Bram Stoker’s Dracula that made a vampire the major character in the Gothic fiction. With the increasing interest on the subject, a few vampire types can be distinguished. Namely, they are the following: psychic, folkloric, historical, fictional and cinematic vampires. Although all of them feed on life, the perception of them as creatures is quite opposite. Historical vampires are allegedly real living humans usually springing from aristocracy, notorious for they cruelty and shedding blood of people whereas folklore vampires are usually animated dead peasants. Historical vampires gave grounds for the appearance of the fictional ones who underwent significant changes during the time span of two centuries and differed from the folklore creatures significantly. Vampires in fiction are described as dead yet living persons; outcasts in society yet independent, extremely erotic yet standing as pure evil in terms of religion and morality. As representations of fictional vampires the cinematic ones emerged. The latter influenced current stereotypical image of the undead. At the same time, psychic vampires coexist but their maintenance is life energy rather than blood.
From another point of view, a vampire is never just a vampire. He functions “to construct our humanity, to provide guidelines against which we can define ourselves” (Gordon and Hollinger 5). Vampires are indices of certain times. They successfully adapt to the changing culture and to their every new role. After all, Auerbach has correctly noted that “individual vampires may die; […] but as a species vampires have been our companions for so long that it is hard to imagine living without them” (Auerbach 1995, 9). Additionaly, “appeal of vampire imagery” for Wolf “seems less global and more personal” (Wolf 1997, 3). Thus, fictional vampires are direct embodiments of basic fears, wishes and anxieties which leads the thesis to the psychoanalytical readings of the Gothic and the vampire.
3 PSYCHOANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE GOTHIC LITERATURE

In different eras, people experienced different problems, different political, economical, and social changes. During the transition periods, fear and insecurity enabled people to reflect on their problems in literature. Gothic fiction with all its various qualities was one of the best ways to cover one’s alarming feelings in the guise of monsters and the supernatural (especially vampire), in the retrospective view of the idealized past and by allusion to the current events. The paper will discuss the anxieties of the eighteenth century when the Gothic genre came to being. Then it will touch upon the fears and anxieties of the nineteenth century and lastly the thesis will try to identify and define current reasons for the anxieties in the contemporary society. In order to analyze the possible meanings the character of the vampire implies, psychoanalytical approach seems especially useful.
3.1 Anxieties of the Eighteenth Century

As Botting has it, “morality and monstrosity were two of the hallmarks of eighteenth-century aesthetical judgment” (Botting 1996, 21). While religion played an important part in human lives, people in general were viewed as sinful and degrading from the Protestant perspective. Therefore, to help to discriminate between virtue and vice a clear distinction between heroes and villains was introduced. In order to prevent further social degeneration, romances (that originally came from France) were condemned and reasonable instructive novels including a moral were praised. Literature was generally supposed to serve didactic function. In the setting of the Gothic novels, the ruins were depicted only to mirror the progress of the current architecture. However, the relationship between past and present remained a major means to depict current events.
Furthermore, the threat to the long lasting feudal order was in horizon. “The decade of the French Revolution saw the most violent of challenges to monarchical order” (Botting 1996, 63). Therefore, not only the social order but also political tensions were finding form in the Gothic genre. France in particular was viewed as a monstrous place because “all forms of change lead to revolution, embodied in France as site of sedition, anarchy, heresy, deception, confusion, superstitious corruption, wickedness, lust, cruelty and destruction” (Botting 1996, 82). In addition, the Age of Reason was experiencing tensions in religion. Catholicism and its dogmas were replaced by superstition and supernatural occurrences in literature. With the spread of the press, women formed a significant part of the readership. Moreover, they started writing. Women who alluded to political events were seen as “unsexed” since they “entered with impunity and impropriety a male domain of writing instead of remaining within the domesticated limits of fiction” (Botting 1996, 80). To restore order, the role of women in the novels was mostly that of the virtuous heroine in distress who is passive and needs to be saved. When alone or out of home (thus out of patriarchal order and protection), she is depicted in all of the possible dangers such as incest, rape and persecution. A good way to illustrate the confusion was the image of the labyrinth, be it a real underground one or that of the complicated decisions to be made.
In short, to quote Kilgour, “the emergence of the gothic in the eighteenth century has also been read as a sign of the resurrection of the need for the sacred and transcendental in a modern enlightened secular world which denies the existence of supernatural forces, or as the rebellion of the imagination against the tyranny of reason” (Kilgour 3). However, the action was usually situated in the medieval setting and times in this manner showing a very important distinction between now and then. Therefore, it can be inferred that literature became an indirect critique of the current situation. In this way it was both powerful and dangerous since people might have got infected with the progressivism, Whiggish liberal views or ideas of change and as a result try to subvert the existing order.
3.2 Nineteenth Century Anxieties

In the nineteenth century, the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) was a stimulus for the formation of numerous anxieties. People in the early Victorian era were troubled by the fact that their leader and authority was now a woman. Alison Milbank argues that “[g]othicizing of Victoria inaugurates the nineteenth century after 1837 as a ‘Gothic cusp’ ” (Milbank 147). Originally the term is due to Robert Miles who coined the phrase to discuss the setting of earlier Gothic. Then, in literature the present events were described as past and current anxieties displayed as ancient. By such parallel structure, “Gothic writers of the 1790s could narrate and thereby recuperate the crisis of their own time” (Milbank 147). By contrast, in the Victorian period to achieve a similar effect the setting was localized. That is, society’s fears were described as current and taking place in Britain. For instance, the Queen was depicted either as a Gothic heroine or as a monarchical tyrant. In the case of a Gothic heroine, she would be portrayed as a helpless naïve passive figure which would not correspond to the duties and representation of the monarch. In these works Victoria’s “ignorance and seclusion are indicated, so that, immured in the luxury of her palace and surrounded by courtiers, she is unaware of the reality outside and the plight of the poor” (Milbank 148). This would mean that the middle and the lower classes are left without supremacy’s surveillance letting corruption, crime, misery and degeneration thrive. Nevertheless, she would then fit into the norm of conventional femininity. After all, as Auerbach states, “[o]fficially, the only woman worthy of worship was a monument of selflessness, with no existence beyond loving influence she exuded as daughter, wife, and mother” (Auerbach 1982, 185). Queen’s situation predetermined the depiction of the Gothic heroine as entrapped/incarcerated/imprisoned in her suffocating interior (usually a castle or a house) or in the social structure in general. On the other hand, depicted as a tyrant, a usurper or otherwise illegitimate she would signify regression to the feudal past and the Middle Ages. Therefore, as Milbank remarks, “[i]t is up to the reader to decide the future: whether to turn to Victoria as a Gothic heroine and the people’s friend, or decry her as a new Gothic tyrant and call for republican liberation from monarchical tyranny” (Milbank 149). In any case, a need for influential proper order was evident.
The next related anxieties specific to the period were the decline of the imperial power and the side effects of the Industrial Revolution. According to Glennis Byron, late Victorian Britain was seen as in danger of being overshadowed by other new leading countries like Germany or the United States (Byron 132). The critic notes that the country suffered
from loss of overseas markets, faced with growing unrest in the colonies and suffused with new doubts about the morality of the imperial mission. This was a highly progressive society now experiencing the social and psychological effects of the Industrial Revolution; crime and disease ran rife within the city slums, aggravated by the influx of the farm workers whose livelihood had been destroyed by the agricultural depression. (Byron 132)

The whole situation witnessed a lack of proper regulation and stability. British concern that the colonies will attack the empire pervades late Victorian fiction. The unrest in the overseas places was mainly expressed in literature as the fear of primitive and barbaric countries invading civilized Britain. Therefore, Victorian imperialism projected its anxiety of decreased power to the other cultures and places. For example, a white aristocrat living in the colony is attacked by natives who revert to their original primitive self (Byron 133). Weseliński notices that such invasion fantasy works “gained in popularity in the last decades of the 19th century, when England was an imperial power. At that time England was regarded as the highest point of human civilization. But Victorians were afraid of relapse into a savage past, of degeneration to a pre-civilized state” (Weseliński 435). In any case, previously dominant Britain starts to feel uneasy in regard to the other countries, either rival or the subjugated ones.
Further on, while earlier Gothic was distanced in time and place, fin de siècle Gothic brings it to now and here. “The city, centre of the British empire, was the key site of the 1890s Gothic monstrosity” (Byron 134). With the influx of people from the rural areas and the immigrants, the city becomes polluted both from people and the smog, produced by factories. London especially was depicted as living a double life. Considering London’s monstrosity, Byron claims: “And it is not just a matter of some external force invading London: the city itself is now regarded by many as the locus of cultural decay, and the threat, it is suggested, may well come from within” (Byron 134). If earlier Gothic fiction found the sublime setting in ruined castles and mountains, now the city with its dark streets, underground places and corrupt people is a locus of horror. The menace lies in moral degeneration of the nation. Much of the bourgeoisie lived a double life: respectable by day and notorious at nights. Botting suggests that “in scientific analyses the origin of these threats was identified in human nature itself” and internalization of this idea had very disturbing effects in society (Botting 1996, 136). People finally realized that their repressed primitive instincts can irrupt.
The central figure in the setting of the city becomes the scientist. As a result, anatomical, physiological and psychological theories emerged in abundance. For example, Darwin’s evolutionary theory violated a previously clear boundary between animal and human. Primarily seen as a superior being, a human was now linked with primitive animals. Convinced with this possibility, people were anxious to even consider that “if something can evolve, it can also devolve” (Byron 134). Consequently, fiction was filled immediately with such creatures as half beast-half human. As Byron puts it, “all these creatures are chaotic, transgressive bodies, refusing proper categorization, and, the ultimate horror, they all partake of the human” (Byron 135). The central problem was that the creatures looked like humans which made it difficult to identify the monster. This applied to the vampire too. Besides, since the creatures could not be classified and safely placed into a fixed norm, disorder was increasing even more.
In a similar manner, criminologists Cesare Lambroso and Max Nordau attempted to find features that would help to identify deviant or criminal members of the society from the decent. They believed that some people were genetically coded to become criminals and could be distinguished by physiognomy. This is why “the fiction of the period is dominated by the marked description of facial features as telling signs of character” (Botting 1996, 137). Moreover, reasons for the dual human nature were explained in Paul Broca’s work. He divided the human brain “into left and right hemispheres, one governing intellectual faculties and the other emotions” (Botting 1996, 137). The theme of dual or multi nature also found its popularity in fiction as doppelgängers or vampires.
The scientist is also shown as engaged in scientific or metaphysical activity, dealing with hypnosis, mesmerism and the unconscious. Byron notes that scientists were often engaged in mental physiology and “frequently shown dabbling with forces that are better left alone. During the fin de siècle, what the scientist tends more and more to dabble with is the mind. […] Mental physiology opened up the mysterious workings of the mind to reveal things that, in the interest of maintaining both social and psychic equilibrium, were often considered better left untouched” (Byron 135, 136). When unleashed from social and ethical taboos and codes of behaviour, all individuals both rich or poor seem to have something bestial inside. The worst fear appeared to be that the source of the threat no longer came from within the marginal groups, the poor and the criminal classes (Byron 137). Aristocracy or the clergy were same as capable of crime as anyone else. Spiritualism, paranormal activity, theories in magnetic, chemical and electric forces allowed people to believe they were able to give life. Scientists crossed the line between man and God bringing forth such uncontrollable monsters as Frankenstein into being. However, dabbling with an unknown and better left untouched sphere, scientists often lost control over their creations. In addition, the quest for eternal life found the figure of the vampire a very attractive one.
Not only were the outside structures of the social and cultural domain threatened. Domestic and familial order was also lacking stability. Before, such writers as Dickens or Collins discussed female domestic powerlessness and feeling of victimization. “Gothic and sensation fiction of the mid-century sought in various ways to register the psychic disturbance of the Victorian middle-class wife, who was confined to the domestic realm at the very time in which that locale ceased to be productive or economically active” (Milbank 155). In Auerbach’s opinion, “THE TOWERING WOMAN who in so many guises possessed the Victorian imagination appears in art and literature as four central types: the angel, the demon, the old maid, and the fallen woman” (Auerbach 1982, 63; capitalization in original). A major change in the psyche of the period was caused by the appearance of the fifth category, the New Woman. Botting states that “in her demand for economic, sexual and political independence, [she] was seen as a threat to conventionally sexualized divisions between domestic and social roles” (Botting 1996, 138). Instead of being Angels in the House, meek, caring, nurturing and repressed, women went for equal rights. They claimed the social sphere which was unheard at the time. Byron comments that literature tried to reverse back the gender roles since “conventional opposition of good woman/evil woman is frequently produced by the 1890s Gothic, suggesting an attempt to stabilize the notion of proper femininity by identifying the sexually aggressive female who usurps male strength as something alien and monstrous. […] the pure woman repeatedly metamorphoses into evil” (Byron 139). Late Victorian era differed strongly from the early one from the perspective of women status. At first, women, including Victoria, were seen as entrapped/imprisoned/incarcerated in the house or castle. Now women were the centre of social critique. “Powerful images of oppression became images of barely suppressed power” (Auerbach 1982, 188). Therefore, to restrain the awakening power of the “feminists” unwomanly women were metamorphosed in literature into monstrous beings like seducing vampirellas. After all, repression produces monsters.
Along similar lines, talking of gender roles, homosexuality occupied a good deal of public disquietude. Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis (which was immediately suppressed) made homosexuality a public debate (Byron 140). Botting claims that “[i]n the loosening of moral, aesthetic and sexual codes associated with fin de siècle decadence, the spectre of homosexuality, as narcissistic, sensually indulgent and unnaturally perverse, constituted a form of deviance that signaled the irruption of regressive patterns of behaviour” (Botting 1996, 138; italics in original). Not only that homosexuality was regarded as regressive, corrupt and deviant but it also threatened the safety and stability of the conventional family model, marriage and religious ideals. Moreover, homosexuality threat was linked to venereal diseases: “syphilis was estimated to have reached epidemic proportions in the 1890s” (Botting 1996, 138). The epidemic witnessed that morality of the British was in decay. Besides, it once again proved that people were living double lives: a respectable at day and a libertine one at night. Therefore, it can be stated that the times corresponded to the ominous message by Max Nordau: “The day is over, the night draws on” (Nordau as quoted in Byron 132). To summarize, Victorian fin de siècle confronted the public with ideas of dissolution in almost every sphere.
3.3 Anxieties of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
However unexpected, after two centuries the Gothic is still on its height today. The reason for this is well determined by Steven Bruhm. He claims that “the gothic has always been a barometer of the anxieties plaguing a certain culture at a particular moment in history” (Bruhm 260). Contemporary Gothic also possesses a range of anxieties. For example, as happened many a time in the course of history, the disease is still a powerful concern. Especially, “vampirism has become for post-modern writers a ready metaphor for the sickness of our society” (Aldiss xi). While in the nineteenth century, “the vampire functioned as a natural metaphor for the symptoms of tuberculosis: consider its associations with wasting, with paleness, with the flow of blood from the mouth, night restlessness, alternate burning and chills, even with the victim’s rumored sexual energy,” in the twentieth century, however, the meaning of consumption has taken a new significance, initially proposed by Sandra Tomc: “a metaphor for “successful dieting,” for the obsession to curtail the consumption of food” (Gordon and Hollinger 6). With such diseases like anorexia and bulimia, the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have faced nothing less but a real body consumption. Further, the current era is troubled by such incurable diseases as HIV, cancer or the increasing drug addiction. According to Suckling, “[v]ampirism has so often been linked to heroin, crack cocaine and other serious drug addiction because the parallels are so close – the unearthly, inexpressible pleasure accompanied by a separation from normal human habits and a desperate hunger that makes little account of the cost” (Suckling 54). Auerbach claims that the vampires “[e]ternally alive, they embody not fear of death but, fear of life: their power and their curse is their undying vitality” (Auerbach 1995, 5). When the “disease” of vampirism cannot be cured, immortality and blood thirst becomes rather a curse than a gift.
Another anxiety which is quite prominent in the current age is the fear of invasion. Although many countries are now free from their former colonizers and occupants, the remembrance of the former order leaves the smaller and weaker countries in danger of self-preservation. Thus, it is perhaps correct to consider that “central concerns of the classical Gothic are not that different from those of the contemporary Gothic: the dynamics of the family, the limits of rationality and passion, the definition of statehood and citizenship, the cultural effects of technology” (Bruhm 259). The evolution of the vampire archetype, for example, has already moved on towards its alien and technological updates. Since this legendary and mythical figure is known to be immortal and to possess the ability to transform other humans into his own kind, it corresponds to the current fear of the superhumans. Batman, Superman, Spiderman, werewolves and vampires – all of them are endowed with the supernatural powers. If there are super weapons in the world, the superhumans may also be in existence. They are the ones, as often depicted in the movies, who would not be easy or even possible to destroy. Moreover, the fear of alien invasion from the outer space no longer seems very ridiculous.
Another anxiety, pointed out by Bruhm, is “the technological explosion in the second half of the twentieth century. Advances in weaponry – both military and medical – have rendered our culture vulnerable to almost total destruction” (Bruhm 260). Nowadays, human beings are as powerful as to destroy the whole planet by means of, for instance, atomic bomb or other biological weapons. Therefore, “fears of communism, […], of nuclear war, of not being certified sexually normal by paternalistic Freudian authorities – fears that fueled the ghastly compulsion to be liked” are among the most troubling (Auerbach 1995, 4). On the other hand, even without the nuclear war but at the moment of peace, immigration, the unstoppable spread of knowledge and mingle of cultures result in the danger of loss of cultural individuality and uniqueness. A nowadays person experiences a desire to be liked. And in order to be liked and accepted, one needs to be like everybody else. This threatens person’s individuality and, as a result, increases alienation in the society. Williamson notices that at this point the metaphor of vampire is fit to embody the anxiety since “the vampire expresses the pathos of the condition of the many in the West – the condition of alienation” (Williamson 183).
Yet another anxiety is perceived in “the rise of feminism, gay liberation and African-American civil rights in the 1960s [which] has assaulted the ideological supremacy of traditional values where straight white males ostensibly control the public sphere” (Bruhm 260). With the policy of equal rights, the power relations previously known and practiced were now shattered. Later, with the recognition of gay and lesbian rights, the fear of destroying the traditional family foundation and values is portrayed. Regarding the family, Bruhm explains that “our domestic lives are supposed to be governed by a logic of chronology – older and wiser parents care for and instruct their innocent and vulnerable offspring – but not in the Gothic” (Bruhm 267). Consequently, without a proper role model of a normal family, the psyche of the children and, thus, the psyche of the new coming generation changes irreversibly. But perhaps what is the most central to the Gothic, be it classical or contemporary, is the very process of psychic life where “financial greed, religious tyranny, and incestuous privation interrupt the smooth workings of the eighteenth-century family […], the contemporary Gothic registers the (Freudian) impossibility of familial harmony, an impossibility built into domestic psyche as much as it is into domestic materiality” (Bruhm 264). Therefore, only a normal family can nurture a healthy psyche. In fact, this leads to another kind of fear.
Bruhm views contemporary society as hugely affected by the Freudian influence. The Freudian thinking states that a human being is not governed by his conscious side but by that which is unconscious. “And what we really want are those desires and objects that have been forbidden”, retells Bruhm (Bruhm 263). The suppressed desires find a form of expression in the so called psychoanalytic Gothic. To quote Bruhm again:
What makes the contemporary Gothic particularly contemporary is both its themes and reception, however, is that these unconscious desires center on the problem of a lost object, the most overriding basis of our need for the Gothic and almost anything else. That loss is usually material (parents, money, property, freedom to move around, a lover, or family member), but the materiality of that loss always has a psychological and symbolic dimension to it. (Bruhm 263)

Therefore, a person of the contemporary society is at the same loss as the people from the eighteenth century. The uncertainty of the future always produces anxious speculations of what is going to happen at the next turn. Since the Gothic genre is “culturally amphibious” it may well serve to express all of the mentioned problems in the guise of a selected kind of monstrosity. The repressed anxieties in Kostova’s The Historian and Stoker’s Dracula find form in the character of Dracula, a vampire. As Gordon and Hollinger note, “[t]he figure of the vampire, as metaphor, can tell us about sexuality, of course, and about power; it can also inscribe more specific contemporary concerns, such as relations of power and alienation, attitudes toward illness, and the definition of evil at the end of an unprecedentedly secular century” (Gordon and Hollinger 3). Vampire appeal is perceived as generational and in terms of Auerbach, “each [vampire] feeds on his age distinctively because he embodies that age” (Auerbach 1995, 1). Therefore, past narratives may comment on the state of contemporary issues. And the longevity and endurance of the vampire image in describing anxieties is that “we need the consistent consciousness of death provided by the Gothic in order to understand and want that life” (Bruhm 274). Therefore, if one is still not persuaded in vampire’s importance, be advised by David J. Skal who warns to “[d]isbelieve, then, at your own peril” (Skal 14).
3.4 Psychoanalytical Terminology
As has been mentioned before, there exist many possible readings of Dracula. According to Gelder, “a veritable ‘academic industry’ has built itself around this novel” canonizing it (Gelder 65). The critic stresses that the novel became popular “through its consumption” rather than for its mastery of writing (Gelder 65). In addition, another critic, Hughes, states that “for Stoker’s literary contemporaries there was seemingly nothing portentous or prophetic to be found in Dracula” (Hughes 2008, 1). However, in the twentieth century, different opinions appeared. To trust Hughes again, Dracula “is a frequently quoted work in critical debate beyond the Gothic. […] It is a novel worthy of translation and of meticulous scholarly annotation” (Hughes 2008, 2). One of such scholarly analysis is that of the psychoanalytical reading of the novel. Bruhm remarks that “most central to the Gothic – be it classical or contemporary – is the very process of psychic life” (Bruhm 261). Michelle A. Massé notes that “the connection between literature and psychoanalysis is as old as psychoanalysis itself” (Massé 229). She further on explains that “psychoanalysis examines how our most strongly held beliefs and perceptions are sometimes at odds” (Massé 230). The analysis of this incongruence fits in well with the subject of the Gothic as this genre hides a subtext and usually has a past. Wright, drawing on the ideas of Maggie Kilgour and David Punter, explains the relationship between the Gothic and psychoanalysis:
This is exactly the same strategy that some critics of the Gothic assign to psychoanalysis, with Maggie Kilgour, for example, observing that ‘psychoanalysis is itself a gothic, necromantic form, that resurrects our psychic pasts’. If we compare this to David Punter’s insight that Gothic writing focuses upon a ‘deeper wound’, ‘a fracture, an imbalance, a “gap” in the social self which would not go away’ we can see that critics have found much common ground between the discourses of the Gothic novel and of psychoanalysis (Wright 2007, 108).

The leading person in the psychoanalysis sphere is Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). His then new theory strongly affected the readings of the novel. In other words, “psychoanalysis has […] undoubtedly shaped academic criticism of Dracula” (Hughes 2008, 22). Later on, many new schools inspired by Freud appeared, represented by, for instance, Carl Gustav Jung or Jacques Lacan. Wright assumes that “a wide variety of critics have used different psychoanalytic theories and approaches to explore the Gothic” (Wright 2007, 101). Nevertheless, the paper will limit itself to the scope of Freudian ideas. Specifically, the attention will be focused on Freud’s most influential theory of the id, the ego and the superego. James Strachey and Anna Freud notices that this theory is “the last of Freud’s major theoretical works” (Strachey and Freud 4). Therefore, it is the most mature one and the concepts have been developed through many years of intensive study.
Freud himself sees the psyche in a few different ways. Mainly, he divides the mind into the conscious and the unconscious. In Freud words, the “division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premises to psycho-analysis” (Freud 2001, 13). This categorization made possible to understand the complicated work of human mental processes. Further, Freud explains the terms linking the councsious and uncounscious to the concept of repression. Repressed fears and wishes are the underlying qualities of the Gothic genre. Therefore, it is essential to correctly understand them. Freud explains that
[t]he state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us [psychoanalysts] repression […]. Thus we obtain our concept of the unconscious from the theory of repression. The repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us. […] The latent, which is unconscious only descriptively, not in the dynamic sense, we call preconscious; we restrict the term unconscious to the dynamically unconscious repressed; so that now we have three terms, conscious (Cs.), preconscious (Pcs.), and unconscious (Ucs.) (Freud 2001, 15; italics in original)

It is quite obvious that the repressed ideas reside in the unconscious part of the human mind. However, Freud warns that “in the unconscious the suppressed wish still exists, only waiting for the chance to become active, and finally succeeds in sending into consciousness, instead of the repressed idea, a disguised and unrecognizable surrogate-creation” (Freud 1965, 27; italics in original). This coincides with the essence of the Gothic genre where repressed anxieties and fears are embodied in the monsters in the literature. The rest of the Freud’s argument may be difficult to follow. Thus, Wright rephrases Freud’s idea in the following way:
Freud sees the mind as having a three-fold division, conscious, precounscious and unconscious. Consciousness he equates with the perception system, the sensing and ordering of the external world; the precounscious covers those elements of experience which can be called into consciousness at will; the unconscious is made up of all that has been kept out of the preconscious-conscious system. The unconscious is dynamic, consisting of instinctual representatives, ideas and images originally fixated in a moment of repression. (Wright 1998, 10)

Therefore, it is now transparent that the human consciousness can be divided in three parts: precounscious, conscious and unconscious. Each of it is responsible for certain aspects of human psyche. The model explained above is called topographical. However, this is not the only one. After some time, Freud elaborated on it and developed a structural model of the topographical scheme. To follow Wright’s further explanation,
[t]he second version of the topographical scheme was introduced by Freud in 1923, when he came to view the mind as having three distinct agencies: the ‘id’, a term applied retrospectively to the instinctual drives that spring from the constitutional needs of the body; the ego as having developed out of the id to be an agency which regulates and opposes the drives; and the ‘superego’, as representative of parental and social influences upon the drives, a transformation of them rather that an external agency. This model of the psyche is often called the ‘structural’ model and is the one drawn on by ego-psychologists. (Wright 1998, 11)

From the quote above, one may understand that the crucial terms developed by Freud in the theory are id, ego and superego. All of these taken together comprise the total personality. The concept of this personality structure was published by Freud in 1921 in his book The Ego and the Id. In his publication, he established the terms for psychological phenomena which were widely adopted and are still in practice nowadays. Therefore, it is worth taking a closer look at the terms.
3.4.1 Id
According to Freud’s theory, the id corresponds to the unconscious of the human’s psyche. Freud explains that the id “behaves as though it were Ucs.” (Freud 2001, 23; italics in original) Ives Hendrick notices that the “Id is the core of the personality” (Hendrick 145). According to Freud, id “contains the passions” and is the impulsive and emotional side of the personality (Freud 2001, 25). Here Hedrick is helpful explaining that id “is the source of instinctual drive, of emotion and tension. […] It comprises those elements of the personality which we refer to as primitive and unrefined” (Hendrick 143). These instincts resemble somewhat animalistic or bestial nature where every wish can be gratified. In the Gothic novels, these primal instincts, although repressed in the daytime, usually appear as the other side of the personality at night. Hendrick adds that “the most striking characteristic of the Id is its subordination to the Pleasure Principle” (Henrick 145). If the sought pleasure is not in the conflict with the ego, it is gratified; otherwise the wish must be suppressed.
3.4.2 Ego
It is assumed that the ego represents the conscious part of the mental apparatus. Freud himself admits that the “relation of the ego to consciousness has been entered into repeatedly” (Freud 2001, 26). The conscious part represents only the surface of the personality, only certain perceptions that one gains from the external as well as from the internal world. Freud argues that the “ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (Freud 2001, 26). By being a projection of the surface the ego represents the personality to the outer world. The very definition of ego is formulated by Freud in the following way: “[i]t starts out, as we see, from the system Pcpt., which is its nucleus, and begins by embracing the Pcs., which is adjacent to the mnemic residues. […] calling the entity which starts out from the system Pcpt. and begins by being Pcs. the ‘ego’ ” (Freud 2001, 23). To simplify, Hendrick explains that a “ “precipitate” of the experiences forms, and it is this that Freud designates the “Ego.” The Ego is what each of us means when he speaks of “self,” when he refers to “I”. It comprises those elements of the personality responsible for perceiving, knowing, thinking, feeling, choosing, and doing” (Hendrick 146). The functions of the ego are to control the Id, to enforce repression and to maintain the Reality Principle (Henrick 146). However, ego keeps trying to substitute the reality principle to the pleasure principle which is why it may be called the reason or the common sense (Freud 2001, 25).
3.4.3 Super-ego
According to Freud, there is the “existence of a grade in the ego, a differentiation within the ego, which may be called the ‘ego ideal’ or ‘super-ego’ ” (Freud 2001, 28). It is the highest degree of the personality representing moral values and the ideal. It stands for everything that society may expect from an educated and socialized person. However, the super-ego is not closely related to the conscious mind. Freud elaborated on the subject stating that super-ego’s
relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: ‘You ought to be like this (like you father).’ It also comprises the prohibition: ‘You may not be like this (like you father) […] The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on – in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt” (Freud 2001, 24-25).

Thus the super-ego is the thirds element of the personality and acts as an authority element. It builds the moral character, represents the prohibition and the guilt. It acts as a part which reminds of the concequences of certain behaviour in this way controlling a person.
All of the three elements represent different levels of human consciousness. However, a human being is a complicated organism and what seems neat in the theory is not so simple in practice. That is, the three agencies interact with each other and, therefore, constantly produce a dynamic conflict. For example, “the id wants its wishes satisfied, whether or not they are compatible with external demands. The ego finds itself threatened by the pressure of the unacceptable wishes” (Wright 1998, 11). Whatever becomes unpleasant then is taken from the consciousness. This is known as repression. However, the repressed matters do not stay silently in the unconscious. Bruhm’s explanation may be handy in this case. He states that the key understanding of the Freudian Gothic in general is “as human beings, we are not free agents operating out of conscious will and self knowledge. Rather, when our fantasies, dreams, and fears take on a nightmarish quality, it is because the unconscious is telling us what we really want. And what we really want are those desires and objects that have been forbidden” (Bruhm 262, 263).
Another explanation of the Freudian theory is provided by Massé. The critic claims that: “at the centre of Freud’s early work is the wish – a heartfelt desire which, when forbidden, will struggle its way to indirect expression even when accompanied by pain. The ‘silence, solitude, and darkness’ in which the uncanny thrives come from infantile anxiety of fear that resides at the heart of the Gothic” (Massé 232). The uncanny is a term introduced by Freud in his essay entitled “The Uncanny” (1919) which may be shortly defined as “the return of the familiar in an unfamiliar form” (Ellmann 1994, 4). To understand the nature of such fear and anxiety in the Gothic, certain interpretive theory was needed. Massé notes that the early critical studies “recognized the elements, themes and structures of the Gothic as indisputably psychological” (Massé 232). A literary text may be compared to a dream where “the veils, specters, dreams, hidden passages and imperfectly understood but foreboding messages that punctuate the next seemed fraught, like actual dreams with an unknown significance (Massé 232). Therefore, a literary text can be analysed in terms of psychological concepts. Massé provides and example of how the Gothic may be explained at a metaphorical level:
Because characters in the Gothic are frequently flat, the genre lends itself easily to allegorical interpretation, in which individual characters or structural features, such as setting, are seen as significant because of what they represent. For example, a critic might say that the hero stands for the ego, the punitive old male for the superego, and the villain for the id, or that the castle is the ego, the dungeon the id, and the monastery the superego. The most common instance of allegorical analysis is recognition of the double or divided self. (Massé 233)

This theory, as explained above, may readily be applied to Stoker’s Dracula as well as to Kostova’s The Historian. The next section in the paper will analyse the selected excerpts from the texts mentioned to see how the theory works.

4 THE ANALYSIS OF BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA AND ELIZABETH KOSTOVA’S THE HISTORIAN
4.1 The Gothic Conventions
A good place to start is to get acquainted to the place where Count Dracula resides. The castle in Transylvania is shown through the eyes of Jonathan Harker, a young and rational English solicitor. The first impression the castle makes for him is that of a surprised scare mixed with awe. It was a: “vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky” (Stoker 14). Harker accentuates the grandeur of the building describing it as a ‘vast’ one. Another interesting aspect is that Harker personalizes the castle. While describing it, he refers to the building using the pronoun ‘whose’ instead of ‘its’. The fact that the castle looked ruined and mysterious in the moonlight sky may have given the idea of a real living being which has its own spirit and history.
It is often the case in the Gothic fiction that through a period of time certain places gain characteristics of people living there together with the historical time which forms memory. The castle provokes certain feeling of uneasiness in that it seems extremely dark. For example, the night is told to be of a moonlit sky, however, from the “tall black windows came no ray of light”, as quoted above. It may signify two things. The first one is that the building seems to be uninhabited and appears, therefore, unwelcoming. The place itself seems lifeless. The other thing which might have been implied is that windows should logically reflect the moonlight. On the other hand, if the building is really personalized, then it naturally cannot have any reflections. It agrees with the fact that the owner, the vampire Count Dracula, cannot have a reflection in the mirror either. Together these facts contribute in forming the warning for Harker which he does not understand.
Moreover, another hint that Dracula himself gives of his real identity is the invitation: “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will! […] Leave something of the happiness you bring!” (Stoker 15, 16) After having encountered with all the superstitions and warnings of the local people, such an expression instantly wakes the feelings of danger and eeriness. It is generally known that a vampire cannot enter any house without being invited. According to the rules, Dracula invites his guest and acts as an educated host.
Another instance of the Gothic setting is Dracula’s residence in London. It is the building that corresponds with all the needs of the vampire. Harker gives the following comments:
At Purfleet, on a by-road I came across just such a place as seemed to be required. […] It is surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of years. The closed gates were of heavy old oak and iron, all eaten with rust. […] It contains in all some twenty acres, quite surrounded by the solid stone wall above mentioned. There are many trees on it, which make it in places gloomy. […] The house is very large and of all periods back, I should say, to mediæval times, for one part is of stone immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily barred with iron. It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an old chapel or church. […] The house has been added to, but in a very straggling way, and I can only guess at the amount of ground it covers, which must be very great. There are but few houses close at hand. (Stoker 23)

The estate is a perfect example of a Gothic building. To prove this, let us review what qualities should be present in a Gothic setting. First comes the antiquity. It was stated in the theoretical part that imagination was awakened by rough and primitive grandeur of medieval buildings or ruins. The estate at Purfleet is exactly of the kind. Not only the building is described as medieval, of an ancient structure and without any major repair but also the surrounding environment is witnessing its decline: the gates are depicted as rust eaten and the chapel is identified as old. All seems to be built of the most ancient material - stone. As a consequence, the estate looks so old that it resembles ruins. One can only guess about the secret passages, dungeons or any other subterranean roads that this place hides inside.
The house is surrounded by the “solid stone wall” which forms the closed space. In this way, the estate becomes quite an isolated location. Especially when “there are but few houses at hand” and even they cannot be seen because of the wall previously mentioned. Further, the image of isolation is strengthened by the vastness of the domain. Harker points out that he is not sure himself what “amount of ground it covers” but adds up that it “must be very great”. According to Burke, “greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime. This is too evident, and the observation too common, to need any illustration” (Burke 90-91). Hence, according to this quote, the house causes the feeling of the sublime. Furthermore, the place is described to be gloomy and it must be very dark inside since there are “only a few windows high up” in the tower. In addition, they are barred and still reduce the already little amount of light coming in. All the strange shades falling from the dense trees make the territory seem even more murky, dark and gloomy.
In The Historian, the setting may be illustrated with the following passage which depicts a twelfth century castle in Slovenia:
The castle was made of brown stones like discolored bone, joined neatly together after some long state of dilapidation. When we came through the first passageway to a chamber of state (I suppose it was), I gasped: through a leaded window the surface of the lake shone a thousand feet below, stretching white in the sunlight. The castle seemed to be clinging to the edge of the precipice with its toes dug in for support. […] Even restored so deftly, the place breathed an ancient life. (Kostova 145)

The imagery of the castle is breath taking and leads to a state of the sublime due to its magnificent grandeur. Great admiration mixed with fear is felt in the tone of the narrator. The ancient building is described as standing on the very edge of the precipice as high as a thousand feet. According to Burke, “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger” may be called the source of sublime (Burke 51). Precipice is the instance of the true sublime met in nature. Then, having in mind that the age of the building may also be one of the features arousing the feeling of sublimity, the castle is told to be centuries old and dilapidated. Moreover, the castle stones are compared to discolored bone which creates the atmosphere of uneasiness and insecurity. The metaphor of the discolored bone also provides a spooky sensation of being inside a dead organism. The imagery of the place is designed in the manner to “chill the spine and curdle the blood”, as Cuddon puts it.
However, the Gothic architecture is not the only way to excite sublime emotions. Nature can awaken similar sensations as well. The next extract takes the reader to Romania and the place where once the original castle of Dracula stood and where the local people dare not enter:
The track soon narrowed to a small wagon road, and after this to a footpath through the forest, which sloped upwards before us. Only the last stretch gave us a steep climb, and this we negotiated with ease. Suddenly, we were on a windy ridge, a stony spine that broke out of the forest. At the very top of the spine, on a vertebra higher than all the rest, clung two ruined towers and a litter of walls, all that remained of Castle Dracula. The view was breathtaking, with the River Argeş barely twinkling in the gorge below and villages scattered here and there at a stone’s drop along it. Far to the south, I saw low hills that Georgescu said were the plains of Wallachia, and to the north towering mountains, some capped with snow. We had made our way to the perch of an eagle. (Kostova 429)

The two men find themselves deep in the formidable forest which is surrounded by the local superstitions as an evil place. Kostova’s expertise in building imagery is clearly at display here. The writer is good at describing the changing scenery. That is, she knows how to excite emotions. According to Botting, sudden contrasts contribute to the creation of the sublime (Botting 1996, 38-39). In the passage above, the men are first told to follow a narrow path and then, suddenly, they get on the open windy ridge. Furthermore, the sublime is strengthened when the men get to the top and see the scenery: two ruined towers, the gorge, the mountains covered in snow and the river surrounding the place. Rossi exclaims that they made it to “the perch of an eagle” to imply the height which is usually reached by the birds only. Height is usually perceived as dangerous and thus standing on the top of the mountain is “productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Burke 51). Yet another example of the setting is a monastery:
The monastery was even lovelier up close, and rather forbidding, with its ancient walls and high cupolas, each crowned with ornate seven-pointed cross. […] Skirting those beautiful old walls, I realized suddenly that for the first time I was actually walking in Dracula’s footsteps. […] It was cold inside, and before I could see anything in the penetrating darkness of the interior, I could smell a smoky spice on the air and feel a clammy draught from the stones, as if they were breathing. When my eyes adjusted to the gloom, it was only to catch faint gleams of brass and candle flame. The daylight filtered in dimly, through heavy, dark coloured glass. (Kostova 412, 416)

In the passage above, Kostova depicts the house of god, a monastery, and the chapel in it. The means by which the writer constructs the picture are those of the exterior and interior visionary descriptions and through the smells that are common to such places. The grandeur of the building is emphasized with the word “crowned”. Moreover, the feeling of the sublime and terror is strengthened by the realization that Dracula himself used to come to this very place. Following his footsteps, Rossi comes into the complete darkness. As explained by Botting, “loudness and sudden contrasts, like the play of light and dark in buildings, contributed to the sense of extension and infinity associated with the sublime” (Botting 1996, 38-39). The inside of the chapel matches the canonical understanding of the Gothic environment. The atmosphere in the building is that of gloom because only the dim light comes through the colored windows and the candles flicker only to make the surrounding brass gleam.
The above passages depict some of the conventions of the Gothic novel. Throughout them, the heroes visit many medieval places with the castles, monasteries and chapels falling apart yet fascinating. All of the places have their forbidding history making every visit chilling, exciting and mysterious.
4.2 The Figure of the Vampire
To start with, Count Dracula is the central character in the novel. In fact, all the story was only begun because of him: Dracula decided to move to London and then he became the subject for the successive events. According to Ellmann, “in Dracula there is no development of characters, no complexity of thought, no choiceness of expression, to distract us from the elementary components of myth. […] That Stoker’s characters are flat and largely interchangeable is all the better, because their mythic function is never befuddled by the nuances of personality” (Ellmann 2008, vii). It might be true because the reader is not closely introduced to the characters’ past or their life before the novel starts. Although to state that characters are flat seems too daring a statement because some characters do undergo quite significant changes. For example, Mina almost becomes a vampire and then returns to a normal human being again. However, Hughes seems to also think in the same vein as Ellmann: “ironically, Dracula, the greatest vampire novel, is the work of literature that takes the vampire out of fiction and returns him to folklore” (Hughes 2004, 144). Nonetheless, some features of a legendary vampire remain. According to the folklore tales, vampires return to torment their immediate relatives. In Dracula’s case, three vampirellas are present in his castle. Stoker lets the reader know that they had been Dracula’s brides. Furthermore, Lucy also seems to firstly desire Arthur as her real serious victim: “come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!” (Stoker 211) The other feature that corresponds to the mythical stories is that Lucy is wearing her burial clothes even though they are already stained with blood.
Another important theme closely linked to vampirism is sexuality and woman’s place in the Victorian era. The male vampire treats women as a superior and females are absolutely obedient to him both as a man and as a master. In general, it seems that vampires are strictly hierarchical in that the senior vampire is always the most powerful. It may coincide with the fact that old vampires still think in the old fashioned way. They think in terms of feudal rather than the democratic ruling. Ellmann suggests that “Count embodies the charismatic power of the leader, his vampirellas [embody] the slave mentality of the crowds. […] Count is not a venture-capitalist but a feudal overlord who creates relations of vassalage through blood” (Ellmann 2008, x-xxi). This is not surprising since women at that time were extremely repressed and if a woman was not a virgin or the Angel in the House then she was a whore.
The sensation of the novel was also that vampirellas represented the liberated women with all their sexual desires and sexuality exposed. Lucy, for instance, from the very beginning showed signs of a victim since she was sorry she could not be married to all of the three men who proposed to her. However, Ellmann notices that Lucy was punished for her desires:
Although rewarded with violent retribution, her wish is also allowed to come true in an indirect way: she gets the blood of not three but four men pumped into her, and the sexual significance of these transfusions is stressed by Van Helsing’s clumsy humour: ‘Ho, ho! Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist,’ he laughs hysterically. At the level of fantasy, semen becomes blood, and not surprisingly, since before the advent of modern medicine, sexual intercourse was actually understood as an exchange of blood. (Ellmann 2008, xxv)

Therefore, accepting this idea as a correct one, the next opinion proposed by Hughes seems to be also correct. He states that one should “regard vampirism as being first and foremost, to use Carol Davison’s words, ‘a thoroughly Victorian displacement of the traditional sex act’ ” (Hughes 2004, 145). Let us consider a specific example from the novel. Harker, being a prisoner in Dracula’s castle encounters the three vampirellas who lick their lips and try to kiss him:
In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. […] Two were dark. […] The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great, wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. […] All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. (Stoker 37)

In this passage the sexuality of the vampire woman is quite explicit. They are described as very beautiful women, “ladies by their dress and manner”. The attractiveness is somewhat magnetic or even hypnotic for Harker’s desires are enflamed. The vampire women could well represent the dream of any man in such a repressed society. Furthermore, not only the women seem to be beautiful but they also rush in starting seducing Harker:
‘He is young and strong; there are kisses for us all.’ I lay quiet, looking out under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. […] I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of me throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer – nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited - waited with beating heart. (Stoker 38)

The passage depicts Harker as a meek maid accepting the awaiting fate. Harker acts as a young obedient virgin girl glimpsing from under his eyelashes and lost in his mixed feelings of fear and ecstasy. The scene is extended on purpose – to form the tension (lower and lower, nearer and nearer, then she paused) and to prolong the sexual anticipation, to arouse the very expectancy of the vampire kiss to take place. The sound of licking the lips, the sense of warm breath and the awareness of soft lips on his neck form one of the most sexual scenes in the novel. It is interesting that this scene is much more sexual than any other in which Harker and Mina are present. Harker experiences more erotic scenes with vampirellas than with his true wife.
Moreover, at this point Count Dracula enters and claims the man all for himself: “How dare you touch him, any of you? […] This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me” (Stoker 39). Some critics impose on this scene arguing that Dracula is in fact of a homoerotic nature. Ellmann explains that “taking up this hint, critics have argued that Dracula’s desires are ultimately homosexual: although he preys on women, what he really wants are the men, and indeed he gets to drink the ‘brave men’s blood’ when they pump it into Lucy” (Ellmann 2008, xxiv). In this way the vampire breaks all the taboo imposed by the society. On the other hand, the nineteenth century Victorian society was already in transition towards the modern world and equal rights. The phenomenon of a “New Woman” was already spreading its roots. Mina with all her rationality, self control and wisdom resembles a New Woman.
However, another perspective towards Dracula could be taken as well. He is depicted as standing completely on his own and even though he has his vampirellas they are not his equals. He is always the ruler and the master, the power and the order. Dracula has no friends and no one to really talk to. That is why he confines Harker in his castle. Not only did he learn from him but also tried to have a companion in his lonely existence.
Even though the Count tries to learn the English language, he is still recognized as a foreigner. It symbolically represents that one cannot be someone who s/he is not. Therefore, Dracula resembles a Byronic hero, the outcast and the outlaw who is nonetheless powerful, authoritarian and cynical. Hughes sums up that “the vampire is simply a minority like any other minority, defining self as well as being defined – often with prejudice – by others” (Hughes 2004, 151). Therefore, it came to light that there also exists some sympathetic view towards Dracula. However, Stoker’s initial purpose was to depict a malevolent supernatural creature which would cause terror and horror for everyone.
In The Historian the narrating girl encounters with the superstition and the theme of the vampire before she actually engages in the quest for Dracula. The following passage depicts the girl and her father Paul on their trip in France. They are told the following story by their waiter:
When the monastery and its little church were just a century old, one of the most pious monks, who taught the younger ones, died mysteriously in middle age. […] In any case, this great scholar was buried in the crypt, and soon after that a curse came over the monastery. Several monks died of a strange plague. They were found dead one by one in the cloisters […]. So, the dead monks were found white as ghosts, as if they had no blood in their veins. Everyone suspected poisons. (Kostova 65)

The story resembles a folk tale but in fact is replete with the superstition. As often happens in the Gothic literature, religion and, Christianity especially, is juxtaposed to the superstitious beliefs of the lower class people. The religious anxiety of the secular world is converted to the tale of how the most pious monk turned into a monster. As the superstition cannot be explained neither by reason nor by science, it involves a certain kind of secret from the past. According to Cuddon, Gothic novels should “contain a strong element of the supernatural” as well as “demonic powers of unspeakably hideous aspects” (Cuddon 381, 382). In this case, the monk is said to have died mysteriously. Then, suddenly “several monks died of a strange plague” too. Therefore, one unexplained event is followed by the next mystery. However, the symptoms are indicative of a certain monster. The bodies “were found white as ghosts” and because “they had no blood in their veins” agree with description of a vampire, who feeds on the blood of the living. However, it is shown how people try to ignore their feelings and engage in the “reasonable” explanations that it was the work of poison but not of the supernatural creature. At this point, Kostova shows how terror is intermingled with the superstition. The next passage continues the vampire story:
Finally, one young monk – he was the favorite student of the monk who had died – he went down the crypt and dug up his teacher, against the wishes of the abbot, who was very frightened. And they found the teacher alive, but not really alive, if you know what I mean. A living death. He was rising at night to take the lives of his fellow monks. In order to send the poor man’s soul up to the right place, they brought holy water from a shrine in the mountains and got a very sharp stake. (Kostova 65)

As was stated by Botting, “terror activates the mind and the imagination, allowing it to overcome, transcend even, its fears and doubts, enabling the subject to move from a state of passivity to activity” (Botting 1996, 75). In the above passage, the young monk, after having experienced terror at the idea that his beloved teacher turned to monster, probably embellished by his own imagination and worst fears as terror activates imagination, decides to actually do something. That is, the young monk exhumes the body to find out if his worst fears were true. Thus, he was moved from a state of passivity to activity by the terror. Not in vain the monk is described as a young monk since to exhume a body is a sin, especially for the men of god like monks or priests. Usually the youngsters are depicted as rebellious, disrespectful of old customs yet brave. Anyway, it was done for the higher purpose: to save the soul of the man and to save the lives of the remaining monks. As it often happens in the vampire literature, the vampire is deemed to be killed by his closest person.
On the other hand, the scene may also be viewed from a slightly different perspective. As suggested by Botting, “horror is most often experienced in underground vaults or burial chambers” which is exactly the situation here (Botting 1996, 75). In the same vein, “a direct encounter with physical mortality, the touching of a cold corpse, the sight of a decaying body” is characteristic of horror which is the negative counterpart of terror (Botting 1996, 75). For this reason, it may be inferred that the above extract is on the verge in the depiction of terror and horror.
4.3 Psychoanalytical Terminology
According to Hughes, there is a prominent connection between a vampire and a doctor encoded in the novel Dracula (Hughes 2008, 29). Stoker was a sickly child and was frequently visited by a doctor. On these grounds, Hughes suggests that there is a “connection between the vampire and the physician, though in psychobiographical readings the association between the two is complicated by suggestions that the author both fears the figure who drains his blood, and yet aspires to the admirable and awful power which he holds over both the patient/victim specifically and life more generally” (Hughes 2008, 29). The image of the powerful and influential doctor may have persisted in the writer’s unconscious thus producing a repressed anxiety. The fear might have been released when Stoker tried to practice in writing, turning a doctor into a vampire who seeks for blood and wishes to control the life of humans. This uncanny experience or the “return of the familiar in an unfamiliar form” might be seen from a different perspective as well (Ellmann 1994, 4). Taking into consideration Freud’s terminology, the doctor as a villain may represent the id. However, seen in a more positive light, the doctor may also be seen as the superego, a person helping people to preserve their life while the patient then occupies the role of the ego. The same id/ego/superego strategy may successfully be applied to the characters in Stoker’s book. The vampire, Dracula, would then represent the conscious, the id with the instinctual side controlled by immediate wish fulfillment (feeding on blood). The preconscious or the ego corresponds with the character of Harker, who is in between the id and the superego, in between the vampire and the Dutch professor. And lastly, Doctor Van Helsing would take the role of the superego since he is the “punitive old male” (Massé 233).
Taking Kostova into consideration, her repressed fears may be associated with the scary folk tales about Eastern Europe. Having heard them when still a child and having in mind that her father loved to travel there, it is no surprise that her book represents a troubled quest for the father. It fits well with Bruhm’s argument that contemporary Gothic is pervasive with the theme of loss (Bruhm 263). Anyway, it seems natural that in The Historian the father has the role of the superego. It does not matter whose father it is: Helen’s father professor Rossi or the narrator’s father Paul. Both of them are educated individuals from the academic level. They act as mentors and provide the information how to defeat the vampire. In the same vein, the vampire, as in Dracula, represents the id. Lastly, the children, be it Helen or Paul, or the narrator herself, represent the ego.
5 CONCLUSIONS

Elizabeth Kostova is a famous American writer who challenged Bram Stoker and rewrote the myth of the vampire from her own perspective. The update of the legend was hugely inspired by the tales of her father and by the travels in the Eastern part of the Europe during Kostova’s formative years. As the novels The Historian and Dracula are of the Gothic genre, the paper paid much attention at explaining the concept of the Gothic. At first, a closer look at the roots of the word was taken. It turned out that the word “Gothic” had multiple meanings in the eighteenth century and that it managed to change its meanings many times during the centuries. Therefore, to use Kilgour’s term, the Gothic is “culturally amphibious”. This quality guaranteed the preservation of the Gothic genre for more than 250 years.
To better understand the Gothic novel, a detailed account on its history and characteristics was provided. The father of the genre is established to be Horace Walpole with his Gothic story The Castle of Otranto (1765). This story was initially intended to be an experiment to create a “new species of romance” by an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance “the ancient and the modern” (Clery 24). In the Age of Reason it was a particularly risky experiment because at these times, governed by strict reason, romances as purely fictional and thus useless were all condemned. Nonetheless, the need for a new literature genre was the outcome of the cultural and social anxieties and fears felt at that era. Little by little certain Gothic conventions were established. The recipe for a successful Gothic novel is provided by an anonymous writer quoted in Botting:
Dark subterranean vaults, decaying abbeys, gloomy forests, jagged mountains and wild scenery inhabited by bandits, persecuted heroines, orphans, and malevolent aristocrats. The atmosphere of gloom and mystery populated by threatening figures was designed to quicken readers’ pulses in terrified expectation. Shocks, supernatural incidents and superstitious beliefs set out to promote a sense of sublime awe and wonder which entwined with fear and elevated imaginations. (Botting 1996, 44)

The recipe was successfully followed by Stoker and Kostova which resulted in the production of the best sellers. The Gothic novel may also be read as a reaction to contemporary society’s fears and anxieties that are embodied in the monstrous archetypal image of a vampire. Furthermore, wondering why has this happened leads to the psychoanalytical analysis of the genre. In terms of Freud, literary works resemble dreams and as such the Gothic is perfectly suited for psychological analyses. In the works discussed, it turned out that the vampire represents the instinctual nature or the id, the mentor – the superego, and the main characters – the ego.

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