Monday, November 2, 2009

I have been thinking a lot about how we as a culture are so obsessed with vampires. It was amazing to look at the chalkboard in class and see how many facts we as a class could come up with. That just proves that vampires are very popular among many different types of people. There are many reasons why we are so obsessed with vampires, but one big reason could be the sex appeal that the vampire has.

It is not just how he looks, but also in how he acts. For example in Dracula, Dracula talks almost sexually about his victims. "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... I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there." (pg 51) Just reading this quote brings up a sexual vibe. It is possible that this sexualness that the vampire has attracts people.

In other vampire literature, vampires are also attractive, often times sexual beings. I am not familiar with very many of these except for the Twilight novels. Those books are very descriptive about how attractive they are. It also talks about how everything about them is attractive to humans. It is possible that the author was trying to show how we all find vampires "attractive."

1 comment:

  1. Leah, you have great ideas in these posts, but I want you to work on pushing your ideas further. I would have liked to have seen more examples here of sexuality and vampirism in Dracula. Why does hypersexuality play such a large role in these vampire characters? What might be "uncanny" about that? Consider Lucy and Mina's transformation, for example. What does the sexuality of female vampires say about sexual repression in our culture? I think you could really explore this idea much further.

    ReplyDelete