American Magazine: November 2013

wonk
Q. Why are we so fascinated by vampires? What do
vampire narratives reveal about us and our society?
A. This is the question I ask my students at the end
of the class. What we can say is that vampire stories are
prominent in times of great change. This is when people
come up with a vampire. It’s escapist, but it gives them the
chance to deal with their fears.
The vampire is a foil on which we can project all of our
fears as a culture. It’s like a blank space: the vampire is
fictional, so it’s safe to think about our fears in a fictional
fantasy world. In the last 200 years, the vampire served to
negotiate fears of immigration or of women who wanted
the right to vote, so the vampire came in and killed only
strong women. Fears of urbanization, industrialization—
the vampire would stand in for all of these things. Every
generation took the vampire as a signifier for another fear.
And I think this is how it perpetuated itself as a story.
The idea of blood as the carrier of life was an
invention of English-language vampire stories of the early
nineteenth century. Later, the heart was considered the
life force—so we had monsters who ate the heart. Today
zombies eat brains. This is because our culture determines
death according to brain activity, so now the brain is the
carrier of life force. The vampire, of course, is feeding off
the life force. So blood is actually old-fashioned in that
regard—but it has survived in the narratives, because blood
continues to signify other key concepts, such as race,
nationalism, and disease in today’s society.
KATHARINA VESTER
Department of History professor
and director of the American
Studies Program, College of Arts
and Sciences
The vampire
gives us unique
access to the
past, allows us to
look at our fears
as if through
a magnifying
glass and to
understand
something about
a culture in a way
that we cannot
get through
historical
documents.
14 AMERICAN MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2013