The Toothsome Delights of Vampires

The Telegraph discusses a new edition of Christopher Frayling's landmark Vampyres, and notes that the belief in vampires has been with us for centuries.  The idea that the undead walk among us, and mean to do us harm dates from at least the Middle Ages, and authors have remade and transformed these very real fears into metaphors for all kinds of culture shock. Get me some hot chocolate, a nice blanket, flickering light from a fire, and a good thunderstorm. I'm ready for the next adaption of Dracula.

"Twilight" As Representation of Victimization and Violence

Susan L. Brody, The John Marshall Law School, has published Twilight: The Unveiling of Victims, Stalking, and Domestic Violence at 21 Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender (2014). Here is the abstract.

This article posits that the Twilight protagonist, seventeen year old Isabella Swan, is not the strong, independent, and mature young woman that she appears to be, but rather, she is a victim. She is a victim of stereotypical life circumstances, the only child of divorced parents bereft of any parenting skills to care for her; she is thus crafted as a young woman who, reinforcing gender stereotypes, is in need of care, protection, and rescue by a “prince charming.” Worse yet, she is also a victim of power, control, and violence, which legally constitute stalking and domestic violence. Telling the story in a first person narrative, Bella falls in love with Edward Cullen, a teen aged boy who sits next to her in a typical high school biology class and who lives nearby in her small town community of Forks, Washington. As the saga unfolds, Bella learns that Edward is a vampire, who could kill her in an instant. Throughout their love story, Bella continuously conflates Edward’s acts of control and violence with love and sex and astonishingly, she even relishes the violent acts against her. She is a precarious role model for impressible young women readers (perhaps numbering in the millions), who may identify with Bella as they are embarking on their own teenage journeys of self-discovery. Although they may recognize as fiction and fantasy the vampire elements of the story, they may, as Bella does, dangerously label as “love” harmful and illegal acts of control and violence, and also like Bella, they may believe such acts are acceptable, normal, and even desirable in a relationship. Male readers likewise may subliminally receive the message that control and violence are normal in a relationship and seek to emulate Edward’s controlling and harmful conduct. Finally, while Bella in the end becomes herself quite powerful, she does not acquire that power by her own actions, but instead, she acquires it because Edward, the man in her life, has given it to her, indeed the result of a violent act against her. For all these reasons, Bella is a harmful role model and one whose decisions to accept the illegal acts against her should not be emulated by anyone, much less young teenagers who may be experiencing a relationship for the first time. This article ultimately presents several alternative ways to rewrite Twilight, which do not eliminate the “fantasy” or the “romantic relationship,” but would make Bella a far better feminist role model and a significantly more deserving heroine.

Download the text of the article from SSRN at the link.

Happy Birthday, Bram Stoker!

Google has devoted a Google Doodle to you! The Christian Science Monitor discusses the five best Bram Stoker novel film adaptations here. More about Mr. Stoker himself here from the Monitor, a discussion of his effect on pop culture here in the Washington Post. Vampires have come of age: check out this True Blood site here.

A short bibliography of materials on vampires and law:

Bradney, Anthony, "The Morally Ambiguous Crowd": The Image of a Large Law Firm in "Angel," 56 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 21 (2005).

Owen, A. Susan, Vampires, Postmodernity, and Postfeminism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 27 Journal of Popular Film and Television 24 (1999).

Sutherland, Sharon, Piercing the Corporate Veil--With a Stake?: Vampire Imagery and the Law, in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Peter Day, ed., Rodopi, B.V., NY, 2006).

Websites:

Slayage: The Online Journal of the Whedon Studies Association.

Bite Me

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an examination of the fascination with vampire lit. For more about the subject see the selected bibliography below.

Benefiel, Candace,  Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of the Nuclear Family in Anne Rice's 

Interview with the Vampire, 38 Journal of Popular Culture 261 (November 2004).

The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature (Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr eds.; Bowling Green State University Press, 1999).

Hollinger, Veronica, The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider, Science Fiction Studies 145 (1989).

Senf, Carol A., The Vampire in 19th Century English Literature (Bowling Green State University Press, 1988).

I Vant To Drink Your Ink

Plagiarism Today explains how we have copyright law to thank for our familiarity with the conventions of vampire lore. More here.

Thanks to Gordon Firemark for the tip.

Bram Stoker's Journal To Be Published

A "bloody good" (or a "bloody" good) story for Hallowe'en: the discovery of author Bram Stoker's journal on his descendant's Isle of Wight bookshelf. Noel Dobbs didn't know what he had until someone doing research contacted him to ask if he might have some information about Stoker's journal. Mr. Dobbs checked, and found the slim volume. Another relative, great-grand nephew Dacre Stoker, who resurrected a Bram Stoker novel called Dracula: The Un-Dead (due out next year) will also help publish the journal. The Lost Journal will also appear next year, the 100th anniversary of the death of Dracula's author.

Promises, Promises

Wendy Adams, McGill University Faculty of Law, has published ‘I Made a Promise to a Lady’: Critical Legal Pluralism as Improvised Law in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in volume 6 of Critical Studies in Improvisation (2010). Here is the abstract.

Given traditional understandings of law, one might be skeptical of a claim that improvisation and justice are not mutually-exclusive concepts. Does not the significance of the rule of law, the requirement that we be governed by rules and not arbitrary, ad hoc discretion, call into question the legitimacy of improvisation in law? To this very lawyerly question, I provide a very lawyerly answer: it depends.

Legal orthodoxy may indeed refuse to acknowledge any role for improvisation in law, but other theories of law, particularly a theory of critical legal pluralism, is likely to be more accommodating. Critical legal pluralism rejects the characterization of law as an external force obeyed by legal subjects. Instead, critical legal pluralism recognizes the improvised nature of law; legal subjects are not law-obeying but rather law-creating, generating their own legal subjectivity and establishing legal order in real time as a knowledge process of creating and maintaining reality.

This article analyzes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a popular television series, to explore the concept of critical legal pluralism as improvised law. Read jurisprudentially, the series provides numerous examples of the improvised nature of law as the social construction of legal meaning. A particularly compelling example is the character of Spike. True to the traditional (pre-Twilight, pre-True Blood) genre, Spike is an evil vampire, a demon without a soul whose capacity and appetite for violence have earned him the title of William the Bloody. Yet viewers readily accept a character arc in which Spike, motivated by chivalry (the genre of knights-in-armour, not vampires) vows to protect a human being even at the expense of his own existence. As a law-creating legal subject, Spike is bound by his commitment to both genre-hybridism and the improvised legal meaning of his circumstances; he has made a promise to a lady, and such promises must be kept, even by soulless vampires.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Eternal Life of Vampires

Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan on why vampires live forever.