UNIVERSITY OF VAASA Faculty of Philosophy English Studies Elina Jurvanen Development of the Vampire Character from Dracula through Interview with the Vampire to Dead until Dark Vaasa 2015 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 3 1 INTRODUCTION 5 1.1 Aim of the Thesis 5 1.2 The Stories and Characters of the Three Vampire Novels 6 1.2.1 Dracula 7 1.2.2 Interview with the Vampire 8 1.2.3 Dead until Dark 10 2 VAMPIRES THEN AND NOW 12 2.1 The Creature in the Shadows 12 2.2 Vampires in Ourselves 15 2.3 Vampires as Monsters 17 3 CHARACTERS IN NARRATIVE FICTION 19 3.1 Studies of Narrative Structure 19 3.2 Characters Revealed Through Language 22 4 CHARACTERISATION AND CHANGE IN THE NOVELS 27 4.1 Presentation of Characters in the Novels 27 4.1.1 External appearance 28 4.1.2 Behaviour, Facial Expressions and Vampire Abilities/Restrictions 34 4.1.3 Action 42 4.1.4 Speech 47 4.1.5 Surroundings and Family 52 5 CONCLUSIONS 59 2 WORKS CITED 3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UNIVERSITY OF VAASA Faculty of Philosophy Discipline: English Studies Author: Elina Jurvanen Master’s Thesis: Development of the Vampire Character from Dracula through Interview with the Vampire to Dead until Dark Degree: Master of Philosophy Date: 2015 Supervisor: Tiina Mäntymäki ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT Tämä tutkielma tarkastelee vampyyrihahmon piirteissä 200 vuoden aikana tapahtuneita muutoksia. Näitä muutoksia analysoidaan kolmen romaanin hahmojen kautta, ja tutkielmassa käytettävät romaanit ovat Bram Stokerin kirjoittama Dracula, joka on julkaistu ensimmäisen kerran vuonna 1897, Anne Ricen Interview with the Vampire, ensijulkaisu 1976, ja Dead until Dark, jonka on kirjoittanut Charlaine Harris ja joka on julkaistu ensimmäisen kerran vuonna 2001. Tutkielmassa myös verrataan eri romaanien nais- ja miespuolisten vampyyrihahmojen piirteitä toisiinsa. Pääasiallisena lähdeteoksena hahmojen piirteiden tutkimisessa käytetään Shlomith Rimmon-Kenanin teosta Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, jossa Rimmon- Kenan esittelee teorian fiktiivisen romaanin hahmojen piirteiden analysoinnista. Teorian pääkategoriat ovat epäsuora ja suora kuvaus, joista epäsuorassa kuvauksessa tarkastellaan hahmon piirteitä sen ulkonäön, tekojen, puheen ja ympäristön perusteella. Suorassa kuvauksessa painottuu hahmoista käytettävien adjektiivien ja substantiivien analysointi. Epäsuora ja suora kategoria eivät kuitenkaan erotu toisistaan selkeästi tutkielmassa tarkastelluissa romaaneissa, joten kategoriat on yhdistetty, sekä analyysiosioon on lisätty kategoria, joka käsittelee vampyyrihahmojen käytöstä, vampyyrien yliluonnollisia kykyjä/ niiden rajoituksia ja kasvojen ilmeitä. Tutkimuksen perusteella loppupäätelmäksi muodostui se, että kaunokirjallisuudessa esiintyvä miespuolinen vampyyrihahmo on 200 vuoden aikana muuttunut erittäin rauhalliseksi, ihmismäiseksi, jopa rakastettavaksi hahmoksi. Nykyisin vampyyri on osa yhteiskuntaa, verrattuna Draculan aikaan, jolloin pelottava Kreivi Dracula piileskeli varjoissa eikä pystynyt vastustamaan verenhimoaan. Naispuolisessa vampyyrihahmossa ei havaittu yhtä selkeitä muutoksia kyseisissä romaaneissa: naispuolinen hahmo jää kaikissa kolmessa tarkastellussa romaanissa miespuolisen hahmon varjoon ja naisvampyyrit ovat Harrisin 2000-luvulla julkaistussa romaanissa edelleen vähäisemmässä asemassa miespuolisiin verrattuna. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- KEYWORDS: Characterisation, Vampire character, Narrative technique, Change, Male-female distinction, Fiction. 4 5 1 INTRODUCTION Since the times of Polidori’s The Vampyre in 1819 through to Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897 and the contemporary vampire stories, the creature has gone through significant changes. The early vampires were monsters that lurked in the shadows of the night looking for new victims to satisfy their blood thirst. In the 1970s the vampire began to find its humane qualities in Anne Rice’s novels. After the turn of the century, in the 2000s, those qualities are more evident than ever. The new vampire boom has given vampires emotions such as love and compassion, and the object of their desire is still, as in Stoker’s Dracula, the human. In these new novels the love story between most often a male vampire and a female human is at the centre of the narrative, but other varieties, including same sex relations also exist. However, since the dualistic male-female distinction runs through the stories, both as regards vampire characters and human characters, I have decided to study the ways in which male and female vampires are described in vampire literature to find out how their characterisation has changed over the past 200 years. 1.1 Aim of the Thesis The aim of the thesis is to study how female and male vampire characters are described in language, through direct definition and indirect presentation in three vampire novels published in different times. In direct definition the character is described through adjectives or abstract and other kinds of nouns, whereas indirect presentation means that the character’s traits are displayed through action, speech, external appearance and environment instead of naming the traits directly. (Ewen, quoted in Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 59) These definitions are characterisation or “character indicators in the discourse” (Lothe 2000: 81). The two narrative techniques, indirect and direct definition overlap so immensely in the novels that I study in this thesis, that I have not made a distinction between the two techniques. The descriptions of female and male characters are also compared to each other between the novels. The three novels are Dracula by Bram Stoker, first published in 1897, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire from the 6 Vampire Chronicles series, first published in 1976, and the first novel of the Southern Vampire Mysteries series Dead until Dark by Charlaine Harris, first published in 2001. I will conduct a diachronic study, which means that I will study how the expressions used of the female and male vampires have changed in time as the three novels have been published in different times. Furthermore, I am interested in how the overall image of the vampire has changed. As the main source for studying the character descriptions in the novels, I will use Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s book Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983). Mieke Bal’s Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (1997) and The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by Porter H. Abbott among others to offer some background information on characterisation and narration in general. 1.2 The Stories and Characters of the Three Vampire Novels The three novels I have chosen for this study, Dracula (1994/1897; henceforth D in references), Interview with the Vampire (2009/1976; henceforth IV in references) and Dead until Dark (2009/2001; henceforth DD in references), are all published in different times for the first time, which is the main reason why I chose them for this study. All of these books have a vampire character as a protagonist or in some other important role in the narrative, which is another important reason for choosing these novels in particular. Dracula can also be seen as one of the most influential vampire stories ever written as new television series and films that are based on the character are still made from time to time over a hundred years after the first publication of the novel. Interview with the Vampire and Dead until Dark represent the Southern gothic, as opposed to Dracula which is a British novel. The events of the Southern gothic -type novels take place, according to Clive Bloom (2010: 187), in “new gothic spaces that are indigenously American”, and “in the swamps or backwoods shacks of the south or the Texas/Mexico border, a mixture of latter-day cowboy weirdness, drug-store banality 7 and small-town isolation”. Small-town isolation is a clear aspect in the novel Dead until Dark and it is one of the important aspects that set the mood for the whole narration. 1.2.1 Dracula Dracula is one of the first popular vampire novels and is considered to be the most significant vampire story of all time. It has been written in the form of a diary, newspaper cuttings and other documents which make the novel seem very personal to the reader. In Dracula, a lawyer called Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania in Romania to meet with a mysterious character called Count Dracula and to do business with him. Harker’s trip to Dracula’s castle in the Transylvanian countryside soon turns into a very unpleasant experience for him, as the Count takes him as a prisoner. Harker’s visit to Romania and the affirmation of a deed of a mansion Dracula has bought in England leads to Dracula’s arrival in the country. After Count Dracula’s arrival in England, all of Harker’s family and loved ones are in danger, because the monster is after human blood and Harker acts as Dracula’s ticket to England. As Harker, his wife Mina and his new acquaintance Doctor Seward find out about Dracula’s lust for fresh blood and new victims, Seward asks his old friend Doctor Van Helsing for help. With Van Helsing’s help the quest to slay the vampire begins before it has time to spread evil throughout England. The character of Count Dracula is most often depicted as a creature from hell that has no compassion and no other goals than his thirst for blood. In one instance Dracula is also said to have a child’s mind which has begun to develop into its former glory after his death. On the other hand, Dracula is still very intelligent and sophisticated; he has a library in his castle and he speaks several different languages. He is always hiding in the shadows, but against many assumptions, he can also walk in broad daylight. Other people living in the area as Dracula refer to him as “the devil”; they fear him and he has no other relationship with humans than a parasitic one. He only interacts with people in order to gain more power by feeding on them. The character is depicted as an unnatural creature that bears no resemblance to human beings, but essentially represents the repressed desires and fears of the human mind. 8 The three female vampires of the novel are Count Dracula’s minions. They are depicted, on one hand, as very feminine with their long hair and voluptuous lips, and on the other hand as deadly sirens that lure men with their beautiful voices. Dracula, who is clearly a male character, is strongly superior to the other female (vampire) characters and the female are strongly subordinate; the female characters have no will of their own or any power over Count Dracula. Dracula’s three female vampires also have the same need for blood as the Count has. Yet another female vampire in Dracula is Lucy who is turned into a vampire by Count Dracula himself. Dracula keeps Lucy under his “spell” like the other female vampires in the novel, so she is not able to think clearly as a vampire and is put to rest by the hand of her fiancé Arthur Holmwood. 1.2.2 Interview with the Vampire Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is actually one of the first vampire novels that depicts vampire characters as human-like instead of monsters such as Count Dracula in Stoker’s novel. The narrator of the novel is the protagonist, the vampire Louis, which makes the narration somewhat similar to Dracula’s diary form because of the first person narration, except that all of the narrators of Dracula are humans. Interview with the Vampire is the first novel of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series and it is filled with eroticism, suspense and beautiful characters and scenes. In Interview with the Vampire the 200 year old vampire Louis tells his life story to a reporter. Louis becomes this creature of the night by the bite of another monster called Lestat who is lonely and bored of his immortality. Later in the story Louis himself turns a little girl called Claudia into a vampire capturing her playfulness and later adult mind in a 5-year-old girl’s body. Both Louis and Claudia wish to find others of their kind to discover their meaning in the world. They feel they are alone in the world as Lestat and themselves are the only vampires they know. The pair leaves the safety of their home town, New Orleans, and heads to Europe in their quest. There Louis and Claudia find a whole society of vampires, but their find is not a pleasant one as they face new menaces after discovering their degenerate Old World fellow creatures. 9 Louis the vampire seems very much like a human compared with the other vampire characters in other novels. Louis has just become a vampire in the beginning of the novel where the character tells his own story to the reporter as mentioned earlier. Before becoming a vampire he was the owner of an indigo plantation near New Orleans. He is very calm and serene in his behaviour and he does not kill humans very often to drink blood, but animals after seeing how Lestat kills without remorse or compassion. The vampire Louis is also described as a very sophisticated character; he reads novels and goes to plays a great deal and appreciates other visual arts very much as well. The Vampire Chronicles series, of which Interview with the Vampire is the first part, tells the story of Louis and his 200-year struggle as a creature of the night. The vampire Lestat is almost like Louis’ opposite; he kills humans to feed on blood and lives his immoral life without troubling himself with what society might think of him or his actions. In other words, Lestat thinks of himself as an evil and all-empowered god, which shows in his total lack of morality and respect towards humans and other vampires. He only respects other vampires if they are like him, acting like kings of the world. The second book of The Vampire Chronicles series called The Vampire Lestat concentrates on Lestat’s life and his becoming a vampire. His character is the narrator of the book, but this book is not analysed in this thesis. The main female vampire of the story, Claudia, develops into a determined young lady and a vicious killer after becoming a vampire in the up-bringing of the vampires Lestat and Louis. She is only five years old when she turns into this immortal creature, but her mind still grows into an adult’s. Louis, the gentler vampire of the story, helps her with this task as he teaches her about culture by reading books together and going to the theatre. At first she is very angry at her ‘makers’ for turning her into a vampire although they saved her from certain death by doing it, but loves them all the same. Claudia’s affection for her makers begins to weaken when she realises that her body will remain that of a five-year-old child’s for the rest of her eternal life. 10 1.2.3 Dead Until Dark The Southern Vampire Mysteries series books, a part of the new wave in vampire novels, are mostly romance fiction, which makes them stand out compared with earlier novels on vampires. Dead until Dark is the first novel of the series. The protagonist and first person narrator of the novels is a cocktail waitress called Sookie Stackhouse, a human girl, who lives in a town called Bon Temps, Louisiana, in the deep south of the United States. In the novel, vampires are ‘coming out of the closet’ and becoming part of society as the Japanese have invented an artificial blood product which enables the vampires to keep from killing humans by drinking the product instead. This is why the vampires are coming out of hiding and starting to live amongst humans. One day a vampire called Bill Compton comes to the bar in which Sookie works, and that is the beginning of a love story between her and the vampire. After being pulled into the vampire world by Bill, Sookie faces all kinds of dangers during the course of the story since all vampires are not as friendly as Bill appears to be. The novels of the 21st century, including Charlaine Harris’ novels, portray the vampire as even more human and because of this more identifiable for readers than thirty years ago. In Dead until Dark and the other novels of Harris’ series, the vampires are described as very human; they are a new minority in the population that has only recently been acknowledged as part of society. Moreover, the creatures are supposed to obey the law since they are now part of the same society as humans. There is racism in the way the humans treat the vampires; the newcomers are feared and loathed by some people but others are interested in them at the same time. The creatures have actually existed for centuries, but people have not been aware of their existence which evokes the racism toward and the interest in these mysterious beings. The main vampire character in the novel, Bill Compton, is depicted as a charming gentleman, but also as an unpredictable creature that has something to hide. Bill’s underlying personality, the primitive animal, becomes apparent through his cold and dismissive behaviour when people come too close to him and begin to get to know him better. He is also unable to commit, in this first novel of the series, to the romantic relationship that has developed between him and the protagonist Sookie. 11 The other key male vampire character in Dead until Dark is called Eric Northman who is a superior creature to Bill because he is hundreds of years older which makes him stronger and more powerful in other ways as well. Eric’s character is not portrayed very extensively in the first novel of the series, but in the eighth novel, From Dead to Worse (2008), it is revealed that he used to be a Viking when he was still a human. Eric is depicted as the prototypical vampire: he drinks human blood and kills humans without mercy. Eric’s character resembles the character of Lestat in Interview with the Vampire with his high self-esteem and care-free attitude towards life. Eric is also similar to Count Dracula; he is a very powerful and influential vampire who does not care about anything else than feeding off on the blood of humans. There are only a few references to female vampire characters in Dead until Dark. The character of Pam is the most significant female vampire character in this book, and she is Eric’s companion. Pam is described as the usual female vampire; beautiful on the outside but deadly on the inside. It is common for the female vampire characters also to be under the control of male vampires and to be of lower ‘rank’ than the male, as in Dead until Dark and in Dracula. In this novel the character of Pam is clearly under the influence of the vampire Eric. The female vampires’ lower status is not quite as evident in the third novel discussed in this thesis, Interview with the Vampire. 12 2 VAMPIRES THEN AND NOW This second chapter sheds some light on the history and present state of the blood- sucking creature known as the vampire. Under the first subheading I will explore the history of the vampire in folklore and in fiction and how the romantic vampire emerged. In sub section 2.2 there is more information on the modern vampire in the 20 th and 21 st centuries. The latter subsection also consists of a discussion concerning the representations of the vampire and its relation to our own image of ourselves. After that there is a discussion on the question of whether or not vampires can be seen as monsters and why they are seen as monsters. 2.1 The Creature in the Shadows The vampire has its history in the folklore of many different regions. It has appeared in the stories of different cultures even long before Christianity, in coastal Egypt, in the Himalayas, as well as in Russia (Twitchell 1981: 7). Belief in vampires has always been most common in Eastern Europe, in such countries as Romania and Bulgaria. There are many ways, according to folklore, that a person can become a vampire. In Eastern Europe and China a dead body may turn into a vampire if a cat or a dog jumps over it, but murder victims are certain to become vampires in Russian stories (Barber 2008: 33– 34). In Greek folklore a person becomes a vampire, because the person was ill-natured when still alive (Barber 2008: 24). According to Laurence A. Rickels (1999: 3), in Bulgaria, if a person’s shadow was stolen during her or his lifetime, that person would become a vampire after death. The appearance of a vampire in folklore differs greatly from the vampires of fiction. One of the main differences is the colour of the skin: the folkloric vampire can be, as stated by Barber (2008: 42), bloated and red, or even black in colour as opposed to the fictional vampire’s white and withered appearance. When a fictional vampire is described in a novel, the long, white and pointy teeth are often the most important feature. In folklore, the vampire’s teeth are hardly mentioned at all (Barber 2008: 44). 13 Despite the fact that the vampire’s teeth are not described as long and pointy, the vampires of folklore do suck blood off of humans, thus resembling the fictional vampires, but not from the same area of the body. The vampires of folklore stories attack the breast, the area close to the heart instead of the neck from which the fictional vampires suck blood from in most fictional narratives. However, in modern fictional vampire stories the area where the vampire drinks the blood may even be the inner thigh, which ties the act to sexual behaviour. Sexuality was not emphasized in the folkloric vampire tales. There are also ways in folklore to ensure that a body does not turn into a vampire, such as burning the whole body completely (in Bulgaria and Romania) or only removing the heart and burning it, which is described in folklore in the area of New England in the United States. The staking of the body is also common in folklore as well as in fictional vampire stories. In Bosnia the body is exhumed, staked with a hawthorn stake and burned to ensure it stays dead (Dundes 1998: 73). Stakes used for killing vampires are also made from different woods in different areas: in Russia and the Baltic from ash and in Eastern Europe from hawthorn. One of the most popular ways to kill a vampire in fictional stories is to decapitate it, and this happens often in folklore as well. In Germany and in Western Slavic countries the head is also buried under the body to ensure that the body does not become undead (Barber 2008: 73). This previously mentioned burial tradition is not common in the world of fiction. In an old Icelandic narrative the activity of a vampire called Glam differs greatly from how the vampire of other folkloric occurrences or fiction spends his or her day. Glam’s appearance is similar to other vampires, or “revenants”; his skin is dark and bloated and his movement strenuous, but he appears to people during both day and night. Furthermore, he does not simply drink their blood, but also takes their sanity by merely appearing to people. Other Icelandic revenants have been in the habit of beating their heels on frozen roofs and their Gypsy relatives in Serbia are in the habit of turning over caravans. (Barber 2008: 85–86) These activities do not have much in common with the later fictional vampires’ activities as they merely drink blood off of humans or other living creatures most of the time. Other strange habits of the vampires of folklore 14 include the vampire appearing only to his living wife. According to another Serbian belief, a vampire called Paja Tomic appeared only to his wife; his sons did not know about him until a month later. There is no clear reason to this, but it is believed that if the vampire sleeps with his wife, the child that is born does not have bones. (Dundes 1998: 74) Vampires act as scapegoats to a number of activities, which is why the creature has different habits in different parts of Europe. In the beginning of the 19 th century the history of the printed vampire literature begins with John Polidori’s short story The Vampyre, published in 1819. As mentioned above, vampire myths have always existed in the folklore of many different cultures, but Polidori’s work is considered to be the starting point for the vampire that popular culture knows today. In the works of Polidori and Stoker, the vampire lurks in the shadows of the night drinking blood, but on the other hand acts as the noble gentleman of his time. The main vampire character in both of these 19 th century works is male; female vampires appear only as slaves for the male vampire in Dracula. Carol A. Senf (1976: 423−424) states that Bram Stoker has added “a number of humanizing touches to make Dracula appear noble and vulnerable as well as demonic and threatening”. The older vampire stories show this duality very clearly compared to the modern stories in which the evil side of the vampire is nearly pushed aside altogether. Even though the evil side is not as noticeable as it may have been in the earlier vampire narratives, it is still a feature of the new vampires as well, since the vampire functions as the expression of forbidden and hidden desires and fears for people. After the new vampire boom in the 1970s, which is said to have begun with Anne Rice’s vampire novels in 1976, the vampire changed into the romantic vampire, like Bill in Dead until Dark, who resembles the average person much more than the character of Count Dracula. This new and transformed vampire character attracted new fans from different age groups. From the beginning of the 21 st century, teenagers have been the new target group for many of the vampire romance stories. One of these stories is Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, in which the first novel was published in 2005, and which tells the story of a human teenaged girl Bella who meets Edward who is also a teenager but a vampire as well. In Meyer’s stories the vampire no longer lurks in the 15 shadows; the character of Edward is even able to live during the day and be in the sunlight. In these new stories the vampire is blended into society and made part of it. Count Dracula in Stoker’s novel Dracula has secluded himself from society and lives during the night. People are afraid of Dracula in the novel, while the character of Edward in the Twilight series for example is seen as mysterious and intriguing, not monstrous at all from Bella’s perspective. The target group of Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries series is somewhat older than that of the Twilight series; it is targeted for people in their twenties or even thirties, but it tells a similar story about a human woman who falls in love with a mysterious male vampire. Dracula and Interview with the Vampire also belong to this adult reader’s category. Vampires are ever changing and this change is not entirely the result of different writers and that the stories were written in different times. Another significant factor concerning the change is culture. Nina Auerbach (1995: 6) states that vampires change with the culture among which they were created. This connotes that when a culture changes, or when a vampire emerges from a new culture that has not known it before, the features of the vampire are changed. One particular part of culture that concerns men’s and women’s status in society has not changed significantly. Women do have an equal status compared to men in most areas of life in Western countries, but when it comes to professional life, women still have a lower status than men: women are paid less salary than men for the same job or position. This characteristic is very clear and evident in all of the three novels in the way the male and female vampires are portrayed. 2.2 Vampires in Ourselves As discussed above, the vampire has had many different forms throughout its history. Today, in the twenty-first century the vampire (he or she), as Matthew Beresford (2008: 193) says, sleeps in a coffin during the day and wakes as the sun sets to find humans to prey and drink their blood. Aside from what vampires are, the myth of the vampire most often represents sexuality and desire, and this continues to be evident in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries in the writings of female authors like Anne Rice. Gina 16 Wisker (2005: 203) asserts that vampirism has become a very popular metaphor for the erotic at the end of the 1900s and at the beginning of the 2000s, but it has always expressed both the terrors and the repressions connected with (female) sexuality. It is said that when the vampire sucks the blood from the neck or chest of, most often, a woman, this action represents sexual intercourse. Franco Moretti (1983: 154) states that in Stoker’s Dracula sexual desire attracts but frightens at the same time. These characteristics are very evident in Charlaine Harris’s vampire mysteries, as well as in Rice’s novels, as mentioned earlier. The vampires in the novels are depicted as sexual beings, very much like humans, but as more experienced and passionate than the human characters. In Dracula, sexuality is very evident, but the character of Count Dracula cannot be said to be human-like; he only pretends to be human in order to bring as much death to the world as possible. In addition to sexuality, the vampire has always symbolised other kinds of desires and fears, the things we repress to the back of our minds and keep them hidden as they are thought to be unacceptable in Western society. These fears include the fear of being out of control and fear of the dark, for example. Thus, as Franco Moretti (2000: 157, italics original) puts it, “the rhetorical figure” of the vampire “expresses the unconscious content and at the same time hides it”. This connotes that vampires can be considered reflections of our inner selves. Nina Auerbach (1995: 102) calls these creatures “psychic vampires” who can be anyone one knows, anyone familiar, as they, in other words, are us. The vampire has also gone through another kind of change since the evil character of Stoker’s Count Dracula. Vampires can no longer be seen as pure evil, but as Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger state in Blood Read (1997: 2) the vampire has been “domesticated” by which they mean that the horror story is nowadays often told from the perspective of the monster instead of the human, making the vampires as monsters, for example, appear more empathetic than a century ago. These changes in the vampire characters appear in the single words and whole pieces of text the author has written of the characters. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is narrated by the protagonist Louis, who could be seen as monstrous because he is a vampire. This particular 17 character, though, is portrayed as quite humane as he tries to fight the monster side of his vampire nature. The vampire of the new vampire boom is a great deal mellower and more like the kind of man or woman that you would like to meet instead of the evil creature hiding in the shadows. Now that vampire characters are more human-like, the reader can identify with them more easily. A part of the fascination towards the vampire is connected, according to Mary Y. Hallab (2009: 4), to the fact that he or she is both human and supernatural. When Dracula’s vampire abilities and qualities are taken away, we are only left with an old aristocrat living alone in a large mansion, which is not that appealing to readers then or today. The combination of supernatural and human qualities is the key. The contemporary vampire is also a metaphor of human existence with compulsive needs, controversial emotions, culturally banned desires. This change that the vampire character has gone through over a hundred years is the spine of this thesis. 2.3 Vampires as Monsters Vampires are traditionally considered monstrous, and they never actually escape the label of monstrosity regardless of what they are like. It is interesting to study what it is that makes them appear as monsters and what a monster actually is because of its multidimensional character. “Monster” is a flexible concept; the word can hold many different meanings to different people. According to Asma (2009: 7), the impression of a monster has become moral in addition to the biological and theological meanings it has carried before. By this Asma means that actions can also define a person or a thing as a monster. In the past a physically deformed person could have been called a monster even though this person had never done anything wrong in a moral sense. He or she was only defined by his or her appearance instead of looking at the person as a whole. Moreover, the thought of what is right and what is wrong in the minds of western peoples comes largely from religion. Religion has defined certain kinds of individuals as monsters, according to Asma. These individuals are defined as monsters by their actions against the teachings of a religion. Murderers, for example, are usually seen as monsters because murdering is not morally or politically correct. 18 In essence monsters are, as Gina Wisker (2005: 219) states, altered versions of ourselves, and they emerge from our own minds and have to be destroyed to make the world normal again. As mentioned before in this thesis, vampires are quite similar to humans; their appearance and behaviour are very similar to ours with the difference that vampires are dead, but also alive at the same time as they can “die” again. The differences, even if they were small, between these strange creatures and ourselves, frighten us because the creatures are so close to what we essentially are. David D. Gilmore (2003: 12) asserts that “[…] they (monsters) observe no limits, respect no boundaries, and attack and kill without compunction […]”, which can be applied to some of the vampire characters from the novels I study in this thesis. At the same time monsters basically say “yes” to everything forbidden, as Gilmore goes on saying (2003: 12). This duality of right and wrong is a part of the fascination of vampires; they attract with their immortality and thus carefree way of life, but are frightening at the same time because of the unpredictability of their actions, which is also an attractive quality. 19 3 CHARACTERS IN NARRATIVE FICTION In the beginning of the first subsection of this third chapter I briefly discuss narration, which is the study of narrative structure. Characterisation is an important part of the process of narration and how it constructs the narrative which is why it is crucial to look into narratology as well in order to create a background for the character studies. After this in the second subchapter I elucidate Rimmon-Kenan’s theory on characterisation that is used as the main theoretical framework in this thesis and other theories that focus on the construction of a character in narrative. At the end of this chapter there are also some basic definitions of adjectives and nouns which are a basis for my analysis of characterisation in the novels. 3.1 Studies of Narrative Structure Narratology or narrative theory is the study of narrative structure and, more specifically, it studies different forms of narration and different types of narrators. Cohen and Shires (2001: 53) define narratology as the analysis of the breaking down of story and narration. Even though this thesis is not actually a study of narrative structure as a whole, narratology relates to the thesis in that the different types of narrators are an important part of my analysis of the characters. Narration and the plot relate to the traits of the characters in the way that in many ways the actions of the characters are intertwined with the whole narration and thus have a significant role on the level of narration as well as on the level of individual characters. Moreover, characterisation and narration are related fields as characters are key components in narrative fiction in general. F. K. Stanzel’s theory of narrative situations precedes Gérard Genette’s classification of narrative fiction, which is studied in the next paragraph. Stanzel (quoted in Onega et al: 1984) defines narrative through the concept of “mediacy”, the presence of a narrator “whose voice is audible […] whenever something is reported”. He further distinguishes “three basic narrative situations” which are “the first person narrative situation”, in 20 which a character acts as the mediator and is a part of the world of the other characters, “the authorial narrative situation”, in which the narrator exists at a different level from the characters and “the figural narrative situation”, in which there is a “reflector” instead of a mediator. This “reflector” means “a character in the novel who thinks, feels and perceives, but does not speak to the reader like a narrator”. (Stanzel quoted in Onega et al: 1984) Stanzel’s third narrative situation, “the figural narrative situation” can be applied to the novel Interview with the Vampire. In the novel the protagonist and narrator Louis is a “reflector” since he is a character in the novel, but does not speak to the reader: he tells his story to a reporter instead of telling it directly to the reader. The novel Dracula has the same narrative situation, even though it is not quite the same as in Interview with the Vampire. In Dracula the narrators write their own diaries or letters to others and express their thoughts to the reader through these texts. In the novel Dead until Dark the narrative situation is a first person narrative situation where the character Sookie is the narrator who is always there when any event takes place. Gérard Genette’s classification of narrative fiction was first published in French in 1972. He divides a narrative to three clear parts: narrative, story and narrating. By the term narrative, Genette means the “discourse or narrative text itself”, the way to tell the story. Story stands for the events and conflicts of the narration, together with the fictional characters of the narration. Narration, then, refers to “the producing narrative action”, and also to the whole situation, either real of fictional, in which the action takes place. (Genette 1980: 27) Jacob Lothe (2000: 6–7), who writes about Genette’s theory, mentions that the narrator has a key role in narration as she or he is the one who communicates it. On the other hand, narrator and character do not refer to the same concept in a narrative text, as Lothe (2000: 77) states, but character connects to the level of the story and narrator to the level of narration and discourse. These classifications in Genette’s theory relate to characterisation and to the aim of this thesis in the way that all of the novelistic narratives and their characters studied in this thesis are a part of the ‘story’ section as defined by Genette. Gérard Genette’s theory is one of the ground- breaking works of narrative structure studies, which makes his theory a good basis for my study. 21 Mieke Bal writes about the construction of characters and especially the different ways the image of a character is constructed into what it is. She states that repetition, piling up of data, relations with others and change are the basis of the image of a character. She suggests that when a characteristic is repeated several times in the course of a story, the reader begins to think of it as an important aspect of the character. Her ‘piling up data’ -part denotes that the reader constructs an image of the character on the basis of a large amount of characteristics she or he has come across in the text. Relations with others are the third of Bal’s points on the formation of the image of a character. The final building block of a character is change. Bal points out that the transformations or changes that a character goes through may change the reader’s whole impression of a character. (1997: 125–126) The whole of Bal’s model relates to this thesis very strongly, since I examine the ways in which the image of the vampire character is constructed in these novels and how it has changed. Bal’s notions on repetition are relevant regarding the themes of this thesis, as some of the direct definitions of characters happens through repetition and it creates a clear image of the character’s qualities. Roger Fowler has created a similar way of analysing characters as Rimmon-Kenan, whose theory I will introduce in the next subchapter. He introduces a semantic feature analysis of characters in Linguistics & The Novel (1977). His method of analysing is quite simple; words and phrases describing characters are distinguished from and contrasted with each other in order to construct an image of a particular character. Fowler remarks that a character is the next three concepts: “an actant” which means that the character has a role in the plot, “an assemblage of semes” (or semantic features) which stands for a collection of meanings, and a proper name. The first two features are, as Fowler mentions, not individual to a character as opposed to its name which is a particular feature of a certain character. (1977: 34–36) I agree with this and believe that names are quite relevant in analysing a character’s traits because a writer gives her or his characters certain qualities only by naming them. I will not study the proper names of the characters in the three novels in this thesis, though; I focus on the other qualities the characters impose. 22 3.2 Characters Revealed Through Language William F. Thrall’s quote in Seymour Chatman’s work explains characterisation as: “the depicting, in writing, of clear images of a person, his actions and manners of thought and life.” (Thrall quoted in Chatman 1978: 107). Thrall’s quote describes the essence of characterisation. It is also relevant to define the word “trait” as this study examines the changing personal traits of the vampire character. Chatman (1978: 126) describes a trait as a quite stable or permanent personal quality of a character and says that a trait can “emerge earlier or later in the course of the story, or […] it may disappear and be replaced by another”. According to Fotis Jannidis (2009: 15), characterisation signifies the attribution of a trait to a character, but it can also mean the whole process and the result of ascribing features to a character. The latter phenomenon is mostly the kind of characterisation that is employed in this thesis. Shlomith Rimmon- Kenan’s analysis on Joseph Ewen’s theory on characterisation in Kenan’s book Narrative Fiction (1983) is the spine of this thesis, and I will study the change of the vampire character with the help of this theory. Rimmon-Kenan presents the two basic indicators of character, which are direct definition and indirect presentation, but as I mention in the introduction, the two indicators are combined into one in this thesis. These types of characterisation are textual; they describe a character’s traits through words and sentences. Direct definition describes a character’s trait by an adjective, an abstract noun or another kind of noun. Descriptions of traits are direct definition only if they come from “the most authoritative voice in the text”. (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 59−60) This means that only the authoritative or omniscient narrator can directly define characters in a reliable way. In Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, there is no reliable, omniscient or authoritative narrator; the story is narrated by many different characters with their diaries and through a few newspaper clippings and a ship log. Carol A. Senf (1979: 423) notes that “the narrators appear to speak with one voice; and Stoker suggests that their opinions are perfectly acceptable as long as they remain within their limited fields of expertise”. This denotes that there cannot be any direct definition of character in the novel as the group of narrators is not trustworthy. Despite this fact, I do need to trust the 23 definitions of many of the narrators keeping in mind that they come from different sources. The second type, indirect presentation, was used more frequently in 20 th century fiction than in the preceding centuries (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 61). It is more commonly used in characterisation in 21 st century fiction as well. When characters are presented indirectly, they are not defined by certain words like in direct definition, but presented through action, their speech, environment and external appearance. In indirect presentation a character’s features can be depicted by habitual actions or one- time actions. Habitual actions include things that a character does all through the narration and one-time actions are not part of the character’s routine. One-time actions make the character seem more dramatic and ever-changing. Habitual actions present the character as unchanging and often have an ironic or comic effect. Mieke Bal (1997: 116) agrees that a character’s actions are as important a part of a character’s description as its outer appearance or inner thoughts. Either of these actions can also be important in the course the plot, and thus reveal more of the character’s qualities. The speech of a character, in a conversation or in the character’s mind, can indicate its traits either through content or form (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 61−63). Characterisation of external appearance indirectly differs from direct definition in the way that the character’s appearance is described through words or phrases that do not directly define the character. When a character’s external appearance is described indirectly, the words or phrases refer to the character as a whole instead of describing one particular feature. Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 65) distinguishes between character traits that are not in the character’s control, like colour of eyes and height, and the ones that she or he can at least partially change or control, like clothes and hair-style. Jakob Lothe mentions behaviour as a part of his character analysis in his book Narrative in Fiction and Film (2000), which I will also discuss in this thesis as a part of a separate analysis section. Environment is the last way of presenting a character indirectly which Rimmon-Kenan introduces. Physical environment, such as house, town and street, as well as the social environment, such as family and social class, are often used to indicate the features of a character (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 65−66). As an example, in Dead Until Dark, the character of Bill the vampire lives alone in a large mansion and always prefers being 24 alone, which tells of his independence and of his recluse nature. Count Dracula can be described in the same way; he has secluded himself even much more than the character of Bill, mostly because most of the local people consider him a monster as they know that he kills people. Another feature of Dracula’s which is referred to a few times in the novel is his social class which, of course, is an important feature of this particular character and will be studied later in this thesis in addition to the previously mentioned features. A more sizeable milieu, as Lothe (2000: 84) says, can also have an effect on characterisation by which he means a whole city or even a forest. H. Porter Abbott (2002: 123−125) states that characters are the most challenging part of a narrative to investigate as they represent ourselves and we know ourselves only through narration. He also mentions flat and round characters which were originally introduced by Forster in his work Aspects of the Novel (1927). Flat characters are very predictable in their behaviour and have no depth in them. These kinds of characters are usually present in satire and comedy, but also in fantasy. Susan Mandala (2010: 120) quotes Hume and Mobley, saying that the characters of fantasy are most often thin and lacking depth. The novel Dracula can be seen partly as fantasy fiction and some of its characters, especially Count Dracula, are quite flat. The opposite of flat characters are round characters which are invariably more complex and have more depth than the flat ones. Round characters may also change and develop during the course of the story, according to Lothe (2000: 80), who continues by saying that it is also possible for a flat character to become a round one and gives the example of Don Quixote, the main character in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The vampire characters in the two other vampire novels, Interview with the Vampire and Dead until Dark, studied in this thesis are round characters as the novels are not comedies or satires and the vampire characters have complex features. Jonathan Culpeper studies characterisation through language mostly in plays in his book Language and Characterisation (2001). Culpeper examines how the words of a text create a picture of a character in the reader’s head. He also presents two different approaches to characters in characterisation: the humanising and de-humanising approaches. In the humanising approach characters are seen as imitations of real people 25 or actually as real people, and in the de-humanising approach characters exist only in texts and they are not considered human in any way (Culpeper 2001: 6−7). An opposite position to this point of view comes from Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 33) who notes that characters are not human beings, but are “person-like” because characters have been created on the basis of the reader’s understanding of what people are. Mieke Bal (1997: 115) agrees with this view by saying that literature is written about people but characters only resemble people; they are not real people and not made of flesh and blood. The characters studied in this thesis are a mixture of these two approaches. The vampire characters, female or male, in these novels are imitations of real people in some ways, even though they are not human or even real as such. They also only exist in the text, which is a part of the de-humanising approach, but in my opinion the characters in the novels in question do have humane qualities, which relates to the humanising approach. Moreover, all characters in fiction do have their basis in reality and in situations outside the text as stories are written by people (Toolan 1988: 97). Vampire characters have changed over the years and begun to resemble humans a great deal more than they did over a hundred years ago. Conversely, some features of the vampire have remained the same, like the fact that they still have some of that dark, evil side in them somewhere. On a lower level the presentations of characters in novels are based on the actual words of a sentence which are the elements that actually describe the character. Literary stylistics relates to the analysis of literature, and it uses linguistic techniques to support the interpretation of texts. (Jeffries 2010: 2) One of the main theoretical materials I will use as a background information source for adjectives in this thesis is Paul Simpson’s Stylistics (2004), which provides many different methods and theories of stylistics, including ways to study adjectives in different kinds of texts. Simpson (2004: 55) introduces one way of defining an adjective by saying that “adjectives ascribe qualities to entities, objects and concepts”. There are classifying adjectives, which, Simpson (2004: 55) says, “specify more fixed qualities relative to the noun they describe” and gradable adjectives which “can be graded by extending or modifying the degree or intensity of the basic quality which they express”. Simpson (2004: 55) mentions that 26 gradable adjectives can also “compare objects and concepts through expressions of comparative, superlative, equal and inferior relationships”. These kinds of adjectives can be found in the three novels studied in this thesis in the indirect definition section where they are presented and analysed. I do not have a separate section for direct definition in the analysis as there were no clear examples of this in the novels I have studied. 27 4 CHARACTERISATION AND CHANGE IN THE NOVELS In this chapter I will analyse the descriptions of characters I have found in the three novels, Dracula, Interview with the Vampire and Dead until Dark, primarily in the light of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s thoughts on characterisation. With the help of this theory I will study how the words and phrases show the change that has occurred in the female and male vampire characters over a hundred years and compare the descriptions of female and male vampire with each other. The sub section 4.1 of this chapter sheds light on the presentation of the characters in the novels under the sub headings of External Appearance, Behaviour, Facial Expressions and Vampire Abilities/Restrictions, Action, Speech and Surroundings and Family. Direct definition is less common in 20 th century writing than indirect presentation, and only one of the novels, Interview with the Vampire, I study in this thesis has been published in the 20 th century. This does not clearly show in the presentation of the characters, which is why I combine the two categories in the analysis. Directly expressed characteristics are usually depicted by another character who is the narrator of the novel or an omniscient narrator. All of the novels studied here are narrated by a character, mostly by the protagonist, but also by an omniscient narrator in some parts of Interview with the Vampire. The novel Dracula, which is narrated by several different characters in the novel, does not contain reliable direct definitions of characters as it does not have an omniscient narrator. An omniscient narrator can also be unreliable in some novels. A direct definition of character is achieved by using adjectives or abstract or other kinds of nouns. The adjectives describing female and male vampire characters in the three novels most often define appearance, such as facial features or personality features that describe the character clearly and directly. 4.1 Presentation of Characters in the Novels According to Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 61), when a character’s features are presented indirectly, they are disguised in the character’s external appearance, of which colour of 28 eyes and height and clothes and hairstyle are examples. This is the first category of analysis. I have also added a category to the analysis called Behaviour, Facial Expressions and Vampire Abilities/Restrictions which comes after the first category of External Appearance. This part consists of the analysis of the vampire characters’ supernatural abilities and behaviour. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan does not mention behaviour as part of indirect presentation, but Jakob Lothe mentions it in his introduction to indirect definition of character in Narrative in Fiction and Film (2000) therefore I will use Lothe’s theory on behaviour as a source in my thesis. The third category in this analysis chapter is Action, which can be divided into habitual action and one-time action. A character’s speech, of which the form and content are analysed, and surroundings and family are the fourth and fifth media through which a character can be defined indirectly according to Rimmon-Kenan, and these aspects are analysed in the subchapters 4.1.4 and 4.1.5. 4.1.1 External Appearance First, I will examine examples of indirect presentation of external appearance of the male and female characters in the three novels and compare the findings with each other. Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 65) divides the external features of a character into two categories: into the features that the character cannot control and the ones he or she can have an effect on. Colour of eyes, length of nose and height are examples of the first and hair-style and clothing are examples of the second category. Moreover, she mentions that some of the appearance features that could not be controlled before are controllable today through plastic surgery and modern cosmetics. (1983: 65) Modern cosmetics include the use of coloured contact lenses which make it possible for a person to control the colour of their eyes as well. In Dracula the male vampire Count Dracula’s appearance is often described as in the following examples: “Within stood a tall old man, clean-shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot […]” (D 21). These phrases, describing Count Dracula’s appearance, make him seem like someone who does not want to be noticed, but someone who is intelligent because he takes care of his appearance. 29 Dracula’s clothing also speaks of his class status: the colour black in clothing in the Renaissance and Medieval times indicated that the wearer was of high social class; mostly only the nobility wore black, peasants typically wore earthly tones. An example from Dracula describes Count Dracula’s facial features: “His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual […]” (D 235). The example depicts the vampire with very negative words, like ‘hard’ and ‘cruel’, which define it as someone who does not care for other people, but looks interesting nonetheless. Moreover, Dracula’s face is depicted as a monster’s; as something terrifying which Harker is shocked at when he sees it. Dracula is described by Mina, Harker’s wife in this example, which explains the last adjective, sensual, she uses when describing Dracula since Mina is under Dracula’s magic charm which makes her see the vampire as a lovely, mystical creature. The Count’s teeth and eyes are also described frequently in the novel by nearly all of the different narrators and very similarly, like in these examples: His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them. (D 53) His eyes flamed with devilish passion […]. (D 388) […] with a mouth full of white, sharp teeth. (D 188) […] his big, white teeth […] were pointed like an animals. (D 235) The three female vampires’ eyes and teeth in Dracula are described quite similarly as Count Dracula’s in the following examples: Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count’s, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great, wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. (D 51) All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. (D 51) […] the bright hard eyes, the white teeth […] (D 505) In the second sentence of the first excerpt the blond vampire’s eyes are not described as red like the other two vampire’s eyes, but blue like a gemstone and her hair is blond 30 compared to the dark hair of the other two vampires. This divergent description makes the blond vampire seem more human and more ordinary than the other two, whose eyes are dark and piercing. The blond vampire is used as bait when they lure Harker in the novel. She approaches him first when the three vampires try to feed on the man’s blood. The depictions of the teeth of the female vampires differ from the depictions of Dracula in the way that the females’ teeth are not describes as pointy or sharp, only white contrasted with red lips. Dracula’s sharp teeth can be compared to a wolf’s or some other canine animal’s teeth; thus the character has animalistic features which show in many of the following text samples about Dracula. These previously mentioned characteristics from Dracula resemble an animal’s appearance; thus, both male and female vampires are made seem powerful, ominous and threatening, but lively and surprising at the same time. Yvonne Leffler (2000: 141) states the same fact about Count Dracula saying that Dracula’s appearance awakens contradictory reactions, that he is both attractive and repulsive. Jonathan Harker actually refers to this in the novel in this excerpt: “But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge […].” (D 47). Harker says that before he even admired the Count, but when he saw Dracula’s strange behaviour, his feelings chaged, which only emphasizes the fact that Count Dracula awakens contradictory emotions. These contradictory emotions are also awakened in Harker by one of the three female vampires in Dracula: “There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive […]” (D 52). Harker develops an interest in Count Dracula’s intellect and sophistication in the beginning, but his feelings change as Dracula begins to haunt him and behave differently. In Interview with the Vampire the teeth or the eyes of the vampires are not emphasized as much as in Dracula, and as a result the characters do not seem as threatening and devilish in the novel. The features of one of the male vampires are actually compared to an angel’s instead of the devil’s: “He was no more human to me than a biblical angel.” (IV 17). Here Lestat is described as an evil creature that has no humanity left in him even though he is not directly compared to the devil. On the other hand the protagonist Louis compares himself and his vampire friend Lestat to the devil in the following way: 31 “We were devils. Our power inescapable.” (IV 51). In both of the previous examples Louis describes himself and the other vampire as something out of the ordinary and their strength as so immense that no human could possess it. The character of Lestat in Interview with the Vampire is depicted by Louis in the following way: “[…] and filled with a distaste for being so close to him, handsome and intriguing though he was.” (IV 25). The protagonist, the vampire character Louis, has a love/hate relationship with the vampire Lestat in this part of the novel. Lestat has just turned Louis into a vampire only a while ago, and Louis is fascinated by the mystical vampire, but at the same time hates him for turning him into that unnatural creature, which can be read between the lines. Louis’s new eternal life does not overwhelm him excessively, though, as he takes on a mission of finding others like him. Lestat, then, created Louis for his own need, Lestat’s need to have others around him to adore and love him. He did not care to think what kind of consequences it would have to turn Louis into a vampire. Another example from Interview with the Vampire describes the female vampire Claudia in the following manner: There was something dreadfully sensual about her lounging on the settee in a tiny nightgown of lace and stitched pearls; she became an eerie and powerful seductress, her voice as clear and sweet as ever, though it had a resonance which was womanish, a sharpness sometimes that proved shocking. (IV 102) This depiction of the character of Claudia emphasises her adulthood, her femininity, but at the same time reminds the reader that she still looks like a child. The character also seems very mysterious and unbelievable; it seems impossible that a girl who looks like a five-year-old can have an adult woman’s mind. In this scene the male vampire Louis is gazing at Claudia, instead of an omniscient narrator who might have a more objective view of the female character and nothing would be revealed about Louis’s character indirectly. Claudia’s character is very different compared to the other vampire characters in all of the three books, as she was made into a vampire as a young child 32 instead of an adult, and thus her outer appearance stays less threatening than the other female vampires’ looks. The vampire character called Pam is described as looking like a milkmaid in Dead until Dark: “[…] her round face and sweet features would have done credit to a milkmaid.” (DD 120). In all of the three novels studied here the outer appearance of the female vampires are described as being very beautiful and luscious. In Dracula the men have difficulties resisting the female vampires when they see the creatures’ appearance. Lucy, for example, is depicted as becoming even more beautiful as she is lying in her coffin as a vampire than she ever was when she was still alive. The female vampires give the impression of a pretty girl, but actually they are malicious killers on the inside. Beautiful outer appearance is a weapon for female vampires in all the three novels; the vampires use it to lure men so that they can to drink the men’s blood. In Dead Until Dark the character of vampire Bill is described as a beautiful man and a stereotypical vampire: […] his lips were lovely, sharply sculpted, and he had dark arched brows. His nose swooped down right out of that arch, like a prince’s in a Byzantine mosaic. […] his eyes were even darker than his hair, and the whites were incredibly white. (DD 2) This description makes the character of Bill show his fantasy figure features with the extremely dark eyes and inconceivably white whites. Bill is depicted quite differently than Count Dracula as Dracula’s eyes are often described as either red or blazing. A similarity between Bill’s and Count Dracula’s characters is that their facial features are strong and distinctive. In contrast, the male vampire Louis is described in a somewhat similar way as Bill: His eyes moved slowly over the finely tailored black coat he’d only glimpsed in the bar, the long folds of the cape, the black silk tie knotted at the throat, and the gleam of the white collar that was as white as the 33 vampire’s flesh. He stared at the vampire’s full black hair, the waves that were combed back over the tips of the ears […] (IV 4) Louis’ groomed appearance communicates of someone who is educated and of high self-esteem. He seems like someone who is wealthy or working in a high position. The descriptions of the external appearance of Dracula and the vampire characters in Dead Until Dark and Interview with the Vampire are quite similar as Count Dracula is described as an intelligent man who has an overall groomed appearance, but he also has some extreme qualities in his appearance. There are a few similarities between the descriptions of Dracula and Louis in particular: they are both described as being clad in dark coloured, fine and clean clothes. The three female vampires’ looks are portrayed in the novel Dracula as follows: “[…] three young women, ladies by their dress and manner.” (D 51). These women also dress and act as if they were wealthy ladies comparable to the male vampire characters in all of the novels. Conversely, both female and male vampires in Interview with the Vampire and Dead until Dark are described as humans on the outside since they are not depicted as having sharp looking teeth or eyes that seem as if they were burning as those of Dracula’s. The vampire character Claudia’s appearance and clothing is the subject of this following excerpt from Interview with the Vampire: […] a vision of lace and loveliness as she slipped on her coat; puffed sleeves again and a violet ribbon on her breast, her white lace stockings showing beneath the hem of the little gown, and her white slippers immaculate. (IV 129) Louis and Lestat dress Claudia in the nicest children’s clothes that they can find saving no expense. Claudia has learned to accept that her body will remain a small child’s body, so she lets Louis and Lestat dress her like a doll. Compared to the male characters in Dracula and Interview with the Vampire, Claudia is dressed in very noticeable and colourful clothes instead of only black. The similarity between the male vampire characters and Claudia is that they are clad in luxurious and expensive clothing. 34 This next example from Dracula describes Lucy Westenra after Dracula has turned her into a vampire: “[…] bloofer lady” (D 243). The phrase stands for ‘beautiful lady’ in Old English slang spoken by a young child. It is from a newspaper article called ‘The Hampstead horror’ in the novel, saying that the horrible woman has terrorised another victim. William Hughes (2009: 35) confirms that ‘bloofer’ means beautiful in Dracula when spoken by children of a certain class: “Her first victims are the children of the British urban proletariat: notably their speech, in which she becomes not the ‘beautiful’ but the ‘bloofer lady’ [...]”. She roams the streets of London looking for children to drink their blood to satisfy her endless bloodlust. The fact that she is only hunting children makes her character even more terrifying because there are depictions of her holding the child victim close to her chest like a mother protecting her child but instead she is hurting him or her. 4.1.2 Behaviour, Facial Expressions and Vampire Abilities/Restrictions The vampire Lestat’s behaviour is described as follows: “Lestat was masterfully clever and utterly vicious.” (IV 78). Here Lestat is described as evil like Count Dracula in the novel Dracula, but these descriptions appear rarely in Dead until Dark. One of these descriptions in Dead until Dark goes: “We’re all mean, Sookie. We’re all very strong and very violent.” (DD 119). In this example the vampire character Bill characterises vampires to the human character and protagonist Sookie in a very straightforward way. Bill says that all vampires are evil, including him, but he does his best to cover his true nature from the humans and live his life like humans do. When compared to Dracula, Bill seems very kind and caring, even though he says he is evil. Dracula does not explain his actions to anyone; he simply does evil things according to his nature. The main female character in Interview with the Vampire, Claudia, has some resemblance to Dracula; she also likes to kill humans to drink their blood feeling no actual remorse for what she has done. The next two examples reveal a humane quality in the vampire character Bill’s behaviour in Dead until Dark, as described by Sookie: 35 Bill proved as adept at social tactics as my grandmother. (DD 51) […] he was a polite dead man. (DD 53, italics original). Bill’s politeness makes him seem more like a human, even if he really cannot fight his vampire features. The same features are found in the other two novels as well. Both Count Dracula and Louis are very polite in their manner publicly; they greet and thank others as well as compliment them, but their vampire nature is still hidden somewhere under the surface. On the other hand, the character of Lestat from Interview with the Vampire is totally the opposite of Bill in his behaviour and manners. Lestat does as he pleases and bows to no one which makes him stand out from the other male vampire characters. Compared to the few female vampire characters in the three books, Claudia’s character is the clearest opposite to Bill, as she does not obey the rules of society. This is the result of her having been raised in part by the mischievous Lestat. Movement and behaviour of both male and female vampires in Dracula are in many occasions compared to animals, to a panther, cat, lizard, lion and to a leech or only to an animal or a wild beast. The following are examples of the animal references: […] move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall. (D 47) […] he lay like a filthy leech, […] (D 71) […] she actually licked her lips like an animal, […] (D 52). All the animals and creatures that the vampires are compared to in Dracula are disgusting or frightening to many; therefore the vampires gain the same qualities as animals such as inhuman agility and strength. The repulsiveness tells of the narrator’s attitude towards vampires. Count Dracula is most often likened to the filthy and disgusting animals. The female vampires in the novel are only referred to as an animal or an unappreciated animal, like a dog or a cat. These examples indicate that the male vampire Dracula is considered disgusting, but the female vampires are not. These references also depend on the narrator’s sex; the depiction is different when a male character is describing Dracula and when a female character is describing him. Moreover, the female characters are mostly under the Count’s spell when they describe 36 his faculties, which changes their attitude into more favourable towards him. The character Lucy’s similar depictions are analysed in the next paragraph. In the following example from Dracula the vampire Lucy’s behaviour is compared to an animal’s behaviour as well: When Lucy […] saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares; then her eyes ranged over us. […] With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. (D 288) Lucy’s behaviour is associated with a cat and a dog’s behaviour. These animals were not appreciated as much in the 1890s as they are today in most of the Western world; cats and dogs were actually considered evil in folklore at the time. She clearly has no human qualities anymore when this event takes place as she snarls and growls instead of saying something to the men. She acts according to her instincts in the excerpt when she tries to keep the men from taking her precious prey, the child that she is holding. Instinctive behaviour is not emphasized as much in the never vampire novels Interview with the Vampire and Dead until Dark. The vampire characters do not totally regress to the intellectual level of a dog in the other two novels as Lucy and often the other female vampires do in Dracula. The movement of the character of Lestat in Interview with the Vampire is similarly compared to the movement of a cat and to that of an animal: […] a graceful, almost feline quality to his movements. (Rice 2009: 13) […] changed his manner again into that of a stalking animal, eyes piercing the dark […]. (IV 33) Even though Lestat’s behaviour is compared to that of an animal several times in the novel, the animals in comparison are never filthy or disgusting as some of the ones Dracula is compared with. This tells that vampires, especially Lestat, are not considered as repulsive by the narrator Louis in Interview with the Vampire as they are to the 37 narrator(s) in Dracula. On the other hand, a narrator’s task is to mediate images to the reader and the mediated images do not necessarily tell of the particular character’s attitude or emotions. Lestat’s movement is also described as quite erotic: “[…] his movement so graceful and so personal that at once made me think of a lover.” (IV 18). Lestat is described like this by Louis who is very fond of him at this point in the novel. The fact that Louis is calling Lestat an animal shows that he no longer considers him human at all. Later in the novel Louis begins to develop hateful feelings towards Lestat as he finds out more about Lestat’s true nature. Count Dracula and the female vampires’ behaviour in the novel Dracula is the subject of the following paragraph. Count Dracula is often described as smiling in the novel: There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. (D 71) […] a kind of insolent smile […] (D 188) […] but the evil smile as quickly passed […] (D 421). The three female vampires are often depicted as laughing: […] then they all three laughed – such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. (D 52) […] with a laugh of ribald coquetry […] (D 54) […] such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room […] (D 54). These descriptions make Dracula and the female characters appear as they are out of their minds and as creatures whose only goal in life is to kill other living creatures to survive. In these examples the male and female vampires are described in the same way, but this is not very common in Interview with the Vampire or in Dead until Dark. In Interview with the Vampire Lestat is sometimes described as having a contemptuous smile on his face, but not very often. In Dead until Dark the vampires are often depicted as very grave and serious. 38 In Dracula the three female vampires are described as demons with a few different nouns like ‘fiend’ and ‘devil’ (D 54, 73). One of the clearest characteristic connected to these words and to the female vampires in the novel is evil nature and violence. Count Dracula is also called ‘a monster of the nether world’ (D 349) which is similar to the previously mentioned nouns used for the female vampires. In these extracts the characters are depicted as demons in a straightforward way instead of using multiple words or sentences as in the indirect way of presenting the traits of a character. Rimmon-Kenan mentions that a character can be described directly by an abstract noun, of which the noun ‘mystery’ is an example in the following extract from Interview with the Vampire, or any other kind of noun, of which the other nouns in the following extract are examples. (1983: 59). The following examples from Interview with the Vampire have nouns describing Claudia’s character: Claudia was mystery. (IV 100) Doll, Doll, I called her. That’s what she was. A magic doll. Laughter and infinite intellect and then the round-cheeked face, the bud mouth. (IV 102) the crowning jewel, the fairy queen (IV 274) By using these particular nouns, ‘mystery’, ‘doll’, ‘jewel’ and ‘queen’, in the examples the character of Claudia is portrayed as a very intelligent and beautiful but mysterious woman who looks like a sweet little child on the outside. Claudia also uses her child’s appearance as a weapon to lure victims with her innocence to drink their blood as mentioned three paragraphs ago. Her character differs from other female vampire characters because she looks like a child instead of a grown woman. The second example shows more of Louis’ own opinion about Claudia. He considers her the most attractive woman in the world and the loveliest companion in life one can have. The example also implies her high status in Louis’ opinion; she is the greatest jewel in a king’s crown for Louis. The strange abilities of Count Dracula become evident to the hunting party in the course of their journey. Here is an example of the behaviour of Dracula told by Van Helsing in his stumbling English: 39 The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere passing of the time; he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous […] (D 327). Van Helsing and the others of the hunting party, Harker in particular, have noticed that the vampire is immortal, can make himself look younger and that drinking blood makes him stronger as the passage states. The Count needs blood as nourishment and cannot live without it. In Dead until Dark (DD 123) Bill tells that the very old vampire called Eric does not need to drink blood as much anymore because of his old age. Eric differs from Dracula significantly in that Eric is able to control his lust for blood, but for Dracula it is a constant need. Dracula is clearly something that goes against the laws of nature and is completely unnatural, but Eric’s ability to control his lust for blood makes him human-like. This passage goes on with other notions of Dracula’s abilities; Van Helsing states that Dracula is able to transform into a wolf and a bat and has an enormous amount of strength. Nursel Icoz (2006: 212) states in her article that the desire to be able to change form “may be seen as seeking to become everything without ever losing the self”. She continues that the ability is also the desire for a symbiosis with nature, to be able to interchange with it (Icoz 2006: 212). The character Van Helsing also mentions that the vampire has no mirror-image and casts no shadow. These abilities and features are common for many commercial vampire characters today, but they reveal that Dracula has no human features in him. These two last features make the vampire seem like he does not exist at all as his image is not visible in the mirror, and he has no shadow which refers to the notion that the vampire exists within us and telling people to think about their own actions more frequently instead of blaming others first. The vampire Dracula’s restrictions as a vampire are the subject of the next text samples: “[…] he can only pass running water at the slack or the flood of the tide.” (D 328–329) and “He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be someone of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please.” (D 328). The first 40 sample describes the restriction of Dracula’s mobility; he can only cross running water, like a river, when the tide is at its lowest or at its highest. The vampire is not able to enter a house without an invitation from the owner of the house. His restrictions tell of his weaker side; even the terrifying vampire Dracula has restrictions behind his all- powerful image, but at the same time these restrictions emphasize his vampire nature. This connotes that vampires represent our repressed fears and desires, but there is still a need of control in those emotions; it is not acceptable for the emotions to overflow, which is why vampires usually have some restrictions to their abilities. Dracula has unmistakably acted as a model for many later vampire stories, but many of the characters in the modern novels do not possess all of these previously stated characteristics as discussed in the two following paragraphs. The vampires in Interview with the Vampire and Dead until Dark are immortal and have very much strength and agility, but they are not able to transform into any other being or make themselves younger like Count Dracula. The female vampire Pam’s physical strength is described in this example from Dead until Dark: “[…] Pam held her upper body in a grip that kept the girl’s body absolutely immobile.” (DD 227). This female character is portrayed somewhat differently here compared with the female vampire characters in the other two books. She is described as physically strong but the other vampire Eric has commanded Pam to keep the girl still, which tells of the maker’s relationship to his or her progeny. In this novel the vampire who has made a person a vampire, as Eric in the example, has complete control over his or her progeny, who is Pam in the example. Dracula’s power over the three female vampires in the novel Dracula is similar to Eric and Pam’s relationship in Dead until Dark. The male vampires are described as having immense physical strength as in the following extracts from Dracula and Interview with the Vampire: This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men. (D 324) […] his arm was like the weight of an iron bar. (IV 19) 41 The examples emphasize the vampires’ unnatural amount of strength. Count Dracula and Lestat from Interview with the Vampire have as much strength in the descriptions as the female vampire Pam in Dead until Dark. In Dead until Dark the vampire character Bill is able to hover in the air and the older vampire Eric is able to fly, but they do not usually let humans see these abilities. The fact that the new vampires have less strange abilities and that these abilities are not emphasized makes the characters more human- like. In Dead until Dark a fictional disease can make vampires weak for a month, which is a restriction to a vampire in this example: Even Sino-AIDS didn’t kill vampires as surely as the AIDS virus killed humans, but it left the undead very weak for nearly a month, during which time it was comparatively easy to catch and stake them. (DD 77) Sino-AIDS is the only disease that affects vampires in the novel. It can make vampires weak for a month if they get the disease through the blood of a human carrier, but it is fatal only if the vampire drinks the infected blood several times. This restriction differs from the restrictions that Count Dracula and Louis have as vampires. Dracula does not seem to have anything that would make him weak for a short period of time; there are only descriptions in the novel of how he can be killed and the restrictions to his supernatural abilities. In Interview with the Vampire, the vampires grow weaker when they drink the blood of a human who has ingested a large amount of alcohol or has drugs in her or his system. Therefore, the vampire characters Lestat, Louis and Claudia have a weakening factor as well, which clearly comes directly from the human world; AIDS, alcohol and drugs are actual problems for people. The restrictions of the vampires in Dead until Dark, again, make them more human-like as Sino-AIDS is quite harmful to them as AIDS is to humans. The following phrase is from Harris’ Dead until Dark: “[…] the legally recognised undead.” (DD 1). In this example from the beginning of the novel the vampire population in general is referred to as an integral part of society. When contrasted with the character of Count Dracula in the novel Dracula, the vampire population in Dead 42 until Dark seems like another minority group in society instead of the frightening and devilish character of Dracula. Being part of society also obligates the vampires to obey the laws of society. Count Dracula does not have these obligations, which leads to him almost destroying the whole population of England. 4.1.3 Action A character’s characteristics can be indicated through habitual or one-time action. These three sentences from Dracula illustrate Count Dracula’s habits: When the count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and suddenly he made a grab at my throat. (D 35) As my eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with giant’s power draw it back. (D 53) With a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the woman from him […] (D 53). Count Dracula’s violence as habitual action makes a clear note of his vampire nature and the aggressiveness which is a key characteristic for him in addition to many other fictional vampire characters. He attacks humans to drink their blood because of his compulsive need to drink blood to stay alive. Furthermore, the violence emphasizes Dracula’s animal nature: instead of solving the situations in a civilised and humane way, like through verbal communication, he uses violence. This is Dracula’s habitual action because it is depicted in such many occasions in the novel. Lestat in Interview with the Vampire is quite similar to Dracula’s character, as Lestat kills humans as much as Dracula and commits his kills in a violent and uncompassionate way. Count Dracula’s violence shows through other kind of action as well. This example depicts it: …I heard the voice of the Count calling in his harsh, metallic whisper. His call seemed to be answered from far and wide by the howling of wolves. Before many minutes had passed a pack of them poured, like a pent-up dam when liberated, through the wide entrance into the courtyard. (D 62– 63) 43 In this piece of text Dracula calls a pack of wolves to kill a woman in the yard of the castle. The woman has come to rescue her child, whom the Count has abducted for the female vampires to drink blood from. Wolves are considered frightening and merciless killers in folklore which shows also in Dracula’s character as he is the master of the wolves. He is even more ruthless and cunning than the animals as he can actually control the beasts. The character Van Helsing mentions that Dracula can command other animals in addition to wolves: “[…] he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat – the moth, and the fox […]” (D 324). He says that Dracula can only command the animals many people consider disgusting or frightening which make Dracula even more frightening and unnatural. Either female or male vampire characters in Interview with the Vampire and Dead until Dark are not able to command animals. The actions of the female vampires are depicted only in a few instances in Dracula; the depictions are generally limited to the female vampires’ external appearance and behaviour which I analysed under the headings 4.1.1 External Appearance and 4.1.2 Behaviour, Facial Expressions and Vampire Abilities/Restrictions. In the other two novels the female vampires’ actions are depicted as explained in the paragraphs after the analysis of the female vampires appearing in Dracula. The three female vampires in Dracula are described as appearing from nowhere in the next example: “The phantom shapes which were becoming gradually materialized from the moonbeams, were those of the three ghostly women…” (D 61–62). This example emphasizes the female vampires’ supernatural qualities, makes them seem like ghosts instead of vampires. There is magic in the number three; there are many examples of three female characters in fiction, the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth for example, that achieve greater power when they are together. The fact that the origin of the women in Dracula is unknown adds to their mysticism and thus creates more interest in them as well as makes them more horrific in the eyes of the human characters. Appearing from nowhere is habitual action for the female vampires in 44 Dracula, but in the other books Interview with the Vampire and Dead until Dark the female or male vampires are not able to disappear and appear again at will. In Dracula, the character of Lucy, who becomes a vampire in the course of the story, drinks the blood of a child in the following example: […] we saw a white figure advance […] which held something dark at its breast. […] We could not see the face, for it was bent down over what we saw to be a fair-haired child. There was a pause and a sharp little cry, such as a child gives in sleep […]. […] by the concentrated light that fell on Lucy’s face we could see that the lips were crimson with fresh blood […]. (D 287–288) Here, Lucy’s husband and the other men, who have been taking care of her, see her as a vampire for the first time and begin to believe that vampires exist. She drinks the blood of the child which she has done a few times before this event. Thus, it is habitual action for the character of Lucy. On the basis of this occasion, Lucy has lost most her humanity and become a full blown vampire since she has attacked many children to satisfy her thirst for blood. She only targets young children, but she does not kill them, like the male vampire Lestat kills his victims in the novel Interview with the Vampire, for instance. The reason why she only attacks young children is that they are easy to seize. She may also have motherly feelings toward them, which is why she only feeds on the children and leaves them alive. In Interview with the Vampire feeding on the blood of a child or a baby is something very satisfying and fulfilling for the male vampires. The blood of a child tastes better to the characters than the blood of a grown- up person, because children are often more healthy. Claudia, the female vampire in Interview with the Vampire, tries to kill Lestat in this excerpt: “[…] she gashed his throat, and he let out a sharp, choking cry.” (IV 136). This example depicts Claudia’s one-time action which is very important for the course of the story and for the development of Claudia’s character. One-time action is often “a turning point in the narrative” according to Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 61), as this particular action is in Interview with the Vampire. Killing Lestat frees Louis and Claudia from Lestat’s power and they leave for Europe to find other vampires, which is a completely 45 new turn in the events. Claudia also gains more power over Louis as he is a kind person and wishes no harm to anybody. This situation makes Claudia very pleased with herself, and Louis stays completely under her control, dressing her and giving her everything she wishes. Vampire Claudia’s habitual action shows in these phrases about her: “fierce killer” (IV 97), “Sister death and sweet death” (IV 104) and “monster child” (IV 200). The vampire character Claudia is described as a hunter who lusts for human blood. She is seen as a cold and brutal killer despite her outer appearance of a child. Her outer appearance makes her character even more frightening as young children are often seen as sweet and kind. It is interesting that Claudia does not learn from her “father” Louis’s example and kill only animals to feed on although she adores him, but kills humans at random without a hint of compassion. She has learned her killing habits from her other “father”, Lestat, who kills humans for blood all the time. One-time action by the protagonist Louis in Interview with the Vampire occurs when he becomes a vampire by drinking blood from the other vampire Lestat’s wrist. Louis says: “…I said good-bye to the sunrise and went out to become a vampire.” (IV 15) This action can be considered a turning point in the character Louis’ life as his life as a human being ends, and he begins his immortal life as a vampire, living only in night- time. Louis hates his life as a vampire, but he was not able to choose between a human life and the life of a vampire. Despite his destiny, he decides to make the most of it and tries to find other vampires to live with. His efforts show that he is a determined character who wishes to grow as a person instead of only having fun and killing people as the other vampire character Lestat does. One occasion of Count Dracula’s one-time action happens when he forces Mina Harker to drink his blood: […] his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. […] a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast, which was shown by his torn-open dress. (D 387–388). 46 This part is an important event in the course of the story, in which the human characters actually see Dracula in the act of turning Mina into a vampire by drinking her blood from her body. It is an important scene, as it is the first time they see Count Dracula draining blood from a victim. The incident eventually leads to Dracula’s destruction at the end of the novel since the men who are hunting him have found him and truly seen what he does to people. Dracula’s actions tell of his craving for exaggeration and attention; instead of draining someone else’s blood and in a more hidden location, he chooses Mina and drains her blood in a house full of other people. He does this to take revenge on Mina and the band of men who have been trying to stop him from conquering England. The Count also has a weakness for beautiful, young women, which leads him to Lucy and Mina. Louis in Interview with the Vampire and Bill in Dead until Dark differ from Dracula’s dramatic way of life; they wish to continue on living mostly like humans despite their lust for blood. In Dead Until Dark the vampire Bill’s one-time action is saving the protagonist Sookie’s life by letting her drink his blood, but not turning her into a vampire. This part is very significant for the course of the story and for the development of Bill’s character because he does not kill Sookie, but restores her to health. Vampire blood is healing for humans in a controlled amount in this story. Bill says to Sookie in the novel: “You’ll heal. Quickly. I have a cure. But you have to be willing.” (DD 35). The vampire’s action tells of his humane side, and that he still wants to help others and especially humans, given that a vampire would usually kill and drink the blood of a human. Compared with the vampire character of Dracula, the character of Bill is different to some degree when it comes to humane qualities, as Dracula is depicted as an unnatural creature that only pretends to be friendly towards humans in order to get to his goal of sucking the blood out of as many humans as possible. Compared with Louis in Interview with the Vampire, Bill’s character is quite similar to Louis as he is also very human-like in his manners and he does not like to kill humans. There is the synthetic blood product in Dead until Dark that Bill drinks instead of killing living creatures. 47 4.1.4 Speech The boy who interviews Louis the vampire in the novel Interview with the Vampire makes a note that the vampire has a French accent in his English: “It’s just a slight sharpness to the consonants, that’s all. I never guessed it was French.” (IV 5) The character’s French accent makes him appear very sophisticated and artistic, as the French culture dates back hundreds of years and it is known for its celebrated artists in different fields. These features have been characteristic to the vampire from the times of Dracula, but these features of intellect and sophistication are emphasized more in Rice’s Interview with the Vampire than in Dracula. In Dead until Dark the vampire characters do not have high artistic talents and they do not read books very much. In the next part of the conversation Claudia the vampire pleads Louis to go and do her favourite thing with her in Interview with the Vampire: “Only kill with me tonight. You never let me see you kill, Louis!” (IV 102). These words emphasize Claudia’s ruthless and compassionless nature, as she thinks of killing humans as a hobby. The second sentence implies something about Louis as well: he is trying to protect Claudia from the horrors of killing humans. He also feels guilty for making Claudia a vampire, as he was in a way forced to do it by the other vampire character Lestat. Furthermore, Louis thinks that there is nothing good in being a vampire. Another phrase which highlights Claudia’s killer nature is: “Let flesh instruct the mind.” (IV 121). She says this to Louis, trying to make him embrace vampire life and to kill humans without remorse. She is saying that he should enjoy killing humans and sucking their blood instead of reading and going to the theatre, because it is what vampires are like. Louis, the vampire in Interview with the Vampire ponders on his identity in this extract from the novel: I don’t know whether I come from the devil or not! I don’t know what I am! […] I am to live to the end of the world, and I do not even know what I am! (IV 70) 48 At this point in the novel Louis begins to wonder what it truly stands for to be a vampire. He has an eternity to find out what he actually is, which makes him very nervous. This tells of his inability to adapt to the changes that have made his life turn into something quite other than before. Louis is afraid of what is to come, which is part of the reason why he travels to Europe to find other vampires and to ask them what his meaning in life is. These reactions to a significant change in life are quite human-like: Louis behaves as any real person would in a similar situation. He feels fear for what is to come and wishes to find out what he is to do with his life. The vampire character Bill in Dead until Dark behaves similarly when he tries to fit into the human society as a vampire and thus as a stranger. The following two lines are stated by two of the three female vampires appearing in Dracula: Go on! You are first, and we shall follow; yours is the right to begin. (D 52) He is young and strong; there are kisses for us all. (D 52) In this scene the female vampires attack the human character Harker and try to drink his blood. One of them manages to drink Harker’s blood from his neck before Count Dracula notices and stops the women. This part emphasizes the women’s primal nature, but at the same time that they are clearly under Dracula’s control because they stop when the Count tells them to. The female vampires do not seem to have personalities of their own, as the Count is always there to tell them what to do or not to do. However, the three vampires have acted against Dracula’s orders by attacking Harker before their master due to their insatiable need for blood. This is how they are similar to the female vampire character Claudia in Interview with the Vampire: she also attacks and drinks people’s blood without listening to what her “father” Louis tells her to do. The women that Dracula bites in the novel, Lucy and Mina, are under his spell after their encounter with him, and Lucy becomes a vampire. She cannot do anything else than try to find the next victim to drink blood from, as she is not human anymore. Lucy even tries to seduce her husband so that she can drink his blood in this part of text: 49 “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!” (D 289). This differs a great deal from the female vampire character Claudia in Interview with the Vampire. Claudia has been raised into the vampire ways and adulthood by Louis and Lestat, but she becomes a very independent person in the course of the story and she does not take any orders from the men. In an example from Dracula, the Count speaks to Mina before making her drink his blood: And so you, like the others, would play your brains against mine. […] You know now, and they know in part already, and will know in full before long, what it is to cross my path. […] You have aided in thwarting me; now you shall come to my call. When my brain says ‘Come!’ to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding; […]. (D 396) After saying this Dracula makes Mina drink his blood, and she is under his spell which means that the Count can tell her what to do only by thinking of it. This part of Count Dracula’s speech indicates that he will not do anything according to anyone else’s will and destroys everyone who crosses his path. Dracula says the previous as a revenge on Mina for turning against him; he will make her a vampire and his servant. Later in the novel Dracula the Count swears to take revenge upon the group of men that have been hunting the vampire: My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine – my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. (D 422) In the sample, the men that are chasing Count Dracula are close to catching him, to which he responds by threatening the men of the hunting party. Dracula is obviously driven only by his lust for blood, and through it, his need to conquer the world. Moreover, this part of Dracula’s speech indicates that he prefers young women as his prey. He preys on the women in part because it annoys the men of the hunting party 50 more than if he targeted men they did not even know. Gina Wisker (2005: 56) agrees that the British men feel that Dracula is a threat to “the ownership of the purity and sexuality of the women of the family”. On the basis of the passage, Dracula can be seen as a confident conqueror whose only goal is to make every person a vampire and rule the world. The vampires, female and male, in Interview with the Vampire and Dead until Dark do not have similar boastful goals of conquering the world as Dracula has, as they only wish to lead their lives in peace and kill some humans now and then. A few lines from a scene with Count Dracula and Jonathan Harker describe similar compassionless killer features of Dracula as before: “Listen to them – the children of the night. What music they make! […] Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.” (D 25). By “children of the night” the character of Dracula is referring to wolves howling outside the castle. The latter sentence is the Count’s comment to Harker’s strange facial expression and his comment expresses that the wolves are his kin and he is as vicious a killer as the wolves. He also says that humans can never understand the vampire nature. Dracula does not speak of killing as openly as the female vampire character Claudia does in Interview with the Vampire, but it must be noted that Claudia is speaking to another of her kind, a vampire, and Dracula is speaking to a human he has only recently met. In both novels the vampire characters are trying to keep their vampire natures hidden from humans in order to keep humans from eliminating them and to be able to keep killing. Dead until Dark differs from the two previously mentioned novels, because in this story the vampires have revealed their existence to humans and have the same legal rights and responsibilities as humans. The following excerpt of text from Dracula is a line by the Count himself after he forbids the three female vampires to touch the human character, Harker: “Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. […] Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him, you shall kiss him at your will.” (D 54). Dracula’s words make him seem very much like a human being with the love he feels towards his female slaves even though the women are completely under his control. The Count’s way of showing his affection towards the female vampires is very different compared to what Louis the vampire in Interview with the Vampire would do and what is usually considered an act 51 of compassion or kindness. Alternatively, Dracula is giving the women a gift, but they cannot have the gift, which is the character Harker’s blood, until he has quenched his own thirst for blood. The character of Lestat the vampire says the following to the other vampires, Louis and Claudia: “I get weary of you both. Greedy, brooding vampires that haunt our own lives. I dislike it.” (IV 131). The character of Lestat can be seen as indifferent on the basis of this sample, as he says this to try to make Louis and Claudia seem the ones who have done wrong by not resorting to killing humans as much as he has. Lestat is bored because his fellow vampires do not act according to what a vampire should do and kill humans for blood as much and as savagely as he does it. There are obvious similarities between Lestat and the character Count Dracula: Dracula kills humans to get nourishment, but his killing is based on actual need instead of boredom. In another example from Interview with the Vampire Lestat is speaking to Louis: God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms. (IV 88–89) This excerpt of text confirms, again, Lestat’s merciless and evil nature. He thinks that even the Christian god has abandoned him and Louis because they are vampires. Lestat implies that they can do anything they wish as they are like gods on earth. His attitude towards life is casual and inconsiderate because he cannot deal with the fact that his life will last forever. Lestat and Count Dracula are very similar in their unconcerned way of life, but different in the way that Dracula has his grand plan of taking over the world compared with Lestat’s wish to only satisfy his own lust for blood in a smaller scale by killing anyone who comes his way. In this example the character Jonathan Harker has arrived to Count Dracula’s castle and Dracula welcomes him by saying: “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” (D 21). Here Count Dracula’s words suggest that if Harker enters his castle, the 52 man will be under the vampire’s control. The vampire has power and control over the man, but it seems like Dracula wishes Harker would succumb to his needs of his own will. Dracula’s manner of speaking is very polite and formal which is a part of the role he plays in order to carry out his evil plans. These words emphasise the notion that in the whole course of the story the vampire has the upper hand, if only the humans are willing to enter his or her ‘lair’ or be in any contact with them. The vampire character Bill’s thoughts are very different compared with Count Dracula’s, but very alike Louis’s. This example is from Dead until Dark: “I like the company of people who lead ordinary lives.” (DD 64). Here Bill says he wishes to be around ordinary human beings instead of vampires. Underneath the words he wishes to be human once more and could lead a normal life. The company of humans makes him feel like one again. However, he does not necessarily mean what he says: he is saying it to be nice and to prevent humans from turning against him and all other vampires. In comparison, in Dracula the Count’s only wish is to be able to kill more humans and become the ruler of the earth with his vampire minions that he has created. Bill does not have these kinds of grand plans in life. 4.1.5 Surroundings and Family The surroundings of a character include its physical environment, such as house and the city it lives in, as well as the human environment of the character, such as family, friends and social class (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 65–66). These traits are often used to build a character in a novel. Physical environment is studied first in this subchapter. The events of Dead until Dark take place in the imaginary town of Bon Temps in the state of Louisiana in the United States. Sookie introduces the town in the beginning of the novel in the following way: “But rural northern Louisiana wasn’t too tempting to vampires, apparently; on the other hand, New Orleans was a real center for them […]. It’s not that long a drive from Bon Temps to New Orleans […]” (DD 1). Here the town of Bon Temps, the home town of the vampire character Bill, is described as an area where vampires are beginning to settle down. Located in the American south, the town 53 has people from many different cultural backgrounds with different habits and religious beliefs. It is a small town where everyone knows each other, but people still have their own dark secrets. The second novel studied in this thesis Interview with the Vampire is also located in the state of Louisiana but not in the same city, but in New Orleans which is not an imaginary city. Both of the novels are popular examples of the Southern gothic. There is a description of New Orleans when Claudia and Louis are leaving for Europe in Interview with the Vampire: The old French city had been for the most part burned a long time ago, and the architecture of these days was as it is now, Spanish, which meant that, as we walked slowly through the narrow street where one cabriolet had to stop for another, we passed white-washed walls and great courtyard gates that revealed distant lamplit courtyard paradises like our own, only each seemed to hold such promise, such sensual mystery. (IV 151) This example shows Louis’ longing for the city of New Orleans when they are moving away. He describes the place in a very nice way, in words like “paradise” and “sensual” and that it is holding promise, and thus clearly has affectionate emotions for the city. Louis considers the city as home, as a place he can always come back to and feel comfortable in. New Orleans sounds like a paradise on the basis of this description; vast, private gardens with Spanish architecture and large and secure gates. These descriptions tell of the great wealth of the people who live there. The depiction of the city is a symbol for Louis’ current state of mind; he is leading a happy life with Claudia and expecting many more happy years which the secret gardens represent in his description. In this text excerpt Louis is describing the countryside when he and Claudia arrive in Europe, near the Black Sea: And it was strange country. Lonely, dark, as rural country is always dark, its castles and ruins often obscured when the moon passed behind the 54 clouds […]. We were naked and lost in their tiny hamlets […]. (IV 169- 170) When compared with the example in which Louis describes New Orleans in the previous paragraph, this example shows that the character does not have the same positive emotions toward the countryside in Europe as he has toward his home town. Louis hoped for more than this dark country before arriving to Europe. His descriptions tell of his great capability to adapt to new situations and places and that he is able to feel safe in new surroundings. New Orleans meant safety, peace and life for Louis, but the dark European countryside makes him feel miserable and depressed. This portrayal of Europe also emphasizes Louis’ state of mind as he is not happy about leaving his beloved home town of New Orleans which the darkness of the new countries and the ruins symbolise. This example describes the city of Paris from Louis’s perspective: But Paris, Paris as a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets – as vast and indestructible as nature itself. […] Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her – and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart […] (IV 204) In this example from Rice’s novel Louis is referring to a city as female, calling it “she”. He seems to love the place as much as he would love a woman, which is why he refers to Paris as a she and describes it with such flattering words. Now that Louis has found the city of Paris, his mood has changed into more positive compared to the arrival in Europe; he has found a new happy home which is why the depiction of the city is very positive. He feels that in a city that has endured the weight of history, his and Claudia’s life and happiness can last forever. The extract also shows that Louis is happiest in a large city with culture, history and masses of people instead of open countryside. In this novel Paris can be seen as the heart of Europe and as the city that, as Punter (1996: 162) says, best describes the time, the 19 th century. The boulevards and the magnificent 55 buildings with the theatres and operas are the things that make Paris the image of the 19 th century. Jonathan Harker, the human character in Dracula, describes the area where Count Dracula lives as being in the “[…] extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe.” (D 2). Dracula’s place of residence communicates that he wishes to stay away from society since his castle is located in the middle of the Carpathian Mountains. It also makes Dracula himself seem like someone who is wild and very few know who he actually is. Another example highlights the castle’s distance from society: “The castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. […] As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree-tops […]” (D 36). Dracula’s castle is located on a cliff, which is, according to Wisker (2005: 44), a prototypical place for the castle of an evil creature in Gothic fiction. The castle is also far away from other houses in the middle of a forest which is another typical place for a villain’s dwelling. Another similar example describing Count Dracula’s castle is also stated by the character Jonathan Harker: The castle was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable, and great windows were placed here where sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach, and consequently light and comfort, impossible to a position which had to be guarded, were secured. To the west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, the sheer rock studded with mountain ash and thorn, whose roots clung in cracks and crevices and crannies of the stone. (D 48–49) This sample of text emphasizes the fact that Dracula’s castle windows are positioned so that unwanted quests are not able to reach him or make a sudden attack towards the castle. On the other hand the windows are positioned so that they give light into the rooms making the castle comfortable at the same time. The castle stands on a hill or a mountain top so that there is a trench all around the castle. This invincibility symbolises 56 Count Dracula’s personality; he considers himself impregnable with his power over human beings. He as well as his castle is always invincible when enemies are trying to attack either of them. The next scene from Stoker’s Dracula continues with descriptions of the Count’s physical environment: “[…] the courtyard of 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.” (D 19) This example describes the castle in which the character of Count Dracula lives in the novel. Although described by Jonathan Harker, the castle reflects Count Dracula’s personality traits. The fact that there are no lights in the castle indicates that the Count is a secluded person and does not want others to know he is at home. The darkness also refers to his inner darkness: he has no light in him and that he is a negative person. The ruined and jagged castle refers to the character’s old age and degeneration and his life experience which comes with old age and perhaps to his cunning nature as well. The immense size of the castle symbolises the twists and turns of Count Dracula’s complicated mind. Harker mentions on many occasions that some of the rooms are locked in the castle and some, like the vast library, are open to him while Dracula keeps him there. Locked rooms in the castle symbolise Count Dracula’s hidden features and the rooms that others have access to represent the features he lets them see, like his intelligence which the open library suggests to. Count Dracula’s coffin and tomb are the subjects of this next extract from the novel Dracula: There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word, DRACULA. This then was the Un-Dead home of the King-Vampire, to whom so many more were due. (D 510) Van Helsing locates Dracula’s tomb at a chapel near Dracula’s castle in the above written example from the end of the novel. The enormous size of the coffin is comparable to the large size of his castle. Even the fact that the Count’s name is written on the coffin in generous sized letters conveys that he has no intention of being modest 57 when it comes to his possessions. He clearly shows others that he is of a noble lineage as his coffin and his place of residence is larger and more noticeable than other people’s. The house where the vampire character Bill Compton lives in is described by Sookie in the following examples from Dead until Dark: The Compton house, like Gran’s was set back from the road. It was a bit more visible from the parish road than hers, and it had a view of the cemetery, which her house didn’t. This was due (at least in part) to the Compton house’s higher setting. It was on top of a knoll and it was fully two-storied. (DD 71) At one point in the family’s long history, the Comptons had had a very nice house. Even in the dark, it had a certain graciousness. But I knew in the daylight you could see the pillars were peeling, the wood siding was crooked, and the yard was simply a jungle. (DD 71) Bill’s house is described as being hidden in the shadows, but on the other hand still visible as it stands on top of a hill. This can be seen to represent the vampire’s own wish to live amongst humans as one of them and keep his dark vampire nature hidden at the same time. The second piece of text also connects to the dark and light side of vampire Bill’s nature. Sookie, the human character, describes the Compton house as gracious when it is dark, but in daylight the damages time and weather have done to it are visible. Similarly vampires look, in Sookie’s eyes, beautiful and gracious in the dark, but they would die if they went into sunlight. Many vampires in Dead until Dark are hundreds of years old, which suggests that if they were humans their outer appearance would be very weathered and wrinkly, as Bill’s house is. Count Dracula’s social class is the subject of these next two examples: When I had done, I looked for a bell, so that I might let the servants know I had finished; but I could not find one. There are certainly odd deficiencies in the house, considering the extraordinary evidences of wealth which are round me. (D 26) We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the common dead. (D 32). 58 In the first example Harker is wondering why Count Dracula does not have servants even though all the curtains and other decorations he sees in the castle are of high value. Moreover, it was very common for people of high social class to have servants in the 19 th century. Clearly, Count Dracula is of high social class, but the lack of servants tells of his evil nature; no servants wish to be around him. The second example, in which Dracula is speaking to Harker, emphasises Dracula’s nobility as he calls himself a ‘Transylvanian noble’. He thinks that it is not suitable for the graves of the people of high social classes and of lower social classes to be in the same cemetery, because his vampirism would be revealed to people if this was so and that would most likely stop his attempt to destroy the world. 59 5 CONCLUSIONS The vampire character has evidently gone through a transformation which I have studied in this thesis. However, there is a clear difference in the degree of change in the female vampire characters compared to male characters; the change is not as significant in female as in male vampire characters. As a main conclusion and on the basis of the examples from the three novels I would say that the vampire character has changed into a more human-like figure that is beginning to become part of human society. Before, as in the novel Dracula, the male vampire character Count Dracula is depicted as a horrifying and unnatural monster that is able to cunningly transform into another being to hide his true nature. During the new vampire boom that began in the 1970s with Anne Rice’s novels, the vampire has become this mellow creature that women usually fall in love with in the stories. In Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire, the character of Louis has become a sexy, husband-material vampire who does not need to obey the laws of society and do nearly anything he wants, which is very appealing to modern readers. However, vampires are still described as having some limitations which is why the relationship of the vampire-human couple faces challenges evident in the novel Dead until Dark. Interestingly, most of the modern vampire novels still tell the tale of the male vampire who preys on the female human, identical to the characters in the novel Dracula. The female vampires in Dracula are servants for Count Dracula and instead of being separate characters that have their own traits; they are part of the Count’s possessions. It is a similar situation with the other two novels studied in this thesis. The female vampire character Claudia in Interview with the Vampire is not described as a very intricate figure; she also stays in the shadow of her two “fathers”, the male vampire characters Louis and Lestat. She does always get what she wants from the male vampires, though, which means that she has some power over them. In Harris’ Dead until Dark the only female vampire character that is depicted most in the course of the story, Pam, is also controlled by her boss Eric, a male vampire character. 60 The change in the vampire character is a clear indicator of changes in society. In the times of Dracula in the end of the 19 th century, people were contained in many aspects of life, including sexuality. 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