Newswise — "Vampires in literature became familiar because they conveyed some broader meaning, not just because they were scary," explained Peter Logan, associate professor of English at Temple University. According to Logan, the popularity of the first fictional vampire, appearing in 1819, rested on its portrayal as a heartless, self-centered, ruthless aristocrat preying on middle-class people. English physician John Polidori based his story, Vampyre, on a published book of folk tales from Eastern Europe that was popular in England at the time. But the vampires in the legends were dirty, smelly zombies that looked a lot like Eastern Europe's uneducated peasants from the previous century, whereas Polidori's vampire was an aristocrat who circulated in the highest circles and had mysterious appeal, particularly for women, even though he secretly despised them and everyone else.
"The conflict between the ruling Lords and the up-and-coming middle class was bitter at the time, and Vampyre captured that middle-class resentment well," said Logan.
Appearing at the end of the century, Bram Stoker's Dracula reflects a changed social environment in which the British Empire was at its height and conflicts with the colonies in Africa and Asia were a major concern. "For these changed times, Count Dracula is still an aristocrat, but he is also an outsider from the fringe of Europe, and he brings his mysterious ways to London, the heart of England and the center of the empire," said Logan. Some critics view this as a reflection of English fears of being "contaminated" by colonial culture—a revenge of the colonized upon the colonizers, in which case the story warns about maintaining the imagined "purity" of England, he noted.
Looking more closes, Count Dracula also offers a lesson to women. His primary victim in the story is a young woman with unorthodox ideas about male/female relationships. She thinks it should be fine, for example, for a woman to have multiple boyfriends at the same time.
"This was the decade in which women in England were breaking out of an older, Victorian model in which women were supposed to have no desires for themselves, only for others, and particularly they were not to have sexual feelings," explained Logan. "The female victim in Dracula is a version of the "New Woman," as she was called at the time. Her best friend is considerably more proper. She survives while the New Woman does not."
In more contemporary times, the central figure in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976), Lestat, is still an aristocrat, but he's a conflicted and sympathetic figure. The melodramatic simplicity of good versus evil does not work in the time of American moral ambiguity following the Vietnam war; it was not clear to many who, exactly, was the "good" guy in that conflict, and who the "bad."
Said Logan, "At a time when the government was perceived as routinely lying about the facts of the war, no one knew who to trust. Lestat reflects that changed circumstance—as a vampire, he should be unambiguously evil, but he turns out to be a sensitive, charismatic figure who is more sympathetic than horrific."
"We can look at vampires in literature and cinema as an empty vessel that can be filled up with any of a variety of contemporary issues. It's a tool with multiple uses, and clearly one that continues to be meaningful in different ways to a new generation," said Logan.
Peter Logan is the author of two books on nineteenth-century British literature. His book Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (University of California Press, 1997) argued that there was a connection between early nineteenth-century first-person narrative forms and ideas about hysteria and nervous disorders at the time. Logan is also co-director of Temple University's Center for the Humanities.
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