The Modern, Toothless Vampire
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In the earliest beginnings of the vampire legend, back with Paladori and Stoker, the legend was a metaphor for rape. The vampires were inevitably aristocratic and attractive, the better to lure in their victims. The act of feeding was monstrous, just as monstrous as the rape it represented, and just as horrible for the victim. The victims would either die or be turned into monsters, just as a woman, in those times, once raped would be better off dead, for she would be seen as a monster in the eyes of society, something unclean and defiled.
Fast forward to the future, and Anne Rice gives us a new breed of vampire, one which is capable of remorse. Louis, despite being the narrator and protagonist of Interview with the Vampire fell flat as a character partially because of his broodiness. Lestat, monstrous and murderous and the constant trixter, was the more interesting character throughout the series. I continued to get disgusted with Louis just as Lestat seemed to for his eternal pouting and refusal to accept that he’d taken a step up the food chain.
At this point, the victims were still very much victims. The embrace of the vampire was such that it causes ecstasy in the victims to the point that they desire it rather than fighting it. When Louis took mercy on a child, he only created a worse monster than that which had killed her.
Even then, the embrace is a metaphor for sex in which the vampire has all of the power, even when the victim is at least partially consenting. The ecstasy of the embrace works like the date-rape drug, allowing the vampire to feed without worrying about the victim fighting back.
Move forward a bit further, and finally the victims of these monsters find a way to fight back, through Joss Whedon‘s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The victims have their own advocate in Buffy, who is exactly the thing the vampires like to eat best, a beautiful young woman. But along comes Angel, a vampire that I got just as disgusted with as I did Louis. Brooding, pouting, and prone to heroics, he’s a vampire with a soul, but that soul and that inability to feed on anything more than sewer rats makes him toothless, and toothlessness in a vampire, following the old metaphor, is equivalent to impotence. This is particularly true in the case of Angel, for it is sex that triggers the loss of his soul, turning him back into the monster. I liked him better when he was Angelus. At least then he wasn’t going around with a ten-ton sign around his neck saying:
“PITY ME! For I am hungry and surrounded by food, but cannot eat!”
The correlation between a vampire’s inability to bite and impotence continues throughout the series with the introduction and “de-fanging” of the vampire Spike through a behavior modification implant. When he discovers that he cannot partake of the tasty morsel presented to him in Willow, they have a discussion not akin to what might follow when a man attempts to have sex and finds that he cannot perform, with similar anxieties on the part of both the victim and the monster.
However, this is not a universe where the victim is helpless, even those without superpowers, and after consoling the impotent vampire, Willow breaks a lamp over his head and escapes. Damsels in distress in Joss’s world don’t wait around helpless and hoping for rescue; they rescue themselves.
And I get disgusted and annoyed with these toothless, impotent, brooding vampire. They can’t or won’t allow themselves to be what they are and instead try to be something resembling a nobler and more self-sacrificing version of human. Even while de-fanged and souled, Spike of BtVS was much more attractive and much less annoying of a character because he never stopped being a vampire. Even with a soul, even when he was fighting on the side of good, he was a ruthless and unapologetic killer.
With the Twilight vampires, the victims are once again unable to fight for themselves as they had been throughout a brief period with Buffy. Gone is the independent, strong, and back-talking heroine, the heroine in these novels is weak and dependent on super-powered and dangerous creatures to protect her from other super-powered and dangerous creatures. The damsel in distress is back to waiting for her hero instead of saving herself, and this time the hero is the monster, the rapist, castrated.
The metaphor may still work as it always did, as a warning against pre-marital sex, but what exactly does it mean now that we are encouraging girls to put their trust in monsters and be happy little damsels waiting for a protector to save them? After all, not all of the monsters out there are defanged or celibate, no matter how attractive they might appear.
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