Vampire Women: I Want One, Please.

The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head . . . I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

No, that’s not from a pornographic work, nor a “racy” book from back in the day.   

It’s from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and if it reads like a man about to passively submit to oral sex, that’s not surprising; Stoker realized early on the ravenously strong link between vampirism and sexuality, far better than any of his predecessors.  Nowadays, there's scarcely a vampire in literature or film without an erotic subtext; it comes with the fangs, I guess. 

In Stoker's Victorian age, open sexuality was unacceptable (at least as conversation) in polite society, and a woman who was known to be sexually active was a social outcast.  

And what are vampires?  Social outcasts, blood-drinking children of the night.  

What better way to exemplify the “forbidden” nature of sexuality than by cloaking it in a work of fiction as nocturnal blood-letting murder? 

Notice also that the narrator, Jonathan Harker (if you know the book, you’ll remember he has a fiancée and romantic commitments at home), is extraordinarily passive, “waiting with beating heart” like a virginal teen on prom night.   The force of the near-rape (the Count interrupts it before it can be consummated) does not rest with the man but with the woman, and the man’s commitments to  a previous lover vanish; he is happy to let them go in the face of a strong woman. 

Gender-reversal statistics aside, rape has always been classified as a male fantasy or male activity--even, in some cultures, a male prerogative.   Stoker’s novel presented readers with a new kind of monster, but he did something more; by pouring erotic wine into the wine-skins of fantasy literature, Stoker ruptured the skins. 

The novel doesn’t confine sexuality to the denizens of the castle.  Both Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker (yes, Jonathan marries her; that vampire woman at the castle meant nothing to him, I’m sure) become stronger, more fearful and much more interesting when the Count puts the bite on them. 

Lucy, already in the throes of vampirism and speaking to her fiancé Arthur on her death bed, is “voluptuously” begging for a kiss.  Mina, once bitten, develops second sight, as well as extraordinary courage in facing the vampire women: “None safer from them than I am,” she says, thus declaring both her defiance of the powers of darkness and her affinity to them. 

If vampirism can do that to the pale, pallid and defenseless heroines of the Victorian age, imagine it inflicted on a girl with modern sexual and social sensibilities today! 

For some reason, I have seldom seen that metamorphosis in film or on TV.  True Blood was once a possible exception; now it only liberates human women to become vampire participants in a soap opera that long ago abandoned its source material.  The transformed girls still have little power above and beyond what they had as humans, but the sex is a little better.   There is none of the frightening strength and sensual role-reversal that Stoker crafted so subtly. 

In fact, vampirism in movies doesn’t seem to change most characters at all, except for the fangs.  Most fictional female victims, if they are sexually active, turn into sexually active vampires; if they are pale and repressed, they become pale and repressed vampires, pathetically uninteresting (no, I must be wrong; I’m sure Edward will love her forever just as she is). 

The best filmed depicition of the liberating force of vampirism was, I think, all the way back in 1966, with Hammer Films’ Dracula Prince of Darkness.  

The character of Helen, played by the inimitable Barbara Shelley, began the film as a repressed spinster; once the Count (the irresistible Christopher Lee) had put the bite on her, she turned into a free-wheeling sexual force, in scanty night dress, lovingly fanged and showing a lech for her sister-in-law (when Sis asks for her husband Charles, Helen says, “you don’t need—Charles”).  

A real vampire woman, like Helen in Prince of Darkness, like the women in Castle Dracula, is someone every man wants, and every woman wants to be, whether they will admit it or not.  She has strength, she stands up to the male population, she is the rapist rather than the rapee (if it should come to that) and she’s sexually relaxed and happy about it.

In the Stoker novel, when the Count confronts the vampire women and rages against them, they answer with “ribald coquetry”—they laugh like defiant happy hookers, with fangs.  

I want a vampire woman, please.  Any age, any time.  Soon, though, I'm not getting any younger.