From Marketwire  via  Slashdot

TEMPE, AZ--(Marketwire - August 23, 2007) - University of Advancing Technology (UAT) instructor and senior web developer Joe McCormack has completed work on a web-based application that translates English words into cuneiform script from the Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and the hieroglyphic script of Egyptian. The tool may be seen at his website, virtualsecrets.com.

The translator works by converting cuneiform and hieroglyphs, both used in the earliest forms of writing, into English words. For example, typing "I am a father" into the Ancient Egyptian translator yields hieroglyphs that roughly translate to "I am" and "father." The translator has been featured on several museum websites around the world and websites specializing in resources for the ancient world.

McCormack, a UAT web developer by trade, worked more than 1,000 hours on researching the cuneiform and hieroglyphic and building the tool and its accompanying website. Inspiration for the project stemmed from his fascination with the science fiction television series "Stargate SG-1," which featured ancient Egyptian mythology and symbols as plot points. These caught McCormack's eye and lead to his research.

The website translator engine took approximately an hour to create, with the language database occupying two hundred hours to line up cuneiforms and hieroglyphics with text descriptors and make a hierarchy to prioritize the information.

"One of the reasons something as big as what I've done hasn't been done before is that there are thousands and thousands of symbols," said McCormack.

McCormack is talking with museums and institutions to garner further exposure. In particular, the Egyptian translator has been a hit; more than half of the 1,100 daily hits stem from the Egyptian hieroglyphic alone. More than 30 countries in six continents are using the website for translations.

About UAT: The University of Advancing Technology is a unique, private college that serves its student body by fostering knowledge creation and academic excellence in an environment that embraces the young technophiles of the world. With three centers of research and a suite of technology-centered undergraduate and graduate degrees, the University is a recognized leader in technology education.

For more information, please visit:

http://www.uat.edu

http://www.virtualsecrets.com

Echoes of Dracula: Racial Politics and the Failure of Segregated Spaces in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. 

Kathy Davis Patterson 

[Dr. Kathy Davis Patterson is Assistant Professor of English at the Kent State University Tuscarawas Campus. She is currently secretary of the Lord Ruthven Assembly.] 
 

On 17 May 1954, the modern Civil Rights Movement in America experienced its first major victory with the Supreme Court's ruling in the Brown vs. Board of Education case. This landmark decision established that “the 'separate but equal' argument for segregation was inherently unequal” and thereby “opened the door for a wealth of legal battles against segregation at the local, state, and federal levels. It gave civil rights organizers their first serious victory of the 20^th century and made it clear that blacks were indeed citizens of the republic, with rights to match” (SparkNotes). Against this backdrop, in the same year, one of the most prominent vampire novels of the twentieth century appeared in print: Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. Coincidence? Perhaps, but the juxtaposition of a burgeoning Civil Rights Movement with a key moment of literary reinvigoration for the vampire is most intriguing. 

   The link between literary vampires and racialized constructions of monstrosity is nothing new. Numerous studies of Dracula, in particular, have explored the characterization of Bram Stoker's infamous Count as an allegorical representation of late nineteenth-century British anxieties regarding the influx of large numbers of Eastern European Jewish immigrants onto English soil. In “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Stephen Arata discusses how “Stoker … transforms the materials of the vampire myth, making them bear the weight of the culture's fears over its declining status. The appearance of vampires becomes the sign of profound trouble” and “vampirism [marks] the intersection of racial strife, political, upheaval, and the fall of empire” (629). Jules Zanger echoes this view in “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews,” and Judith Halberstam devotes an entire chapter to it in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. According to Halberstam, Dracula “condenses the xenophobia of Gothic fiction into a very specific horror - the vampire embodies and exhibits all the stereotyping of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism” in which

  the Jew was marked as a threat to capital, to masculinity, and to nationhood. Jews in England at the turn of the century were the objects of an internal colonization. While the black African became the threatening Other abroad, it was closer to home that people focused their fears about the collapse of nation through a desire for racial homogeneity. (14) 

Halberstam's mention of black Africans as “threatening Others” is especially worth noting in the context of this study, as is Gwendolyn Whitehead's assertion that “The monstrosity of blackness is one of the final contributions of the nineteenth century to the modern myth of the vampire” (216). Such arguments clearly foreground the social, cultural, and political links between racism and vampire fiction of the Victorian era - links that carry forward into the modern era and are manifest in I Am Legend, where twentieth-century America replaces turn-of-the-century England as the nation under vampire threat. Thanks largely to the lasting impact of slavery and its attendant prejudices, the black African in this context is constructed as a monstrous Other that threatens the dominant society just as the Jew was perceived to threaten England: from within. It is my contention that the dramatic structure of Matheson's novel contains a very clear, racially charged subtext that reflects the cultural anxieties of a white America newly confronted with the fact that it can no longer segregate itself from those whom it has labeled Other. This Other may be constructively viewed as a manifestation of what Toni Morrison has termed an “Africanist” presence.

   In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison defines “Africanism” as “the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people” (6-7). Within the scope of early American literature, she contends that “Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence - one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness” (6). In other words, white Americans relied on their constructions of  blackness, literary and otherwise, as keys to defining their own white identities. This trend continued into the twentieth century and is articulated in I Am Legend, with its “heavily nuanced conflict” between Neville and the vampires.

   The plot of I Am Legend pits a solitary man against a host of vampires in a post-atomic war world. In the year 1976, Robert Neville is the sole survivor of a terrible plague that has turned the rest of humanity, including family and former friends, into nocturnal creatures thirsting for his blood. In this novel, vampirism is not a supernatural curse but a consequence of biological warfare - i.e., a new strain of bacteria for which there is no known cure. Neville's race is established very early and very directly as Caucasian. Matheson describes him as “a tall man, thirty-six, born of English-German stock,” complete with bright blue eyes (14). By contrast, the vampires have no obvious racial attributes per se. However, in Neville's mind, they are consistently referred to in connection with blackness. Reflecting on the plague that caused vampirism, Neville recalls the Black Plague and thinks to himself that “Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages” (28). At a moment of intense frustration during a hangover, his hatred of the vampires surfaces and he despairs: “It was no use; they'd beaten him, the black bastards had beaten him” (35). When the plague first began to spread and people began to panic, Neville recalls being dragged into a revival meeting where the preacher exhorted his audience: “Do you want to be changed into a black unholy animal?” (113) Perhaps the most telling expression of the vampire as an Africanist presence in the novel occurs during one of Neville's alcohol-induced mental ramblings. His raw sarcasm is worth quoting at length: 

        Friends, I come before you to discuss the vampire; a minority element if there ever was one, and there was one.

       But to concision: I will sketch out the basis for my thesis, which ... is this: Vampires are prejudiced against.

       The keynote of minority prejudice is this: They are loathed because they are feared …

       But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of other animals and men? ... Really, now, search your soul … is the vampire so bad?

       All he does is drink blood.

      Why, then, this unkind prejudice, this thoughtless bias? Why cannot the vampire live where he chooses? Why must he seek out hiding places where none can find him out? Why do you wish him destroyed?

      Ah, see, you have turned the poor guileless innocent into a haunted animal.  He has no means of support, no measures for proper education, he has not the voting franchise. No wonder he is compelled to seek out a predatory nocturnal existence.

      Robert Neville grunted a surly grunt.  Sure, sure, he thought, but would you let your sister marry one? (32) 

With its opening reference to a “minority,” its subsequent catalog of the very real problems facing the socially and politically disenfranchised, and its closing rejection of miscegenation, this passage couches Neville's feelings towards the vampires in explicitly xenophobic terms and creates a subtext within the novel that makes racial difference and vampirism synonymous. It also coats his efforts to exterminate vampires, though ostensibly acts of self-preservation in what he perceives as a world gone mad, with an air of genocide.

   Essentially, Neville is a white man who barricades himself in his house and spends most of his energy trying to keep the monsters out. He has established a segregated space that he fights to keep exclusively for himself, a small bastion of civilization in the midst of a suburban wilderness decimated by the effects of the plague. His character parallels, in many ways, the “self-conscious but highly problematic construction of the American as a new white man” which Toni Morrison posits as a focal concern of early American literature (39). Morrison quotes extensively from Bernard Bailyn's Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution, giving special attention to his chronicle of William Dunbar, an intellectual Scot who emigrated to Mississippi in the eighteenth century, acquired slaves, and built a successful plantation: 

… alone on the far periphery of British civilization where physical survival was a daily struggle, where ruthless exploitation was a way of life, and where disorder, violence, and human degradation were commonplace, he had triumphed by successful adaptation. Endlessly enterprising and resourceful, his finer sensibilities dulled by the arasions of frontier life, and feeling within himself a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half-savage world. (qtd. in Morrison 42) 

Morrison contends that this world is construed as “raw” and “savage” not only because “a nonwhite indigenous population” is present, but also “because there is ready to hand a bound and unfree, rebellious but serviceable, black population against which Dunbar and all white men are enabled to measure these privileging and privileged differences” (45). As it turns out, Bailyn's portrait of colonial America anticipates post-Apocalyptic America as Richard Matheson constructs it. Like William Dunbar, Robert Neville is a “borderland gentleman,” a white man who finds himself alone in a savage world where he must learn to adapt, relying on his own authority and autonomy to establish dominance over his environment. Vampires, not slaves, are the unruly “black population” he must confront and endeavor to control. They are also the contaminated Others against whom he measures his own state of humanity, with blood as the prevailing indicator of who's who. Under the lens of Neville's microscope, his own blood becomes the standard for identifying what is pure - and, by default, what is human: the middle class white heterosexual male.¹

   Both Neville's body and his house are under constant threat, watched by vampires who seek any means of access. Violence is one potential route, as witnessed by the amount of time Neville spends stringing garlic, replacing boards, and repairing the damage vampires inflict on the house at night. The most dangerously effective strategy, however, is sex. Female vampires can rouse Neville's lust with ease, and he agonizes with the knowledge that “The women were out there, their dresses open or taken off, their flesh waiting for his touch, their lips waiting for - My blood, my blood!” (Matheson 29) Like Dracula's Jonathan Harker before him, he is both tempted and horrified by the bodies and lips of female vampires, who do not trouble to hide their lusts. At one point, he nearly gives in to temptation and goes out to them. Significantly, this moment of weakness occurs immediately following his extended reflection on vampires as minorities and the possibility of miscegenation implied therein. For Neville, mating with a vampire would involve the penetration of his body not only by vampire fangs, but by the bacteria vampires carry. In his world of strict binaries (inside/outside, pure/impure, white/black, light/darkness, good/evil, human/monster), this type of mixing is a possibility he refuses to allow. His blood remains uncontaminated and he is determined to keep it that way. Still, the intense desire that he feels for the vampire women, when considered in terms of his whiteness and their “blackness,” carries echoes of the very real sexual exploitation of black female bodies by white men during the era of slavery and beyond.²

   Contextually, Neville enacts a predatory white male gaze. In Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, Anne Williams discusses  

the relation of the Male Gothic hero/villain's gaze to his identity and to a necessarily guilty desire, a transgression against the divine principle that flesh, especially female flesh, is a snare and a delusion. In Male Gothic the gaze is another aspect of those omnipresent boundary violations that lead, eventually, to punishment - looks may literally 'kill.' (145) 

   Robert Neville's gaze ultimately does lead to flesh-oriented transgressions against female vampires, and the boundary violations involved do lead to death for his chosen victims. As the novel progresses, he channels his frustrated sexual desire into a very practiced form of misogyny.  In his quest to isolate the bacteria that causes vampirism and discover various methods by which vampires may be destroyed, his test subjects are always female. At one point, pricked by conscience, he asks himself, “Why do you always experiment on women?” Almost immediately, he understands the implication of the question and tries to deny it, thinking “For God's sake! ... I'm not going to rape the woman!” His conscience, however, reveals underlying doubt: “Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood?” (61) His status as a sexual threat is very real, yet in scene after scene, he violates the bodies of female vampires every way but sexually. On one occasion, he steals a vampire woman from her bed, ties her to a chair, and attempts to force her to look at a cross.  When she fights him, he kills her (the implication is that he beats her to death) and throws her body out the front door as spoils for the other vampires. In another instance, he goes into a house, finds a young woman with blood on her mouth asleep in her bed, turns her over, lifts her skirt, and injects one of his experimental vampire-killing concoctions into her buttock. Another woman is pulled from her bed and dragged down the stairs of her home. When she starts to resist him, he drags her the rest of the way outside by her hair and throws her onto the sidewalk to suffer a lingering death in the sunlight. At this point, the reader is told that “Usually he felt a twinge when he realized, but for some affliction he didn't understand, these people were the same as he.  But now an experimental fervor had seized him and he could think of nothing else” (39, emphasis added). The Otherness of these women precludes their suitability as sexual partners and marks them as perceived threats to Neville's life, to the sanctity of both his body and his home. As such, they become expendable. His admission that, but for their vampirism (their “blackness,” as it were), they are “just like him” renders his actions all the more racially and ethically problematic. The only positive emotions Neville displays toward women are reserved for his dead wife, Virginia, and daughter, Kathy,³ whose memory evokes longing for an idyllic female warmth and companionship he can no longer have. Both contracted the vampire plague, but Neville's memories of their former family life keep them “pure” in his mind. Kathy, whose body is burned in a mass funeral pyre, becomes an eternal child virgin incapable of enacting a monstrous return to her father's house. Virginia, however, endures a more complex fate. She is Neville's wife, and when she dies, he finds himself incapable of destroying her body. When she returns home as a vampire Neville must, like Dracula's Arthur Holmwood before him, pound the stake into his own beloved's breast to “free” her from the curse of vampirism (149). Christopher Craft, Burton Hatlen, and others have produced Freudian interpretations of the act of staking in Dracula, linking it with both rape and an especially violent orgasm.⁴ In I Am Legend, the absence of gory details describing Virginia's staking tends to preclude the rape/orgasm connection. The phallicism of the stake, however, ensures that the sexual connotation remains. After being infected by the bacteria that causes vampirism, Virginia becomes a contaminated creature who threatens to reproduce her contagion in others. Her staking at the hands of Robert, her still-human husband and representative of the American cultural status quo, is a final act of possession, a gesture of his exclusive rights to penetrate her body. Once Virginia is truly dead, Neville places her body in a casket and locks the casket in a marble crypt to which only he has access. When he discovers the crypt's iron door ajar, his fears are vividly expressed: “If they've been at her, I'll burn down the city … I swear to God, I'll burn it to the ground if they've touched her” (36). Neville's dread of vampire/minority incursions and his obsession with the continued purity of Virginia's body drives him to emotional extremes. Although her casket remains intact, he violently expels the body of a male vampire who sought shelter within the crypt. This willful act of segregation keeps Virginia safely “his.” Thanks to his efforts, her body will neither produce nor nourish any vampires. Metaphorically, the white male has protected the sanctity of the white female body, thereby assuring the continued incorruptibility of white blood. On one level, the entire scene may be read as a reflection of the dominant society's views regarding appropriate vs. inappropriate sexual congress. The underlying condemnation of interracial sex and the resultant mixing of bloodlines is clear.

   In Neville's worldview, hybrid blood equals contaminated blood. His obsessive studies of blood and his efforts to identify, prevent, and possibly cure blood contamination reflect a desperate desire to restore homogeneity and, with it, a social order that he recognizes. Alone in his house, he perceives himself as an island of humanity/civilization surrounded by vampires/chaos, in perpetual danger of being overwhelmed. His resulting paranoia becomes the driving force behind his continued existence. Judith Halberstam has discussed the tendency of “masculine paranoia, or paranoid Gothic” to “force the subject to gothicize “others” while attempting to elevate or purify the self” (112, 117). For Neville, this tendency reaches a nadir in Part Three of the novel, which is set in June 1978. After more than two-and-a-half years alone he discovers Ruth, a woman whom he is shocked to encounter abroad in daylight. He spies her across a field, chases her down, and brings her home with him in true caveman fashion. Though desperately lonely, he stubbornly refuses to trust that she is what she appears to be - a living, normal human woman. Fearing that she may be infected with the vampire bacteria, he insists on testing her, first shoving a plate of crushed garlic under her nose and then asking for a sample of her blood. His assertion that “You're on trial, not me,” (Matheson 130) demonstrates not only his sense of authority in this situation, but also his perception of himself as the norm, of his own blood as the control factor against which she and all others are to be judged. Convinced that her normal appearance may belie the contamination of her blood, Neville is essentially afraid that she may be “passing,” that he may, in fact, have let a monster into his house. In Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain, H.L. Malchow discusses this particular fear in the context of vampire fiction as a fear of racial hybridity. According to Malchow, 

… there is also lurking in the vampire the powerful suggestion of an explicitly racial obsession - that of the “half-breed.” Both vampire and half-breed are creatures who transgress boundaries and are caught between two worlds. Both are hidden threats - disguised presences bringing pollution of the blood. Both may be able to “pass” among the unsuspecting, although both bear hidden signs of their difference, which the wary may read. (168)

Neville spends much of his time with Ruth searching her behavior and, ultimately, her blood, for these “signs.” Their conversations at this stage  are crucial in terms of highlighting how narrow Neville's understanding of the world truly is.  For instance, during dinner he confesses: “I don't understand it ... almost three years now, and still there are some of them alive. Food supplies are being used up.  As far as I know, they still lie in a coma during the day…. But they're not dead.  Three years and they're not dead. What keeps them going?” (Matheson 133). It is interesting - and profoundly disturbing - that he makes no exception for these people who are still, by his own admission, alive and clearly not relying on blood for sustenance. If he finds them in a coma during the day, he murders them. In his one-man crusade, it is Neville who has become the solitary monster who stalks his victims as they sleep - and he cannot see it. Even Ruth, lucid though she is, is not safe from the extremity of his prejudice against plague victims. His thoughts leave little doubt as to what her fate will be should he find the bacteria in her blood: “He was afraid he might discover that she was infected. In the meantime he had to pass an evening and a night with her, perhaps get to know her and be attracted to her.  When in the morning he might have to …” (134). Neville refuses to complete the thought, but it is clear that despite her human appearance and human behavior, he is ready to kill her based solely on what he sees in her blood. When Ruth questions him about the nature of the vampire bacteria and about his progressive studies of vampires, she is treated with very clinical descriptions of how he has killed vampires by various means. When she shows signs of distress, he smiles and says, “One gets used to these things ... One has to” (146).  Still, she questions him: 

     “But you said a lot of them are - are still living … How do you know they're not going to stay alive?”

     “I know,” he said. “I know the germ, know how it multiplies. No matter how long their systems fight it, in the end the germ will win. I've made antibiotics, injected dozens of them. But it doesn't work, it can't work ... It can't be done, believe me. It's a trap. If I didn't kill them, sooner or later they'd die and come after me. I have no choice; no choice at all.” (146) 

Or so he tries to convince himself. For the first time in years Neville must consider a viewpoint at odds with his own, and he finds the experience disconcerting. 

It was strange, he thought, to find himself vaguely on the defensive for what yesterday was accepted necessity. In the years that had passed he had never once considered the possibility that he was wrong.  It took her presence to bring about such thoughts.  And they were strange, alien thoughts.

     “Do you actually think I'm wrong?” he asked in an incredulous voice. (146)  

By her very presence in his home, Ruth has begun to undermine Neville's myopic presumptions about the world and his self-appointed role in it. Only later, after learning that Ruth's blood is, indeed, contaminated, does he begin to understand just how wrong his assumptions have been.  In the note she leaves behind, Ruth reveals that she was indeed sent to spy on him: 

I know now that you were just as much forced into your situation as we were forced into ours. We are infected. But you already know that. What you don't understand yet is that we're going to stay alive. We've found a way to do that and we're going to set up society again slowly but surely. We're going to do away with all those wretched creatures whom death has cheated. And, even though I pray otherwise, we may decide to kill you and those like you. (154) 

As it turns out, there is a drug that controls the bacteria. Ruth and those like her are hybrids, existing at a level between human and vampire, and their numbers are growing. Eventually they will dominate the planet, and there is nothing Neville can do to stop them. In addition to killing vampires, he has been murdering innocent people like Ruth - including Ruth's husband - with  no comprehension, no sympathy, no remorse.

   When the hybrids finally come for Neville, he watches as they exterminate the vampires that have so long been the focus of his hatred - and is horrified. 

Did they have to do it like this, with such a black and brutal slaughtering? Why did they slay with alarum by night, when by day the vampires could be dispatched in peace?

     Robert Neville felt tight fists shaking at his sides.  He didn't like the looks of them, he didn't like the methodical butchery. They were more like gangsters than men forced into a situation. There were looks of vicious triumph on their faces, white and stark in the spotlights.  Their faces were cruel and emotionless. (158) 

The irony here is that he makes no connection between his own previous crusade of butchery against vampires and what he sees now - yet he was every bit as ruthless, and the daylight deaths he caused were far from “peaceful.” He remains stubbornly blind to his own hypocrisy and to his own kinship, however unwanted, with both the killers and the killed. He feels hatred for these “dark men with their guns and their bloodstained pikes,” (160) yet when they breach the defenses around his house, he wonders: “What were they doing? Why didn't they call on him to surrender? He wasn't a vampire, he was a man like them. What were they doing? ... He didn't understand, he didn't understand!” (161, emphasis added). In this new hybrid society, Neville's worldview is no longer dominant and he has lost the authority to enforce his determinations of who is “monster” and who is “man.” From the perspective of the hybrids, whom he has terrorized, he is certainly not “a man like them,” and his world “spin[s] away into blackness” as “the dark men [drag] his lifeless body from the house ... Into the world that [is] theirs and no longer his” (162).

   The tableau of a white man being dragged from his house by “dark men” into a world that is “no longer his” is a stark concretization of white racial anxieties in 1950s America and serves as a powerful metaphor for the inevitable failure of segregation. It echoes the racism that Judith Halberstam has “identified as a hallmark of nineteenth-century Gothic literature,” (15) continuing a trend found in Dracula and earlier vampire texts which suggest that the monster 

… will find you in the intimacy of your own home; indeed, it will make your home its home (or you its home) and alter forever the comfort of domestic privacy. The monster peeps through the window, enters through the back door, and sits beside you in the parlor; the monster is always invited in but never asked to stay. The racism that seems to inhere to the nineteenth-century Gothic monster, then, may be drawn from imperialistic or colonialist fantasies of other lands and peoples, but it concentrates its imaginative force upon the other peoples in “our” lands, the monsters at home. (15) 

I Am Legend further complicates this issue, however, by shifting the protagonist's perception of his own racial identity as the novel ends. On one level, Neville represents the dominant/white society striving to keep the monsters/blacks out of a space he has constructed as exclusively his own. On another level, from the hybrids' perspective, Neville himself is the monster who “peeps through the window” and invades their homes by daylight. He realizes this, finally, as he looks down on a street full of people who 

all stood looking up at him with their white faces. He stared back. And suddenly he thought, I'm the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.

     Abruptly that realization joined with what he saw on their faces - awe, fear, shrinking horror - and he knew that they were afraid of him. To them he was some terrible scourge they had never seen, a scourge even worse than the disease they had come to live with. He was an invisible specter who had left for evidence of his existence the bloodless bodies of their loved ones. And he understood what they felt and did not hate them …

     Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. (169-170) 

Finally, in that moment, Neville understands - and accepts - the monster he himself has become.  He swallows the poison pills Ruth has given him and as he dies, he acknowledges how, through him, the vampire has come “Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever” (170).

   This displacement is the ultimate irony of the novel. Through Neville and his legacy, readers are left with a story in which the white Western male has become the monster, the “legend” to be feared. The old world (symbolized by Neville, his barricaded/segregated house, and his singular convictions of moral rectitude) must give way to the new world (symbolized by Ruth, the other hybrids, and their restructuring of society). The inevitable shift in power comes, in no small part, because of Neville's incapacity to change. Though Ruth warns him of danger well in advance, he refuses to leave his house, stating  

I ... couldn't ... I almost went several times. Once I even packed and ... started out.  But I couldn't, I couldn't ... go.  I was too used to the ... the house.  It was a habit, just ... just like the habit of living. I got ... used to it. (165).

In this unstable post-apocalyptic landscape, it is Neville who has become stagnant, “passé,” a persistent stereotype that refuses to die. In line with the racial subtext of the novel, he is the white male whose battle to preserve the status quo, to remain in the house where his truths and his values dominate and where, through violence and exploitation, he has managed to keep out everything he designates as Other, is doomed to failure. He was once part of a ruling majority, but in the end the novel situates him as a minority who finds himself surrounded and subsequently shot, both his house and his body penetrated by a race he is erroneously convinced he “knows.”  This dexterous bit of race reversal is concretized by Matheson's closing juxtaposition of color - namely, the sea of “white faces” that look up at Neville and see him as a “black terror.” In I Am Legend, both Neville (white society) and the vampires (black society) are overrun and destroyed. Those who survive are a hybrid mixture of the two, yet Neville still interprets this scene using racialized signifiers for what is human (white) and what is monstrous (black). His word choice reflects the degree to which he depends on these signifiers as a means of understanding his own identity. It also supports Morrison's contention that “The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self” (17) - in this case, a white male American writer meditating, at least in part, on how the racial and cultural ramifications of desegregation will impact his place in a changing society. The world Matheson projects through Robert Neville's eyes is horrifyingly tragic and violent, yet it is not entirely without hope. People survive to begin rebuilding society - but they will do so without Neville, “the last of the old race,” (167) who has become the Other against whom they will define themselves. His newfound blackness plays out what Eugenia DeLamotte has described as “the Gothic suspicion that the dark evil Other is, after all, a projection of the darkness at the heart of whiteness” (27). The manner of his demise suggests that racially motivated fears and prejudices, along with their attendant violence and ultimately futile efforts at segregation, will endure no matter what new hybrid form the society takes. It also suggests that those who perpetuate racially motivated violence are doomed to become victims of such violence themselves.

Works Cited

Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33.4 (1990):  621-645.

Craft, Christopher.  “'Kiss Me With Those Red Lips':  Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula.” Representations 8 (1984): 107-133.

DeLamotte, Eugenia. “White Terror, Black Dreams: Gothic Constructions of Race in the Nineteenth Century.” The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, eds. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. 17-31.

Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Hatlen, Burton. “The Return of the Repressed/Oppressed in Bram Stoker's Dracula.” The Minnesota Review 15 (1980): 80-97.

Malchow, H.L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996.

Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. 1954. New York: Orb, 1995.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

The Omega Man. Dir. Boris Sagal. Perf. Charlton Heston, Rosalind Cash, and Anthony Zerbe. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2003.

SparkNotes. “The Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968). Online. 12 Jan. 2005    <http://www.sparknotes.com/history/american/civilrights/section2.rhtml>

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. New York: Signet Classic, 1965.

Whitehead, Gwendolyn. “The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature.” University of Mississippi Studies in English (1990): 243-248.

Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic.  Chicago:  U of Chicago P, 1995.

Zanger, Jules. “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920  34.1 (1991):  33-44.

If the first teaser for Red Scream Vampyres whetted your appetite or stimulated your interest (or both) then just wait till you see what Editor Seng Varipath has in store for the upcoming series of teasers, clips, and possibly even a full blown trailer. I wish I could describe it but...this is film not literature...you'll just have to see for yourself...and what an ocular fest it will be!

The Influence of Dracula on the Lesbian Vampire Film 

Sharon A. Russell 

[Sharon Russell, Professor of Communications and Women's Studies at Indiana State University, is author of Stephen King and A Guide to African Cinema, both published by Greenwood Press.] 
 

Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla is one of the major sources of films dealing with female vampires, especially those portraying lesbian relationships. Its story of the vampiric love between two women that lives on even after the death of the title character is often seen as a version which foregrounds affection and passion.  Bram Stoker's Dracula, while influenced by the earlier story, is the major cinematic source for the image of the male vampire who can embody aspects of the lover, but who is most often associated with more violent manifestations of the vampire as monster. I am interested in the extent to which the Dracula story has taken over the earlier story so that, even in a film that acknowledges Carmilla, many of the traits of the vampires actually derive from the Bram Stoker version. An understanding of the alteration of the traits associated with vampires in each version raises interesting questions about the presentation of the female, the lesbian relationship, and the role of the patriarchy. Rather than attempting to survey all of the films with female vampires as central characters or even those adapted from Le Fanu, I will deal with a film that purports to recreate the Carmilla story, The Vampire Lovers, (Roy Ward Baker, 1970, AIP) and the recent film Nadja (Michael Almereyda, 1994, Kino Link), that develops the Bram Stoker version of the vampire story.

      Many critics have acknowledged both The Vampire Lovers' relative faithfulness as an adaptation of Carmilla and the basic change that occurs because of its being reframed as the story told by a male vampire hunter rather than by Laura as in the Le Fanu tale. The shift to a male perspective also facilitates the more pornographic aspects of the film where the interactions of the large-breasted female central characters,  often in semi-nude states, are offered for men to watch. But there are subtler changes that further alter the character of the narrative and seem to bring the film closer to the Dracula tradition than the romantic encounters of Carmilla. 

      While the events that are repeated in each version occur in the same order in film and story, their details are shifted. Laura learns of the death of the General's niece, Bertha, through a letter in the story.  In the film the viewer sees the bite marks which cause the death of Laura (the Bertha character) as well as the relationship between this woman and the vampire. The viewer also sees the mother establish the situation for the character, who is first called Marcilla, to stay with Laura. While the reader is not yet aware of the cause of the death, the viewer knows of the vampiric source, Laura's friend, Marcilla. The presence of a vampire is immediately associated with violence rather than love because of the opening sequence of the film featuring Baron von Hertog destroying a female vampire who exhibits the usual fangs and blood draining capabilities of Dracula at the same time that she also attempts sexual attraction to distract him from his task. The new opening also establishes the heterosexuality of this vampire. Her victim is a male, and she also comes on to the Baron in an attempt to prevent his attack.

      The other significant addition to the opening of the film is the introduction of the male romantic interest, Karl. He is presented as Laura's boyfriend at the ball, but later is recruited by Emma's father to watch her in his absence. He becomes central to the resolution of the film when he arrives at the house in time to rescue Emma from Carmilla. The early introduction of a male alternative to the lesbian love offered by Marcilla/Carmilla undermines the effectiveness of a possible positive portrayal of the female relationships. Even at the ball Emma tells Laura how good looking Karl is, establishing a heterosexual norm which is disturbed by Carmilla. The male love interest also recalls Lucy's loves in Dracula, and Karl is every bit as bland as her men. The way he can later shift his attention to Emma marks him as an all-purpose young male figure who is placed in the story to counter the lesbian relationships and assert the importance of heterosexuality at all levels of the narrative. The triangle generated by Marcilla, Laura, and Karl is clearly demonstrated in the scene in the ball when Laura thinks Marcilla is staring at Karl, but he is aware the young woman is actually looking at Laura. An instance of a woman expressing desire toward another woman is deflected by the male intervention in interpreting the gaze. The patriarchal intervention suggested by the addition of Karl is furthered developed through the unnamed caped figure who seems to control the female vampires. He enters the ball to summon Marcilla's mother and is present when Marcilla/Carmilla embarks on a seduction. The suggestion of male domination recalls Dracula's interaction with vampire women both in the novel and in films. 

      While the male figures provide a context which emphasizes the turn away from the female world of the original, the associations of Carmilla with the type of vampire reflected in the figure of Dracula further distance The Vampire Lovers from the story.  The film retains the images of the cat visiting the young women, but the actual visualizations of vampiric encounters change a love relationship into an attack with the same ambiguity present in those films which attempt to transform Dracula into a lover (such as the John Badham Dracula). The bloody death-giving fangs Carmilla reveals turn her into a predator. By the end of the film the sympathy which might have been generated for a woman who can not stop loving too well is lost by her absorption into the more familiar image of the monster who will stop at nothing to achieve success. 

      Just as the opening of the film suggests the way the film will retain the major narrative elements of the story while altering their effect, the ending demonstrates the implications of those changes. First Carmilla's role as sexual predator is emphasized. The story, told from the point of view of Laura, traces the vagaries of a growing love between two women, a love punctuated by a needle_like pain which Laura suffers and which seems to be connected to her failing health. Throughout the film the relationship between Carmilla and Emma is undercut by Carmilla's need to posses her friend. Aside from the pornographic implication of the bathing scene so well described by Andrea Weiss in Vampires and Violets (92-93), Emma's loss of innocence and identity is represented by her wearing Carmilla's dress at the end of the scene. As the film progresses Carmilla increasingly resembles Dracula in her need to protect her prey. She solidifies her position in the house by seducing Emma's governess who is left in charge when her father leaves. The patriarchy, through Renton, the butler, attempts to regain control. Renton introduces the traditional garlic flowers and cross into Emma's room by claiming the authority of the doctor, more indications of the influence of Dracula and the patriarchy.  Carmilla manages to seduce the butler so he countermands his own orders, and then she kills him just as he thinks he will receive a sexual reward for doing as she asked. While the men gather to destroy the last of the vampires the Baron had failed to erase, Carmilla attempts to escape with Emma. As Karl rides to the house to save her, Carmilla kills the governess who begs to go with her. This vicious attack which horrifies her is Emma's first evidence of the true nature of her lover. When Karl enters she runs to his arms. He manages to send Carmilla back to her grave where shots of her in her coffin are alternated with shots of Emma in bed where she screams as the men decapitate Carmilla. 

      The story ends as Laura thinks she hears Carmilla's step; their love survives. In the film the triumph of the patriarchy is matched by the redemption of heterosexual love from the threat of the lesbian. Emma ends up in Karl's arms with no sense of blame for the young man who can move from love to love so quickly. Even Carmilla must exhibit bisexuality in her seduction of Renton. Whatever threat might have existed from the presence of lesbian relationships is countered by the revival of heterosexual relationships at the end of the film. The kisses between Renton and Carmilla are more openly passionate as is his fondling of her breast. In the opening, the female vampire's naked nipple touches the Baron's chest, but no such contact between the women is visualized. The coupling of death and destruction with love transforms Carmilla from lover to monster as evidenced by Emma's revulsion at the end. The addition of elements associated with Dracula help demonize Carmilla. But rather than adding a certain element of attractive danger to the seductive powers of the vampire as in Badham's Dracula, Carmilla's fangs reinforce the stereotype of the predatory lesbian. The male domination of this film transforms a lesbian romance into a pornographic male oriented spectacle. But the use of visual effects associated with Bram Stoker's vampire destroys any possible attraction for the female viewer in the love relationship.

      Some of the problems in dealing with a lesbian relationship might be attributed to the period when The Vampire Lovers was made, as Bonnie Zimmerman indicates in her essay “Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film.” She suggests men felt secure enough in their power to “flirt with lesbianism and female violence against men.” Weiss disagrees with Zimmerman and instead sees the emergence of the lesbian vampire at this point as an expression of the threats posed by the rise of feminist demands. One might think we have come a long way in the nineties. This decade had provided many new ways to look at vampires in film from the timorous suggestion of the even more cinematically forbidden homosexual love of Interview with the Vampire to reclaiming of a heroic past in Bram Stoker's Dracula. But the image of the lesbian vampire has not been revised. With the sexually explicit films now permitted, lesbian sexuality no longer provides the voyeuristic thrill for those who can go into their local video store and get their pornography straight. The recent film Nadja has a bisexual female vampire as the central character. Its treatment of the lesbian union is some indication of the status of this relationship at the end of this century.

      The New York locations and New York based production lead the viewer to expect a certain level of sophistication in the treatment of the female vampire. The film opens with Nadja and a prospective male victim in one of the many bars which serve as settings. This first scene sets much of the tone for the rest of the film as Nadja moves from an ironic discussion of the difficulty of finding food after 10:00 p.m. in Europe as opposed to its ready availability in the lively night life of New York. The first view of the reflective side of her character is revealed with her expression of her need to simplify her life. It is not long before her true nature is revealed in the first of a series of sequences where the supernatural is suggested through the use of Fisher_Price Pixelvision.  Nadja attacks and drains her first victim, the man she met and spoke with in the bar. She is immediately depicted as foreign through her accent and the exotic Indian style scarf she wears over her head.  Her early kill also establishes her role as the predator in the film. The Pixelvision sequence also introduces one of the major themes. The film cuts to an image of a staked vampire, and Nadja looks up, her face dripping blood as she verbalizes the event, the death of her father. While the exact identity of her father is not completely clear the next sequence identifies him and many of the other major characters.

      The remainder of the establishing sequences set up a semi serious/semi humorous updating of the Dracula story. While the viewer can already place Nadja in the category of the troubled modern vampire, her relationship with the bloodsucking tradition has yet to be clarified. In a narrative where all of the characters eventually form attachments through blood, either of kinship or affection, the opening provides a kind of list of up-to-date versions of classic characters. The film shifts from Nadja's feeding to a young man ineptly sparring with an older partner. Jim, one of the vampire hunters, receives a bloody nose when his wife Lucy (a buzzer goes off for the initiated) enters to give him the news of his uncle's incarceration. Lucy's action as she bends over Jim and attempts to wipe his bloody nose is both a reflection of Nadja's interaction with her victim and a foreshadowing of Lucy's own bloody nose later in the film. While the film does not immediately establish the relationship between the two women, the viewer who is well schooled in vampire lore makes the connection when Lucy tells Jim his uncle is in jail for murder. He has staked his victim through the heart. The identity of the victim is confirmed when Nadja and Renfield come to claim the body at the morgue. She reels off the list of his names, among them Dracula. 

      The introduction of the familiar is completed when Jim and his Uncle Van Helsing converse in a diner after his uncle's release from jail. The casting of Peter Fonda as Van Helsing conflates two pasts and two legends, the independent cinematic history of Peter Fonda in his present incarnation as a long-haired has-been, and his role as a Van Helsing who carries around his bicycle instead of riding his motorcycle and wears antique looking Norfolk jackets. His description of the Count's death is not that of the difficult and heroic actions usually associated with this event in traditional films. As Van Helsing states, “He was like Elvis in the end, just going through the motions. The magic was gone.” He suggests a story that may just about have run its course. The introduction of Nadja might suggest a new direction for the narrative, and the connections between past and present are only the beginning of the complex bloody relationships that spread through the film.

      The connections of love and blood between the characters form the core of the narrative that is then injected into the traditional search and destroy vampire story. Nadja believes her father's death frees her from his domination, but in fact she will be unable to divorce herself from the pull of her heritage. His body may be transformed into ashes, but she will carry him with her just as she hauls around the urn that contains his remains. The problems of the Dracula family are mirrored in those of Van Helsing and his relatives. While Lucy has never liked him, he must eventually reveal the fact that he is actually Jim's father and thus her father-in-law. Van Helsing is the only living father in this world of dead parents. 

      The emphasis on family does not have to include an endorsement of heterosexual relationships, and one would not expect such an attitude from a narrative so willing to play with tradition. The inevitable meeting between Nadja and Lucy in another bar suggests the possibility of a new configuration of the tradition. The one extended love scene in the film is between the two women, a sequence which includes the introduction of Lucy's pet tarantula, Bela, and Nadja's upset when Lucy plays with a Christmas tree ornament vampire head which shakes and shrieks. The scene's more serious and suggestive elements hint at the implications of the merging of menstrual blood with the vampire tradition. But Nadja is most interested in exploring the “pain of fleeting joy.” After she explains her origins, the daughter of the strange union of a peasant mother and Dracula that produced twins.  While the scene presents a love relationship, it does not pander to pornographic voyeurism and hints at more than it reveals. Lucy is transformed, and Nadja expresses her love for Lucy when she returns to her home and Renfield who is identified as her slave. Since he is the last person she has turned to her way of life, a lesbian relationship is only a part of her bisexual identity.

      The role of the lesbian relationship between Nadja and Lucy is difficult to determine. Nadja obviously makes a distinction between those she attacks and immediately kills and those she loves. While Lucy is later placed into a kind of trance that draws her to Nadja much as Mina's mind connects her to Dracula, Lucy does not reject her husband and their heterosexuality.  Nadja is also in love with her ailing twin brother Edgar. To add to the familial complexity Edgar is in love with his nurse, Cassandra, who is Jim's half sister, and she loves him. Lucy and Nadja form the only lesbian love pairing in the film, and their relationship is built on a single contact. While Nadja may proclaim her love and call Lucy to her, she seems to be more interested in her brother.

      At the end of the film all of the characters come together in the ancestral home in Transylvania. By this point in the film blood sucking has been replaced by transfusions. Edgar is revived by the same plasma treatments Nadja claims to use, part of their father's provisions for their future. However the ultimate transfusion takes place as Van Helsing and Jim hunt the vampires to remove Lucy's connection to Nadja and fulfill the destiny of their names. As they wander through the basement of the castle, Nadja initiates a transfusion with Cassandra. Renfield attempts to protect his love and master. When he is unsuccessful he commits suicide by falling on a stake. In a reenactment of the traditional finale, Van Helsing shows Edgar how to perform the staking ritual on his sister. It would seem a kind of order has been restored when the two remaining couples embrace. The stability of heterosexuality has been established. But a voice-over reveals the true transgression in the film resides on another level. The final transfusion has actually transferred the persons of Cassandra and Nadja. The closing images of Nadja's marriage with Edgar present the ultimate transgression in the film, incest.

      The marriage of Edgar and Nadja raises many questions about the attitude toward traditional heterosexual couples in the film. From the perspective of the stereotypes generated by the genre, Nadja would be seen as the manipulative female predator who seduces young women and young men. The more detailed presentation of the lesbian seduction could then be viewed as an element in the usual demonization of the seductive female, especially one with lesbian or bisexual affiliations. But Nadja's transformation into Cassandra alters the traditional genre expectations. On one level the sexual transgression of incest decreases the impact of the lesbian love affair. A lesbian union is much less of a transgression than an incestual one. On another level the substitution of incestual love for lesbian love could also be a means of trivializing it and valorizing heterosexuality at any cost. Nadja's taking over of the body of Cassandra can be either the ultimate union or the ultimate predation. 

      The union of two vampires in a marriage ceremony in Nadja does also reveal the hypocrisy behind this cultural ritual and the transformation of the couple into a family. The Vampire Lovers also questions the stability of the family, but in a way which does not imply a critique of the institution. Both films feature fragmented families that have difficulty dealing with the threat posed by a vampire. The increased role of patriarchal figures in the film about Carmilla as opposed to the original story forces the formation of a new heterosexual couple at the end and undercuts the importance of the lesbian relationship. The addition of vampiric traits associated with Dracula turns Carmilla into a predator rather than a lover. Nadja is her father's daughter, but she expresses a wish to divorce herself from her heritage. The patriarchy is not necessarily a positive force in the film. While Dracula's heritage is negative, those who oppose him are for the most part bumbling fools who only partially understand what is happening. Jim is ineffective boxing in the gym, and is at his best comforting Lucy. He is not a typical example of the patriarchal domination exhibited at the end of the traditional vampire film. Both he and Lucy fight Renfield before he gives up and commits suicide. In this context the lesbian relationship becomes another challenge to the patriarchy, a stage in the film's more general attack on conventional values which culminates in incest. Heterosexuality is not the cure for the lesbian love affair. We still have yet to find an open and enduring lesbian or homosexual vampire in a loving relationship, but maybe we have come a little closer in the nineties. 

Works Cited 

Le Fanu, Sheridan. “Carmilla.” In a Glass Darkly. Ed.  Robert Tracy.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.Nadja.  Dir. Michael Almereyda.  Kino Link,  1994.

The Vampire Lovers.  Dir. Roy Ward Baker. AIP/Hammer, 1970.

Weiss, Andrea.  Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film. New York: Penguin, 1993.Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film.  Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P,  1996.