Ardeur - 14 Writers on the Anita Blake Vampire Slayer
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Later, when Anita falls in love with hunky, thoughtful Richard (who just happens to be a werewolf), she keeps her pants on. It’s one thing for her to turn down a vampire. She knows that getting involved with Jean-Claude necessarily means she’ll wind up his human servant and then it’s bye-bye afterlife. But for Anita to turn down the man she loves unless they’re married is some seriously Victorian thinking. Richard doesn’t mind, though; he simply asks Anita to marry him. And Anita says yes. At first. Until she says no, that is, and eventually gets involved with both Jean-Claude and Richard. Ah, the tumble begins!
Creating stories about women’s chastity and the lack thereof isn’t only the providence of novelists. A whole genre of fiction is devoted to rewriting the sexual history of female celebrities. Real life offers plenty of good girls gone bad to captivate mass audiences. How else would the paparazzi stay in business? Every era has its Jezebels; the twenty-first century simply has more media outlets to cover degradation. And Britney Spears has been covered in every one of them.
As Vanessa Grigoriadis points out in her 2008 Rolling Stone article “The Tragedy of Britney Spears,” Britney was “created as a virgin to be deflowered before us, for our amusement.” Once Britney left Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, she signed on with manager Larry Rudolph, who promoted seventeen-year-old Britney as a Southern good girl with just a hint of Lolita thrown in to titillate. This version of Britney’s life claimed that she was a virgin and planned on saving herself for marriage, even as she dated teen heartthrob Justin Timberlake. Spears’ mother, Lynn, debunked that myth years later in her tell-all book, Through the Storm, in which she claimed Britney lost her virginity at fourteen to her high school boyfriend and that she routinely slept with Timberlake. This from her own mother!
Britney has more in common with Bertha Mason and Anita Blake than you might think. Some speculate the reasons for Britney’s unchaste behavior (both in and out of the sack) could be hereditary. Her grandmother was thought to have been mentally ill, as evidenced by shooting herself on the grave of her dead son, pulling the trigger of a shotgun with her big toe. Anita has her own issues of maternal heredity, probably gaining her innate powers of necromancy from her mother’s mother, who was a voodoo queen. But there could also be an alternate reading to the Britney Spears story. Like Bertha, Britney is raging against a world that tried to pin her into a tightly circumscribed role. As Grigoriadis says, Britney “doesn’t want anything to do with the person the world thought she was.” Her current image as a paparazzi-baiting, drug-abusing, head-shaving, midriff-baring sex kitten is about as far from a good Southern girl as Britney could get. And like Bertha, in the process of losing her mind Britney lost nearly everything else in her life—her marriage to Kevin Federline failed, she lost custody of her children, and she’s gone in and out of rehab.
Anita is no stranger to rage either, but in her case wrath is a job skill. Anita is able to channel her anger into something productive—killing monsters. Plus, she’s the only one of these three women who’s licensed to carry a gun. Being a pissy woman who’s allowed to shoot bad guys—without punishment—is one of the reasons Anita is so fun to read. Bertha eventually exacts her revenge on Rochester by setting fire to his estate, but while Rochester loses his sight and one hand while fighting the fire, Bertha dies engulfed in the hell-like blaze. Britney’s rage is the most impotent of the three because it hurts nobody but herself (and possibly her children, who’ve, at least for now, lost their mother).
Also like Britney, Anita was set up for her big fall. By making Anita Christian to distinguish her from the monsters, Hamilton allows her to plummet from grace when she finally becomes Jean-Claude’s lover. Britney’s damnation may not be eternal (there’s always next year’s VMA Awards) but by accepting Jean-Claude’s marks, Anita gives up the one thing she held dear: her chance at a Christian afterlife. But unlike Britney and Bertha, Anita has an out and that out is power.
Where neither Bertha nor Britney could find a toe hold in the world that shaped them and their rage, Anita takes control. She enters a triumvirate with Richard and Jean-Claude in which the vampire, animal servant, and human servant are linked and share power. In turn, Anita becomes Jean-Claude’s human servant (thus accepting potential immortality) so the messy doctrine of eternal life via Christianity is out of the way. This doesn’t mean that Anita no longer considers herself a Christian, just that she doesn’t consider all the sex she’s having to be immoral because she’s no longer concerned about mortality and an afterlife in a Christian Heaven. In other words, Anita has chosen to play by new rules.
As a consequence of joining forces with Jean-Claude, Anita is infected with the ardeur. If mental illness is what drove Bertha and Britney over the edge, the ardeur is what makes Anita change from celibate to swinger, and unlike insanity (in Bertha and Britney’s cases), this gives her more power, not less. In order to keep the ardeur in check, Anita must have several lovers or the ardeur will drain her, possibly killing her. She leaves Richard and shacks up with two wereleopards, plus takes on many other lovers to feed her need—sex every six hours. At this point, Anita has to fuck to live.
Here’s where Anita’s story trumps Bertha and Britney’s. When Hamilton gives Anita a reason to go hog wild with sex, she allows the line between human and monster to blur. Anita gains empathy for the creatures she hunts because she’s able to see her own will to survive a difficult and unjust world reflected in their lives. Anita says herself, “One of my favorite things about hanging out with the monsters is the healing. Straight humans seemed to get killed on me a lot. Monsters survived. Let’s hear it for the monsters” (Cerulean Sins). Not only does Anita accept that monsters may have something over humans, but physically she now harbors strains of lycanthrope which may eventually lead to her becoming a shapeshifter. Not only does Anita change from a celibate woman to a highly sexualized being, but her very nature shifts. The fall is complete, but unlike her literary and real-life predecessors, Anita’s tumble doesn’t undo her. It only makes her stronger.
Gender politics, sex, and power have long been linked in literature and in life, but few characters have had as much fun with them as Anita Blake. In the end, Anita didn’t need a man to rescue her from depravity. Hamilton said herself that she set out to write a strong female protagonist who got to do the things men usually get to do in hard-boiled detective novels: kill people without remorse and have lots of sex. Without someone giving them the same permission to live life like a man, Bertha and Britney both crashed and burned, but Anita embraces her depravity as a form of power and has a hell of a good time on her way down.
When Hamilton started the Anita Blake series, she felt there remained a prevailing notion in society that women should not be comfortable, let alone bold, about their sexuality and desire. But over the course of sixteen novels, Hamilton questioned that presumption and slowly shifted Anita into a woman who was both comfortable and bold.
This move has won Anita Blake millions of fans (as evidenced by the number of weeks she’s lounged around the New York Times bestseller list over the past fifteen years). Britney has retained her wild popularity in spite of, or perhaps because of, her ups and downs, but her “fans” seem to find pity in and fascination for her plight. They laud her accomplishments, but also stand in line to watch her stumble. Bertha’s most enduring readers tend to be feminist scholars who look for historical clues about the changing nature of womanhood via literature. Anita fans are different.
Hamilton has taken a fair amount of flack (from critics and fans) for turning Anita books into soft-core monster porn, yet she retains a huge devout group of fans who don’t simply read about Anita’s exploits, they look to her for life lessons. She’s a rare female character who’s dangerous and can also take care of herself. She rarely relies on a man to save her tail, but if it turns out that way, she returns the favor in kind later. Although we don’t live in world of vampires and werebeasts, real women face their own demons, and according to Hamilton some female
fans have left abusive relationships because they said they knew Anita wouldn’t take treatment like that.
So this begs the question: is Anita another fallen woman whose popularity hinges on our collective love for watching women tumble? Not in my book. Hamilton wrote new rules for the female protagonist. She could be tough, she could be sexy, she could even be bitchy. She could do whatever she needed to protect herself and make herself happy. I think Anita continues to appeal because, far from falling, she soars.
Heather Swain is the author of the young adult novels Me, My Elf and I and Selfish Elf Wish as well as two novels for adults (Eliot’s Banana and Luscious Lemon), personal essays, magazine articles, and short stories. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two young children, but you can stop by her website www.heatherswainbooks.com anytime for a visit.
First, I hate ambiguity. It’s one of my least favorite things. Most of the time, I would rather have a firm no than a maybe. A no means I can move on, a maybe traps me in that gray area between yes and no. That being one of my personality traits, it was inevitable that the dance of will Anita sleep with, or kill, Jean-Claude? was going to be answered. I actually set it up to kill him at the end of book three, Circus of the Damned, but when the moment came Anita would have missed him, and so would I. The kiss-me-kill-me paradigm can only interest me so long and then I want a choice. People seem to think that Anita not choosing one of the men is ambiguity, but it’s not. The choice Anita made was not to pick a single man to be monogamous with, and I’m still taking heat for that particular choice. It certainly wasn’t the original plan, but if your first plan doesn’t work, make a new one, and keep doing that until something works.
Second, one of the reasons that Anita Blake came on the scene guns blazing and gender roles be damned was that I didn’t know how to be a girl. my grandmother raised me to be the boy. it was more important how much I could lift and how hard I could work than what I looked like. What I could do mattered more than how I appeared. I was never, ever told that I should be a soft, feminine, nurturing, passive recipient of any male action. I was raised on stories of my grandfather abusing my grandmother for the twenty years of their marriage. My own biological father had left my mother and they were divorced by the time I was six months old. Men were no good, according to my grandmother, and I didn’t need one. i found as i got older it was more fair to say that not all people are good, regardless of their gender, and that though i didn’t need a man in a traditional role in my life i did want a man in my life if he could be a true life partner. I always wanted a partner, an equal. Even though my first husband and I divorced he never treated me as less-than because I was a woman, except for a memorable lapse when some male friends convinced him he needed to be the head of the household. I soon let him know that if I couldn’t be equal, I wanted nothing to do with him. He backpedaled and never brought it up again. Some things you do not compromise on and being an equal in my marriage was one of them.
Growing up i saw a lot of things. i saw that soft women were victims. I saw that seemingly strong women fell in love and lost their gumption and folded into some feminine ideal that made them victims. Nurturing is good, but I demanded my first husband help with our daughter, and when he had another lapse during my pregnancy with her I told him this: “If you force me to raise our baby like I’m a single parent, I will be.” I meant it, he knew it, and he has been a devoted father ever since.
I did not even know that there was an entire girl culture I was clueless about until just a year or so ago, when other women were trying to convince me that I should feel intimidated by a new friend who happened to be tall, blond, blue-eyed, voluptuous, and gorgeous. i didn’t understand why i was supposed to be intimidated by my friend. One female business associate explained, patiently, that I should be jealous, or competitive, with my friend. I asked, “Why? She’s my friend. The rain is wet and she’s beautiful. Why should that bother me?” She never could explain it to me, but later that business trip she showed me: by sandbagging me before an important business dinner. I did the guy thing, and asked her if I needed to dress up for the event. She assured me that business clothes were fine.
When I arrived at the event, I was the only woman there not dressed to kill. Cocktail dresses ormore, full make-up, professionally styled hair—the works. The woman herself was in a semiformal sequined number with her hair done up on top of her head in elaborate curls. In that moment, I got it. I’d intimidated her because I was attractive by her standards and she’d feared that if I dressed up I’d look better than she did. I got that she’d lied to me so I wouldn’t look as dressed up. I was the most casually dressed woman there. Did it bother me? Yes, because I hate being lied to. Did it make me feel less of a woman by wearing something that wasn’t as frilly? No. I wasn’t competing with anyone at the business function. I was there for business, not to see who could be queen bitch. But this one incident explained a lifetime of mystery regarding other women, and before that other girls, to me. I had been on the receiving end of things like this my whole life and never understood that most of the other women were playing by this secret game, one that I had never been told existed.
I’m only competitive with myself and with people I see as true competition in business. But not in the cutthroat way, only, How is that writer doing better than me? What are they doing that I’m not? Who’s making more money? Find out how. More prestige? Find out how. I’ve always looked around and found the writers doing better than me in some way and tried to find out their business plan and do my own version of it. I play to win the big picture, not the small squabbles, but I also play like I believe a woman is “supposed” to play if she really were the kinder sex. I like to see everyone succeed. I’m helpful if I can be. I have never knowingly undercut another woman personally, or in business, just because she was a woman and I felt she might look better than me in a dress. That kind of thinking hurts not only the woman who’s being picked on, but even more the woman doing it. The female business associate who was so intimidated by me lost a chance to be my friend, and I try to be a really good friend.
I’m still very good friends with my tall, gorgeous, blond, blueeyed friend. She and I get along just fine.
—Laurell
Ambiguous Anita
by Lilith Saintcrow
One doesn’t have to precisely blame Laurell K. Hamilton for the explosion of paranormal romance and kickass-chick urban fantasy currently filling bookstore shelves. Hamilton started out, a decade or so ago in Guilty Pleasures, with the same type of urban-fantasy-with-a-touch-of-noir that has been a small, important subsection of fantasy ever since someone first decided to cross a detective story with something supernatural. From Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker (Dracula is, after all, a detective story as well as a psychosexual morality play) to Charles de Lint and Simon Green, the supernatural detective is alive and well—for which I am profoundly grateful.
What separated Anita Blake, Vampire Executioner, from the common run of schlock and fantasy was two things: Anita’s gender and Anita’s ambiguity. I don’t think I’m far wrong in stating that Anita was one of the very first “kickass” female characters in urban fantasy, a template for all those ladies with tramp-stamp tattoos and tight clothing hanging out on so many covers nowadays. However, she was not the first, and her popularity has its roots in a different dynamic: the fact that Anita Blake is one of the first female protagonists with the noir hallmark of moral and ethical ambiguity guiding her actions.
The phenomenon I refer to as “ambiguous Anita” only shows up in the first five books of the series. By the sixth she is embroiled in a process of becoming a more standard female character, whose primary concern is her interpersonal relationships with the monsters she is embroiled with sexually. This is where Anita loses significant amounts of her noir-ish features: ethical/moral flexibility, dilemmas with no clear “winning” outcome, and a significant amount of cruelty and ruthlessness our culture is exceedingly uncomfortable with female
s displaying. Until that sixth book, Anita is a character who wouldn’t be out of place in a souped-up Sam Spade world, with all its undercurrents of cruelty, perversion, weariness (not to mention situational ethics driven by need instead of love), and violence.
Let’s not forget the violence. It’s important to keep in mind that the critical defining factor of ambiguous Anita is her attitude toward violence—or more specifically, her lack of guilt over applying extreme sanctions to “onsters.”
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, dear reader.
When discussing Anita and “strong female characters,” Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer often comes up. There is a critical difference between Buffy and Anita, and it’s not just the age divide. Buffy Summers, for all her strength, power, and snappy dialogue, is basically a passive recipient of a talent that forces her to fight darkness. The Buffy cycle derives most of its narrative drive from constantly exploiting the tension between those powers and Buffy’s oft-expressed and central desire to be a “normal” teenager instead of a reluctant freak. While this may be an excellent vehicle for exploring female teen sexuality and the frightening charge of sex and foreign adult responsibility every young girl faces in the process of maturing, Buffy is still essentially passive, and eternally on the cusp of adulthood.
Anita, however, is introduced to us as a full-fledged adult, however emotionally stunted. She is an active recipient of her powers, trained in their use from childhood by her grandmother and displaying surprisingly little angst over them. In fact, Anita’s powers are how she earns her adult living. They place her in the role of judge, jury, and executioner; whereas Buffy is no more, when all is said and done, than a supernatural cockroach exterminator.