I believe that both archetypes, Vampire and Werecreature, are necessary, at this time in America, to work out the cultural traumas that result from our culture’s shared history. In the last three generations alone we have experienced extreme gender oppression and extreme sexual freedom, resulting in a great deal of confusion and pain. I believe the vampire/animal/woman triumvirate in current fiction is an expression of our collective attempts to resolve these contradictions. Meyer’s books construct these dangers as a metaphor for teen sexual fears, while Harris approaches the problem more directly, as a journey for her heroine’s reclamation of her own body after historical sexual trauma.
Hamilton, however, again applies the existential rules of noir and pulp fiction to our wounded landscape. In Anita’s world, sexual trauma is a matter of course—especially for men, which is another self-conscious reversal of the archetypes (“hooker with the heart of gold,” “femme fatale,” “daddy’s little girl,” “frigid/decadent virgin/whore”) that represent womanhood in noir stories. Everybody has their kinks because everybody has a sexual history with mistakes in it, along a spectrum from the repressive personality (Richard!) to the deeply horrific (Edward’s stepchildren). Hamilton’s men (just as the women in Marlowe) comprise mainly sex workers and the sexually wounded. Anita’s harem are physically smaller than the national average, putting them on a physical plane with Anita herself and reducing the natural intimidation a woman of her size would feel; they dress and behave in ways that are not always stereotypically male, some with hair down to their ankles. Their attitudes toward Anita’s own growing power and insatiable needs are as forgiving and flexible as the nursemaid/whores that always show up just in time to hand Marlowe a gun.
But again, we see that instead of inverting a standard, frankly ugly and dehumanizing stereotype of woman-as-mindless object, Hamilton finds a way to strike a fresh balance. Most importantly, Hamilton’s men come with their own baggage, often sad but never pitied, which must be lovingly and gently administered to and dealt with in order that life can continue. Their business becomes Anita’s, becomes ours, and more than anything becomes one of the parts of the Hamilton biologist’s machine. I think it’s courageous, frankly, to address such touchy subjects as bondage, rape, and sadomasochism respectfully, as consequences of our history, while still accepting them as issues not to be ignored or denigrated. While a guilt-free, pain-free, shame-free sexuality might be a part of the world of grace, it’s unlikely that any of us have sufficiently escaped our history to the degree that it’s possible. By acknowledging the history that leads to the harem’s various sexual proclivities—and by avoiding the genre’s recent BDSM bravado, which seeks above all to deny even the possibility of historical or psychological elements in those proclivities—Anita (and Hamilton) gives these men the freedom to express their own sexuality unburdened by fear.
In this case, Anita does so both by her nonjudgmental attempts to take their emotional and sexual needs into consideration (I’m thinking here specifically of Anita’s forcing herself to be cognizant of Nathaniel’s submissive needs, which are openly regarded as a symptom of earlier trauma, or her open-armed leap into Jean-Claude’s complex relationship with Asher, both of which represent active transgression of her own sexual boundaries for the sake of love), and by responding to her growing harem not as a typical male hero would (by containing them all in a room full of pillows and incense, virtue guarded by eunuchs) but as a real woman might: by trying to contain her jealousy, and swiftly learning that nonstop sex requires a serious amount of logistical oversight! Only a woman with a seriously pragmatic sense of humor could possibly write a wish-fulfillment sex fantasy that involves quite so much worrying over laundry and getting everybody fed and cleaned and bedded down each night with a kiss to the forehead. One is reminded of an XXX Neverland, in which Wendy spends as much time laughing to herself as she spends calming distraught Lost Boys down after a big tiring day.
In fact, it’s in this attention to consequences that Hamilton’s obsession with detail and playing by her narrative rules comes most closely into focus. For a book ostensibly about—and full of— chapter-long, intensely detailed, multiple-partner, multiple-orgasm, multiple-position, often painful (or at best unlikely to be pleasurable), frankly exhausting sex, it certainly came as a surprise to yours truly to read my first Anita book, Danse Macabre, and discover that it begins with a seriously long (and hilarious) discussion among approximately fifteen people about the children that might result from such a wild sequence of events: the fictional medical complications that might result, the touchiness of assigning paternity, the volunteering for daycare and nightly care, the soothing of ruffled feathers and raised hackles over all the larger implications, the communal household complications of the pregnancy, the belabored scheduling of said sexual romps, etc. In fact, I was delighted. I don’t read a lot of porn, but I’ve never read porn that worried over the details and consequences of what is essentially considered a delightful activity even slightly, much less in such meticulous depth.
And, of course, we mustn’t forget that ardeur is French for le total hassle for everybody. Again, only the most pragmatic sense of humor would seek to imbue supernatural significance to that sinking feeling we’ve all felt, coming home after a long, awful day at work only to be surprised by that certain gleam in a loved one’s eye. But Hamilton has already, throughout the series, unhinged sex from its usual signifiers by making it a purely biological and magical act. No matter how many National Geographic videos of animals mating you watch—lions, tigers, hyenas—you’re never going to see a single candlelit dinner, good red wine, foot rubs, favorite novels or poetry, or any of the other tokens that get human animals laid.
In the biological, animal kingdom of which Hamilton is a devoted student, mating is part of the job. We hunt or scavenge, we mate, and we care for our young. We help out Darwin by doing two things well: not dying, and having kids. There’s no dating, no breakups, and no making up. There’s barely even any commitment beyond the few minutes necessary: just the need, from deep incomprehensible places, being met by the best possible nearby option. Which is to say that the attraction between animals is closer to the ardeur, shaping the behavior and attitudes of our best possible mates through magical, rather than biological means—or, science would say (though we hate to listen), through our own behavior—than it is to the human constructs and social niceties that obscure it. Ardeur, on a sufficiently large scale, is not that different from the forces and weirder effects generally ascribed to evolutionary law. Watching those animals on TV isn’t disturbing because it’s so alien; it’s disturbing because we recognize, on a basic level, what they’re up to.
So we see the ways in which Hamilton makes Anita’s succubus duties every bit as important and demanding as those of Necromancer Anita, or U.S. Marshal Anita, or Detective Anita. I think the disconnect between book and reader, when it occurs, takes place at the line where sexuality becomes purely about commerce or currency. The moral majority in America would proudly explain that it is scared to death of looking at sex as anything other than the loving and committed expression of physical affection between a legally married man and woman, above the age of consent and giving it willingly, for the purposes of procreation. As our hypothetical representative sample becomes more and more liberal in its sexual morality, individual words and qualifications disappear from that sentence, but most would draw the line at some point in there. Yours is probably different from mine, but not so much so that we would come to blows.
What Hamilton has done—with the rules she’s set for herself as a writer (about the kind of woman and heroine Anita must be) and the rules she has set for her world (a purely Hobbesian freefor-all in which sex, death, violence, and love circle each other the same boxing ring, constantly bleeding and constantly making up)— is remove that line entirely. Terrifying, simply horrifying. In a horror novel. How … novel!
As exercises in world-building logic, as exercises in reviving old my
thical tropes and giving them new and raucous life, as exercises in feminist reinvention of more recent horror and mystery tropes, and as judgment-free surveys of sexual and romantic possibilities—and scary certainties!—the ardeur as a motivating force and Anita’s ascendance as a female monster out of myth can be considered organic extrapolations from first principles.
All writers have one goal: to speak, to be heard, to communicate personal complexities of emotion and experience. Writers do one thing only: reach out through the page to touch the reader and say, “There. Now we are both less alone.”
This essay takes its title from an incident in Bloody Bones in which Anita puts a victim of vampire attack at ease by showing him her own scars. I think that by showing the considerable toll, and often awkward or painful methods, of Anita’s ongoing transformation into a creature of the night, the ongoing story elevates itself beyond simple sensationalism. I think that by showing the emotional and physical impact our personal and sexual histories have on our present lives and our relationships, Hamilton is seeking an honest portrayal of the more shadowed parts of our culture. And I think that through her own vulnerability and honesty as an author—a human being not much unlike any other humans you’ve met in your life—and by honoring the painful lives and prices of Anita and her thousand lovers in Anita’s ongoing survival, Hamilton seeks to put us at ease in just that way. After all, I would say it’s the mandate of the horror writer most of all to say the scariest thing imaginable, the better to reach through the page and touch the reader, and simply say:
“I’m scared, too. We’re in this together.”
Jacob Clifton is a novelist and staff writer for Television Without Pity and the Science Channel’s Remote Possibilities. He spends nights revising his novels The Urges and Mondegreen, and his days wishing Team Bella were a viable alternative.
Footnotes:
1 Quoted in “Angry Angels: Repression, Containment, and Deviance, in Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre,” by Joan Z. Anderson.
2 Emphasis added.
3 As quoted in S. Rupp’s ‘The Boy’s Got Bite: Why people are vamping it up again, a century after “Dracula.”
4 Before Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, there was Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire in Carmilla (1872), who combined terror with eros, and before that, James Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1847), which first introduced many of the standard vampire conventions, including fangs (which leave two puncture wounds in the neck), superhuman strength, and hypnotic powers. Indeed, the modern vampire novel can be traced back as far as 1819, when Lord Byron’s physician John Polidori took up Byron’s challenge, during a small gathering of friends, to write a ghost story. Polidori’s The Vampyre was not only the first English-language vampire story but, in the words of cultural scholar Christopher Frayling, also “the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre.” It is worth noting that this gathering was also the birth of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Byron’s own epic poem “Mazappa.”
5 As just one example of the novel’s overtones of racial threat, consider the Count’s taunting comment to Van Helsing and the rest of the vampire hunters at the conclusion of an unsuccessful (from the hunters’ perspective) confrontation: “You think to baffle me, you—with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s.”
6 Some readers may be familiar with the 2007 film of the same name, though inexplicably the film replaces the novel’s vampires with zombies and depicts Neville as an African American (Will Smith). Film fans may also recall two previous film adaptations of I Am Legend: The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, and The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston. Given the discrepancies between book and film, it is necessary to note that the analysis in this section is based solely on the book.
7 This is actually true of most modern vampires (e.g., in the Buffyverse and the Twilight series), who don’t have hooked noses, pointy ears, clawed hands, or unusual amounts of body hair, as did their ancestors. Even the fangs, the vampire’s most recognizable marker, are now discreet, hidden from view and only revealed at the vampire’s whim.
8 In the Anita Blake universe, age equals power.
9 It is worth noting that just as vampires are often metaphors for the contemporary threat in novels, so are they in non-fictional discourse. Consider as evidence the frequent online references to immigrants sucking the resources of the host community (e.g., Rojas) or the following “definition” of an ACLU attorney found in an online blog: “A soulless creature that cowers at the sight of a crucifix and lives by sucking money from the government… . Refuses to be seen in any media interview, since the glaring light of truth shone upon the world through an honest question is the ACLU Lawyers equivalent of a mirror” (from the blog Ravings of a Mad Tech).
10 I actually must confess that I missed Anita Blake’s Mexican background entirely in my own reading and was alerted to this by this book’s fine editor, who also generously shared with me her inspiration for Anita’s full assimilation into Whiteness.
11It is also worth noting that, like many U.S. cities, St. Louis was historically segregated, with north St. Louis being primarily African American and South St. Louis City primarily White. It is not evident from the books’ description whether the Vampire District is located in the north or south.
12 Others include Yasmeen, a master vampire (Circus of the Damned); Vivian, a wereleopard (Burnt Offerings, Narcissus in Chains); Rashida, a werewolf (Circus of the Damned); and Jamison Clarke, a fellow animator at Animators, Inc. (Guilty Pleasures, The Laughing Corpse).
13A bar in the district owned by a vampire and ex-cop by the same name. Luther was last seen working there in The Laughing Corpse.
14 It is worth noting that in contemporary U.S. race relations, the Black-White paradigm is so dominant that other racialized groups, including Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, are often rendered invisible. Despite over ten years of work in racial studies, I too am sometimes guilty of this and am grateful to BenBella’s Leah Wilson for reminding me that Manny’s personal and religious connection to the Vaudun priestess in The Laughing Corpse was an integral and culturally significant part of the storyline. At the same time (and despite the recent anti-immigration sentiments directed at Americans of Mexican descent), it is Blackness that continues to be the primary representation of the “racial other.”
15 It is important to note that this emphasis on recognition and valuing of cultural differences is a drastic departure from the ideology of most white conservatives who tend to locate racial justice in color-blindness, a way of interacting with non-Whites as though race had no meaning.
16 I am speaking here as a part of the White racial majority.
17 I use “evolution” here only as a measure of the genre’s ongoing transformation, not to suggest that worthwhile and enjoyable fictions aren’t being written to this day using every mode available; after all, in postmodern fictions nothing is lost.
About Laurell K. Hamilton
Paranormal thriller writer Laurell K. Hamilton is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of two series. The first Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novel, Guilty Pleasures, was published in 1993. There are now more than 6 million copies of Anita in print worldwide, published in sixteen languages. As the series approaches nineteen novels, with Flirt and Bullet being released in February and June 2010, Anita Blake only continues to grow in power and popularity. A Kiss of Shadows introduced Merry Gentry, a Fey Princess of the Unseelie Court and Los Angeles Private Investigator. With eight novels in the series, sales for the Merry Gentry books now exceed 2 million copies.
Hamilton currently resides in St. Louis with her husband, daughter, and pampered pug. She invites you to visit her website at www.Laurellkhamilton.org or follow her on Twitter under @LKHamilton.
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Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series Page 20
