Vampirism is not an author’s imagination, or terminology, but for some category of people; it is a life dogma and path they willfully and viciously want to follow. According to Foster, vampirism is about selfishness, and denying other people’s rights to live in order to meet one’s own demands. The unusual vampirism, through the detailed description, complex syntax, and unusual diction, demonstrates the destructive consequences of violence on human beings leading the lives of the victims as well as their families to be shed into pieces.
Mr. Harvey’s vampirism in The Lovely Bones distorts the Salmons’ persistence as well as their inability to accept the reality of Susie’s murder. Mr. Harvey brutally raped and then murdered Susie Salmon in the most violent and indescribable way. “ He felt thoughts of me…my muffled scream…The glorious white flesh that had never seen the sun…then split, so perfectly with the blade of his knife…”(Sebold 50). Through the use of detailed description, it is evident how Harvey splits Susie’s body with his knife as his own way of finding pleasure in killing her violently, and in enjoying the painful sounds of his victim. Also, the serial killer has mastered all the violent variety methods of killing. “Violence…the specific injury…cause characters to visit on another or on themselves…shootings, stabbings …”(Foster 89). Apparently, Harvey has learnt not only to inflict pain on his victims, but to take pleasures in his violent killing methods. Nevertheless, Harvey’s violent act of murder caused great sorrow for the Salmons, and led to their entire denial of Susie’s death. Even after finding the elbow of Susie, the Salmons are willfully ignoring the reality of her death so that they can clin...
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...essed” (Line18-20). The phrase “ill spirit it possessed” symbolizes the body’s lustful and evil desires, which only leads to the soul’s ailment and eventually, destruction. Nevertheless, the body complains of being entrapped by the “bonds of this tyrannic soul” (Line 12). By identifying the soul as “tyrannical” Marvell coveys how the soul’s morality and conscience cause difficulty and complexity to individuals when it resists their egotistical desires. Although the soul encounters the body’s vehement outbreaks with love and hope; mistakenly, the body considers such love as psychological sufferings inflicted by soul.
As it is presented here, vampirism is not a product of art, it is a path followed by every selfish and powerful one who misuse his powers on the account of others’ happiness. It is the moto of the outcast and those who are deprived of the good nature.
In a world with ghosts, monsters, demons, and ghouls, there is one being that resonates in everyone’s mind. The idea of these creatures can be found in almost every culture on the planet in one form or another. They prey on the weak and they feast on the blood of their victims. They are compared to a fox for being quick and cunning, but also rather seductive in their nature. With their unholy existence one can only describe them as almost demonic. So what is this horrid creature? Well it is none other than the vampire, a creature as old as time itself. Throughout history there have been many different variations of the vampire, each with their own unique abilities. But one cannot help but mention
“How could it feel so good when it should be disgusting and painful?” (Butler 75) These words spoken by Theodora, an elderly white woman, about her symbiotic and sometimes sexual relationship with Shori, a black “elfin little girl” (Butler 75), express the societal fear that Octavia Butler exposes in her characterization of Shori as a monster. Shori is a monster because her very existence is a testament to the blurring of historically concrete lines. She is androgynous, vampire and human, black and white, a child with adult strength and urges. Shori’s relationship with her human symbionts and other Ina usually defies normal standards of behavior and acceptance by using pleasure instead of pain as a mechanism of control and abandoning traditional ideas about gender, sexuality, and crossbreeding.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula illustrated fears about sexual women in contrast to the woman who respected and abided by society’s sexual norms. Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s “Carmilla” represented not only the fear of feminine sexuality, but also the fear of sexuality between women. John William Polidori’s “The Vampyre” showed society’s fear of sexuality in terms of the seductive man who could “ruin” a young girl.These texts are representative of vampire stories in the Victorian Era, and will be the focus here.
“You’re impossibly fast and strong. Your skin is pale whit and ice cold. Your eyes change color and sometimes you speak like -- like you’re from a different time. You never eat or drink anything. You don’t go out in the sunlight…” (Bella, from the movie Twilight) At that point in the movie Twilight, Bella is putting pieces together that Edward Cullen is a vampire, but can vampires actually be real in real life? All that is really needed to be considered a vampire is by the want and urge to drink human blood. This paper will inform you on just how vampires can be real to a certain extent.
Carmilla is an example of a woman who loves her food far too much. Carmilla is consumed entirely by her food, even sleeping in a coffin of blood: “The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed” (Le Fanu 102). There exists a unique relationship between the vampire and their victims. Food becomes defined in terms of victimhood, distinctly separated from humanity’s general consumption of meat. The need for human victims makes hunting synonymous with courtship, as intense emotional connections are established between the vampiress and her food. As seen in the intense relationship developed between Laura and Carmilla, the vampire is “prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons” (105). For Carmilla, cruelty and love are inseparable (33). The taking of the victims’ blood for sustenance is a highly sexualized exchange of fluids from one body to another. The act of consumption is transformed into an illicit carnal exchange between the hunter and the hunted.
After analyzing The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth is the ideal vampiric figure, supporting Thomas Foster’s perspective about vampirism from his book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor. In fact, Roger Chillingworth, presents many instances of how vampires might act and appear in literature. Even though he is not a literal vampire, it does not
One of the primary causes of fear that leads to change is the lack, loss, and gain of power. Shortly after Stephen Kumalo learns that his son, Absalom, murdered Arthur Jarvis, Kumalo is horrified and approaches Msimangu for support and advice. Even upon doing so, Kumalo is thoroughly shaken, with only one thought in his head at the moment, “What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill one another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave between the searing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?” (79). In his questioning of “what [breaks] in a man” to trigger cold-blooded murder, Kumalo is face-to-face with a direct product of a
“Nice to Eat With You: Acts of Vampires” in the book How to Read Literature like a Professor. Diana Moon Grampers is a form of Vampirism she is a dictator who controls all the handicap people. Controlling a community is a lot easier if no one knows what you are doing so they could take advantage. By making the smarter people handicap Diana came achieve that goal.
The sexual overtones of many vampire stories, including recent ones, in which the vampire bite serves as a stand-in or metaphor for penetration, undergo a radical
The vampire had been depicted as the epitome of offensive and seductive behavior in their early representations. It has suffered an enduring image of something inhuman and monstrous that feeds and thrives at the expense of others. As David Punter and Glennis Byron have asserted, “Confounding all categories, the vampire is the ultimate embodiment of transgression” (The Gothic 268). The transgressive behavior of the vampire was first observed with Stoker’s Dracula. Although this figure is attractive to us in many ways, with his intelligence and immortality, the Count is primaril...
In the diverse categories of monsters, there are specific types of monsters which are “cursed by a bite”—Vampires, Zombies and Werewolves (Kaplan 2012: 136). Perhaps vampires are the most interesting of all. They have been around for centuries. From Dracula (Stoker 1897) to Twilight (Meyer 2005), vampire culture has seduced fiction lovers all over the world. Before vampire`s otherness in the 19th century renders vampirism a terrifying threat, but late 20th century America finds itself in a mood to perceive otherness as attractive. (Milly 2005).
First of all, ‘The Lovely Bones’ is about a girl named Susie Salmon and tells a story of how she died and how people get along together and live without her. She was a normal fourteen-year-old girl when she was murdered in the novel 's opening pages. She narrates the rest of her story from heaven, often returning to Earth to watch over her loved ones; mostly family, some friends and Mr. Harvey and the other people he kills. ‘Lovely Bones’ is represents Susie’s body the connection of heaven to earth, earth to heaven. This is main symbolism of this book as Susie. ‘She began to see things without her and the events that her death will influence her in heaven and her family and friends in earth.’ In this passage, the author talks about her life
it horrifies us and reinforces our sense of boundaries and normalcy” (Halberstam 13). Assuming that Bram Stoker’s Dracula sets the archetype of the vampire, it is clear that modern vampires have demonstrated a decrease in the Gothic horror despite similarities in the Gothic imagery and themes, and such a shift is attributed to a changing value of the limit within society and postmodernism. The Count is the benchmark of the vampire archetype as the monstrous Other that “announces itself as the place of corruption” (Anolik and Howard 1). Dracula is associated with disruption and transgression of accepted limits—a monstrosity of great evil that serves to guarantee the existence of good (Punter and Byron 231).
Both del Toro and Hogan affirm that beings such as vampires will never die, but not because of their immortality, but how they illustrate one’s desires. The authors of “Why Vampires Never Die” exploit numerous rhetorical components to convey this notion to the reader. So do vampires flare and then fade forever? No they do not. For as their impurity grants its nightly endowment, vampires alter humanities abominable finite identities and bind it to the treasure of infinity, and therefore impart within people their inner desire. As long as they express societies lust, they will forever be immortal.
Yet, Dukes’ analysis, more than a comparison between the two figures, focuses on demonstrating how Stoker’s creation, although inspired by Vlad, is considerably moved from the historical figure and authentic life of the Voievode, and directed towards constructing a more gothic and fictitious character. Should readers fathom that all superstitions derived from Stoker’s Dracula and related to Transylvania are real? Or should we doubt that these stories have even an ounce of veridity in them? In his recent book The Dracula Dilemma Duncan Light gives a partial answer to such questions and points out that “nothing in Romanian folklore narratives associates Vlad epeș with vampirism” (2012: 44). Light dedicates an entire chapter to the Historical Dracula, contrasting it with the Dracula of Literature, showing in this way how the first was the source of inspiration for the second.