Vampires and Tuberculosis: A Brief Overview
In the beginning, the vampire was a smelly, nasty, hairy, yellow-toothed creature that preyed primarily on his or her immediate family. Sort of an undead redneck; not at all inspiring.
Tuberculosis was a little better; it killed you quite dead, but it made you beautiful (according to Victorian sensibilities) in the process.
Then, in 1897, Bram Stoker presented the Victorian readership of England with a book that combined the deeply sublimated fear of sexuality of his day with the symptoms of the fashionable disease. To do this, he reconstructed the vampire from icky zombie-creature to the traditional figure of Death the Lover and made the dread Prince Dracula from distant and exotic Transylvania the carrier of tuberculosis' symptoms - wasting, pallor, and bloody lips. And through the Dark Prince he verbalized for a generation that found the feminine ankle too provacative to contemplate the desirability of the forbidden. Overnight, as it were, a star was born.
Since then, the vampire has been a standard vehicle for the expression of forbidden sexuality and the power of darkness. In keeping with Stoker's theme of Dracula vampirizing the heros' wife and fiancee, the vampire has been particularly associated with the danger of unrestrained female sexuality. When the seduction of a wife or girlfriend was no longer shocking, the stakes were raised with the "Carmilla" theme - lesbian vampire woman turns innocent girl on to illicit desires.
But such is the nature of our society that nothing stays shocking long, and as social mores have become less restrictive, the vampire has become less frightening and more sympathetic. Max Schrenk's Nosferatu gave way to the seductive sexual predator portrayed by Christopher Lee, which in turn yeilded to Gary Oldman's tragic, romantic Dracula (Interview with a Vampire makes an interesting sidelight to this trend, suggestive as it is in the Louis's self-loathing and several other negative vampire prortrayals of the quasi-backlash against moral relativity in our culture.)
Meanwhile, the Gothic subculture has completed the circle opened by Stoker, by both embracing the vampire and staging a revival of "tuberculosis chic" (sometimes mistaken by the ignorant for "heroin chic" but involving much nicer clothes and less vomiting.) No matter how dangerously close to cliche this motif may seem to totter, there appears to be little risk of the vampire being consigned to the graveyard in the forseeable future.
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Copyright 1998 Carrie Laben
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