#nina auerbach

[winged-cries]

we were kids together, you and i

[cor-ardens-archive]

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

Belligerently, even comically foreign though he is, Bela Lugosi's Dracula is the first authentic transplantation of Stoker's character to America. Paradoxically, Dracula was not notably foreign until he became American. Stoker's Count struggled to pass, perfecting his English accent and idioms, filling his library with British books, newspapers, magazines, reference works, and even, as Jonathan Harker notes admiringly, railway timetables. Once in England, he blends into Piccadilly so well, if so lewdly, that not even Mina notices him. No Englishman, he vows, will say of him, "Ha, ha! a stranger!" (p. 28). Bela Lugosi revels in being a stranger—even a comic stranger to whom we might say "Ha, ha!" His succulently foreign lntonations inspired the legend that he leamed his lines phonetically, scarcely understanding the dialogue of his fellow actors. Whether or not Lugosi knew the language he made his own, his accent became Dracula, expelling Stoker's adaptable invader. After his American transplantation, to be Dracula meant speaking in a different voice.

Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach

[aeslinnreads]

"Love offers no salvation from vampires; instead, it summons them."

Our Vampires, Ourselves (Nina Auerbach)

[elektramouthed]

Because [vampires] are always changing, their appeal is dramatically generational. In 1991 and 1993, I taught large classes at the University of Pennsylvania on the evolution of vampires. In none of my other courses have age differences been so central. Aficionados all, the students acknowledged my favorite vampires more or less politely, but had to teach me to appreciate theirs. Moreover, the 1991 class searched with obsessive unanimity for the rules governing vampirism, rules that bored students in 1993, who were enchanted by the less governable world of Anne Rice and didn’t care much for anything outside. There may have been political reasons for this shift; between 1991 and 1993, the anxieties of the Persian Gulf War gave way to the looser, more amorphous climate of the Clinton administration. Whyever it happened, the vampires covered in these courses took life from generational debates: along with the differences between two groups of students, between myself and both groups, there were the distinctive perspectives of my teaching assistants, women in their twenties who were devoted to the vampires of the 1980s.

Nina Auerbach, from Our Vampires, Ourselves

[bloodcryptskull]

My Own "Lost Boys/Near Dark" take

Based on this image I've found linked here, for a long time I've been brainstorming my own take of my own "Lost Boys/Near Dark" style vampire story which I'm then taken back to Nina Auerbach's "Our Vampires Ourselves" where discusses that Vampires originally a threat to the patriarchy but by the 1980s came along, they suddenly became the patriarchy which is exemplified by Max the "Head Vampire" from "Lost Boys" and Jesse Hooker from "Near Dark" due to Reaganism of the era. Although the only difference is the films treated single parenthood such as the Single Mother from "Lost Boys" brought Evil to the home while the Single Father in "Near Dark" cured vampirism while the Grandfather was the one who defeated the "Head Vampire" in Lost Boys therefore further solidifying that patriarchal narrative as well.

The main point being that None of the Vampire gangs from those films represented a life outside patriarchy which is not only a 'wasted' opportunity but also it's an example of how Reaganist conservatism was pretty prevalent during that era. Which brings me to the main point of this current piece is that for a long time I've been trying to brainstorm ideas of a inversion of the story structure found in "Near Dark/Lost Boys" with Vampires being the protagonists characters and they actually do represent a life outside the patriarchy while the human characters like Hunters for example and especially those from her mortal life like her parents, etc represent the patriarchy and the status quo.

Like for example I would like to play on the "Blood transfusion" aspect like the protagonist's own father is a doctor who tries to cure her of vampirism via a Blood Transfusion but finds that it not only doesn't work but has rather disastrous consequences for him? And the Protagonists Grandfather is a Vampire Hunter and perhaps one of the main antagonists in the story? So the story I have in mind is that like in "The Lost Boys/Near Dark" the protagonist gets turned into a Vampire and she joins a Vampire gang where she experiences freedom for the first time in her entire life more so than she ever had as a mortal but then something happens she and the vampire gang gets ambushed by Vampire Hunters where she runs off to the night and people from her mortal life like her mother picks her up and her father due to being a Doctor and notices she's a Vampire and thinks her condition is curable with a Blood Transfusion but ends up in a huge disaster for him as she drains her Father dry (or alternatively the blood transfusion just replaces the blood with no real effect) so she runs off to the night and is found by a few members of her gang giving them time to recuperate but then the Hunters strike again revealing that the protagonist's Grandfather is actually one of the top leaders of the Hunter organization since she always knew that her Grandfather was a priest/minister and a deeply religious man but didn't realize that this is what he was up to all along and his main goal is to kill the "Head Vampire" as he believes that if he dies then entire "Vampire bloodline" will topple despite his very poor research on the matter though.

TL;DR It's a Lost Boys/Near Dark 'tribute' with Vampires as protagonists and Hunters as antagonists while keeping the spirit of the 1980s but in a more progressive take that is free of constraints of Reaganism if not it actually criticizes it.

Thoughts on the matter?

[orangerosebush]

Nina Auerbach, from Our Vampires, Ourselves

[soundlessl-y]

[ID: Vampires are neither inhuman nor nonhuman nor all-too-human; they are simply more alive than they should be. /end ID]

Nina Auerbach | Our Vampires, Ourselves

[yvain]

Women writers of the Victorian era regarded the fairy tale as a dormant literature of their own. When Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre hears hoofbeats approaching her in the dark, ice-covered Hay Lane, ��memories of nursery stories” immediately flood her mind, especially the recollection of “a North-of-England” monster capable of assuming several bestial forms. But the beastly apparition Jane expects turns out to be Rochester, the “master” whom she promptly causes to fall off his horse and who will eventually become her thrall. Rochester himself soon shows his own conversance with, and respect for, powers he associates with the magical women of traditional fairy tales. “When you came on me in Hay Lane last night,” he tells Jane, “I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse. I am not sure yet. Who are your parents?” When Jane replies that she is parentless, Rochester endows her with a supernatural ancestry. Surely, he insists, she must have been “waiting for [her] people,” the fairies who hold their revels in the moonlight: “Did I break one of your rings, that you spread the damned ice on the causeway?”

Here and elsewhere in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë takes even more seriously than her two characters do the potency of the female fairy-tale tradition to which she has them refer. Karen E. Rowe, who has so ably written on that tradition, was the first to show how fully saturated Jane Eyre is with patterns drawn from major folktales such as “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Blue Beard,” and, as a prime analogue for Jane’s developing relationship with the homely Rochester, from “Beauty and the Beast,” the 1756 Kunstmärchen (or literary fairy tale) adapted and popularized by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont.

Nina Auerbach, Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers

[malaisequotes]

“Vampires are neither inhuman nor nonhuman nor all-too-human; they are simply more alive than they should be.”

Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach

[claudiablogger]

it's literally claudia birth day. many are celebrating this

[winged-cries]

[cor-ardens-archive]

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

Nina accordingly becomes the final, crucial bridge between town and invader, humanity and the monster. By luring the vampire to her bed so that he will vanish with daybreak, Nna both dies for humanity and, more knowingly than her husband, crosses the bridge beyond lt. Nina’s ambiguous sacrifice abolishes Stoker’s polarization between pure and carnal women, for Nina is less a victim than a link between shadow and substance, life and death, corruption and respectability. She may dispel Max Schreck, but she also marries him to the civil domesticity she represents.

Our Vampires, Ourseves by Nina Auerbach

[aeslinnreads]

"Even a countercultural vampire is a product, if a resistant one, of its age."

Our Vampires, Ourselves (Nina Auerbach)

[elektramouthed]

There are no fangs, no slavering, no red eyes, no mesmerism, and no dematerialization, only a larger-than-average cat and a door that opens. The opening door is the key to this vampire: she is all body, though a mutating one, with no vampire trap to enforce transparency. Male vampires took their authority from the ghost of Hamlet’s father, but Carmilla’s is as cozy as a cat, though one eerily elongated.

Nina Auerbach, from Our Vampires, Ourselves