Everybody Knows I’m A (Particular Kind) Of Monster
A week or so ago, I had a really frustrating conversation. This conversation was with someone who admits to not really being a "fiction person." That is, they don't read fiction very often and therefore don't want to be bothered with things like metaphors or representative qualities.
(You know who you are, nonfiction person. Please take this snark with a healthy dollop of "you know I love you.")
This came up as we discussed Twilight. I have not read Twilight, nor do I plan to. I do plan to watch the movies as a drinking game, though. I have also read enough excerpts from Twilight to realize it might not be very good. I'm also prone to hyperbole. So anybody who loves Twilight and reads this blog (though the odds do seem slim...), please don't flip out in the comments. Twilight is not the point.
What I said was that Twilight had one good idea in it and it was too bad that a hack had the idea. My NonFicFriend asked what this good idea was.
"Celibate sex monsters?" I said. "C'mon, that's gold." His response was a somewhat blank stare. "Vampires are sex monsters," I said a little too loudly. He wasn't having it. "This can't lose you, it's on the label," I insisted. "I mean, I shouldn't lose you until I start talking about how the sex monsters used to be racist monsters and were loneliness monsters before that."
At which point I took many deep breaths and realized I had a blog post.
Monsters are not just things that try and eat your face. Not the really interesting ones, at any rate. Monsters represent concepts we find legitimately terrifying but are so nebulous a concept that we have to give it fangs or weird powers or something in order to get a grip on it.
Take sex, for example. Sex is freakin' frightening, you guys. It has powers over us we barely understand or control. It sells us things. It convinces us insane actions are totally reasonable in the name of short term gain. And that's before I get into the really controversial stuff. Sex is TERRIFYING.
And that's why Vampires are usually (at least these days) sex monsters. They are super attractive despite being incredibly dangerous. They mesmerize us, make us do things against our will, and remain ever-youthful (see also: potency/virility/fecundity) even while sucking out our life force (blood and fertility have a lot going on mythologically). They're also the "bad boys" or "femme fatales" that attract otherwise "pure" or "good" women and men with their darker qualities. Which is a reflection of other weird things sex does to us (ie, making us want what we shouldn't want).
Where this gets particularly interesting to me is when the thing the monster represents drifts with culture. For instance, today vampires are sex monsters, but this is a holdover from Dracula. Except Dracula wasn't a sex monster...or at least, he wasn't only a sex monster. In fact, he wasn't even primarily a sex monster. He was a foreigner monster, and the sex just got tacked on because that made the foreigner even more terrible.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, let me explain. This may be blunt, so keep grace in mind. Dracula is a foreigner monster because he is a hairy-knuckled Slav who shows up in Victoria's England and starts assimilating himself into society while not leaving any of his barbaric, Eastern European customs behind. This is exactly what Victorian society feared the most. The sun may never set on the Empire, but that only allowed a bunch of grubby heathens on the edges of it to claim they were English.
Here's where the sex monster part comes in: Dracula "ruins" the good English women! He forces them to lust after him with his swarthy skin, fantastic mustachios, and monstrous mesmerizing powers! Then he becomes intimate with these women, thus stealing their virtue and ruining them for the Empire as women of (literally) good breeding! Surely this is theft of the flower of English womanhood is how the Empire will eventually fall!
Dracula is a monstrous, racist caricature of what Victorian England most feared: It's own slow destruction from inside at the hands of the less savory edges of the Empire. And this attack would not come from a military force, but by occupation of the nation's wombs.
These days, we like to think we're more enlightened and less overtly racist, so the feared foreigner has worn off Dracula leaving us with only the sex monster. Which a whole host of creators have happily polished to a gemlike quality in the intervening century and a half. So much so that it's often hard to think of them as anything but sex monsters.
As weird as that is, I'm still not entirely sure how Stoker took a Romani loneliness monster and turned it into a racist sex monster. I'm pretty happy he did, though.
What do you guys think? Am I reading too much into monsters? Do you want to hear about a few more before you decide if this is a good theory? Which ones do you think break the concept? Let me know in the comments!
