Vampire Gothic

Author(s): Teresa A. Goddu

Source: American Literary History , Spring, 1999, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 125-
141
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/490080

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Vampire Gothic
Teresa A. Goddu

Number of the world's 810 vampires who live in the United Monster Theory:
States, according to the Vampire Research Center: 550 Reading Culture
Number who live in Romania: 3 By Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
University of Minnesota
Press, 1996
Harper's Index, October 1992
Our Vampires, Ourselves
By Nina Auerbach
Vampires seem to be on the rise, at least in my part of the
University of Chicago
world. Recently, a teenage vampire clan was discovered in Mur-
Press, 1995
ray, Kentucky, home of the National Boy Scout Museum. This
clan met in an abandoned hilltop house, which the press named
Skin Shows: Gothic
Horror and the
"The Vampire Hotel," to participate in role-playing games that
included drinking each other's blood and killing puppies inTechnology
the of Monsters
By Judith Halberstam
local animal shelter. This local clan, however, did not make na-
Duke University Press,
tional news until four of the teenagers traveled to Florida to help
1995
a friend murder her parents, after which they stole the parents'
car for a trip to New Orleans, residence of Anne Rice. The Ken-
tucky clan and their message of teenage monstrosity inspired a
three-part series on a local Nashville newscast entitled "Vam-
pires: Games of Death" that purported to expose the secret sub-
culture of Nashville's teenage vampires.1 After investigating what
goes on in Nashville after dark, the report urged parents to check
their children's rooms for satanic books and their children's bod-
ies for signs of self-mutilation. Relying on a minister as an expert
witness, the series concluded that parents need to pay more at-
tention to their teens and give them less freedom. Fittingly, the
same station ran a special report on "the soul" soon after. In the
Bible Belt, the teenage vampire serves as a threatening image of
family values gone awry-the child as soulless killer, as home-
grown horror.
The conjunction of morality and monstrosity in the Bible
Belt vampire is also evident in a public service advertisement at
the Nashville International Airport, which, like all sites of trans-
portation, serves as a nexus of locality and mobility. Visible im-
mediately after passing through the metal detectors, the image of
a bat flying through an open window with a full moon in the
background warns the traveler: "Beware of Fly-By-Night Rela-
tionships. AIDS. See the Light." Having been greeted on arrival

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126 Vampire Gothic

in Nashville by wholesome images of country music and Opry-

land U.S.A., the traveler is policed upon departure by the image
of the vampire as romantic horror, by the lover as serial killer.2
Registering the fears of cultural globalization and mobility, this
vampire warns against illicit sexuality as well as the terrors of
tourism.
These vampire sightings, which reflect the reactionary ef-
fects of fin de siecle gothicism, suggest several things. First, the
timeworn conventions of gothic horror still have vitality. As store
decorations moved seamlessly from jack-o'-lanterns in orange
and black to Christmas wreaths in red and green, the New York
Times (23 October 1996) reported that Halloween has become
the second largest commercial holiday next to Christmas. Be-
sides being a marketable commercial category, gothic horror has
also become a cultural phenomenon. "Terror," as Mark Edmund-
son states, "has probably never been so hot, surely never so lucra-
tive" (50). From Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs
(1991), Goth rock, and Stephen King to Jeffrey Dahmer, Timo-
thy McVeigh ("terror in the heartland"), and talk television, the
gothic informs our cultural imagination: it is front page news and
draws high ratings. Given the recent proliferation of academic
texts on gothic/horror-including the books under review
here-the academy is also participating in this horror boom.3
Second, these vampire sightings show that, despite its cur-
rent proliferation, gothic horror is articulated through particular
locations. If the gothic is the repository for cultural anxieties, then
the specific form and site of its conventions have much to say
about its cultural effects. For instance, in stating that Nashville's
vampires are a particular "breed" and that two "Yankee gothics"
equal one "Tennessee gothic," Jonathan, chief of the Nashville
vampire clan, insists on regional difference among vampires as
well as cultural hierarchy: here the vampire's embodiment as
Southern chauvinist reconfigures the vampire's earlier symbol-
ism as aristocratic imperialist. Moreover, the placement of the
public service advertisement in the airport suggests the image of
a specific traveler: "patient zero," flight attendant Gaetan Dugas,
who has been popularized as having begun the AIDS epidemic
and whose very profession invokes the rootless cosmopolitan
vampire of the nineteenth century. Local contingency governs
possible readings of the gothic and its cultural resonances.
Finally, these traveling vampires remind us of the gothic's
mobility. It is precisely the fear that the vampire might relocate-
crossing the border from Kentucky to Tennessee or migrating
through the ease of flight (no coffin required)-that troubles
these sightings and invokes their regulatory effects. Able to re-

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 American Literary History 127

produce itself through a single bite, the vampire serves as the

sign of contagion. The vampire's ability to metamorphose into
different forms-fog, bat, human-is similar to the gothic's ge-
neric mutation just as its mobility-Transylvania to England,
Florida to New Orleans-signifies the genre's movement across
diverse geographical spaces. As a mode of excess, the gothic can-
nibalizes other genres and transgresses their domain; as Fred
Botting argues, "in generating and refracting diverse objects of
fear and anxiety" the gothic constantly "transforms its own
shape and focus" (20). Like its vampires, then, the gothic should
be studied through its particular locales as well as its traveling
transformations.
By focusing on the gothic as a traveling form, both geo-
graphically and generically, this essay suggests where we might
(re)locate the gothic in its American locale. It will specifically
connect American horror to the issue of race and the historical
context of slavery. While the three books in this review do not
focus exclusively on American literature and culture or even on
the gothic as a genre per se, they offer interesting perspectives
from which to reassess American traditions of gothic horror.
Monster Theory, edited by Jeffrey Cohen, a collection of essays
on how the monster embodies its culture; Nina Auerbach's Our
Vampires, Ourselves, a study of the vampire's ever-changing form;
and Judith Halberstam's Skin Shows, a discussion of the techno-
logies of monstrosity in Anglo-American gothic horror, consider
the multiple and mobile meanings of the monstrous. All three
works see monsters as boundary creatures whose bodies reflect
and produce cultural identity; all trace the monster's movement
across national boundaries and through numerous forms.ByBy breaking down the
breaking down the rigid concepts of national traditions andrigidge-
concepts of national

neric classifications, the monster theories of these works traditions

chal- and generic
classifications, the
lenge us to rethink how our current literary histories delineate,
monster theories of these
define, and bind the monstrous and often messy category worksofchallenge us to
"gothic." rethink how our current

Monster Theory begins with Cohen's assertion: "We live in literary histories

a time of monsters" (vii). His introduction and opening essay delineate, define, and
bind the monstrous and
provide an overview to the theoretical preoccupations of the col-
often messy category of
lection. His seven theses (which include "the monster is the har- "gothic."
binger of category crisis," "the monster dwells at the gates of
difference," "the monster polices the borders of the possible")
outline the way in which the monster serves as a site of cultural
production. The "cultural fascination with the monster," Cohen
argues, "is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult
to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower)
that which threatens" (viii). While Cohen's theoretical rubrics

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128 Vampire Gothic

give the reader a useful starting place, the strength of the volume
lies in its local histories of monsters. Many of the essays focus
on the production of monsters in specific cultural contexts: the
odd pairing of Gargantua and Tom Thumb in Stuart England,
Saracen alterity in the literature of the crusades, the dinosaur
and US consumer capitalism. In exploring the cultural work each
monster does, these local histories give detailed accountings of
the symbolic structures monsters exceed and the cultural bound-
aries they transgress as they disrupt and delineate gendered, ra-
cial, ethnic, sexual, class, and national identities.
For example, one of three essays that focus on American
culture, Allison Pingree's "America's 'United Siamese Brothers':
Chang and Eng and Nineteenth-Century Ideologies of Democ-
racy and Domesticity," shows how the spectacle of the conjoined
body of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng displayed issues of na-
tional identity and contradiction.4 Their bodies, Pingree argues,
at once symbolized the national union-"epluribus unum"-and
disrupted it through their excessive sexuality: in marrying a pair
of sisters and fathering 21 children, their bodies became the site
of perverse sexualities (incest, homosexuality, adultery) that
threatened to unveil the democratic project as monstrous. Pin-
gree's excellent teasing out of the tensions between the domestic
and political representations of Chang's and Eng's sexualized
bodies, however, raises another issue that remains unexplored in
her essay: the conjunction of race and nation in the monstrous
body. Chang and Eng's location in the South (they bought slaves
and settled on a farm in North Carolina) suggests that the spec-
ter of miscegenation may also haunt representations of their sex-
ualized bodies. Pingree's discussion of how the twins' sexuality
was portrayed in terms of Siamese polygamy could be extended
by linking their "foreign" excess to orientalized images of the
South and the polygamous sexual practices of many Southern
plantation owners. Having to negotiate constantly who is master
and who is slave, Chang and Eng's foreign, racialized bodies
might also reflect the Other within: the domestic issue of South-
ern slavery. Perverse sexuality may be the excessive sign of an-
other threat to the national body-slavery. By proposing a con-
nection between racial and sexual representations of these twins,
my point is not to fault Pingree's fine work but to suggest how
monsters often operate on multiple levels. As bodies of excess,
monsters provide profitable sites to explore the localized colli-
sions and collusions between the boundaries of different iden-
tities.
The range of essays in this collection demonstrates the
monster's multiplicity. Assembling monsters from different times

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 American Literary History 129

and places (medieval Icelandic revenants to Anne Rice's vampire

Lestat) as well as discourses (science, anthropology, critical
theory), Monster Theory breaks down period and disciplinary
boundaries to reveal the monster's many haunts. Sewn together
from parts like Frankenstein's creature, this collection seeks to
"instigate a chain of resonances rather than delimit singular
meanings" (ix). Taken together, its individual essays engender
meaningful associations: its diverse monsters (hermaphrodites,
vampires, white supremacists) not only disclose a continuum be-
tween monster and human but also suggest ways in which the
two categories are mutually constituted. The various essays re-
veal that monsters do not look or act alike while also showing
how monsters perform certain recognizable functions. Monster
Theory's form, then, embodies its point: monsters are pervasive
and culturally specific.
Nina Auerbach's Our Vampires, Ourselves concurs with
Monster Theory's understanding that the monster is "known only
through process and movement, never through dissection-table
analysis" (x). Asserting that all monsters are not created equal
(ghosts, werewolves, and manufactured monsters are too change-
less for Auerbach), Auerbach focuses on the vampire and its
infinite variety. "There is no such creature as 'The Vampire,"'
she writes, "there are only vampires" (5). Tracing the vampire
through its numerous transformations and movements-from
friend to tyrant, ghost to animal, nineteenth-century England to
twentieth-century America, theater to film-Auerbach demon-
strates the vampire's adaptability. Bram Stoker's Dracula does
not take center stage in this book; rather, he is placed in a long
line of vampires going back to Varney and Camilla and forward
to Lestat and Gilda. Dracula, Auerbach argues, is important less
for the tradition he shapes than for the one he breaks: he embod-
ies the shift from the nineteenth century's ghostly intimate to the
twentieth century's "power-hungry predator" (7). Instead of
serving as a static master trope, Dracula represents the process
of change that Auerbach argues makes the vampire immortal.
By focusing on the differences among vampires, Auerbach never
allows the conventions of the vampire to solidify. Hence, her
book is never schematic and her vampires are never stereotypical.
Auerbach couples her comprehensive knowledge with a delicious
delight at unearthing each new variety of vampire.
Auerbach, however, is interested not only in the vampire's
changing conventions but also in how those conventions respond
to their cultural context. Vampires, Auerbach argues, change ac-
cording to their time: "[E]ach feeds on his age distinctively be-
cause he embodies that age" (1). The vampire reflects national

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130 Vampire Gothic

moods and, hence, tells us who we are. Varney's commercialism

marks him as the paradigmatic citizen of a decade named the
Hungry '40s; Dracula, a creature of classification, is born from
"a decade shaped by medical experts," his "primary progenitor"
being the criminalized homosexual, Oscar Wilde in the dock
(83); the vampires of the post-Watergate 1970s rush to fill the
vacuum of authority while vampires in the 1980s die under
Reaganite authoritarianism. Auerbach succeeds both at tracing
the vampire's conventions out through its culture-she tracks
Dracula's animal affinities to Darwinian philosophy, the specta-
cle of the Elephant Man, and Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books
(1894, 1895)-and at seeing how a single cultural moment can
produce diverse effects. In comparing Anne Rice's Lestat and his
exclusive aristocracy to Stephen King's leaderless vampires in
Salems Lot (1975), Auerbach articulates how both vampires re-
spond to an age of fallen leaders: one represents the fantasy of a
past, finer nation, the other the fear of an undefined and direc-
tionless future. Auerbach also elucidates the way conventions re-
spond to their culture's technologies: the incorporeality of the
nineteenth century's ghostly vampires is reflected in the theatri-
cal technology of the "Vampire (or Vamp) Trap," which enabled
"phantomlike intrusions into or out of domestic space" (23); the
"witty and literate self-justifications via cassette tape of Fred Sa-
berhagen's Dracula in 1975 and of Anne Rice's Louis in 1976"
(152) are refractions of the Watergate tapes. On the whole, Auer-
bach's cultural analyses are suggestive rather than prescriptive;
her argument works through an accretion of incisive insights
rather than sustained historical analysis.
Auerbach also makes clear her own personal investments
in the vampire. The reader knows which vampires she likes and
which she sees as betrayers of the breed. Auerbach's identifica-
tions with her vampires are what make this book-dare I say-
so much fun. Especially in her discussions of the twentieth cen-
tury, we see vampires change with her life and times. Her exhila-
ration over the vampires of the 1970s and her sense of the joyless
paralysis of the vampires of the 1980s mark her own political
pulse. Her recognition that the vampire's appeal is "dramatically
generational" (5)-her students have different favorites-fore-
grounds the connection between our love of vampires and our
passion for their times. Our identifications with the monsters we
seek may explain Auerbach's ending. Weary of the wilted, de-
pressed creatures of the 1980s, Auerbach looks to queer and fem-
inist works to conjure some countercultural vampires. While she
locates some forms of resistance, she is unable to find a vampire
that offers an actual threat. Auerbach's underlying pessimism

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 American Literary History 131

about feminist and queer interventions into conservative culture

ends the book on a cautionary note. She concludes by stating
that vampires are in "need of a long restorative sleep" (192).
If Our Vampires, Ourselves maps the vampire's diverse
movements and mutations, Judith Halberstam's Skin Shows fo-
cuses on how monsters stitch together the fragments of Other-
ness into a single, "all-purpose" body. Monsters, Halberstam
writes, are bodies "pieced together out of the fabric of race, class,
gender, and sexuality" (3). From its histories of horror to its the-
ories of the postmodern monster, Skin Shows gives readers much
to sink their teeth into. Using a Foucauldian approach, Halbers-
tam argues that monsters encode, particularly through their skin,
the technologies of subjectivity. As the site of deviant identities,
the monster condenses "as many fear-producing traits as pos-
sible into one body" (21). Reading the monster through its nu-
merous significations, Halberstam shows how subjectivity is
culturally produced through the "mutual and interdependent
constructions of race, class, and gender" (31). Her insightful
reading of Stoker's Dracula (1897) connects the vampire and the
Jew and reads anti-Semitism as a gothic discourse. Extending
Sander L. Gilman's elucidation of how the Jew's body was
demonized in Victorian England through medical, political, and
psychological discourses (The Jew's Body [1991]), she links Dra-
cula's degenerate identity to anti-Semitic representations of the
Jew as foreign, economically and sexually parasitical, and femi-
nine; blood is not only the mark of sexuality but of race and
capital as well.5
Skin Shows places its historically specific discussions of the
conjunctions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in nineteenth-
century British monsters within a larger argument about the lim-
its of psychoanalytic readings of gothic monstrosity. For Halber-
stam, psychoanalysis is another technology of horror that must
be historically situated. Her insistence that all fear is "histor-
ically conditioned rather than a psychological universal" (6)
keeps her focused in the first half of the book on the material
conditions that produce monsters. Moreover, throughout her
readings, Halberstam underscores how social and political strug-
gles become internalized as psychic mechanisms. While she sees
psychoanalysis's normative impulses as inadequate to under-
standing the gothic's monsters, Halberstam does not jettison the
category of psychoanalysis altogether. Instead, she is interested
in looking at how the gothic participates in producing a psychol-
ogy of self and how psychoanalysis generates new structures of
subjectivity and hence monstrosity in the twentieth century.
Halberstam's intervention into psychoanalysis is fore-

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132 Vampire Gothic

grounded in the second half of the book, where she takes on

Freud's theory of paranoia in order to "unhinge monstrosity
from masculine power and fear from feminine victimhood"
(108). Through feminist and queer readings of contemporary
American horror films ranging from Alfred Hitchcock's The
Birds (1963) to splatter films and The Silence of the Lambs, Hal-
berstam refutes "the dominant narratives of pleasure and dis-
pleasure validated by psychoanalysis" (126) and their conflation
of monstrosity and sexual perversion. Besides constructing femi-
nist and antihomophobic counternarratives of contemporary
horror, Halberstam attempts to "resituate the subtexts of race
and class that the gendered narrative erases" (126). Psychoana-
lytic accounts of horror, Halberstam argues, miss other registers
of fear in their focus on gender and sexuality. Her reading of
The Birds, however, which itself privileges gender, only gestures
toward a reading of race and class: it suggests seeing the image
of the massing birds sociopolitically in terms of feminism, civil
rights, and student activism as the "banding together of birds of
a feather" (128).
Despite Halberstam's recognition of the various frames of
reference available to contemporary horror, race and class be-
come parenthetical to her discussion in the second half of the
book since she sees gender and sexuality as the "dominant mark
of otherness" (7) in the twentieth century. Halberstam argues
that the shift from the nineteenth century's multiple monstrosity
to the twentieth century's "primary focus upon sexuality and
gender" is due to the "success of the hegemonic installation of
psychoanalytic interpretations of human subjectivity" (24). This
ambitious assertion, however, lacks the detailed historical analy-
sis present in the first half of the book. Instead of tracing the
historical process of this shift in representations of subjectivity
or explicating the cultural contexts of "gendered horror," Halber-
stam's argument privileges the psychoanalytical approaches of
feminist, queer, and film theory. Hence, the book falls into two
contradictory parts: the first half, which focuses on the British
novel and sees the monster as multiple, situates horror histori-
cally; the second half, which reads horror in twentieth-century
American film and views the monster as dominated by gender
and sexuality, understands horror psychoanalytically. While
Halberstam's theoretical discussions in the second half of the
book are incisive, her explanation for large historical shifts be-
tween nineteenth- and twentieth-century horror are not fully
worked through. Her argument does not account for its move-
ment from novel to film or from British to American culture in
part because Halberstam often generalizes from her own inter-

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 American Literary History 133

ests: a comment like the narrative of twentieth-century gothic

horror "resides almost exculsively in popular cinema" (52) sig-
nals the limited scope of her argument rather than the narrow
location of contemporary horror. In shifting the ground of its
argument, then, Skin Shows sometimes gets coalesced into posi-
tions its own readings warn against or go beyond.
Halberstam's reading of The Silence of the Lambs is a case
in point. Comparing Frankenstein's creature to Buffalo Bill, the
film's serial killer who sews a woman's suit out of skin, she states
that the "nineteenth-century monster is marked by racial or spe-
cies violation while Buffalo Bill seems to be all gender" (6). Inter-
ested in how Buffalo Bill "challenges the heterosexist and misog-
ynist constructions of ... humanness" (177), Halberstam's
reading of The Silence of the Lambs focuses on his "posthuman"
gender identity. However, her discussion of anti-Semitism in
nineteenth-century gothic horror could be usefully applied to a
racial reading of Buffalo Bill's skin show. Importantly, the film
associates the monstrosity of Buffalo Bill's violence not only with
his skinning of women but also with US imperialism and Nazi
anti-Semitism. Buffalo Bill is allied with the imperialistic prac-
tices of his namesake, Buffalo Bill Cody, a US Army scout
known for scalping Indians as well as slaughtering buffalo; his
violence is also connected to US interventions in Asia. The cli-
max of the film, which shows Buffalo Bill armed with a gun and
night goggles, captures the following sequence of shots: Buffalo
Bill looking through the night goggles at his quarry, Clarice,
framed by an American flag on the wall in the background;
Buffalo Bill lying dead on the floor, the light from the shot-out
window exposing a soldier's helmet, a small American flag, and
a GI Joe; an Asian screen with butterflies on it twisting slowly in
the wind. As the allusion to e. e. cumming's poem "Buffalo Bill's
defunct" (a line of which-"how do you like your blueeyed
boy"-is written on the blackboard in one of the FBI offices)
makes clear, Buffalo Bill is the "handsome" American "blueeyed
boy" as killer. His blue eyes, along with his tattoos and his white
supremacist posters on the wall in his den, mark him as a white
racist, a skinhead. Perhaps the most telling signifier of Buffalo
Bill's monstrous racism is the white quilt with orange swastikas
that covers his bed. Significantly, the quilt is only visible as
Buffalo Bill picks up a gun from the bed. The quilt, the bed's
skin, insists that the site of sexuality is also marked by the vio-
lence of white racism. Indeed, with its focus on skin being turned
into serviceable objects and what Cary Wolfe and Jonathan El-
mer describe as its "species discourse," the film is haunted by
the Holocaust.

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134 Vampire Gothic

The film's conflation of normative "whiteness" with mon-

strosity allows for a critical reading of racism; however, its por-
trayal of "blackness" tends, as Elizabeth Young argues in her
essay "The Silence of the Lambs and the Flaying of Feminist The-
ory" (1991), to reinscribe racist stereotypes. The final image of
Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter sitting on a Caribbean island
calling Clarice associates him with a British imperialism based
on racism and capital (there are British pound notes above his
head) as well as with the American tourist as voracious con-
sumer. Yet, as Young points out, the "sophisticated allegory, in
which cannibalism, usually considered the province of the 'sav-
age,' becomes instead the mode of the white man, who cannibal-
izes not only the Third World, but his own kind" quickly col-
lapses upon itself as "blackness" becomes a mere backdrop (26).
The film allies Clarice with black characters throughout, yet they
remain token characters: her best friend Ardelia, who gives her
a high five at the beginning of the film, points her toward Lecter's
clues during the search and watches supportively as she gets her
badge at the end; Barney, Lecter's cell-warden, treats Clarice with
kindness, allowing her access to Lecter, setting out a chair for
her, and assuring her he will watch her as she talks with Lecter.
The film may seem eager to critique white racism by suggesting
how Barney, clothed in a white turtleneck and uniform, is also
imprisoned in the cellar despite his access to the key (in one scene
a white officer loads a gun through a glass directly behind a black
orderly's head), but it ends up reinscribing racist stereotypes:
blackness as animalistic or mad, the Caribbean as a site of canni-
balism.6
The film's ultimate demonization of black identity as well
as its relegation of black characters to token positions is one ex-
ample of what makes Halberstam wary more generally of in-
tervening in contemporary horror through race. Black charac-
ters, Halberstam argues, are most often relegated to the role of
"body shield" or totalized as monsters in contemporary horror.
She states: "The gothicization of certain 'races' over the last cen-
tury, one might say, has been all too successful. This does not
mean that Gothic race is not readable in the contemporary hor-
ror text but it is clear that, within Gothic, the difference between
representing racism and representing race is extremely tricky to
negotiate" (4). This negotiation may be difficult but it is worth-
while. As Halberstam's own untangling of the strands of anti-
Semitism in nineteenth-century England elucidates, it is im-
portant to show how deviant racial identities are historically
produced in order to defamiliarize the gothicization of racial
difference. Halberstam's recuperations of horror for feminist and

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 American Literary History 135

antihomophobic ends serve as useful models for reconsiderations

of the antiracist possibilities of gothic horror.
The classic fleshfest, George Romero's Night of the Living
Dead (1968), is one place to begin such a reconsideration. As
Richard Dyer demonstrates in his article "White" (1988), the
skin show of Night of the Living Dead depends on race: all the
zombies are white and all the whites act like zombies (60). The
hero of the movie, the only African-American character, Ben,
must fight against a reign of terror emanating from the living
dead without and the living within. Trapped in a white farm-
house, Ben relies on his wits to survive the night. Unhinging the
gothic's usual association of blackness/evil and whiteness/good,
the movie critiques "whiteness" as rapacious and horrifying.
Moreover, it conflates white rapacity with US military power.
The zombies are described as an "army of unidentified assas-
sins"; their reanimated corpses are the result of high levels of
radiation issuing from the frontier of space, a fallen NASA satel-
lite. The images of the burnt and fleshless bodies of Hiroshima
hide behind these flesh-feasting zombies. The survival instruc-
tions offered to the citizens over the radio and television, which
resemble those of a nuclear attack, suggest that the fallout from
years of US imperialism enabled by racism is an implosion from
within, a feasting on the self. The helicopter at the end of the
film, which invokes Vietnam, makes this link more directly. From
the helicopter's perspective above, we see a line of zombies walk-
ing across a field toward the farmhouse; from the ground, we
soon realize that these armed men are not zombies but vigilante
justice organized to protect the citizenry. These men-who re-
semble, with their dogs, belts of bullets, and down-home sayings
(you can "beat 'em or burn 'em, they go up pretty easy"), the
image of Southern law enforcement during the civil rights era-
end up attacking the house and killing Ben, thinking he is a zom-
bie. The final images of the movie, grainy black and white stills
that show Ben being dragged from the house and thrown onto a
bonfire of burning flesh, conjure up through their documentary
form the history of lynching. At the end of the film, Ben is rele-
gated to the undifferentiated and dead position that the movie
has resisted associating with him. In doing this, the film does not
simply recontain Ben's threat to white dominance (he kills not
only zombies but also Mr. Cooper, one of the living) or return
him to the position of victim; instead it insists that the military
might of the US is based on racism both at home and abroad.
From its opening image of flags waving in front of graves, the
movie argues that the US is a white power built on a graveyard
of rotting human flesh.

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136 Vampire Gothic

An understanding of horror in terms of race is especially

productive for American configurations of the gothic. As Toni
Morrison has shown, the peculiar brew of slavery and freedom
that produced the US and its literature is often articulated
through a gothic discourse: "[I]t is striking how dour, how trou-
bled, how frightened and haunted our early and founding litera-
ture truly is," she writes (35). Remarking upon the "strong affin-
ity between the nineteenth-century American psyche and gothic
romance," Morrison examines how white American identity de-
fined itself by demonizing African difference and by projecting
its terror of the new world onto "conveniently bound and vio-
lently silenced black bodies" (36-38). The gothic's role in gener-
ating racial discourse and its production from the context of slav-
ery-what H. L. Malchow describes as the inseparable process
of "the gothicization of race and the racialization of the gothic"
(3)-require examination. This is not to say that readings of
American horror in terms of other cultural contexts are not nec-
essary. On the contrary, more local histories of the American
gothic, which attend to the terrors of the visible as well as to the
traces of horror that haunt the national landscape, are needed.7
The specific project of exploring the interdependence be-
tween racial and gothic discourses within the context of Ameri-
ca's "peculiar" institutions depends upon dislodging American
horror from the domain of the twentieth century and relocating
it within different genres, especially nonfictional forms. In posi-
tioning the British gothic in the nineteenth century and Ameri-
can horror in the twentieth, Auerbach and Halberstam reinforce
a problematic paradigm. From Edgar Allan Poe's psychic vam-
pires and George Lippard's monstrous Devil-Bug to the slave
narrative's terrors, the gothic flourishes in America throughout
the nineteenth century and earlier. Reading the roots of Ameri-
can horror as well as its contemporary manifestations allows for
a more historical understanding of the gothic's foundational role
in the nation's racial legacy.8 Moreover, once the gothic is recog-
nized as a discourse deployed in many forms, from founding doc-
uments and antislavery tracts to science writing and supernatural
stories, its tropes are seen to permeate cultural constructions of
nation and race. As Joan Dayan argues in Haiti, History, and the
Gods (1995), "If we begin to reread unnatural fictions as bound
to the natural histories that were so much a part of their origina-
tion, inexplicable fantasies (or supernatural events) become quite
intelligible. Conversely, local historiography ... becomes a har-
rowing myth of the Americas" (193). Reading the Black Code as
a tale of terror, Dayan demonstrates how the mechanisms of slav-
ery were complicit with supernatural and sadistic fantasies; cata-

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 American Literary History 137

loging figures of blackness, she reveals how the racial terminol-

ogy of the colonists spawned monsters. Understood as actual
histories as well as supernatural narratives, then, the gothic is
revealed to be the site of a complex historical encounter between
the discourses of romance and race.
Hence, the gothic's supernatural effects need to be interro-
gated for their fantasies of race as well as for their complicity
with and critiques of racist discourse. As Robert Hemenway
points out, the gothic's oppositional white-black symbolism co-
incides with and reinforces the racial mythologies of Western cul-
ture (101). Studies such as Clive Bloom's, which explains how
H. P. Lovecraft's fictional fantasies issued from his social fears
about white racial degeneracy, or Susan Gillman's, which articu-
lates how Pauline Hopkins's gothic fictions use the science of the
occult to unmask their culture's science fictions of race, inform
the way the gothic mobilizes and resists certain discourses of
race. Given that the gothic novel issued from the context of slav-
ery (both in England and the US) and given slavery's rootedness
in gothic tropes (its terror of possession, its iconography of tor-
ture, its obsession with origins), discourses of slavery also serve
as crucial sites for examining the gothic's role in (re)configuring
national narratives of race.
A study of the American gothic through the lens of race,
then, needs to be attentive to how the gothic operates in multiple
ways. It is crucial to acknowledge and hence reframe the gothic's
demonization of difference. The outcry over the Time cover of
0. J. Simpson (27 June 1994) demonstrated the importance of
rehearsing how race is gothicized. By darkening Simpson's im-
age, Time symbolized him as a monster. The critiques of this act
foregrounded how the media often exploits and reproduces the
gothicization of African Americans and hence intervened to dis-
rupt this familiar conflation. Local studies of how the gothic
manufactures particular bodies as monstrous will further illumi-
nate the historical contingency of such conflations. The gothic,
however, also needs to be examined as a locale for intervening
into the often imprisoning narratives of racial discourse. Femi-
nist criticism, like Auerbach's and Halberstam's, that reclaims
horror for a female tradition and articulates how the gothic can
be an ally for the very groups it seems to terrorize provides direc-
tion. Critics, however, have been less sanguine about the recuper-
ation of the gothic for antiracist ends. The lengthy tradition of
the gothic's deployment by African-American authors, however,
is one place to begin such an intervention. From Harriet Jacobs
and Frederick Douglass to Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright,
and Toni Morrison, the gothic has served as a useful mode for

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138 Vampire Gothic

African-American authors to resurrect and resist America's ra-

cial history. As the producers of terror instead of its text,
African-American writers use the gothic to haunt back, re-
working the gothic's conventions to intervene in discourses that
would demonize them. Critical work, like Mary Sisney's or Jo-
seph Bodziock's on Richard Wright's reworking of the gothic,
Julia Stern's on Harriet Wilson's critique of domestic discourse
through the gothic, or Pamela Barnett's on Morrison's deploy-
ment of the succubus figure in Beloved (1987), clarifies the
African-American gothic's power to deconstruct dominant ra-
cial discourses.
The African-American gothic is important to any reconsid-
eration of American horror not only because it signals the pow-
ers and dangers of the gothic mode but also because it reconfig-
ures the gothic as a traveling form. While the American gothic
has always implicitly relied upon a comparativist approach, it
tends to be discussed only within a narrow Anglo-American tra-
dition, William Godwin's influence on Charles Brockden Brown,
for instance. The African-American gothic insists that the Amer-
ican gothic be read in conjunction with other traditions, espe-
cially African and Caribbean. Geraldine Smith-Wright's work on
ghosts in the fiction of black women writers, for example, dis-
cusses how slaves' folktales issued from the master's terror tactics
as well as from African oral traditions. Conversely, William
Piersen's study of the mixed bloodlines of the early Ku Klux Klan
demonstrates how this specific form of American horror was in-
fluenced by the masking traditions of African and African-
American secret societies; white terror relied upon African and
African-American beliefs.9 Finally, Kari Winter's consideration
of the conjunctions between British female gothic novels and
American slave narratives offers a more dynamic model for
understanding the cross-fertilization between the gothic and
slavery.
By exploring instead of collapsing the boundaries between
different locations and traditions of the gothic and by seeing the
gothic as a constantly moving form with no fixed abode, we begin
to trace its web of monstrous relations. As we move into new
critical paradigms such as Greater Atlantic studies, we might
well turn to the gothic to map the new world's terrors as well as
its complex encounters. Given the recent centennial anniversary
of Stoker's Dracula, we would also profit from sightings of Afri-
can-American vampires. From Morrison's vampiric Beloved,
who sucks the past out of Sethe, to Eddie Murphy's Vampire in
Brooklyn (1995), which replays Dracula's landing in England as

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 American Literary History 139

the entrance into New York harbor of a crumbling Caribbean

slave ship populated with corpses, the African-American vam-
pire reminds us that the American gothic travels from elsewhere
and is burdened by the horror of racial history.

Notes

1. This series ran on the local Nashville CBS affiliate, WTVF, 18-20 Febru-
ary 1997.

2. See Hanson for a discussion of the media's use of the vampire to repre-
sent AIDS.

3. Recently published studies of the gothic include Anne Williams's Art of

Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995), Fred Botting's Gothic (1996), Maggie
Kilgour's The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995), Tony Magistrale and Michael
Morrison's A Dark Night's Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction
(1996), and H. L. Malchow's Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Brit-
ain (1996). Moreover, the call for papers for the 1997 Modern Language Associ-
ation's convention included sessions on Gothic Americas and 1970s gothic.

4. The other essays that focus on American literature and culture are Frank
Grady's "Vampire Culture," a discussion of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles,
and John O'Neill's "Dinosaurs-R-Us: The (Un)Natural History of Jurassic
Park."

5. See Malchow for a further historical contextualization of the vampire's re-

lationship to the Jew.

6. For readings of how class functions in the film, see the conclusion to
Young's essay and Chris Lehmann's review "Jonathan Demme and the Aesthet-
ics of Contempt" (1991).

7. Recent articles by Karen Halttunen-"Early American Murder Narra-

tives: The Birth of Horror" (1993) and "Humanitarianism and the Pornography
of Pain in Anglo-American Culture" (1995)-have begun the process of exca-
vating the cultural history of American horror.

8. Malchow's insightful study, which explores the intersection of gothic, racial

and national discourses, offers a useful model for reexaminations of nineteenth-
century American gothic. Avery F. Gordon's Ghostly Matters. Haunting the
Sociological Imagination (1997) conjures forth the ghostly forms that haunt so-
cial life and historical memory; see especially ch. 4 on US slavery.

9. Fry makes a similar point in her study of how whites utilized the supernatu-
ral as a means of psychologically controlling the black population. See also
McWhiney and Simkins for further discussions of the Klan's use of black "su-
perstition."

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140 Vampire Gothic

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