Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the signifier and signified, when applied to the literary vampire, helps us explain the phenomenon of the modern vampire.  Culturally, we all have an internalised image of a vampire; mine is Christopher Lee, yours maybe Tom Cruise, but we all have one or an amalgamation of many.  The word is universal; it has to be and it is the signifier our internal image, the signified, giving meaning to the word.

This is a simplistic explanation:  A signifier in linguistics is the marks (letters) we string together to make a unique word. Take the word tree; when you see this word in text, t-r-e-e has no actual link with the natural world.  As we read, we see the letters and interpret them, fitting them to our internal, mental image of a tree.  As children we absorb our verbal language from the world around us.  Sounds become words and words become sentences as we gradually  learn how to communicate with the world around us.  Our brains are like sponges; as small children, up to the age of 11, we have a capability to learn language that fades as we get older.  Before we ever learn about the signifier, we have already learnt what is signified by the words for the things we experience all around us.  To reinforce the link, most books for very small children have both the word and a picture, so that the link is instant in the child’s mind.

So, back to the vampire.  When we see this word, we all have an internal image, as I’ve said before.  What is strange about the vampire in modern literature is that this image is fluid.  What do I mean by fluid?  Compare two vampires Dracula and Lestat.  What is it they share that makes them ‘vampires’?  They are both evil, that isn’t true.  They both drink blood, true.  They are both nocturnal, not true.  They kill indiscriminately, isn’t true.  They both have pointy teeth, true.  So, the only two characteristics Dracula and Lestat share in the above list is that they both drink blood and both have pointy teeth.  Both characters are vampires, the only thing that separates them is the century they were written in.  In the last millennium, the signified for the vampire was different than it is today, the vampire was the signifier for evil and the corruption of good by ancient bloodlines.  After the French and Russian revolutions, unrest raged throughout Europe and the vampire, with his noble, but corrupt blood, is the signified for the old order, the hated royalty and debauched landed gentry who bled the peasants dry.

Today’s vampire is both evil, villain, saviour and hero.  Writers of vampire fiction in this millennium are painting their image of a vampire with a much fuller pallet.  The reader’s relationship with the vampire has changed beyond anything Bram Stoker could have foretold when he transported Dracula from folklore into a new technological age.  The old world met the new in Dracula and the new age, a time of science and invention won or did it?

Why is the myth of the vampire so fluid and organic in modern literature?  In popular culture our ideas and fears change and evolve into the present.  Past, present and even future collide in the vampire.  As old as mankind, the vampire has travelled the long and winding road from oral tradition, into print and finally onto the big and small screen.  In all the world can you think of anything other than a deity that has travel this road and weathered the storms of human existence.

Why has the vampire survived? Because he evolves, changing to adapt to his changing environment. As people celebrate the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On The Origin of Species, we can study the origin of vampires in a similar way. Society in the nineteenth century provided an environment suited to Bram Stoker’s Dracula; although still a religious country, the industrial revolution had produced a culture of secular living and an increasingly educated population.  Add to this the mass production of books, the most common being the “Penny Dreadful”, and the popularity of the Gothic novel in the early part of the nineteenth century and we have the perfect natural habitat of the literary vampire.

Why has the vampire survived into this millennium?  The vampire obviously connected with the population in the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth century, where the vampire survived almost unchanged.  In the 1960s, the vampire became synonymous with sex in cinema.  From Christopher Lee’s fangs were born a decade of sexually aggressive vampires, both male and female, who paraded across the silver screen in a shabby cape of titillation.  In the 1970s and 1980s things began to change.  The vampire started on the road to bloodsucking hero and has become a phenomenal success, crossing the genre boundaries so many times that it is now almost impossible to categorise a vampire as just a horror or Gothic creature.

The vampire started life as a mythological, undead creature found throughout history and across the whole world. When the secular nature of modern life threatened the vampire’s existence, he evolved into vampiric super villain personified by the actors Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee.  In an age of social flux, our vampire metamorphosed into a complex, misunderstood character who agonised over his need to feed.  The vampire mirrored the changes in western social structure, his social status lowered and, god forbid, he became a new man.  From Lestat to Spike, vampires have become sensitive, suffering from a modern malaise of guilt and depression.  Post 1980s, the vampire has adapted again and again until the vampire novels we read  and the vampire films we watch now are as far removed from the mythical vampire as it is possible to go.

What next for the vampire?  Well he’s already stormed the bastions of teen movie and jumped up and down in excitement with each new romantic comedy vampire novel or film that’s released.  Vampires have been in space already, so is there something new for the vampire?  My guess is there is, because, even taking into consideration the saturation of the market by the vampire, I don’t think we have seen the vampire’s final evolution.  Can you imagine the vampire’s next step on the evolutionary ladder?  If you can you’d better write the novel quickly before the vampire environment changes and the monster must evolve again. 

In the search for a literary theory which explains the vampire as a polymorphic metaphor within the literary text, it is structuralism, with its almost scientific approach that closely parallels the scientific approach taken to defeat the vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The 1960’s saw the peak in literary structuralism although it is based on the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure whose work dates back to the early twentieth century. Structuralism looks not at the whole work, or the culture which produces it, but at a series of signs revealed within the text and their linguistic relevance to the underlining meaning. According to Raman Selden;

‘At the heart of structuralism is a scientific ambition to discover the codes, the rules, the system, which underlie all human social and cultural practices. The disciplines of archaeology and geology are frequently invoked as the models of structuralist enterprise’. ¹

It is the ‘codes’ which reveal our cultural preoccupations rather than the other way around. This theory mirrors on of the central metaphorical theme in Dracula; the use scientific solutions to dispel superstition. The most effective weapons the human protagonist have against the threat of the vampire is knowledge and in the late Victorian era, technology has gone beyond the point where its use can predict it effect on the future.

‘It was almost impossible to believe that the things which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted out[....]We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of type-writing’ (Dracula: p.326).

This note at the end of the novel removes any doubt, that the destruction of Dracula, has destroyed the any pretensions to scientific writing. At the end the text itself declares it own existence as a work of fiction.

David Glover suggest that the structure of Dracula is like for of narrative made popular by Wilkie Collin’s The Moonstone in so much as it is ‘quasi-legal’ the reality in the text is produced by the type of person giving testimony in the novel. Raman Selden give Roland Barthes view of structuralism as:

‘Writers only have the power to mix already existing writings, to reassemble or redeploy the; writers cannot use writing to ‘express’ themselves, but only to draw upon that immense dictionary of language and culture which is ‘alway already written’ (to use a favourite Barthean phrase). It would not be misleading to use the term ‘anti-humanist’ to describe the spirit of structuralism. Indeed the word has been used by structuralists themselves to emphasise their opposition to all forms of literary criticism in which the human subjects is the source and origin of literary meaning’².

This anti-humanist approach to literature is problematic when discussing vampire literature, where the metaphor is often used by humanist criticism to reveal human anxieties about our society. However Glover goes on to suggest:

‘A flawed modernity, a modernity still struggling with the powers of the past, even when equipped with phonographs, telegrams, cameras, newspapers, and typewriters, a world of mechanical and electronic reproduction’³

The human protagonists Mina Harker uses a typewriter and Dr Seward records his notes on a phonograph, however his scientific method of keeping notes has an unforseen drawback. Dr Seward cannot retrieve specific information, his audio record like speech is transitory, his work must be written; his words will then gain authority.

‘You see, I do not know how to pick out any particular part of the diary.’ Even while he was speaking an idea dawned upon him, and he said with unconscious simplicity, in a different voice, and with the naivety of a child: “That’s quite true, upon my honour. Honest India!” I could not but smile, at which he grimaced. ‘I gave myself away that time!’ he said. ‘But do you know that, although I have kept the diary for months past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any particular part of it in case I wanted to look it up?’ By this time my mind was made up that the diary of

a doctor who attended Lucy might have something to add to the sum of our knowledge of the terrible Being, and I said boldly:–

‘Then, Dr Seward, you had better let me copy it out for you on my

typewriter’ (p.196)

This extract from Dracula chapter XVII is from Mina Harker’s Journal another form of language is exposed. Dr Seward speaks with simplicity in a ‘different voice’, a child’s language. This simplistic language reveal the flaw in the human protagonists use of technology. Dr Seward’s diary is useless as the is no way access the information contained in it. Before Mina typewrites his audio diary and legitimises it a part of the text. In this extract Dr Seward and Mina’s forms of recording, Mina uses shorthand which can only be read by herself or Johnathan Harker, signifies the problematic nature of scientific advancement: its veracity depends on the spoken discourse of the scientist being understood.

However Mina’s character it that of author, her position within the text is a collate information into a readable narrative form. Roland Barthes make the following argument in “Science Versus Literature”, he argues the language in literature has always had an important role in understanding society:

‘Science will become literature, to the same extent as literature, growingly subject as it is to an overturning of the traditional genres of poetry, narrative, criticism and essay, already is and always has been a science. What the human sciences are discovering today, in whatever field it may be, sociological, psychological, psychiatric, linguistic, ect., literature has always known. The only difference is that literature has not said it, but written it. In contrast to the integral truth of literature, the human sciences, belatedly formulated in the wake of bourgeois positivism, appear as the technical alibis proffered by our society in order to maintain within itself the fiction of a theological truth proudly, and improperly, free from language’.⁴

To be of any use in the future Dr Seward’s oral account must be transformed in the tangible physicalised form, writing. And it is in this written rather than spoken language that the structuralist critic looks for signs. Dr Van Helsing and Dr Seward express the ‘bourgeois positivism’ that Roland Barthes talks about in “Science Verses Literature” in their ‘other’ scientific words for things. This language excludes outsiders, Van Helsing in chapter X is specifically stating that doctors do not and should not inform patient about their illnesses. However, Mina is fully knowledgeable about her condition and its treatment when she is infected by Dracula. Dracula uses the knowledge gain from book the understand England. Like many wealthy Englishmen he has a varied knowledge gained from books.

‘The books were of the most varied kind— history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law— all relating to England and English life and customs and manners’ (Dracula: p.25).

Dracula knowledge of England and the English language comes only from books, he lures Harker to the castle to learn how to communicate in English. The scientists believe the can defeat death by through knowledge and as the doctors knowledge increases so does that of the layperson’s. In chapter X Van Helsing remark to Dr Seward:

‘You were always a careful student, and your casebook was ever more full than the rest. You were only student then; now you are master, and I trust that good habit

have not fail. Remember, my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory’ (Dracula p.112).

Both Dr Seward and Dracula are good students. In Sussarian theory of the signfier and the signified, Dr Seward’s phonograph could be described as a signifier of science search for a modern method of communication, while what is signified is the thoughtlessness of the scientist not in the production of knowledge but how it can be utilised. When Van Helsing returns to Amsterdam after Lucy’s first transfusion for his books, his search for knowledge is to be found in language rather than observation of the patient. This is the opposite to Dr Seward approach to the Zoophagous patient at the asylum.

The deference in language is shown in chapter X, Dr Seward’s Diary by Van Helsing’s use of the English language. The first words Van Helsing to Dr Seward on his arrival are: ‘Have you said anything to our young friend the lover of her?’ Here Van Helsing refers to Arthur and Lucy, but whereas he describes Arthur as belonging to their kind, male, and Lucy only by the impersonal pronoun ‘her’. Rosemary Jackson describes this process as:

‘The kind of substitution of name for thing, or of part of a thing for the whole, opens up possibilities for a linguistic study of fantasy as working through metonymic and synecdochic processes of elision and substitution, as well as reinforcing the argument by Mark Nash as to the centrality of a play up on pronoun functions in the fantastic’.⁵

According to Rosemary Jackson the substitution of Arthur and Lucy’s names is linguistically significant. The structualist approach to this is that the text in the form of Van Helsing use of the English language has encoded Lucy as an outsider.

When later in chapter X Van Helsing is talking to Arthur he once again uses a pronoun in substitution for a thing. When Van Helsing refers to him in context of new blood it is implicit in the code that the cure for Lucy’s illness is an infusion of masculine blood. However, the text also implies the pronoun ‘him’ is the vampire and that Lucy is pining for him.

‘Young miss is bad, very bad. She wants blood, and blood she must have or die. My

friend John and I have consulted; and we are about to perform what we call transfusion of blood—to transfer from full veins of one to the empty veins which pine for him. John was to give his blood, as he is the more young and strong than me’– here Arthur took my hand and wrung it hard in silence— ‘but, now you are here, you are more good than us, old or young, who toil much in the world of thought. Our nerves are not so calm and our blood not so bright than yours!’ (Dracula: p.p. 113-114).

Here Lucy is not described as ill as one would expect a doctor to say, but as bad: at this point in the novel Lucy has not yet taken her role as a metaphor. Young miss and bad are still inhabiting the same semantic field. The fact the Lucy is still alive according to Jules Zanger’s interpretation of metaphor and metonymy precludes Lucy’s character from metaphoric meaning at this point in the novel:

‘When we say “the woman is an angel,” we are producing a metaphor, since in Western though “woman” and “angel” belong to different semantic fields, one natural, the other supernatural. When, however, we say “the lady is a tramp,” our construction is metonymic, since “lady” and “tramp” belong to a single human semantic category’⁶

Using Zanger’s argument Lucy occupies the same semantic field as bad. Nevertheless the fact the Van Helsing does not use her name has dehumanised Lucy. Metonymy is grounded in realism: this passage works on two levels of language within the text. When Van Helsing begins speaking to the Hon. Arthur Holmwood he refers to ‘transfusion of blood— to transfer from full veins of one’, Van Helsing starts his explanation in realist scientific speech to a more metaphoric language ‘to the empty veins which pine for him’, here the text through Van Helsing quaint use of the English language is revealing a message to us, a code, to the reader. For Lucy is indeed pining, lusting and languishing for him, Count Dracula, the vampire. This is the code in the text as explained by Gerard Genette:

‘Structuralist method as such is constituted at the very moment when on rediscovers the message in the code, uncovered by an analysis of the immanent structures and not imposed from the outside by ideological prejudices’.⁷

The structuralist approach, and more specifically Saussure’s theory of the signifier and signified, “young miss” and “bad” occupy different semantic fields. It could be argued that “young miss” signifies Lucy as a virgin, a young unmarried woman, juxtaposed with this image is the word “bad” rather than more appropriate words such as sick, ill or unwell. The organic metaphor of “young miss” is symbolic and the tenor of this vehicle is static. However, the telescoped metaphor of “bad” the vehicle becomes the tenor for the vehicle of the vampire. The female vampire is a signifier and that wanting and badness are arbitrary signs.

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula the character of Lucy is a metaphor for New Woman and the New Woman signifies the degeneracy of women and the corruption of future generation through disease. Thus the character of Lucy as a Vampire is a telescoped metaphor as the vehicle, Lucy, becomes the tenor of another metaphor; the meaning changes for sexual degeneration to race degeneration. Because, although the vehicle of the metaphor is fixed, Lucy’s state is not. Lucy is still alive in some respects, her heart still beats, so she is no truly one of the ‘undead’. Lucy is both vampire and human, hence Van Helsing’s description of her as bad.

From the perspective of structuralism, having identified the codes within the text we then ignore the surface meaning and look for a deeper meaning. This view is expounded by Terry Eagleton:

‘The method is analytical, not evaluative [....] Structuralism is a calculated affront to common sense. It refuses the ‘obvious’ meaning of the story and seeks instead to isolate certain ‘deep’ structures within it, which are not apparent on the surface. It does not take the text at face value, but ‘displaces’ it into a quite different kind of object’.⁸

Here the question to ask oneself is what do vampire novel have to do with common sense? The simple answer is nothing, but structuralism doesn’t need great works of literature, it is as applicable to Bram Stoker’s Dracula as it is to Lorna Doone, by R. D. Blackmoore. The meaning a structuralist could discover in Dracula is the meaning of communication and non-communication. From the very beginning of Dracula language is important, Johnathan Harker’s ‘smattering of German’ (Dracula: p.9) because it allows him to communicate in the Carpathians. Nonetheless all communication is taken away from Harker when the landlord ‘pretended that he could not understand my German’ (Dracula: p.12). When Dracula writes to Harker he signs the letter: ‘Your friend Dracula’ (Dracula: p.12) just as Van Helsing refers to ‘our friend’ when he speaks of Arthur.

The last hundred years of human history have engendered swift economic and social changes within society. In the maelstrom of change that characterised the late Victorian age, Bram Stoker wrote his celebrated popular novel Dracula (1897). Literature is a product of our culture, and the same culture that produces the novel also consumes it. Although only seventy eight years separate Count Dracula from Lestat, Anne Rice’s vampire lives in a world where human knowledge and invention are spiralling out of control. We could argue that in The Vampire Chronicles themselves, the vampire is a metaphor for contemporary problems of adaptability and survival.

‘In modern times, of course, as the complexity of human society and the rate of technological advance constantly increased, the vampire must adapt faster and more radically than ever before’.¹

The different modes of travel available, aeroplanes, cars and trains, reflect the speed at which humanity now exists, but, for the vampire, transport is a metaphor for anonymity. Vampire survival, like human survival, depends on adaptability. However, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula the humans, as a collective and collecting whole, serve as a metaphor for adaptation and technological advance. The vampire’s lifestyle mirrors that of the rich and famous, which bombard us from the pages of glossy magazines. Ken Gelder describes the new vampire as:

‘Global exotic’– where the vampire functions as a kind of internationalised, cosmopolitan tourist, mobile (and leisured) enough to make the world ‘my own’ — and channelling that world through the kind of panoramic perception’²

Armand, one of the most conservative vampires, owns an island retreat which he shares with a mortal male partner. Travel for the vampire had become as common place as for humans. Many vampire fictions are concerned with travel and more importantly journeys. Jewel Gomez’s vampire Gilda, starts her journey as a hunted runaway slave and at the completion of the novel Gilda is once again a slave, hunted by the same wealthy powerful humans; these humans now want the use the vampire’s blood. To survive, as in previous times, slave labour was necessary to them for economic survival. In Jewel Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, vampires live in a symbiotic relationship with humanity, it’s mortality which engenders predation of the other, the vampire.

We could also describe the polymorphic metaphor in vampire novels as a telescoped or complex metaphor and is described best in a phrase devised by I. A. Richards, tenor and vehicle. The vampire is the vehicle within the novel and the tenor is its unconscious meaning. It is the tenor of the metaphor which is fluid and it is the fluidity of the tenor that we are describing as polymorphic. That is to say, the metaphor of the vampire is static and singular, it is the meaning that is plural. It is the adaptability of the vampire as a metaphor for everything, from dieting to homophobia and feminism to the death of small town middle America, that requires us to think about why it works. Because it does work, in each new incarnation the vampire both gives us something new and remains unchanged.

Anne Rice’s successful novels The Vampire Chronicles introduce a different type of vampire from Dracula. Jules Zanger has argued that the vampire Lestat is too fully humanized to act as a metaphor and that now the ‘new’ vampire has shifted towards metonymy rather than metaphor.³ An argument for why Anne Rice’s vampire appears to be more human than Bram Stoker’s creation could be due to the fact that when she wrote the novel Interview with the Vampire (1975) Anne Rice had not read Dracula. Anne Rice had only encountered the cinematic version of the vampire Dracula. The cultural differences between the society in which the Dracula of the novel was produced and the Dracula of the cinema had already begun to erode the image of the vampire as alien other. The critical study of the literary vampire is a cultural study, because the language used, as well as the imagery revealed in the text of the novel, tells us about the society it was created within and that which consumes it. Although, Anne Rice’s vampires may have blurred the edges between human and other, she could not eradicate the main difference between vampire and human, death. The character of the vampire in modern fiction is the monster who is neither alive or dead in human terms. This point is clarified in The Tale of the Body Thief (1985).  In this novel, Lestat is conned out of his vampiric body. Once Lestat is fully human again, he is changed. The vampire experiences again, after three hundred years, the fear of death.

As you read vampire fictions try and identify the tenor of the metaphor for yourself.  Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Steven King’s contemporary American vampire novel Salem’s Lot share a common metaphor, the fear of outside corruption from the old world into the new world. Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and Poppy Z Brite’s Lost Souls are the examples of post-structuralist critical theories of absence and quest. Recpetion theory is one way to understand why the literary vampire is still so popular.  Reception theory simply explained says that we, society, do not read in a vacuum.  Each person who reads a text reads something different, because we, as readers, bring a new element to each novel we read.  Reception theory explains the vampire as a metaphor for absence and quest.  We, as readers, superempose our own absences and our own quests into the vacant spaces within the text. In conclusion, an argument is proposed that reception theory is most applicable in understanding why the vampire as a metaphor is polymorphic. Much academic criticism has been written in recent years on the subject of the popular literary vampire. Much of the stigma attached to serious study of such a culturally marginalised subject has now been rejected. According to Franco Morreti:

‘Mass literature is not the undifferentiated and meaningless expanse most critics still say it is. It holds many surprises, and not just because of the meanings within it, but also because of the light it sheds on works of a different kind’⁴.

The literary vampire is a playground for theorists, mainly because it is a culturally metaphoric character.  When reading a new vampire novel, an awareness of the complexity of what we are reading isn’t necessary, because we are all products of the same culture that has produced the vampire.  We are all unconsciously aware of the subtext and subversions that abound in the vampire novel.