Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural
352
Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural
352eBook
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Overview
The Gothic, Romanticism's gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today's Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives.
To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original Gothic-the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration.
Fictions such as the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West's premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci Code and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan's Labyrinth, Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780674069602 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Harvard University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/23/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
From Chapter Six: The Bright God Beckons: The New Vampire Romance
To bring this transformation about, Meyer pulls various bright threads from a tapestry of story traditions originating in the folktales, religious apocrypha, and legends of premodern Western culture, some via the Gothick and some not. The first of these threads is one we have already seen: Bella is the bride of Death. She’s in love, after all, with a being whose deepest instinct is to kill her. In the classic vampire story, the woman who is seduced by a vampire dies, horribly, only to become one of the undead herself. By the 1990s, the new convention of “feeding without killing” allowed a female protagonist to have a vampire lover without having to die and become a vampire herself; she could now be the girlfriend of Death, not the bride, and suffer no fatal consequences. Bella follows Lucy Westenra’s path through death and out the other side without becoming either a victim or a monster.
The presence of another ancient trope in the Twilight series helps subliminally underscore Bella’s overdetermined role as the bride of Death. It appears in the two striking physical qualities Meyer’s vampires possess. First, in daylight they don’t turn to dust; rather, they sparkle beautifully “like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface.” The sparkling body has immediate associations with the diamond or rainbow body of Tibetan Buddhism, the normally invisible sheath surrounding the physical body that connects consciousness to the transcendent realm. After death, the diamond body, like the Christian resurrection body or the Gnostic “radiant” astral body, promises immortality. The fact that the vampires’ diamond bodies are visible to the naked eye in daylight strongly suggests they belong to some category of the divine, not the demonic. In accordance with a number of esoteric religious traditions, they have reached the highest state of human development on earth, in which, in the words of a contemporary Theosophist, “enlightenment becomes a literal fact through the transubstantiation of flesh and blood into an immortal body of light.”
Second, building on a convention established by Rice, Meyer’s vampires look and feel like statues. Edward’s chiseled beauty does not recall the sinister figures of Dracula or Lestat but rather the classic outlines of a Renaissance statue, “carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal”; his body is “hard and cold—and perfect—as an ice sculpture.” The words “marble,” “statue,” and “perfect” repeat over and over, creating the sense of a moving idol (and statues, recall, are the material doubles of divinities, thought to draw down and possess their special powers) who is bright and beautiful. Bella says cuddling with him feels like “snuggling with Michelangelo’s David, except that this perfect marble creature wrapped his arms around me to pull me closer.”
The motif of loving a statue has been around since Ovid’s story of Pygmalion and his stone bride, picked up in the Old Goth French dream vision poem Roman de la Rose and circulated in other medieval works along with myriad popular tales of loving an image of either Venus or Mary, the result being taking holy vows (if the statue was of Mary) or death (if it was Venus). The nineteenth-century French writer Prosper Mérimee gave the story a typically Gothick twist in his “Venus d’Ille” (1837), about a thoughtless bridegroom who puts his wedding ring on the finger of a blackened, recently excavated Roman statue as a joke, only to find the unamused Goddess of Love crushing him to death (just as Edward fears he will do to Bella) in the course of demanding her erotic due. As Kenneth Gross puts it, in these stories “certain qualities of the statue begin to catch hold of those around it...The living statue turns living persons to stone or brings about their death.”