The Beloved Does Not Bite

Moral Vampires and the Humans Who Love Them

Debra Dudek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351846844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In this new monograph, author Debra Dudek defines a new era of vampire texts in which vampires have moved from their iconic dark, feared, often seductive figure lingering in alleys, to the beloved and morally sensitive vampire winning the affections of teen protagonists throughout pop culture. Dudek takes a close look at three hugely-popular vampire series for young adults, drawing parallels between the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Twilight Saga novels/films, and The Vampire Diaries TV series/book series. By defining a new era of vampire texts and situating these three series within this transition, The Beloved Does Not Bite signals their significance and lays the groundwork for future scholarship on the flourishing genre of paranormal romances for young adults.

1 From Killing to Kissing

Tracing the Syntactic Redetermination

Buffy, the Twilight saga, and The Vampire Diaries conform to and build upon other texts within the “Sympathetic Cycle” by drawing on a range of genres including horror, romance, teen drama, action, and comedy. While Kane argues genre pastiche is typical of the films and televisual texts within the sympathetic cycle (88), the genre pastiche BtVS exemplifies and the Twilight saga and The Vampire Diaries expand moves beyond Kane’s study. Since the publication of Kane’s book in 2006, the syntax and semantics established in BtVS can be seen in numerous other teen film and televisual series, including the Twilight films and The Vampire Diaries and other paranormal romances for teens and adults, such as Teen Wolf, Bitten, Warm Bodies, True Blood, Moonlight, and Blood Ties. BtVS, however, is the first vampire series that moves teenage protagonists from sympathizing with to falling in love with vampires, successfully merging teen drama, romance, and horror. In BtVS, most vampires are still evil monsters who have to die, but, when Buffy falls in love with Angel and Angel with Buffy, a new syntax begins.

In this new cycle of the vampire genre, these vampire-human lovers offer moral guidance about how to live and love well and how to act ethically because of this love. In other words, the semantic and syntactic elements of this genre precipitate an ideological and affective shift from fearing and/or sympathizing with a vampire to loving him. Following Rick Altman’s methodology, The Beloved Does Not Bite attends to semantic and syntactic elements of this new Beloved Cycle and connects these elements to the ways in which the three series offer “imaginary answers to real problems”—to borrow from Kearney’s work—via a love-based justice in which emotional evaluations allow for a reconsideration of what it means to act ethically; or as Gordon and Hollinger state, monsters “help us construct our own humanity, to provide guidelines against which we can define ourselves” (5).

I borrow this terminology of syntax and semantics from genre and film critic Rick Altman because it provides a useful framework for analyzing the conventions that recur across these three teen vampire series. Altman defines semantic and syntactic views as follows:

we can as a whole distinguish between generic definitions which depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like—thus stressing the semantic elements which make up the genre—and definitions which play up instead certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders—relationships which might be called the genre’s fundamental syntax. The semantic approach thus stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged.

(“Semantic” 10)

Both syntactic and semantic approaches define a genre through the repetition of elements across and within texts. For instance, Angel’s character draws upon the semantics of previous vampires—his face changes from human to monster, he wears a long black coat, he lurks in the shadows.

More significantly, Angel introduces a new semantic element: the vampire who does not bite to kill. This semantic element combines with the syntax of his relationship with Buffy, which becomes a precursor to contemporary vampires and vampire-human long-term romantic relationships, such as Edward and Bella in the Twilight saga and Stefan and Elena and Damon and Elena in The Vampire Diaries. These series have flourished and, after sixteen years, sired new offspring—such as The Vampire Diaries spin-off show The Originals—which substantiates my claim the vampire genre has moved from the Sympathetic Cycle to a Beloved Cycle. As Altman observes, “[j]ust as individual texts establish new meanings for familiar terms only by subjecting well known semantic units to a syntactic redetermination, so generic meaning comes into being only through the repeated deployment of substantially the same syntactic strategies” (“Semantic” 16).

In recent vampire televisual series, the semantic unit of a vampire trying to behave ethically by resisting his vampirism undergoes syntactic redetermination in two main forms. One syntactic redetermination transfers the new semantic element of the vampire seeking redemption onto the syntax of the film noir genre, which is established in the series Angel and continues into relatively short-lived television shows for adult viewers, such as Moonlight and Blood Ties. Another syntax, much more successful and seemingly durable, and the one upon which this book focuses, follows the romantic relationship between a guilt-ridden male vampire and an exceptional female human. These examples include True Blood for adult audiences and The Vampire Diaries and the Twilight saga for teen viewers.

The pilot episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Welcome to the Hellmouth” 1001) both draws from and refuses characteristics of the horror genre and anticipates the series continued genre blending, with a focus on romance. The episode opens with a scene in which a young dark-haired man and a blonde woman break into a school, looking for a place in which they can be intimate. The man enters first, holding the hand of the woman, who appears unsure. They hear a noise, and she asks, “What was that?” He says, “Some THING,” and makes spooky gestures with his hands. She hits him playfully, and they continue into the school. They appear to be looking for a deserted place where they can make out. The woman, seemingly skeptical and fearful, says, “Are you sure that we’re alone?” He replies in the affirmative and reaches for her. She says, “Good,” as she turns around and grabs him. He screams as she plunges her vampire fangs into his neck. Recognizable elements of horror permeate this scene: the deserted building, the young blonde woman, the sparsely lit atmosphere, and the suspenseful music. The “horizon of expectation,” to use Hans Robert Jauss’s term, leads to a conclusion that sees at least the blonde girl, if not the couple, murdered by some lurking serial killer. Instead, the blonde girl opens her maw to reveal herself as the serial killer, and the ground shifts on the genre.

The Vampire Diaries similarly employs and overturns techniques from the horror genre, again interweaving aspects of romance. The television series opens with Stefan’s voiceover saying, “For over a century, I have lived in secret. Hiding in the shadows. Alone in the world. Until now. I am a vampire. And this is my story.” The action then shifts to a young man and woman—seemingly a couple—driving in a car along a deserted road. Suddenly, a figure appears in the middle of the road. The man brakes, but the car slams into the figure, whose body tumbles over the back of the car. The man emerges from the car to see if the person he hit is still alive. The figure on the road suddenly sits up and grabs the man. The camera zooms in to a close-up to show an open mouth with fangs. We hear the sound of biting. The scene ends with the woman running screaming down the road and then being lifted into the air by some unseen force.

The next scene opens with an image of the back of a man’s head looking into some bushes. The same voice that opens the episode continues to tell his story: “I shouldn’t have come home. I know the risk. But I had no choice. I have to know her.” The camera pulls back to a long shot, and we see the man, who we later learn is Stefan, stands on the roof of a house. He jumps off the roof and lands effortlessly, and the setting transfers to a bedroom where a young woman sits on a bed and writes in a book. We hear what we presume to be her voice sharing the words she writes: “Dear Diary. Today will be different. It has to be. I will smile. And it will be believable. My smile will say, ‘I’m fine. Thank you. Yes, I feel much better. I will no longer be the sad little girl who lost her parents. I will start fresh. Be someone new. That’s the only way I’ll make it through.’” Thus, within the first three minutes of the first episode, the main characters and their personalities emerge, although viewers remain unsure about the seeming disconnect between the vampire who tells his story and the vampire who kills the young couple in the car. Later, the show reveals Damon murdered them, but the visual ambiguity and the verbal tension remain until Damon makes an appearance three-quarters of the way through the first episode. This dialogic format between Stefan and Elena interrupted by Damon’s actions reverberates throughout the first two episodes and reaches its choral climax when Elena and Stefan either say the same words at the same time, such as at the end of the first episode, when they both say that they are looking for “someone alive” or when the voices narrating their individual diary entries sound like an intimate conversation.

While Twilight deviates from these overt vampire references in its opening moments, both the book and the film introduce the main narrative with a suggestive romance/horror beginning. The novel starts with the following short Preface:

I’d never given much thought to how I would die—though I’d had reason enough in the last few months—but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.

I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me.

Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.

I knew that if I’d never gone to Forks, I wouldn’t be facing death now. But, terrified as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision. When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.

The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered forward to kill me.

(2)

Bella’s self-reflective moment connects love and death, and although the hunter’s identity as a vampire remains undisclosed until the final chapters, Bella’s confrontation with her own death indicates this romance has teeth.

Moreover, the passage demonstrates Bella’s perceived connection between love and moral action, for the decision that leads her to this moment occurs because the “hunter” threatens the life of Bella’s mother. Bella believes her choice to die in order to save a loved one is a worthy sacrifice, and we see this decision made over and over again throughout this saga and the other two series. Buffy dies twice to save other people, both known and unknown, and Elena and her friends repeatedly sacrifice themselves so their loved ones can live, most notably when Elena dies and becomes a vampire in order to save Matt and when Bonnie dies and becomes a ghost in order to bring Jeremy back to life.

To return to Twilight, the visual metaphor that accompanies the voiceover in the opening scene of the film shifts Bella’s love-based decision to die in place of her mother to Bella’s position as a vulnerable and hunted being, thus linking love with vulnerability. The film begins with Bella’s voiceover and no images: “I’ve never given much thought to how I would die....” In the pause after this sentence, the sound of gentle music and bird chirps enter, and the black screen becomes a close-up of a lush green forest. The camera travels over moss-covered logs and finds beneath them a watering hole with a deer drinking from it. As Bella’s voice returns, the camera closes in on the face of the deer, so Bella and the deer become one: “But dying in place of someone I love... seems like a good way to go.” The following chase scene places the viewer in the role of the hunter, until a blue jacket flits past in the foreground. As the deer leaps over a fallen tree and the music crescendos, a man reaches out and grabs her. A sudden cut to a blue sky shifts the scene, and Bella’s voice and face appear: “So I can’t regret the decision to leave home.” The rest of her voiceover provides the backstory to leaving Phoenix and moving to Forks, but none of the novel’s references to her immanent death appear. Instead, the film represents Bella as the hunted and the viewer as the hunter, or at least complicit in the hunt, part of the pack.

The series unite horror conventions with romance generally but with Romeo and Juliet specifically. Besides the overt story of the “star-crossed lovers” and their “death-marked love” (Romeo and Juliet “Prologue”) that transcends their death and unites warring families, Romeo and Juliet also introduces some of the semantic elements in the Beloved Cycle overall: love at first sight, a problematic love triangle, night as the friend of love and sunrise as its enemy, and the blurring of lines between life and death. Perhaps mentioning all three series draw breath from Romeo and Juliet seems obvious, but the second part of the Twilight saga, New Moon, relies so heavily upon this intertext it would be remiss of me not to address it. The book opens with an epigraph from the play that aligns with Edward’s concern that his kiss/bite will kill Bella: “These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which, as they kiss, consume” (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene VI). Arguably the most tragic of teen love stories, Romeo and Juliet suggests teenagers can and do love deeply, and although the lovers themselves do not benefit from their actions, their love leads to larger justice for their community. These three vampire series rewrite this love and demonstrate how being marked by death does not necessarily mean the end of life and love.

All three series, then, signal from the beginning a link between love and death, between romance and horror. In relation to conventions of vampire narratives specifically, for the most part, BtVS leaves the semantics of the vampire intact: they can be killed by sunlight, a wooden stake to the heart, and beheading; crosses repulse them; they cannot enter a home without being invited in; they feed on human blood to survive; and they feel no guilt and indeed find pleasure in killing. The core of the genre redetermination lies in the fact that one vampire, Angel, has a soul, which means he feels guilt for all his past transgressions and now lives to help Buffy rid the world of evil. When Angel first presents himself to Buffy, he says, “I know what you’re thinking; don’t worry, I don’t bite” (“Welcome to the Hellmouth” 1001). Angel’s articulation of this phrase “I don’t bite”—and his actions that support his utterance—establishes Angel’s separation from the normalized discourse of the vampire who bites and initiates a new semantic unit of the vampire who does not bite humans to kill them. Instead, the bite becomes a metaphor for connection between a human and her beloved vampire. Both Buffy and Elena encourage the bite to help their lovers survive, and in Twilight, Edward must suck poisonous vampire venom out of Bella after James—the hunter mentioned in the opening scene—bites her.

This semantic shift of the vampire who does not bite to kill leads to the syntactic redetermination of the genre: the erotic love between a vampire and a human. In order to facilitate this romance, another semantic change occurs in the Twilight saga and The Vampire Diaries: sunlight does not kill vampires. In a now somewhat laughable narrative device, all vampires in the Twilight saga can live in the sunlight, but they need to stay out of the sun because the sunlight makes their skin sparkle, which means people who see them will know they are not human. As I discuss in Chapter 2, Edward’s s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Beloved Cycle: A New Vampire Sub-genre
• 1 From Killing to Kissing: Tracing the Syntactic Redetermination
• 2 “Doesn’t He Own a Shirt?”: Beauty and Justice
• 3 “I Could See Your Heart”: Looking Leads to Kissing
• 4 “You Have a Heart?”: Loving, Leaving, and Letting Go
• 5 “I Know I Don’t Deserve Your Forgiveness, But I Need It”: Vengeance, Compassion, and Forgiveness
• 6 “But How Do I Stop a Monster without Becoming One?”: War and Killing
• Conclusion: “If We Cease to Believe in Love, Why Would We Want to Live?”: Fallen Angels, Emotional Zombies, and other Rebel Lovers
• Index