Vampires: The desire for family, sex and relationships - Essay Example

Vampires: The desire for family, sex and relationships 'Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, I use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals--of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn to Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Haraway's reading of vampires (1997), retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture. "philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism" --Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science There is a recurring dream, a nightmare, in the unconscious of these white United States. It is a dream of passion, violence, transgression, invasion--and all the perverse titillation that these bring. It is also a dream of power, violation and purity, of strict and rigid and obsessive fascination with boundaries. It frightens, infuriates, traps or protects us according to the bodies and subject positions we inhabit within this cultural symbolic. Stirring the worst anxieties of some of the nastiest parts of U.S. history, it is a nightmare rarely mentioned but always circulating, rarely noticed but always present. It boils and bubbles just below the surface, silently but perpetually, shaping that surface without itself surfacing. The nightmare is the scene of the black rapist, particularly of the black male raping a white girl. It is the nightmare that convicts Bigger Thomas, the alleged black rapist of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940)..'(1) What has America grown to becomeit has become the monster of its own children's invention who divide under the supervision of its parents into blacks and whites,the differences between which is what God would see to be in the night and day,as if day was made for the white people and black designates the black people who live in the shadows and when appear in the light have no right but to be punished publicly and in a bulling manner when acting towards people of the opposite side of the sun(the sunlight and shadow of the sunlight's contrasts),such as the contracts between the sons and daughters of nature and the anger there is for being black or white,ugly or beautiful,fortunate for this being of theirs or being unfortunate and thus being dealt in a form which is so defeating the soul and bringing it to blow itself out of the bandages the society it lives in to rip and untie its knots from its mind and heart and run and scream wildly in its actions to try to prove itself to those who are so nave or unable to see beyond their eyes and into the insights of others except through what they see visually and mentally with their hearts from what others show of anger and hatred towards them for something they have no hand in being(such as color which also signifies race). Culture is what we believe in which is unable to meet what we desire mostly because we wish it to be better but could not transgress or go beyond unless by belonging in way of thinking to the other race thus unify with the other's identity but lose ours in return and our characters as men or women,black or white,kind or unkind according to what we want to do to be loved or to be respected or to be wanted by the other sex and race. This is the catastrophe of the novel:how a black second coming of Yeats comes to rise in the rape of a white woman by a black man which signifies the uproar in the culture of African Americans who want to see and show what it is to be African and believe in the American dream as 'fit for everyone who is a citizen in the united states either by heritage or by being someone who has contributed to its history',even if this is untrue as many of the African American stories of glory in America are undone and shadowed since it is a 'white man's history which contributes the history of the world of the white race,especially that such a history refers to the history of the being of the white man who has become glorified by what they have done for the country they came to being descendants of European races and because they restored the modern Rome of the old times by enslaving Africans in the America that they constituted and made sure that to 'make it sound that it was democracy of the white race' that freedom was to be signified to the African race by emancipating them and then 'as power grows' emancipate the whole black world from its blackness. 'In Lacan's radical revision of Freud's early childhood stages of psychosexual development, the mirror stage marks the crucial period when the individual's nascent sense of self is "mirrored" or oriented in the intimidating presence of another who, in turn, elicits aggressive reactions of self-preservation in the self. Consequently, this period is one of intense anxiety in which the individual develops against the potentially dominating influence, or gaze, of powerful "others." Lacan's gaze, and the equally important forms of the gaze expressed in the passages from Nietzsche and Dickinson quoted above, form a central idea and motif in African American gothic literature.'(2) The development of someone who develops psychosexual beliefs and understanding of others in such a manner is dependent on what the other gives them from beliefs about themselves and what they could do to be able to prevent and prove themselves not what others try to make them prove about their ownselves. The victims of the psychosexual problems understand that in order to prove that they are not weak to prove themselves strong sexually they force intercourse on those who are from opposite sexes as if to say 'you are weak and we are stronger,more desirable and preferable than those of your own sex from the opposite sex or of the other races,see us!feel us and want us!',it's how they prove themselves proper and able and capable of what they want to prove themselves of. Gothic stories are stories with frightening events happening in frightening places. This being related to the African American history in america and what it has suffered in the world of the white people who once enslaved their parents and families it is a way of releasing the anger in the community of the minorities by finding grounds of power for themselves to work in and to prevail in. These writers of the African American race send a message that blood bond between one another is stronger than that which could be relating a ghetto to his own more dominating race in their being and the fact that blood between the white and black is either spilled blood(a brawl) or a significance of lust which could only be seen in the darkness and unaccepted by the 'light' and thus is a sinful type which could only be occurring by those who are dwelling in the darknesses and understands what the underworld of the African Americans could be to those who live on top of the world from the outside. Blood is significant in color and in meaning:redness is either the color of lust,the color of death,the color of tyranny and release of anger,the color of bonding between two or more and a symbol of brotherhood,marital bond(whether in the sense of marriage or the marriage or bonding of a group under one oath). The rhythm of the story and the rhythm of the beat of blood makes it shown that the blood factor is that of binding the darkness with the light/passion with anger of being unaccepted/wrath with the peacefulness disturbed by the disturbed mind/understanding the right proper manners of conduct codes and the conducts of those who live with me in the society and how one could be confused of being unaccepted such conducts by those who are of my same race but acceptable to the other race but who do not accept it from my own race towards them. To gild is to cover a surface with a thin layer of gold or with a substance which is shiny as gold and like it in color. This is what the ethics of the novel spoke of:that the hero is confused between the anger and wrath inside him for having confronted those who think him weak with his understandings and with what he believes of himself and what reactions he has grown from them towards himself. The gold is the core that he tries to spring out which is not what the society wants to speak of or wishes to see from someone who is from an opposite race. The novel shows that the people of one race are suppressed by the other race especially that they are responsible for their inability to grow into a power in the society except by growing in the darkness and taking those from the other race as people who are weak in the laws of the concrete jungle who could be lured and used to suffice a feeling of superiority in the weak side which has been suppressed by the strong side and is asked to 'restrain themselves and control their feelings and act as the bigger brothers of the race when confronted when the other races' problematic behaviors'. This symbolism of looks which refers to the type of people speaking and what they men with their looks and what others mean and want from them and what they understand from their looks fully builds the infrastructure of the person whose only reason to live is to draw attention of others to his own side and especially the side of greatness or bigness that is in his character which he is mostly proud of and able to sustain under all kinds of pressure especially that such pressure makes him understand that in order to go on and to move on into the deep of the waters of the 'hole' he has to be able to go beyond the gazer into action and what it relies on from courage and ability to understand how to face and wait for the right moment to spring into action to find the best way to prove one's ability to prevail:which,in the balance of the wilderness and the wildness of the natures inside most humans,is by eating the flesh of the weaker ones who have no ability to say that they could survive by those who could only stay alive by eating the weak to remain dominant and able to compete between those who live and are equally strong as they are from other sexes. The balance is thus:all races are strong enough to live together but the weakest of each race is the vanquished by the strong of the other race and the strong of the same race for this race's strong individuals to be able to show themselves as fit for survival and that getting rid of the weak is a point for their own good where they prove themselves worthy of living. The weak has only the chance of proving themselves strong by bullying on the weakest of the other races who are weaker than them or as weak as they are. This is to say that such weak persons have only the shadows to capture the weak of other races to pose their powers to and thus is why the darkness and the dark skin of any race is hated when it comes to the 'fairness of skin ' of the lighter colored races. Bibliography: (1)Gomez, Jewelle. The Gilda Stories: A Novel. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1991. (2)Gomez, Jewelle. "Recasting the Mythology: Writing Vampire Fiction." Veronica Hollinger, (Ed.). Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 85-92. Oral Sex: Vampiric Transgression and the Writing of Angela Carter by Sarah Sceats - Tulsa Studies in Woman's Literature, vol, 20, No.1. (Spring 2001) pp. 107-121. A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula by John Allen Stevenson - PMLA, Vol. 103, No. 2 (Mar., 1988), pp. 139-149. Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture by George Haggerty - NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 1, Reading Gender after Feminism (Autum, 1998), pp. 5-18. Read More