Gothics, vampires, and and l'écriture-femme

The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

From: "Judy Geater"
To:
Subject: 'The Vampire Tapestry' 1: Katje
Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001

Dear all

Here are a few opening thoughts on the first section of 'The Vampire Tapestry', mainly focusing on Katje - I'll send a separate posting probably tomorrow looking more at Weyland, because sadly I've run out of time! At first, I felt as if the book was a series of short stories or novellas rather than a novel, because each section seems to be almost self-contained, with a new cast of characters. However, the central figure of the vampire does run through the book and hold it together, and we see his character changing as he is affected by the events. By the end I certainly felt I had read a complete novel, even though it is in some ways fragmented.

The first thing that really struck me was the title of the first section - 'The Ancient Mind at Work'. On the face of it, the ancient mind belongs to the vampire, Dr Weyland, who has survived from past centuries, although at the start of the book we do not know whether he is an undead, sleeping at night in a coffin somewhere, or really alive in the late 20th century. (We quickly learn that he is alive, and this is confirmed at the end of the chapter when Katje's bullets hurt him rather than passing straight through him - he is flesh and blood, though of a strange kind.)

But, in another way, the woman who suspects and then hunts him also has an 'ancient mind'. Katje de Groot also feels that her world is past - she grew up in a South Africa which no longer exists, and there is a powerful passage which links her with the vampire.

"Reluctantly she admitted that one of her feelings while listening to Dr Weyland talk had been an unwilling empathy: if he was a one-way time-traveler, so was she. She saw herself cut off from the old life of raw vigor, the rivers of game, the smoky village air, all viewed from the heights of white privilege. To lose one's world these days one did not have to sleep for half a century; one had only to grow older."

This is probably the passage which stuck in my mind the most from this chapter, so I was interested to see that Anne Cranny Francis picks it out as a turning-point in her essay 'On the Vampire Tapestry', which is included in Clive Bloom's anthology 'Gothic Horror' - I was lucky enough to pick this up at the library today.

Francis discusses the race and gender politics of this section, and shows that Katje's views change through interaction with the vampire. She says that Katje wants to ignore the politics of South Africa, but eventually she realises this is impossible - because of her knowledge of the vampire, she sees that she too is an outsider.

Similarly, Katje's view of other women changes when she is attacked by the vampire - there is a rapist on the campus, and she had taken the view that rape victims brought it on themselves, but, when she is put in the same position herself, she is forced to realise she was wrong. I'm not sure if I fully follow everything in Francis's essay, but I certainly found it interesting, and she gives a strong feminist perspective on the novel.

It is noticeable that Katje's view of her colleague Jackson changes during the chapter. At first, while outwardly polite, she secretly thinks of him in dismissive and racist terms, as this worrying sentence shows:

"Katje never called him by his name because she didn't know whether he was Jackson Somebody or Somebody Jackson, and she had learned to be careful in everything to do with blacks in this country."

But, as she pursues and is pursued by Weyland, she also comes to know Jackson better and to see him as an individual rather than a stereotype. At the end of the chapter she is keen to avoid getting Jackson into trouble and messing up his college career - and she is also prepared to go home to the present-day South Africa and, it is implied, help to work to defeat the apartheid regime which was coming to an end.

"If Weyland could fit himself to new future, so could she.She was adaptable and determined - like him."

Judy Geater

To Litalk-l

December 9, 2001

Re: Vampire Tapestry: An old Hawk

Dear Judy and all,

Thank you so much for the commentary from Francis's essay.

Like Bryan I see the name Weyland as an allusion to Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland. I wish I could say more than the name suggests "here is American Gothic", but I've only read an excerpt of the novel in Rictor Norton's Gothic Readings, and Norton's description doesn't make Brown's book sound like this one: "Brown was fascinated by pathological mental states", though the subtitle is "or, The Transformation" and as Dr Weyland tells the audience the vampire can die and come back and be transformed over centuries, each time reappearing in another way and having to mould himself to an era, so Norton says of Wieland: it is about "identity conflict .... 'transformations' betwene 'inner' and 'outer selves, 'doppelgangers, multiple motivations and the unreliablity of our own perceptions." Another parallel that comes to mind is that in "The Unicorn Tapestry" Weyland visits a psychologist who attempts to analyze him and at first doesn't believe he's a vampire. Actually some of my students asserted they didn't believe Weyland was a vampire either. I tried to tell them that although the conventional paraphernailia was gone and he did play tricks with the psychologist and the book is psychological in the modern sense (relativist, subjectivities emphasized), nonetheless, the man is a vampire. To say he's not is to take away its power. I instanced Radcliffe. I dunno that I convinced those who disbelieved.

Like Judy what struck me as I began to read this book was how unlike most previous gothic stories I had read this one is -- how little paraphernalia of the conventional sort. Dr Weyland has some fun mocking it. I had only read a few 20th century pieces. This second time through I do see the strangenesses. They are quiet, not overdone or theatrical: references to his power like a tiger or lion ("slightly leonine"), to his age and alienation ("sockets darkened with fatigue, had a withdrawn pensive aspect"). They are scattered throughout. He is also mocking and witty -- a quality people associate with Stoker's resonant-voiced creature (it's said Stoker modelled his vampire partly on Henry Irving, the actor for whom Stoker worked). For example:

"I pay well."

"a deprivation which cannot have improved his temper ... [I like to sleep too]

The daring lecture where he amuses himself. He is a dangerous creature too: "He cut her throat."

The author mocks too: "Wouldn't he be lonely?" sighed a girl; "A nervous girl ventured ... "[and the rest of a mock on pseudo-sophistication against "the ancient mind"]

I agree with Judy that the dream work and Mrs de Groot are well chosen as parallels and reinforcements.

There is academic satire here too and Katje's position made her a sympathetic figure for me. I did like Jackson said to her when she asked him if his aunt who was a cleaning woman "minded her work?"

"Jackson pulled up opposite the bus stop. 'She said you just do what it comes to you to do and thank God for it" (p. 32).

Yes. Weyland does what it comes to him to do -- though, and this makes me smile, he doesn't thank God for it.

The book makes me smile in odd ways; it's a kind of snarl-smile at moral cant which I nonetheless feel real sympathy with. I am also drawn to the sexuality of it - for no matter how Weyland denies any sexual content, it's there; he's alluring. Handsome. There's the line "he had the aspect of an old hawk, intent but aloof". There is the whiff of the Montonis of gothic, but it's better for the image is natural. There's a line in a Nancy Griffin song (she's a folk-singer I like very much) where she sings of a hawk flying high on a wing. The Mercedes is Weyland's wing - did anyone else remember the evil aggresive Cropper who also got about in a Mercedes?

Cheers to all
Ellen

Re: Vampire Tapestry and The Great Divorce: Why the American South or Southwest?

This chapter also led me to wonder why Louisiana is so often a focus for modern US gothic. Anne Rich sets her book in Louisiana. So too several of Valerie Martin's, and this second reading made me recall Martin's The Great Divorce.

Arizona (or is the place New Mexico) is not Louisiana, but still the "feel" of this book recalled Valerie Martin's. The Great Divorce also makes the same parallels between men and wild animals. Martin's book is interwoven instead of separate episodes, but they go back and forth in time. Women are peculiarly vulnerable, and there is a strong woman who deals with ill tiger-cats.

Martin does not write vampire fiction, and The Great Divorce doesn't even have any real supernatural. But she did rewrite Jekyll and Hyde and other of her stories and novels are gothics.

I am wondering if Charnas loses anything but not building the usual atmosphere of palpable dread and anxiety and keeping the uncanny at the margins of her text.

Cheers to all, Ellen

To Litalk-l

December 10, 2001

Re: The Vampire Tapestry: Katja de Groot and Jessica Lange as Rob Roy's woman

Laura Carroll's posting [now lost] is very interesting. I agree that Katje de Groot functions as a sort of Van Helsing figure: that she mocks the character points to the consciousness of this identification in the text.

I'm not troubled by her as a character in a fiction. I often distinguish between the way I feel about characters in fictions and people in real life. Were I to meet with such a woman in real life I might keep away; I doubt we'd have much to say to one another; I would not like her reactionary views. Of course there might be much else to her I would like (though maybe not), at any rate much that no book could easily dramatize unless it were a Tolstoi like fiction, and even then it would be shaped to a purpose.

A character in a fiction (to me) functions symbolically, and as a symbol I am drawn to Katje. I see her as standing for the anti-modern world with its pseudo- sophistications which keep at bay, short circuit the terrors and mysteries of our real existences, the anti-medicine, anti-science, anti-learning theme so typical of gothic books from Frankenstein on. She distrusts the Freudian explanation which explains away what is not to be ignored and not to be made sense of by moralising. And the book proves her to have more wisdom than the learned people about her. She has roots in the archetype of the wise woman-witch.

Laura made me realize another aspect of this figure which helps me to get a lien on the sexuality, the frisson of this book. Laura wrote:

"Katje is unattractively nostalgic for her Afrikaaner life, a world that is, as Judy said, past; and that most of us would say good riddance to. But no; Katje wants to go back to the house with a stoep and the hot yellow grass, back to killing wild animals for fun and uncomplicated thinking about 'blacks' as sub-human.

I might not like to live on the stoeps but as imaginative experience and what that stands for in my life and what I probably experience more subtly or at least only in the margins of my existence (I won't embarrass anyone by specifying where) I do find her valid.

A month or so ago I watched the film adaptation of Rob Roy and found myself similarly identifying, finding valid Rob Roy's wife as played by Jessica Lange. Liam Nelson as the eternal Patriarchal Male allured me with his strong kindness -- and direct sex. The film put me in mind of an 18th century poem by Elizabeth Tollet where the female speaker revels in savagery of her man: Winter Song:

Ask me no more, my truth to prove,
What I would suffer for my love.
With thee I would in exile go
To regions of eternal snow,
O'er floods by solid ice confined
Through forest bare with northern wind:
While all around my eyes I cast,
Where all is wild and all is waste.
If there the timorous stag you chase,
Or rouse to right a fiercer race,
Undaunted I thy arms would bear,
And give thy hand the hunter's spear.
When the low sun withdraws his light,
And menaces an half-year's night,
The conscious moon and stars above,
Shall guide me with my wandering love,
Beneath the mountain's hollow brow,
Or in its rocky cells below,
Thy rural feast I would provide,
Nor envy palaces their pride.
The softest moss should dress thy bed,
Withs savage spoils about thee spread;
While faithful love the watch should keep,
To banish danger from thy sleep."

I identify with this, especially as played by Jessica Lange as Mary MacGregor.

Not that I could endure the life of the woman as shown in the film or this poem for real. It's an erotic dream.

Not that Charnas allows this. She's not having it: Katja pulls out a gun; we hear the voice of the male in "I cut her throat". Still Katja carries in her figure this archetype even if the turn of the story -- pay attention to what happens in a story, it counts -- tells us such a rough woman would turn on the man with a wholly egoistic violence as animal as his.

That final scene between Katja and Weyland is now amusing -- I see it in a new angle I hadn't before. The savage lady no longer swoons but pulls out her gun, and as for the anima well she's very silly -- as we can see from the replies such Adeline-like figures give Weyland in his lecture. He'd eat them up in seconds; they are no meal for him. Not even enough for an appetizer. That's why he goes for Katja. I see it.

Ah, the real enjoyment here is the snarl-smile. Charnas has reversed the archetype. The thing is though Katja is old; she has had her sex life, so in a way the reversal is a kind of trick, with the dice loaded against the archetype to start with. We never see Jessica Lange when old -- and a cleaning woman.

Ellen

Re: The racism angle

The racism angle [referring back to Part 1] recalls Dracula's own racial origins and rhetoric, which must have made him especially horrific to 1890s Victorian readers.

There's Drac's southeastern European origins, also very suspect to many American readers of the time. He mingles his blood with the heroes' and heroines', a nice example of fantasy's tendency to take metaphors literally.

Then there's his own origin story:

"We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights... Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which the Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlkie furty had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the devils in the desert." (Ch. 3; 33-4, Norton critical ed)

From: Ellen Moody
To: litalk-l@frank.mtsu.edu
Subject: Why Read Gothics?

Dear Susan and all,

I am glad of an excuse to talk about why people read gothics. One reason people rarely talk for real about why they read them is they are unwilling to say they like to read deeply melancholy literature -- for the kind of snarl-smile surface that we have in our present modern guarded variant of the gothic is rooted in the deeply melancholy. They are unwilling to say they find real pleasure in strong critiques of our society because the next thing you need they'll find themselves confronted with reproachful but determined apologetics for things as they are, for a sense of proportion, for "balance" (great word that). They are unwilling openly to revel in the pessmistic -- I use this word as the most neutral inclusive one I can because gothic is both reactionary and radical; curiously its subversion moves both to the right and left (Godwin wrote gothics) equally.

I am just now reading a novel by Germaine de Stael: Delphine, and this conversation reminds me of her great treatise on fiction and literature where she forcibly describes what is valuable in literature and fiction itself as instances of the above. I don't have the time to type it out but it is available in an anthology called Major Writings of Germaine de Stael edited by Vivien Folkenflik.

Cheers to all,
Ellen

From: "Judy Geater"
To:
Subject: Vampire Tapestry 1: Weyland

Dear all

Ellen wrote

I'll end this meandering posting by saying that Charnas's book attempts to put aside all these ancient mythic gestures and paraphernalia. In this week's Part I Weyland makes fun of them. > But she does keep the idea of the wound and the knife, even though Weyland denies he is a victim and will not allow the least whiff of sentimentality to be real.

When I started reading the book, I suppose I was expecting the ancient gestures along with the ancient mind. Up to now I had only read 19th-century vampire tales - so I definitely assumed the vampire would be an undead, complete with all the paraphernalia of garlic and crucifixes, and was wondering how Charnas could make all this convincing in a modern world. However, her vampire is very different from the Dracula image, as she shows in the very first sentence, which immediately makes it clear that this is a modern vampire and not like anything we might expect:

"On a Tuesday morning Katje discovered that Dr Weyland was a vampire, like the one in the movie she'd seen last week."

That prosaic "Tuesday morning" immediately shows us that this won't be a movie vampire, and he isn't. We first meet him shutting a door - not passing through it - and wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, a physical detail which suggests that this vampire is a substantial figure rather than a ghostly shadow.

The opening passage conjures up the movie image, which sounds like Christopher Lee in the Hammer horror films: "the movie vampire had swirled about in a black cloak, not a raincoat, and had gone after bosomy young females", but only gives us this image in order to dismiss it. Katje realises that Weyland is nothing like this old cliché.

She herself goes on to dismiss 'Dracula' as "a silly book," and scoffs at Van Helsing, her own counterpart, while Weyland rejects all the old stage-business in his lecture, presenting the vampire as "the greatest of all predators, living as he would off the top of the food chain," and scoffing at the garlic etc, He plays with the audience by telling them exactly how he lives, with the long periods sleeping in suspended animation, but presenting it all as something hypothetical, an intellectual joke. By piling on so many layers, with the knowing references to the film and book versions of vampires, Charnas somehow makes it possible for the reader to accept her own portrayal as less outlandish. She manages to make a 50-year sleep seem more likely than an undead vampire stepping out of his coffin - even though of course both are equally impossible in the real world.

Although there are a lot of differences between Weyland and Dracula, though, there are some similarities - he too is tall, aristocratic and with that strange sexual magnetism which makes people fall under his spell. Charnas enters on the dream origins of much of the great horror fiction ('Dracula' was partly inspired by a dream) by making Weyland be in charge of a sleep laboratory and study dreams.

I've been puzzling over whether the name "Weyland" has some special significance, but haven't come up with anything, except perhaps coming from a land far away? Does anybody have any other ideas on this?

Thanks to Mario for the information on 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'. It sounds as if I will have to give it a look, even at this late stage in the series!

Judy Geater

From: balexand
To: litalk-l
Subject: "Katje"

I agree about the episodic feel of the novel. Each section appears nearly autonomous, referencing the others - more like a serial (a nod to *Varney*?!).

About whose mind is ancient - I love considering Katje in that, ah, vein. I'm also wondering if that mind isn't supposed to be ours, humanity's, as well. After all, the novel will use Weyland (cf Charles Brockden Brown's, and possibly America's, first novel) as a way of looking at humans. This vamp's been with us for a very long time, and surely offers sage, time-accumulated observations.

Bryan, excited as seeing a discussion begin with which he might actually, for once, be able to participate

From: "Laura Jean Carroll"
To: litalk-l@frank.mtsu.edu
Subject: VT part 1: Katje
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001

Did other people find Katje de Groot a troubling and difficult figure? I thought that in making hers the key observing consciousness of the first section of the book, Charnas took a big risk. Katje is unattractively nostalgic for her Afrikaaner life, a world that is, as Judy said, past; and that most of us would say good riddance to. But no; Katje wants to go back to the house with a stoep and the hot yellow grass, back to killing wild animals for fun and uncomplicated thinking about 'blacks' as sub-human.

I loathed her at first. I also thought she was written as a stupid person, not just a bigoted one; it something about the way she allowed herself to become convinced that Dr Weyland was a vampire on not much more than gut feelings. (An interesting thread through the novel has to do with the variety of ways the 'problem' of ancillary characters in each section recognizing the vampire for what he is, is handled.) But as Ellen observed, Katje's refusal to decorously remove herself from the campus after her tenure as faculty wife expired awakens our sympathy, and respect, as does her complete refusal to feel sorry for herself. But I don't think we feel much for her, and when she shoots Weyland, I for one am certainly not egging her on, even though at this point Weyland himself is none too appealing. (He comes over as insufferably arrogant, no social skills, ruthless in the academic rat-race, exploitative of his student's emotions...)

Judy is right to point out that there are hints of a change of heart in Katje, at the close of the chapter, but I for one was not entirely convinced by them. I think her more repellent traits have an important purpose in setting the agenda of the book, and make better sense in retrospect. She's the person who comes closest to matching the Van Helsing function in the novel - fearless, ruthless vampire destroyer - and her capacity for inflicting a certain kind of damage on Weyland is the product of her ability to see members of other races as non-human, without lives, histories, or feelings, and her hunter's ability to prey on creatures that want to live. We have to ask ourselves whether the kind of person psychically equipped to kill vampires is the kind of person we can have any respect for (I'd say no..)

Katje's traits are Weyland's traits also, at the beginning of the book: but this will change.

A couple of questions: do people know much about Loren Eiseley, dedicatee? I'd like to know a bit about him. And perhaps the many people on the list who have read more vampire fictio could tell me if there are other books that make connections between vampires and academe / anthropology?

Also, thanks to the person who recommended Haruki Murakami. I'm 500 pages into the Wind-up Bird Chronicle and enjoying it very much.

Laura Carroll

Re: VT, Part 1: Katje

Laura Carroll's posting is very interesting. I agree that Katje de Groot functions as a sort of Van Helsing figure: that she mocks the character points to the consciousness of this identification in the text.

I'm not troubled by her as a character in a fiction. I often distinguish between the way I feel about characters in fictions and people in real life. Were I to meet with such a woman in real life I might keep away; I doubt we'd have much to say to one another; I would not like her reactionary views. Of course there might be much else to her I would like (though maybe not), at any rate much that no book could easily dramatize unless it were a Tolstoi like fiction, and even then it would be shaped to a purpose.

A character in a fiction (to me) functions symbolically, and as a symbol I am drawn to Katje. I see her as standing for the anti-modern world with its pseudo- sophistications which keep at bay, short circuit the terrors and mysteries of our real existences, the anti-medicine, anti-science, anti-learning theme so typical of gothic books from Frankenstein on. She distrusts the Freudian explanation which explains away what is not to be ignored and not to be made sense of by moralising. And the book proves her to have more wisdom than the learned people about her. She has roots in the archetype of the wise woman-witch.

Laura made me realize another aspect of this figure which helps me to get a lien on the sexuality, the frisson of this book. Laura wrote:

"Katje is unattractively nostalgic for her Afrikaaner life, a world that is, as Judy said, past; and that most of us would say good riddance to. But no; Katje wants to go back to the house with a stoep and the hot yellow grass, back to killing wild animals for fun and uncomplicated thinking about 'blacks' as sub-human.

Again I might not like to live on the stoeps but as imaginative experience and what that stands for in my life and what I probably experience more subtly or at least only in the margins of my existence (I won't embarrass anyone by specifying where) I do find her valid.

Ellen