Today’s Twilight Characters and the Old-Fashioned Count Dracula

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} There’s alot of hype about Twilight , and it’snot coming just from teenage girls. For better or worse, the series hascaptured the interest of readers with a wide range of age and experience. Muchlike Harry Potter and other fictionwith an element of the fantastical, the supernatural parts are far from beingentirely new. Twilight puts a currentspin on the decidedly vintage idea of the vampire.   That mostfamous of vampires, Count Dracula, was first incarnated in the book Dracula , written by Bram Stoker andpublished in 1897. (In the Twilight world, this is only four years before Edward Cullen is born, meaning the poorguy has been plagued by negative vampire stereotypes his whole life.) Whereasthe Cullens move to Forks, Washington , toadhere to a “vegetarian” diet and avoid the sunlight that would reveal theirsparkly skin, Dracula relocates to Great Britain from his native Transylvania (modern-day Romania ) precisely to feed on asmany people as possible. They say that English cuisine leaves something to bedesired, but for Dracula, London is the perfect place to find serving after serving of his favorite dish.     In short,Dracula displays none of Edward’s restraint around Bella. Desirable women arepromptly bitten and turned into vampires, and this is the enduring image ofvampires in our culture. We don’t even find out that much about him; most ofthe book consists of other characters – the good guys – trying to hunt himdown. As these Twilight quotes show, the series doesn’tstray away from acknowledging this literary heritage.   [Bella:] “Don't laugh – but how can you come out   during the daytime?” [Edward] laughed anyway. “Myth.” “Burned by the sun?” “Myth.” “Sleeping in coffins?” “Myth.”   Take that,Mr. Stoker – your information is clearly out of date. Twilight characters spend a fair amount of time dealing with the past, though, and Bella makes someobservations about other myths she digs up in her research on vampires. “It seemed that most vampiremyths centered around beautiful women as demons and children as victims,” Belladecides. “[T]hey also seemed like constructs created to explain away the highmortality rates for young children, and to give men an excuse for infidelity.” Inother words, Bella has figured out that the way we explain things we don’tunderstand has a lot to do with the current cultural climate.   So if we take a step backfrom Bella, and look at her and Edward as a fictional characters, we could lookat Twilight the same way. The bookhas taken a well-known cultural figure and distorted it into somethingrecognizable and approachable by today’s standards. Twilight is really about the plight of teenagers, and, in Stoker’stime, adolescence wasn’t as popular a theme (and didn’t sell as muchmerchandise) as it is today. A common reading of Edward and Bella’s struggle tobe together without any deadly fang action is that it mirrors the teenagedesire for, and anxiety about, sexual experiences. Edward is attractive, butdangerous; Bella is willing, but overemotional. Vampirism in Dracula is highly sexualized, but in adifferent way. In adapting the vampire for modern times and trying to leave Dracula behind, Twilight deals less with vampire stereotypes as it does withstereotypes of adolescents. As is evident, though, the figure of Count Draculahas endured to the present day, and it remains to be seen whether Twilight will have the same long lastinginfluence on how we imagine vampires.

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