As Barbara Creed points out in her book The Monstrous-Feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis, “The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or female subjectivity” (Creed 7). Vampires have certainly become one of society’s super-anti-heroes, but women tend to be denied this role to build narrative tension, and people of color tend to be denied it entirely. Bella is eventually turned, but not until she and Edward have married and consummated their union, resulting in a pregnancy, and he turns her then only because she is dying in childbirth. Mann connects Bella’s approach to life to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which describes the woman’s journey to adulthood and fulfillment as necessarily the death of herself and her rebirth as an extension of her lover, in this case, Edward, who also takes on the role of the involved parent Bella feels she does not have. She puts herself in near-deadly scenarios so she can glimpse Edward, who has abandoned her. But since she can’t convince Edward to turn her, Bonnie Mann explains, Bella’s modus operandi becomes self-sacrifice to the extreme: self-annihilation. In the Twilight series, Bella Swan comments as she tries to convince Edward to turn her “I can’t always be Lois Lane. Vampire media often play with the contradictions clashing between the powerlessness of women and the power of monstrosity, power that is therefore alluring. This is the message of white feminism that often discounts and undermines the struggles of women of color, not to mention any woman facing economic or health hardships. Those are comforting messages in a world that otherwise insists that women must strive to “lean in” and “have it all,” even if their situation makes it impossible. For her suffering, the woman holds out hope that the monster will eventually empower her with his strength and immortality, or she clings desperately to her humanity in spite of her love for him. All of these conventions replicate accepted gender norms and perpetuate harmful myths about gender, particularly that any unexceptional woman can attract the interest of an exceptional man, even if he is monstrous (read abusive) conventional wisdom seems to have it that if she just gives him the love he needs, he will turn away from monstrosity to humanity, all for her, and they will live happily ever after. These women are unexceptional, or are not revealed to be special until later in the series. Gender roles in vampire media of the past three decades seem to follow a certain pattern: the protagonist may be female, but the monster is male love triangles with another man or male monster are common and the human woman is the foundation of the male vampire’s conflicted humanity and keeps him wanting to be “good”. Informed by scholarship spanning topics of gender, race, monstrosity, and games, this video essay serves to frame my text-based video game, The Blood of the Vampire, which takes up at the end of the novel of the same name, and allows players to explore the psyche of a vampiric woman of color as she discovers what she is capable of in London, 1897. It would seem the monster craze is petering, so why look at a vampire tale now, particularly one overlooked for over a hundred and twenty years? My reasoning is intersectional and twofold: this particular Victorian woman, who is, unbeknownst to her, both mixed race and a vampire may give us valuable insight into some of the social problems that seem to escalate daily in the headlines-and this may prove especially transformative if we get to actively drive her identity formation in a game, rather than passively watching her story unfold on the page or screen. I see the decline of vampire media as partly an indication of the political climate: since the 2016 election cycle, real life has taken a dark turn, and perhaps because our society seems overrun with monsters in disguise, media has, in general, turned away from the monsters it has held dear for decades, embracing heroes and villains both complicated and flat, but clinging desperately to the inevitable conclusion: the unambiguous triumph of good. Vampires do not appear to hold the same appeal in media as they once did, but why? Portraying and playing with our deepest fears, not least of which is death-or worse, becoming the monster ourselves-some of these creatures spent the ‘90s, the aughts, and the first half of the 20-teens struggling with what they are, striving to reconcile their monstrosity with the human they long to still be, and, typically, falling in love with human women.
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