Beloved

The first thirty or forty pages of Beloved were confusing to me, because the focus of attention would switch from characters or time would change between paragraphs without telling the reader. This stylistic choice made it very difficult to start reading the novel for me. The example of this that comes to mind for me occurs on the bottom of page 28, after Paul D and Sethe have just finished having sex. “Actually it was a good feeling-not wanting her. Twenty-five years and blip! The kind of thing Sixo would do-like the time he arranged a meeting with Patsy the Thirty-Mile Women.”
Following this statement is a page-long description of Sixo and his attempts to sleep with a woman who lived a considerable distance away. I failed to understand how Paul D equates his sex with Sethe with the sex Sixo had with Patsy. They both couplings had been anticipated for a long time before they came to fruition but it is never said that Sixo suddenly felt antipathy toward his lady after they had done the deed. Perhaps he did when he told the rest of Sweet Home and the author doesn’t feel the need to mention it. Either way the novel felt especially sporadic in it’s beginning, and reminded me of the novel “Go Down, Moses” which is about relations between blacks and whites. The idea that time is cyclical and that it hardly matters whom specifically is involved in events is prominent in both books.
The ghost in Beloved is different from the spirits in The Monk and Wuthering Heights in its character and presence. In Beloved the ghost has haunted 124 for as long as most of its’ residents have lived there. The ghost is like The Monk’s ghostly Nun or a stereotypical ghost in the beginning of the story by being angry, violent, and tethered to the sufferings of her life. On page 43 Sethe explains to Denver that she had not been praying when Denver had seen the dress hold her.
“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.” In this passage, Sethe seems to be explaining the idea of ghosts without using the word. The concept of ghosts can be found in many different cultures and perhaps seethe has chanced upon the idea autonomously. Nearby Sethe then tells Denver that “Nothing ever dies”, and later Denver tells Sethe that she thinks “That baby has plans”, making the pages extremely foreshadowing of Beloved’s revival.

creative project

For my creative project I will be writing a piece of fan-fiction. One idea I currently enamored with is an alternate history set in the fictional world of Frankenstein, where Victor’s research on reanimating the living were not lost and there is a large population of the Creature’s ilk. But if it becomes obvious that I cannot produce anything worthwhile from said idea I might do a piece of fan-fiction on Interview with a Vampire, from the perspective of one of the vampires victims.
The passage that my idea about the Frankenstein fan-fiction came from is on page 98 of the novel and is written, “What I ask you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now feel.”
Out of all the available creative project options a few stood out to me. If I were a talented artist I would definitely have enjoyed to create a piece of visual art concerning one of the novels. I thought that the psychoanalysis was very interesting as well, but I have no background in psychiatry, and would most likely botch the psychobabble. I’d be interested to know how any multimedia projects were done in the past, it seems to me like a difficult project to pull off.
As to the written component of the creative project I believe I will be trying to accomplish a passing grade as well as a chilling what-if style alternate past where the creatures have become slaves and beggars living underneath the modern society. I’ll focus on architecture, religion, the supernatural, and the sense of the uncanny those who encounter the Creatures will experience in an effort to make the piece sound gothic.
I can already tell you what I best like about this project and that is the idea. Sadly, once pulled out of its theoretical and hypothetical realm, this idea will become marred, tainted, and stained by the grim realities of my writing capability and inability to make any deadlines.
Speaking of, question five of the written component asks “How did you get your project done? Did you wait until almost the last minute and then create it all at once? Did you do extensive revising, or did you find that your first draft was fairly clear and complete already?” The initial two sentences scream to me the word ‘trap’. Although you could be subconsciously impressed by the quality of a work started and finished hours before it is due, some semblance of coherency while barely making it to the desired length would be the impressing features, I can’t help but feel as though you are looking for a specific answer to this question.

Benefiel’s Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of The Nuclear Family in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire

Benefiel’s Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of The Nuclear Family in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire explains the vampire’s transformation from a hunted monster to drive the plot forward from shadowy castles to deeper characters capable of eliciting sympathy. The vampire has been a vehicle for social commentary for as long as it has existed, with the foreigner, and the homosexual in the past and now more contemporary topics like drug addiction, AIDS, and the selfishness and narcissism of the baby boomer generation.
On page three, Benefiel writes, “In the bulk of vampire fiction, a master vampire serves as father, mother, and husband, while other younger vampires serve as children/lovers”. The conventions of the nuclear family are queered by vampirism, with the typical relationships blurred. The older vampire acts as the father, mother, and husband, but also as a teacher to the younger vampires. The incestuous familial relationships between vampire families creates a feeling of the uncanny. In addition to the vampire acting as mother and father, the vampire is bisexual or pan gendered, feeding off of men and women whenever they see fit.
On page four of the paper Benefiel states that, “Within the family, after its creation, there is no sexual contact-normal or otherwise-between the members”. I thought that when Lestat took Claudia out hunting it was more or less a sexual act. The act of sex is described as a pale shadow to killing, so to share in the kill would be very intimate and passionate. Louis is the prude of the family, refusing Claudia’s requests to come kill with her, instead Louis kills in solitude, out of necessity and not pleasure. In addition to the homoerotic overtones when Louis is turned, Lestat seems drawn to Louis consistently after they part ways. To me, Lestat seemed to be following Claudia and Louis to England to get his revenge on Claudia but also to reclaim Louis. Lestat shouts his name in the theatre of the vampires and tells him he has something to tell him. At the end of the book Lestat is a tottering old senile, begging Louis to stay and help him, a request that Louis refuses. Without having sex, the two main male vampires seem to treat each other like jilted lovers from time to time. The time and proximity they share makes us wonder how close they really are.
On page 9 of the readings Benefiel describes Claudia as a rebellious teen. The closeness to the typical nuclear family and its roles and tropes causes Rice’s family to be a kind of parody. Claudia wishes for her own coffin to sleep in and she removes herself more from the family, evading Lestat for weeks despite them living together. The way the vampire family follows the conventional family ideas and aspects while mixing them to ultimately queer the traditional values ascribed to them is how the novel makes commentary on today’s social structure.

After Louis and Claudia escape Lestat in their burning home they board a ship for Europe. On the way they muse as to how Lestat had survived Claudia’s poisoning and stabbing. “But how could he have survived? I asked her. You saw him, you know what became of him.” (162) Recounting how Lestat might have survived the night he was dumped into the swamp, Claudia attributes Lestat’s vivacity with his tenacity or a will to live. Louis rejects this conclusion, instead offering, “…perhaps he was incapable of dying…perhaps he is, and we are…truly immortal?” To Louis, the immortality vampirism offers is a very religious thing, and the life that he has gained is a curse.
When confronted with the thought of Lestat being burned to death, Louis thinks that the will to live had nothing to do with Lestat’s survival. He instead feels that to Lestat there was no recourse. There is no choice for a vampire when it comes to death. The sun and earth reject them as agents of Satan. Louis feels that a vampire burned still lives, that the body has been more or less destroyed but that perhaps the vampire remains conscious forever.
When Louis first drinks the blood of another human he does not describe the physical beauty of the runaway slave, nor does he comment on his pressing hunger for blood. When Louis drinks blood for the first time, all else vanishes “and there came the beating of the drum again, which was the drumbeat of his heart-only this time it beat in perfect rhythm with the drumbeat of my own heart, the two resounding in every fiber of my being” (30). The way Louis describes the heart of his victim I think that the life of a vampire is more closely tied to the heart of its victim then its blood.
For many of the vampires in the book interview with a vampire, life itself means much more then the beating of another’s heart. When Louis first feels and then kills a rat or mouse he senses the creature and it’s life force. Blood itself does not fuel vampires, because blood from the dead is deadly and unpleasant and blood taken out of the body and put in a wine glass soon becomes cold and unpleasant. The life force itself seems to be what vampires feed off of, and blood then is vessel for it.
Lestat kills young rich women and young men at the prime of their life. I couldn’t decide if this destructive tendency of killing people at their pinnacle was another way Lestat choose to get revenge on the world or if all vampires choose to kill the young and beautiful for the pleasure of snuffing out life. The animals that Louis kills are smaller then humans but no vampire makes any attempt to kill horses or cows instead of their regular human kills. I think that this is because the amount of blood has little to do with the amount sustenance drawn from a victim. That is why an animal would never be as pleasing to the palette of a vampire opposed to a human. The life of an animal is a pale comparison to the life of a human.

Interview with a vampire

In Interview with a Vampire I was somewhat perplexed by the character of Lestat. He enters into the story a mystery, and he seems to remain one. Louis is the stories narrator, and so we get to see every single occurrence in his life. Claudia is found as a child, and while her reasoning and perceptions are complex and unreadable at times, we are allowed to see her life from it’s beginning to end, without any gaps. Lestat on the other hand is a character throughout the novel and we hardly ever gain insight to his motives or thinking.
Louise constantly derides Lestat as a terrible teacher, one who failed to fully explain the senses of a vampire and focused only on the love of killing others. Throughout the novel we are told again and again that Lestat knows nothing of vampires origins or powers. But by threatening Claudia and Louise with the possibility of some critical knowledge he is able to keep them under his power for decades.
Most puzzling is Lestat’s past. His blind father asks forgiveness for burning several of his son’s books so that he could not go to school, but how Lestat is transformed into a vampire is never explained. Later when Claudia and Louise find Armand and his group of vampires, it is reviled that Lestat had been one of several vampires under one master. But whether Lestat killed his Master or not remains mere heresy.
Lestat remains a mystery throughout the book. In the first half of the book he acts violent and vengeful in nature interspaced with bouts of civility and what could be love. On page 55 Lestat refuses to forgive his father saying, “For what! Taking me out of school!” he threw up his hand in desperation “Damn him! Kill him!” After Claudia poisons and stabs Lestat he manages to survive, though the ordeal is never told. After that Lestat is left in New Orleans for years, only recurring to help kill Claudia, after which he seems desperate to tell Louise something that the readers never find out. Finally at the end of the book Lestat eats only cats and babies, frightened of sirens. He tells Louis “Louis, I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it, Help me, Louis, stay with me.” Lestat acquires another young vampire for a slave, and ages and degenerates so much, but the stories behind these things we never learn.

When I read the literary criticism “The Occidental Tourist” I found myself agreeing with the majority of Arata’s points. On page 463 Arata notes on how Stoker links vampires to military conquest and the rise and fall of empires. Van Hellsing provides this insight to the behaviors of vampires, “He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, and the Magyar.” This makes perfect sense to me. The supernatural creature that is the vampire has nothing to fear when it comes to men’s rifles or swords. The battlefield would be the perfect environment for the vampire. There would be scores of bloodied and dying bodies; with so many deaths a few paler corpses with pricks in their necks would go completely unnoticed. Additionally the vampire could reap the spoils of war, such as gold, land, and titles for fighting for his country.

With Dracula’s history in such a war-torn area, it is no surprise he was able to amass such a fortune and fortify himself so steadfastly into the country. Before Dracula moved to England he imprisoned Johnathan Harker to learn the subtle mannerisms of a British man, and Dracula also purchased and studied any written material on his intended land of conquest. On page 26 of the novel Dracula explains that ‘I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say, “Ha, ha! A stranger!’ Dracula lost the defenses of his castle that included the forest full of wolf minions and the heavily defended castle for the anonymity of the “teeming masses”.
Dracula is portrayed as not only a bloodthirsty vampire but also as a Szekely warrior. The reasoning behind Dracula’s move from his homeland to a new place with potential danger was made much clearer after Arata stresses the conqueror spirit in Dracula. Dracula had been living in his castle for centuries and the allure of Britain was too much for him. Dracula is a conqueror of the lands, men, and women. He is defined through the immense power he wields wherever he goes. The newness of Dracula’s three wives had worn off, children were easy prey, so it is understandable that Dracula wanted a challenge.
Victorians view that Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster were capable of rearing hordes of demonic offspring seem to point to a xenophobic undercurrent in the thoughts. In Frankenstein the monster wanted a wife created the same as him to be his companion, but Dracula takes these thoughts a step farther through Dracula’s conquest and defilement of English women. Throughout the novel women seem to serve as the main battlefield for Dracula and the Victorian men. Each male character gives his own blood trying to save the life of Lucy as she is being fed upon and later Mina is in constant danger of being taken by the Count. I agreed with Aratathat the role of women in the novel was that of life givers, the means to which the race was continued.

Throughout the novel the editor comments on how the book Dracula differs from the film. The first such instance described Dracula’s hairiness, “film adaptations avoid Dracula’s hairiness; different as they are from each other most cinematic Dracula’s are clean shaven…these hairy palms are one of Dracula’s few affinities with the werewolf (and in the opinion of some commentators, with the Victorian masturbator as well.”(24) While I don’t think that Dracula’s pleasure is ever autoerotic, the very idea of the vampire is one who feeds of others to survive, I did find Dracula’s werewolf qualities interesting. In addition Dracula is described as having a uni-brow and a large white moustache, drastically different from any vampire I have ever seen.
Although it makes sense for a vampire to grow a moustache if he could, it helps hiding big fangs. Another strange example of how novel Dracula differs from film adaptations is when Jonathan Harker witnesses Dracula leaving, crawling down the sheer face of his castle walls face down. The related footnote seemed odd to me, “Jonathan’s repeated association of the crawling Dracula with a lizard aligns the vampire with those monstrous proofs of Darwinian evolution, dinosaurs-which Victorian scientists classified as reptiles-rather than with the mammalian bat.”(39) This was the first instance I had heard of with Dracula crawling around rather then flying, but I did not compare Dracula to a dinosaur in my mind or see how evolution tied into the equation at all. Later on in the story Dracula transforms into a large black dog, a mammal. And Dracula’s vampire brides transform into moonbeams while harassing Jonathan in the castle. My point being vampires abilities are much more likely to be tied with the supernatural then with Darwinian evolution.
All-in-all I found the barrage of footnotes helpful. The majority of notes deal with the names of nationalities and geography in the start of the novel. The editors call continuity on Bram Stoker a few times, though I worry they might be jumping the gun. The footnotes draw constant correlations with the Bible and Shakespeare, and without the notes I would miss most of the references entirely. But a select few notes seem unnecessary, “The first of many tributes to Dracula’s mastery of languages.” Is footnote number 9 on page 18. While I in no way disagree, I don’t think the editors need to add in the patterns they see.
The novel’s footnotes also play up the aspects of technology in the novel, giving the introduction every piece of gadgetry an aside. I only wish that the same were done for each mention of religion. While many of the superstitions are described to us, and there are a good number of footnotes concerning Biblical references, the technology in the novel is examined closely under a microscope, the subverted purpose of specific characters and their relation to the equipment pondered, while I am left scratching my head over the meaning of old men giving monologues on the dead and the grim reaper.
“There is legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows.”(63) This brief aside reminded me deeply of the novel “The Monk”. The ghost is a part of local legend and there is speculation as to her true identity as well as why she walks the ruins of Whitby Abbey. I also had strong vibes of the Monk when the gypsy woman comes to the castle after her child is taken from her by Dracula and eaten. She pounds on her chest and has a fit outside the main door. But instead of the character falling sick from her outburst, she is eaten by an army of wolves sent by Dracula almost immediately.