Transcripts

PAM KEESEY: She was very pale, had very dark hair, dark eyes, very languid. She didn't eat anything. She didn't appear to sleep at night.

She didn't like going out during the day. She tricked her way into a household and became a good friend of the daughter of the household. And this is where we find that she starts to-- the verb is to vamp Laura, who is the heroine of the story, to vamp being to maintain this ongoing relationship between the vampire and the victim.

SPEAKER: Was Carmilla, the precursor to Bram Stoker's Dracula Then?

PAM KEESEY: Yes. Actually, Bram Stoker, in his own journals refers back to Carmilla as something that he had read at a certain time and then goes back to the structure of Carmilla in creating Dracula. Carmilla has that narrative structure. It is told by the heroine. The story is told by the heroine 10 years after the fact.

So it has that recalling the past structure that Dracula also has. It also has the structure where you come into contact with the vampire. The vampire becomes part of the daily activity. And then it ends with what is essentially a chase scene and trying to chase down the vampire. So that structure is also repeated again in Dracula.

SPEAKER: So actually, "Dracula," then the image of a male vampire is very contrary to earlier versions of vampires who are female.

PAM KEESEY: Yes.

SPEAKER: Are they all necessarily lesbian?

PAM KEESEY: No. Actually, I think what happens is that the vampire becomes this taboo creature. And so this taboo creature deals with all sorts of our own taboos in terms of dealing with death, in terms of taking life, but also in terms of sexuality.

The sexual relationship between the vampire and the victim becomes almost polymorphous. It's the vampires are attractive to everyone and the vampire is attracted to everyone. So that whole ambiguity about sexuality is a major part of the vampire lore.

SPEAKER: The word vamp in the 1920s was used to describe a woman who was very sexual, and very sure of herself and was almost preyed on other women's menfolk in a way. How did that how does that whole fit-- that whole image fit into this?

PAM KEESEY: Actually, it surprised me. I started my research at a very basic level by going to the Oxford English Dictionary because it's the biggest one. I looked up vampire and it actually refers to vamp.

So there's a very literal connection between vamp and vampire and that whole-- again, that idea of dealing with what is taboo, the free woman who doesn't live by somebody else's rules, and again, with the sexuality, the sexual nature, she's attractive to everyone and attracted to everyone. And some of the most famous vamps of the 1920s were usual-- in their own lives, often were bisexual, but also were portrayed in their roles as being bisexual or just being attractive to everyone. So there's a very strong connection there.

SPEAKER: I really didn't realize-- not to be ignorant, but I really didn't realize that these stories went back hundreds of years literally.

PAM KEESEY: Literally, yes.

SPEAKER: Way back when you're talking about the goddesses, why do you think these stories have remained hidden for so long, especially when it comes to lesbian vampire stories?

PAM KEESEY: I think a lot of that has to do with the Victorian age. The first identifiably lesbian vampire that came about in the English language was in 1817, and it's a poem by Samuel Coleridge, who's a very well-known poet. But his poem, "Christabel," is less well known. And although he doesn't use the word vampire or any of the words related to vampires, there's definitely the relationship of the vampire to the victim in the sense that the victim starts to weaken and becomes more pale while the vampire becomes stronger.

That poem became a very significant influence for the writing of Carmilla. It was in the 1870s when a lot more research was coming out about bisexuality and homosexuality and definitely in the sense of condemning what it meant to be homosexual. So this story is very telling in that it is condemning relationships between women and saying, this is what can happen to you if you form too close a relationship with another woman, especially if it's, in this case, considered to be young women. This is dangerous and this could ruin the rest of your life.

SPEAKER: I can see why that was taboo.

PAM KEESEY: Yeah, very taboo.

SPEAKER: Is there something that goes beyond the sexuality, and the blood, and gore of vampire stories, and there's actually a larger message here?

PAM KEESEY: I think there really is, especially starting in the 1970s where we start to see stories from the vampires' point of view rather than from the victim's point of view, start to see the struggle that the vampire is going through and trying to figure out the vampires place in society because they live alongside us. And I think this is one of the things that Anne Rice in particular touches on. What does it mean to live in a society that is predominantly Christian when you are one of those who is supposedly damned by God? What does it mean to take a human life, to think and act like a human, but also depend on humans for the life, for the blood that they get from humans?

And I think it really does raise a lot of questions about the human being's relationship to the world around them and what that spiritual relationship is. Because we are looking at questions of, who has innate value, who is damned, who is not damned? And this is something that the vampire, as a figure, helps us to look at in a completely different way because the vampire is able to look at it in the scope of several hundreds and sometimes even thousands of years.