The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children by Simon Bacon Leo Ruickbie

Author:Simon Bacon, Leo Ruickbie [Simon Bacon, Leo Ruickbie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785275203
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2020-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

And with that she closes her eyes. When she awakens, we are not certain she is alive as she is only acknowledged by those that, as noted earlier in the film, can see ghosts. Her escape might have been no escape at all, and it is possible that she has been reclaimed by the system, the category of childhood that she thought she had left behind her.

4. The Vampire Child

More often than not, at least in the Western tradition, vampires are unable to give birth or procreate biologically, and so have to ‘sire’ or create their own children.22 Due to the nature of vampires this form of reproduction is usually extremely violent and involves the supernatural being biting and sucking the blood of its young victim, often forcing it to drink the creature’s undead blood in return. This traumatic ‘birth’ into undead life holds the child in an eternal stasis, meaning that it is physically unable to age beyond the point at which it became a vampire. For example, the child vampire Eli, in Let the Right One In, when asked how old he/she is, replies, ‘I’m twelve. But I’ve been twelve for a very long time.’23 In fact, the book from which the film was made says that Eli has been that age for hundreds of years and has not aged a day since being turned. The child victim of the vampire then is forced to stay in a category over which it has little or no control.

This is shown even more distinctly in the body of the undead child Claudia from Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994) by Neil Jordan. Here, in eighteenth-century New Orleans, a very young girl is found by the body of her dead mother by two vampires, Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt.24 Louis takes pity on her, but unable to control himself bites her and then flees in a fit of remorse and guilt. Lestat saves her by making her a vampire, and as she wakes into her new ‘life’, tells her: ‘You’re mine and Louis’ daughter now.’25 What she does not realize at that point is that she will not only remain the same age forever, but will also be unable to change her physical appearance. As she changes from a human into a vampire child, or from a being that could age into one that became reified forever, her complexion whitens, her lips redden into rosebuds and her lank hair becomes long, golden curly tresses – she becomes the perfect doll-like representation of a child as imagined by the adult Lestat. At one point during the film she viciously attacks her own hair with a pair of scissors to rid herself of the golden curls only for them to almost instantly grow back. Although fixed to look the same forever, the Claudia inside the reified exterior grows, becoming an adult trapped within a child’s body. As noted by Nina Auerbach, ‘She [Claudia] is a visual icon

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