The Moral Panics of Sexuality by B. Fahs

Author:B. Fahs [Fahs, B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137353184
Publisher: PalgraveMacmillan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Vampire mythology, then and now

“I’m doing a study of the young girl’s head and shoulders. You won’t object to removing your blouse, will you?”

So begins an oddly homoerotic scene in Dracula’s Daughter, the sequel to Bela Lugosi’s famous Dracula and Hollywood’s first vampire franchise. I deem the scene’s innuendo odd for two reasons: (1) It was filmed for mass release in 1936; (2) It’s also a scene between two women.

Marya Zeleska, Dracula’s now orphaned daughter, has been seeing a psychiatrist for addictive behaviors and uncontrollable urges. The doctor is unaware that Zeleska seeks escape from her vampiring ways now that her father is dead. In true 1930s psychiatric horror, the doctor advises Zeleska to face her addiction one on one (not without first referencing how alcoholism can be cured by shutting a drunk up alone with a bottle of liquor). The idea is to confront and beat one’s addiction head on.

Zeleska is taking his advice. An artist, she has hired a homeless young girl off the street to model for her and hopes to avoid hurting the girl.

“You have beautiful hands, but they’re so white and bloodless,” Zeleska says.

“They’re cold, Ma’am,” the girl, Lily, replies.

“… Finish your wine. It will warm you. Stand by the fire for a moment. You mustn’t catch cold,” Zeleska says calmly but authoritatively in staccato-like sentences. Lily complies, and Zeleska watches the girl as she warms herself by the fire. Lily has already removed her blouse and holds her undergarments by their now fallen straps so as not to fully expose her breasts. She misunderstands why the artist is staring at her exposed neck and shoulders.

“Why are you looking at me that way? Won’t I do?” the model asks.

“Yes, you’ll do very well indeed,” Zeleska assures her, removing an old jewel she uses to hypnotize victims. She begins to explain the jewel to Lily.

“I don’t think I’ll pose tonight. I think I’ll go if you don’t mind,” Lily says plainly, but she doesn’t move. She has begun to stare back at Zeleska, not a trace of fear on the young girl’s expressionless face. “Please don’t come any closer,” Lily says.

The audience now sees only Zeleska’s face, smiling baby-like as it moves slowly off the screen and toward Lily. Zeleska’s face is off-center, and the camera is slightly out of focus. The scene ends, Lily screaming.

Traditionally, the vampire begets mixed feelings of attraction and repulsion—a visceral ambivalence intended to make readers second guess their basest or most primal urges. For Marya Zeleska, those primal urges evolve into addictive tendencies. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the novel from which almost all vampire lore springs, reacted against Victorian sexual repression through the introduction of a foreign character, the culturally strange Count Dracula. Character Jonathan Harker, a London lawyer, writes in his journal while traveling to meet the Count, “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East” (Stoker 2003, 7). Stoker shows, like his contemporaries, that conversations about sex are best when taken place outside of the Empire.

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