Sympathy and Consent: The problems of vampire love

The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion.... In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. -Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

"Resembling?"

I remember reading it the first time. I put down the book, stared up, frowning at the ceiling (light green, artex. My adolescent bedroom), rubbing the tattered paper of the spine.

"Resembling?"

After all, I was a Buffy fan, had seen enough of Angel's brooding, heard Spike's immortal line:

I wasn't surprised to find the idea of vampiric obsession, the idea that vampires were capable of strong, even affectionate, emotion towards humans and each other - what bothered me was the line being drawn. "Resembling."

The affection Carmilla has for the narrator is evident, her passion clear - why, then, the reluctance to call it by it's name?

Dracula, too, is charged with an inability to love, and answers, "Yes, I too can love. You yourselves can tell it from the past." What's more, the person accusing him is one his 'wives' - another vampire, suggesting that love is valued by the Undead, that Dracula's lack of it is an aberration. However, context is important; the 'love' to which the wives are refering involves eating the object of their desire. What's more, Dracula counters their criticism by claiming that he had once loved them in the same fashion - three women whom he seems to ignore when he isn't indulging them with a baby-in-a-bag, women he is in the process of abandoning.

The Dracula we see in the novel is alone, almost tragically so.

Vampiric love, then, is one which it is difficult to seperate from appetite, from death. After all, Carmilla talks of love and passion without reservation, but it is clear she means something a lot less sanitary than chocolate boxes and billet doux. She recalls "a cruel love - strange love, that would have taken my life," believes, "Love will have its sacrifices." Even in Buffy (which was my teen-relationship textbook) vampire romance is never healthy - there's Angel's painful impossible love of Buffy; there's  Spike and his glorious, dysfunctional infatuation with Dru; and there's Dru swooning over Angelus, the monster who drove her insane.

Perhaps that's what Le Fanu was getting at - we can recognise the strength of the feeling, its passion, its realness - but ultimately it either fickle, self-serving, or destructive. It is not a wholesome, it offers no support or strength, can only kill one or both parties. Although similar to love in many ways, it cannot be love because, by definition, its focus, its practicioners are perverse.

Transgression, Perversity and Otherness:

Hmmm. Yes.

Hopefully it is news to no-one that vampires are often used as a sexual metaphor. However, the sex they represent is seldom normative, sanctioned sexuality - monogamous, heterosexual, vanilla, and focused on reproduction. Vampires are used to explore Otherness, and one way to do that is to present them as sexually 'transgressive'. This holds true, even at a surface reading: Carmilla is a lesbian, Spike a male submissive, Dracula a bigamous foreigner. If I started to list the gay vampires out there, we would be here all day.

And one of the ways that Othering dehumanises a figure is to present their emotions and reactions as deviant, immature, perverse. Because they are different to us, because they are 'less' than us, their emotions and motivations can never be as real, important, or respectable as the feelings of mainstream groups.

So just an Other cannot be forthright, but rather is shrill or beligerant, what they believe to be love is not really love. It is merely lust, infatuation, obessession. Their relationships are perversions and inverstions of the ones that 'we' practice, the 'real' relationships. When they run against us, their attentions are clinging, embarrasing, unwelcome. Their influence is corrupting by default.

Yes, this fits the metaphor of vampirism rather nicely, doesn't it?

And metaphors are powerful. If these stories show, over and again, that the only 'right' love is male-dominated, heterosexual monogamy, then anything which falls outside of that, which is represented by vampires, is dangerous, evil, corrupt.

And, like many things didactic moralists preach against, it also looks kinda fun.

Take me away from all this death.

"Make me into one too," said the boy. "Please? I want to be one. I want to walk the night with you and fall in love and drink blood. Kill me. Make me into a vampire too. Bite me. Take me with you." - Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls

 Oh, who hasn't at least thought about it? About being eternally beautiful, unbreakable, strong?

Sympathy for the vampire is not an uncommon reading, or indeed response to the genre, and the reaction against such sympathy it is always strong, morally guided and didactic.It's well known that the British Board of Film Classification pushed for censorship of Hammer's vampire films because of the sexual element of the biting scenes, especially Mina's almost gleeful acceptance of Dracula's advances.

Even today, there are no shortage of people who seem to want to drag vampirism back into the realms of 'good, clean horror'. But these currents have always been there. The real power of vampirism is neither in its desirability, nor its horror, but in the ambivalence it raises. As the narrator of Carmilla says:

In these mysterious moods, I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her... but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrance. - Carmilla

We are aware of the moral failings of vampires, even as we are drawn to them. They may be tragic and lovely, but they cannot be saved.

Something in him ached for that boy. For the sadness in his face, for his eyes yearning to stay young. He wanted to grab Nothing away from his companions and tell him that sometimes, everything could be all right, that pain did not have to come with magic, that childhood never had to end. And yet he wondered whether Nothing had not known all those things when he made his choice.  - Lost Souls

Writers do fascinating gymnastics to navigate this problem, but ultimately, it will always be as Carmilla says, "I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so." It is a mad love, is amour fou - another thing which is belittled, mocked, denegrated. It is another thing that is often described as not 'really' being love, only 'resembling' it.

But, oh, it is so very real, and so very tempting. It is a love which transgressive, morally ambivalent, one that can bring with it an entire world of pain. And many vampire writers chase so hard after it, trying to bring it to a happy ending. But tidying away its danger, its nastiness, its utter disregard of morality, it is very difficult to maintain its white-hot intensity. If a vampire is prepared to call your father, 'sir' and wait until marriage, passion can hardly be consuming him that badly, right?

Well, maybe. There is such a thing as self-control. And, after all, Le Fanu speaks of an "artful courtship" of longing for "something like sympathy and consent"?

Take me away from all this death!

That "like" again.


The Boundaries of Metaphor, the Limits of Consent:
 

As mentioned above, the sympathy is easy. It's the heart of the vampire's allure, after all. It is precisely that balance of attraction and disgust. The idea that something about you is being admitted that you would never have owned before. It is about a sense of transgression, of non-normativity. It's about self discovery - and the ensuing shame, ambivalence, emergence.

The reinvention of the vampire as a romantic hero comes from that longing, that desire to put away all the weakness and uncertainty, to have your secret desires unfolded, to be lifted up on a love that is actually forever. So, of course it appeals, it is so tempting to leave it at that. 

But consent? Oh, how on earth do do we negotiate the morality of this?

After all, this is not coming out or getting laid. It's not asking your partner to spank you: we are talking about a vampire. This is someone who kills humans in order to live. So, yeah, you might sympathise, but that won't stop you reaching for the stakes and the communian wafer.

Besides, even if it didn't, can a word like consent actually be used in these circusmtances? The watchword of the BDSM community is SSC - safe, sane and consensual - and if consent is the most discussed, it does not exist in isolation. The three are interdependent - without consent and safety, it cannot be sane; without consent and sanity, it is not safe; without safety and sanity you cannot be said to have consented.

Also, legally, certain things are out of bounds, no matter how much you might want someone to do them to you. Being eaten, for example.

How can vampire romance ever be unproblematic?

So people tidy things up. They removed the Otherness of vampires,  stop them being killers, make them just humans with better hair and super-strength. But this overlooks the power of that Otherness, the importance of vampire mythos to groups who have been Othered, told their desires are dirty, immoral, or just worthy of mockery.

Contemporary vampire novels are frequently queer, or kinky, or else the dream relationships of lonely women of various ages*. To love a vampire is to desire to turn outsider status in to the ultimate in-group, to rewrite loneliness and frustration in to endless pleasure, to cast off low self-esteem nd find body confidence, beauty and sexual agency.

So we write stories where there are 'good' vampires, where they have souls and don't eat humans, and it becomes all about the metaphor. These are good people, just like us, facing unfair discrimination. The fact they must live in secrecy is unjust. The huge taboo surrounding vampire love is misguided.

However, as an idea of 'devaint love reclaimed as permissible', vampirism is a flawed model. To be able to embrace it wholeheartedly involves tidying away the ugliness, the whole vampire bit of vampirism. Female sexual agency isn't actually fatal, and lesbianism is does not cause aneamia. There is a lacuna between the metaphorical truth of vampirism-as-sexuality and its narrative reality. A young queer person may be justified in feeling that coming out will get them treated like a monster - it happens far too often - but they will never become one. Kinky sex (or, honestly, just sex) may feel dangerous, furtive and transgressive - but it should never actually be so.

Vampirism is. Its whole draw is the idea of being wanted so badly by someone that they will devour you. But this isn't a brutal slash and hack job - it is tender, loving, slow. It is romantic, sensuous, arousing.

And it will kill you.

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* Mine is, arguably, all three. 

What Price Fantasy? Consent and the policing of desire

This is sort of a follow-up to Alys' Addiction to Villains, dealing as it does with that fraught line between the fictional and the real.

Sex scenes and Consent:

A while ago, I read this fantastic article on the importance of consent in fiction by literary agent Laura Zats. The reason it's brilliant is because she's right. Consent is necessary, and hot and, y'know, the line between fun-times and sexual assault. Yet while the majority of my brain was cheering on this home-run of good sense and ethical sexy times in romance novels, I read this sentence and a tiny part of me flinched.

"Romance novels are also examples of what love and sex should look like in the real world."

I ignored the flinch. I flinch a lot.

But as the article charged on breathless to its rebuttal of rape culture, the little bit of me that flinched wriggled around a bit, pulled and nagged at my mind, and before I knew it I had my arms crossed over my chest and there was that nasty little whisper that used to keep me awake at night, "Just what is wrong with you?"

Ouch.

I thought I'd kicked that one. I thought I'd accepted the kinky mess of my brain, thought I'd settled with myself that dark thoughts and darker desires were not incompatible with self-worth, that I knew what I really needed and deserved, and what was just fun to think about. I thought I was over this.

But you're never over it. And it never takes much to bring it back again. Just some sweeping comment from a misogynist, just some below-the-line comment from an intellectual lightweight trying to save me from myself.

Or a thoughtful, intelligent, necessary article from someone I'd be proud to call an ally.

My shipping, my head-canon, the erotica I write (that you chaps are seriously never reading) would this be judged by others as "examples of what love and sex should look like in the real world", when it's not, and it isn't intended that way, and for goodness sakes, aren't we all aware of that by now?

I'm done berating myself about this. I got angry. 

Fiction is another word for fantasy. 

Even the most real-world, blow by blow account of an ordinary day is a fabrication, a falsity. And yeah, while I agree that we need a world that does not normalise sexual assault via media, can we not accept that some things are an escape? That some people like to think about things that - in real world terms - would constitute serious criminal acts?

Politically, I am left of centre. 

Actually, I'm left of centre by quite a long way. 

In fact, I probably couldn't see the centre with a telescope, but that's immaterial. As an unrepentant lefty, I would like to think that I am ethical. As such, I want an end to all the ways that people use power to hurt each other. I want an end to rape. I want, desperately, for every kind of non-consensual sexual activity eradicated from our world. I want our conversations around sex to become unambiguous and free from shame. I would like all abusive tosspots to learn how to be decent human beings and, frankly, while we're at it, I'd like an anarchist utopia. 

That's what I pray for, after all: people being decent to each other not because of law, custom or fear, but because it's the decent thing to do.

But just because I want these things, doesn't mean I'm not allowed to read books that glamorise vicious feudal societies. Just because I'm anti-murder does that mean I must resist the charm of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Just because I am a pacifist, am I not allowed to enjoy Preacher?

So, yeah, I'm anti rape. But does that mean I have to bar non-con from my fantasy life as well?

Especially when we get kinky, it's all about consent.

It's probably about time I mentioned BDSM. This is, after all, as much as a fictional framing device as erotic fiction. However 24/7 a relationship, it is still has its limits, however extreme the actions, they are always bound by consent. BDSM allows people to hurt or be hurt at one remove, not to experience power but to play at it. Just because someone someone indulges in interrogation play does not mean they want to be interrogated. BDSM is a safe space for fantasies, it is a yes-but-not-really.

I have heard arguments from erotica writers and readers that this is how it should be, that non-con should always be framed as fantasy within the construct of a story. So, any scene where a questionable act is eroticised it is necessary to reveal it as a consensual activity where all participants are engaging in a mutual game of make-believe. We may see something vicious, even violent, but when the lens pans out we see the mutual laugh and hug afterwards, the safe-word and the quick release restraints. In a longer story, we see these safe guards working, we see that this is all consensual and that, however intense, it is all in the name of good fun.

BDSM gives us as neat a get-out clause in fiction as it does to real life. We can go to these places without ever bringing our ethics into question.

But when we're reading a novel or a story we already have a framing device which tells the reader that nothing that follows is really real. A work of fiction is, of itself, a consensual, mutual game between the reader and the author. If a reader likes the idea of a forceful hunk sweeping them up to the bedroom over their half-hearted protestations, then a book is a place they can have that without the ensuing emotional scars. If at any point something unsettles them, triggers them, hurts them, they can say a non-negotiable "no", and put down the book. Stopping reading is the best safe-word in the world. 

What is more, most adults are capable of this distinction between reality and fiction. We know what we're reading isn't real - any crimes committed are not real crimes, the blood shed disappears with the next turned page. To add to this wonderful game a second disclaimer would be almost like a massive subtitle on the dangerous bits of an action film which state "These explosions are a special effect! Stunt doubles were used and not harmed!" 

When one reads - especially when one reads erotica - one suspends one's disbelief in order to get one's jollies. One does not want to come back to earth with a thump. We get it. It's a construct. If you aren't conversant with that, you really shouldn't be playing the game - you are still scrabbling at the backs of wardrobes seeking passage to Narnia, still walking into walls between platforms at King's Cross. 

So I could get scornful here, vicious against the people who fail to understand that, just because I entertain questionable notions in my head, doesn't mean I am ever going to act upon them in real, non pre-agreed reality.

But this attitude is rather glib.

Because that isn't what this is about. Because even though books are safe spaces, even though they are the finest of fetish clubs, even I draw back from too much realism in my villain. One might be fine with the idea of an elf-lord dreamboat pinning one's hands and ripping one's bodice, but when the setting is a market town in Surrey and the ravisher in question is a stockbrocker then no matter how much emotionally escapist bliss comes into play, to me that's going to sound like date rape.

Likewise, while I know that writers have no particular responsibility to their readers as a moral force, I am also aware of the part they play in creating cultural discourses and normative modes in the media. And these discourses - for all they are created in that 'harmless' realm of paper an ink - can cause real-world suffering, real world pain. I'm not talking about Harry Potter being the slippery slope into Satanism, I'm talking about semiotics. I'm talking about yet another strand of media excusing sexual assault, normalising it, glorifying it. 

In short, I'm talking about rape culture. Faced with that, to say, "It's only fantasy, I won't self censor, sod the consequences" is to show either blinding privilege or borderline malice. 

There should probably be a conclusion here

But there won't be. Because I know that people can't be held accountable for their fantasies provided those fantasies remain fiction (in whatever form). Because I know that reading about non-con, however horrific or scary, and getting off on it is not the same thing as wanting it to happen. I know that, as people, we need to challenge the dark bits of our minds, to embrace them and enjoy them if we can do that without harming people. I know that devotes of the macabre, fans of the kinky among us shouldn't have to feel like freaks, shouldn't need to be ashamed that they get a frisson from things a bit beyond the beaten track. The stigma against these things is strong enough as it is; let's not shame people further.

But I know, too, that if a story is told often enough to become our mode of understanding a thing it can do incalculable harm. I know if a person's, particularly a woman's, "No" comes to signify only token resistance, then we live in a society that excuses rape. And I am a hundred percent certain that this is wrong.

So I can't reach an answer. The line between fiction and reality is nothing like so definite as the line between enthusiastic consent and everything else. The boundary of what is too close to the bone changes from reader to reader, author to author, person to person. What's more, in a society that has so much shame, so much obfuscation around desire, too many people find themselves unable to communicate, to give or to ask consent. So, yes, we certainly need discourses which show us the words to do this, but as fiction reflects reality, we also need words which reflect back the pain of that inability, words for that struggle, for that uncertainty. 

How much do writers owe to ethics? To reality? At what price do our fantasies come? I wish there were a rubric that I could get behind, a pocket guide to acceptability because with the cost so high in human suffering, I could do with one.

All I know for certain is this; I am a Gothic writer, a teller of fucked up little narratives with ambiguous moralities, and I am not always sure that I am doing the right thing.