So vampirism isn't about vampires?
Oh, it is. It is. But it's also about things other than literal vampirism: selfishness, exploitation, a refusal to respect the autonomy of other people, just for starters.
[...]
But you don't need fangs and a cape to be a vampire.
The essentials of the vampire story, as we discussed earlier: an older figure representing corrupt, outworn values; a young, preferably virginal female; a stripping away of her youth, energy, virtue; a continuance of the life force of the old male; the death or destruction of the young woman.
[...]
In "Daisy Miller" (1878), Henry James employs the figure of the vampire as an emblem of the way society -- polite, ostensibly normal society -- battens on and consumes its victims.
[...]
That's what this figure really comes down to, whether in Elizabethan, Victorian, or more modern incarnations: exploitation in its many forms. Using other people to get what we want. Denying someone else's right to live in the face of our overwhelming demands. Placing our desires, particularly our uglier ones, above the needs of another. That's pretty much what the vampire does, after all. He wakes up in the morning -- actually the evening, now that I think about it -- and says something like, "In order to remain undead, I must steel the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own."
I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.
My guess is that as long as people act toward their fellows in exploitative and selfish ways, the vampire will be with us.
Bibliography: How to read literature like a professor, Thomas C. Foster, Harper.
[...]
But you don't need fangs and a cape to be a vampire.
The essentials of the vampire story, as we discussed earlier: an older figure representing corrupt, outworn values; a young, preferably virginal female; a stripping away of her youth, energy, virtue; a continuance of the life force of the old male; the death or destruction of the young woman.
[...]
In "Daisy Miller" (1878), Henry James employs the figure of the vampire as an emblem of the way society -- polite, ostensibly normal society -- battens on and consumes its victims.
[...]
That's what this figure really comes down to, whether in Elizabethan, Victorian, or more modern incarnations: exploitation in its many forms. Using other people to get what we want. Denying someone else's right to live in the face of our overwhelming demands. Placing our desires, particularly our uglier ones, above the needs of another. That's pretty much what the vampire does, after all. He wakes up in the morning -- actually the evening, now that I think about it -- and says something like, "In order to remain undead, I must steel the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own."
I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.
My guess is that as long as people act toward their fellows in exploitative and selfish ways, the vampire will be with us.
Bibliography: How to read literature like a professor, Thomas C. Foster, Harper.
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