With teeth: Why girls love vampires

Suspended between death and life, the vampire occupies a liminal space wherein typical boundaries can be blurred.

Image credit: Van Hesling (2004)

It was a blue-tinged afternoon, and perhaps it exists that way in my memory because it was 2008, the year of Twilight. I was wandering alone in the far reaches of the playground (something I, as an emo child, did often) when a group of girls approached me, holding a magazine open in front of them. “When you get a cut, do you ever suck the blood?” They asked. A strange question, I thought. It got gradually stranger as they held the magazine up to my face, presumably comparing how pale I was to a scale on the page, and without another word they all screamed and ran away in perfect unison. I watched them run. 

For a young girl, there’s perhaps nothing more frustrating than the realisation that the world is looking at you, but not seeing you. Even years later, I find myself drawn back to that moment in the playground — how it felt to be watched, the way I watched back. The feeling of witnessing my own body in relation to the bodies I saw around me.

For feminist author Simone de Beauvoir, the body is not just a physical form, but a situation. Experience cannot be separated from the body. This is a notion that rings true for girls — after all, how many times might we have wished not to be judged through the lens of our bodies? It seems that girlhood is a perpetual state of being witnessed by oneself and the world, but it is also a state of witnessing bodies that are different from one’s own.

The vampire — the ultimate uncanny body — has long been used to symbolise what our culture represses. The vampire, like the girl, is defined as an Other: fundamentally different, uncanny, not belonging. Suspended between death and life, the vampire occupies a liminal space wherein typical boundaries can be blurred. Gender, for example, is treated with an ambivalence which disrupts traditional delineations between masculine and feminine roles. Male and female vampires both suck blood: in this less-than-subtle allusion to the sex act, women vampires also take on the role of pursuer and penetrate with their ‘phallic’ teeth. In essence, this subversion of gendered meaning empowers women by positioning them as active subjects, able to watch and interact with the world around them just as their male counterparts do.

The vampires in Twilight are no exception. The vampire body is inhumanly flawless, but it comes at a cost. As Rosalie explains to Bella, “once it’s done, it can’t be undone”. Becoming a vampire erases her ability to choose her own path in life, entrapping her and binding her to Edward. Rosalie desperately tries to convey this to Bella: “You have the choice that I didn’t have, and you’re choosing wrong!” For de Beauvoir, the process of becoming a woman is dependent on the ability to choose freely, but the framing of the body as a situation restricts this ability, making it impossible to transcend the body entirely. For Bella, the lack of choice is a small price to pay for eternal, inhuman beauty. After all, if the body is a situation, then what does it mean to have a body which is immortal?

Image credit: EW Photoshoot

Okay, so Bella isn’t exactly a feminist icon. She isn’t completely disempowered, either. She is an active, witnessing subject who takes on the gaze (that is typically afforded to male characters) through her first person narrative. She is constantly watching Edward, recognising something in him which also exists in herself: an Otherness. “I was sure there was something different,” she explains as she watches him in the cafeteria, “I vividly remembered the flat black color of his eyes the last time he glared at me – the color was striking against the background of his pale skin and his auburn hair. Today, his eyes were a completely different color [sic]”. It is this strangeness that draws Bella to Edward; she is ostensibly attracted to him, but she is also intrigued by what being with him might reveal about her. At their prom, she says to Edward: “Do you remember when you told me that I didn’t see myself very clearly? [...] You obviously have the same blindness.” Part of the reason she is accepted into his world is her ability to see this similarity; in her role as seer, she witnesses herself as well as the world around her, transcending the fate of passive object. In negotiating her position as the Other, she is able to define herself. 

In a post-Twilight world, that blue-tinged afternoon on the playground calls to me still. Years of remembering have smoothed the edges of that moment, changing what it means. One thing remains the same: I liked the small power of being able to look back out at a world that seemed committed to misunderstanding me. After all, a little power feels like a lot for a young girl.