Vampire Whores: The Demonizing of Women

With vampires being all the rage in books, films, and television these days, I thought I would post a piece I wrote last year for class on the demonizing of women's sexuality.
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Spare the Mother, Kill the Whore: The Demonizing of Women’s Sexuality in “I Am Legend” and Dracula

At a glance, Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend” and Bram Stoker’s Dracula have nothing in common except mention of the stereotyped ways to kill a vampire. Matheson references Stoker’s story and characters, which to an unseeing eye, underscores how different the two writers’ styles are. For the close reader, however, Matheson leaves a clue that he has borrowed more from Stoker than merely garlic and stakes. One of the greatest thematic overlaps between Matheson and Stoker is the aggressive attack of female sexuality. In both “I Am Legend” and Dracula, sexual women are necessarily evil and must be destroyed. This demonizing of sexuality in women demonstrates how little the values of the hegemony had changed with regard to women from the Victorian era to the mid 1950s and shows the ideal role as the chaste, pure mother.



The first half of “I Am Legend” is littered with references to the female “vampires” that surround Robert Neville’s home on a nightly basis. Every night since the women noticed Neville, they “had started striking vile postures in order to entice him out of the house” (Matheson 7). Neville compares the women to “lewd puppets” (7) and is infuriated by the women’s actions. What seems to distress Neville most is that he cannot control his desire for these women. He is not opposed necessarily to their sexuality, but is opposed to their having more control over his reaction than he seems to have. As Neville thinks about “the lustful, bloodthirsty, naked women flaunting their hot bodies at him” (Matheson 22) he simultaneously reminds himself that they’re not hot because he won’t allow himself to think of them that way. He finds the response of his body to these monstrous women to be “an insult to a man” (Matheson 8). It is not the idea of women possessing sexuality, but rather the idea of their holding power in sexual situations that is threatening to his role as a man.



It can be no accident that when Neville goes on vampire killing sprees, he always seems to find the women in their bedrooms. It is also not an accident that during one such moment, Matheson juxtaposes the question of why Neville always experiments on women with the thought of raping the women (49-50). In much the same way a rapist might, Neville is purging his anger at these women by enacting violence on their bodies. No, he does not force sex on them, because to his mind that would be a weakness in himself, but he saves his most aggressive physical tortures and sadistic experiments to punish the women for their blatant sexuality. These acts also reestablish Neville’s role as the dominant person in the interaction.



The one woman in “I Am Legend” that finds redemption is Ruth. Ruth, unlike Neville’s lewd puppets, has retained her feminine modesty. When she met Neville and noticed “her exposed breast, she reached down and held up the torn material of her dress” (Matheson 113). This act of decency and behavior appropriate to a woman in the 1950s leads Neville to trust Ruth more than the others. At some level, Neville recognizes that he is being deceived by Ruth even as they are talking in his home. Ruth is sitting on the couch and part of her leg is exposed which Neville classifies as “a typical feminine gesture… an artificial movement” (Matheson 130). It is because of this doubt and recognition that Neville feels he must test the woman and if he finds she is one of the vampires, she (and her potential for aggressive sexuality) must be destroyed.



In the end Ruth is saved from Neville’s torture of women not by her cunning, but by being a pure mother figure. Rather than seduce Neville, she holds him and comforts him as a mother would. Even once he is captured and imprisoned, she is seen “patting perspiration from his brow, touching his lips with a cool, wet cloth” (Matheson 154). By now, it is also known that Ruth is not like the other vampire women because she has been given a drug that keeps her more human. It is her lack of obscenity that allows her to maintain her humanity and her caring mother image that keeps her from being destroyed. “I Am Legend” takes directly from Dracula this idea the powerful female sexuality must be destroyed while the purity of the mother figure must be preserved.



Bram Stoker first exposes us to women in Dracula by introducing three young women who come upon Jonathan Harker in Dracula’s castle. The women are described, much like Matheson’s women, as having a “deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive” (Stoker 42). The scene peaks as Jonathan is laying passive on the bed feeling one of the women’s teeth pushing at his throat and he waits in a “languorous ecstasy” for the woman to penetrate him (Stoker 43). It is no surprise that when Jonathan realizes these women have had such sexual power over him he feels emasculated and overcome with horror.



Next, Stoker presents us with Lucy. Lucy is presented as a young girl with wild thoughts perhaps inappropriate for her time. She once kids that there is no reason a woman should not be able to take three husbands. Lucy is punished for pushing the boundary of what a Victorian woman should be and as she becomes more and more vampiric, she is also described in increasing sexually appealing terms. Her voluptuousness and red lips become more apparent as does her inherent evil. In the final scene when Lucy is destroyed, it is by her fiancé’s hand and is described in overtly sexual terms. Arthur is seen penetrating Lucy with a stake “deeper and deeper… whilst blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it” (Stoker 192). Meanwhile, Lucy’s body, still sexualized in its dying moments, is seen “writhing and quivering” (Stoker 192). Once the men had killed Lucy’s body and removed the demonic power over her soul, it is key that her image is seen as having restored “unequalled sweetness and purity” (Stoker 192).



Just as in the story Matheson presents, Stoker’s tale incorporates one woman who must be saved rather than destroyed because her image as a pure mother figure. Mina Harker is seen as the devoted wife who utilizes all her knowledge, time, and skills to benefit her husband. When Jonathan is recovering from great trauma and illness, Mina helps nurse him back to health and takes great care to protect him from things she fears would set him back in his recovery. She understands that to be a Victorian woman means to sacrifice one’s own feelings and tend to the needs of the man, much as a mother does with her children. In Mina’s case, even at her most ill and frightened, she puts on a mask of cheerfulness while serving the men tea. She notes in her own journal, “I did what I could to brighten them up, and I suppose the effort did me good, for I forgot how tired I was” (Stoker 228).



There are constant references to the purity and upstanding character of Mina and it is doubly worth noting that even at her most ill, Mina never receives blood from any of the other men as Lucy did. The only fluid exchange Mina participates in is forced upon her by Dracula and she is so horrified by this metaphorical rape, she believes herself to now be “unclean” (Stoker 259) and questions what she has done wrong to deserve such a fate. Clearly, the reader cannot blame this one sexualized act on Mina since she had no choice in the matter and her subsequent actions show her constantly trying to reclaim the purity that was stolen from her. Mina pushes forward, trying to care for and support the men in their quest to kill Dracula all the while reinforcing her desire to remain pure by making them all promise to kill her if she shows herself beyond salvation.



As Robert Neville in “I Am Legend” was angered by the prospect of sexually forward women, so too were the men in Stoker’s Dracula. The sexual aggression of female vampires leads them all to be destroyed while the passive, nearly absent, sexuality of Ruth and Mina allows them to remain alive. The mother-like qualities of these two women shows them as the perfect archetype of the loving, supportive, pure female so valued by men in the Victorian age and the 1950s alike. Both women are given motherly roles in the book to underscore the fact that unlike the other demonized women, they are true to their expected station. In fact, both Ruth and Mina are literally mothers as we know Ruth had two children and the final pages of Dracula mention Mina having given birth to a son.




In the end, all is righted in the world of both stories when only the sexually submissive females remain. Every instance of vampiric, demonized sexuality seen in a woman has led to her violent destruction. In Dracula, the original corrupting force has also been killed so that no more women may be robbed of their purity and the men may maintain their dominance. Similarly, “I Am Legend” closes with the knowledge that in the new society, there is a drug that can prevent people from being so thoroughly infected with this vampire’s disease that they become like the women on Neville’s lawn every night. There is a sense that with the death of the whore and the preservation of the mother, the world is once again a safe place to inhabit.