November 5, 2010
Literary Criticism Essay
Echoes of Dracula
In Dr. Kathy Davis Patterson's essay, 'Echoes of Dracula: Racial Politics and the Failure of Segregated Speace in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend', she discusses the idea that vampires have been used to represent racial politics in politics for quite some time, and introduces the idea by noting that 1954 was both the year of the Supreme Court's ruling on the Brown vs. Board of Education case, as well as the year in which Richard Matheson's I Am Legend was first published. "Coincidence?", she writes. It would seems as though Patterson doesn't think so. She writes that "The link between literary vampires and racialized constructions of monstrostrosity is nothing new" (Patterson, 19), and uses the rest of her essay to reinforce this idea.
The first example that she references is Bram Stoker's Dracula. According to Patterson, "Numerous studies of [Dracula] have explored the characterization of Bram Stoker's infamous Count as an allegorical representation of late nineteenth-centure British anxieties regarding the influx of large numbers of Eastern European Jewish immigrants on English soil." (Patterson, 19) She goes on to discuss the way in which gothic fiction is connected to xenophobia. While Dracula was a representation of cultural anxieties in England at the time, Patterson suggests that I Am Legend is, in the same way, a commentary on cultural anxieties of white America during the Civil Rights Movement. Patterson writes that "white Americans relied on their constructions of blackness, literary and otherwise, as keys to defining their own white identies." (Patterson, 20)
The essay then goes on to discuss the ways in which the plot of I Am Legend reflects these concepts through the treatment of the its vampiric characters. It is first noted that the main character Neville's race is made known very early on in the novel. He is described as being tall and white (English-German, to be more specific). However, Patterson then goes on how to discuss that even though the vampire creatures have no obvious racial attributes, they are associated with 'blackness' time and time again. Through multiple quotes from the novel, she illustrates that I Am Legend often associates blackness with that which is unholy or evil.
Patterson discusses the nature of Neville's attraction to the female vampires, as well, and relates it back to the concept of whiteness and blackness in American society at the time. She writes how, like John Harker of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Neville is somewhat helplessly attracted to the female vampires. She writes that "the intense desire that he feels for the vampire women, when considered in terms of his whiteness and their "blackness," carries echoes of the very real sexual exploitation of black femal bodies by white men during the era of slavery and beyond." (Patterson, 21)
Later, Neville's perspective on blood in I Am Legend is discussed as a representation of racial purity. "In Neville's worldview, hybrid blood equals contaminated blood. His obsessiev studies of blood and his efforts to identify, prevent, and possibly cure blood contamination reflect a desperate desire to restore homgeneity and, with, a social order that he recongnizes." (Patterson, 23) Throughout the novel, this contamination of his "pure blood" is the ultimate 'worst case scenario', and it is something that he is constantly trying to avoid. This is related in the essay to people during the Civil Rights movement (and other social movements), who are resistant to change because they find familiarity and order in their own culture.
Overall, I think that Patterson intended this essay to be something that makes us look deeper into the nature of gothic horror and what makes it so scary. While there are many theories regarding this, I think that this racial segregation concept is very interesting. While I find myself still somewhat doubting some of the connections made in the essay, it is hard to deny that vampiric writing is at least somewhat of a product of social anxieties and situations that have been an important parts of society in the past.
Works Cited
Davis Patterson, Kathy. Echoes of Dracula: Racial Politics and the Failure of Segregated Spaces in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. Print.
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