Analyzing the Civil War Origin Story of Modern Day American Vampire Narratives: How Character Backstories in Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries Prompt Social Critique

Scholars have a tendency to stumble into academic territory that they did not intend to enter.  Or, well, I do at least.  A few years ago I decided to write a feminist critique of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.    It resulted in two publications.  You write two pieces on vampires and suddenly you’re marked as someone well versed in feminist readings of the monstrous.  I didn’t want to pigeon-holed in this way so I swore I was done writing on vampires… and then I saw a 

call for a collection on The Vampire Diaries.

I have a soft spot for the L.J. Smith’s Vampire Diaries.  I read the trilogy when I was in junior high and adored the books.  I was thrilled when I heard they were adapting them for television and, surprisingly, I like the television series more than I did the books they stemmed from.  (Although I do feel a bit silly for following a CW show so faithfully – it feels a bit like shopping in the junior section of a department store.)  So, I decided to flesh out an idea I had had rolling about in my mind for a few years on these recent vampire adaptations.  Unsurprisingly, it has my usual post-9/11 focus.  (Hey, if it works for zombies, why not for vampires too?)

Vampire narratives from Dracula to present have been analyzed (and allegorized) in terms of race and cultural conflict, allowing the fictional figures within such texts to often represent much more than mere mythical creatures.  For example, scholars have read Bram Stoker’s text as reflecting the fears that spawned the eugenics movement during the early 20^th century – fears of blood contamination and interracial marriage.    Scholarly analyses of vampire texts at the close of the 20^th century have read such narratives as alluding to other cultural concerns, such as terrorism – fears of “the other” who can hide among us and attack without provocation.   In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach argues that every age embraces its own particular kind of vampire – a cultural archetype that plays out the societal concerns from which it derives (145).   In the American post-9/11 cultural climate, it is interesting to see how the various vampire fictions represent the current cultural concerns of the 21^st century.  More interesting is the way some of the most popular vampire texts are remediating a past historical event – the Civil War – to bring attention to the cultural divides presently plaguing the United States.

Being that vampire texts throughout the centuries have attended to racial tensions and cultural rifts, the evocation of the Civil War is, in many ways, not surprising.  What is surprising is the specific ways that vampire cross-over texts are integrating this historical event into their narratives.  In my most recent essay I analyze three vampire series that have crossed mediated divides, revamping narrative content from print collections to fit the serialized small screen and the Hollywood big screen:  HBO’s True Blood (2008-present), CW’s The Vampire Diaries (2009-present), and the film adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012).   Below I’ll provide a brief summary of the arguments I make in greater detail in the larger work.

HBO’s hit drama derived from Charlaine Harris’s popular novel series, The Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001-present). One of the main vampire figures in this series (both in the print and televised versions) is Bill Compton, a vampire whose human life as a soldier and family man ended during the Civil War.  Although the primary focus of the series is often the romantic relationship between Bill and Sookie Stackhouse, the social commentary surrounding this melodramatic focus is often more interesting.  The first season of True Blood actively draws upon Bill’s historical past, one that prompts main characters to criticize the racial inequity of 19^th century.  This attention to race is one anticipated from the series’ onset.  In fact, the very first moments within the program’s opening credits house controversial scenes from the racially divided American south of the 1960s (e.g. an image of a child in Ku Klux Klan attire).  Although this focus on race relations often slips into the backdrop as the series progresses, Bill Compton exists to remind viewers of the divided state of the country both in the 1800s and at present; moreover, the juxtaposition of these time periods suggest that society has not progressed all that far.  True Blood also uses its narrative to critique other issues that divide the United States in the 21^st century.  The show focuses heavily on non-normative sexuality, allowing the discrimination the vampire characters experience on the show to parallel discrimination experienced by homosexuals in present-day America. As the series was released in 2008 during the height of the outrage over Proposition 8, the California Marriage Protection Act, it was primed to be a text that transferred societal debates over the role of the family and the sanctity of marriage into the fictional confines of the vampire infused world in a way that critiqued the current political landscape.

Released a year after True Blood, The Vampire Diaries also draws upon the Civil War to highlight contemporary concerns, although more subtly.  The CW’s teen drama brought renewed attention to L.J. Smith’s 1991 trilogy of the same name.  Likely inspired by the success of Meyer’s Twilight series, Smith took advantage of the resurgent popularity of vampire narratives, expanding her print series after almost two decades and accepting a television deal that would take her original storyline in a vastly different direction.  Smith’s original series focused on a love triangle between two vampire brothers and their human love interest, Elena Gilbert.  This remains the tie that binds the two versions together at present.  Although much could be contrasted between the television series and the original trilogy, for the purposes of this essay the most interesting change relates to the backstory of the two brothers.  Smith’s novel series portrayed the two male characters, Damon and Stefan Salvatore, as brothers born during the Italian Renaissance.  The CW series alters their pasts, recasting them as young men who met their demise on American soil during the Civil War era.  The television series devotes much more of its narrative contents to the past than did its textual predecessor and it also transforms one of its main characters into an African American descendant of slaves to draw attention to the setting’s cultural hierarchy.  The racial segregation of the vampires and witches is quite explicit and, I argue, problematic.

Unlike the previous two examples, the adapted Twilight films remain closer to their ancestor texts, focusing primarily on the romantic relationship between a human, Bella Swan, and a vampire, Edward Cullen.  The Civil War connection within this series is the origin story of Jasper Cullen who was a major in the confederate army when he was turned.  While this plot element is rather minor, this series is perhaps the most obvious of the three in the way that it expresses nostalgia for the past through the characterization of the main male characters.   All of the series use this historic event as a way to anchor their stories in an American past that is sometimes romanticized.  The Civil War time period shares with this contemporary one a societal resurgence of patriotism – patriotism that comes in a form so strong that it can divide a nation.  In fact, some critics have drawn parallels between the contemporary Tea Party movement and the Civil War Confederacy.  The protagonist vampires from these series associated with the Civil War epoch are also interesting to analyze in that they do not exist as vampires traditionally do.  They are not depicted as an “other” to be feared (which might be expected from post-9/11 texts).  They exist instead as heroic characters who work alongside their human partners to thwart evil in various forms – evil that threatens to terrorize their communities.  But to be clear, these narratives still do depict dark, dangerous others in a way that calls out for a post-9/11 reading.  In these texts all of the good vampires are American and (at least initially) all of the bad vampires come from abroad.  Some examples of the evil non-American vampires from these series include Aro Volturi in Twilight, Russell Edginton in True Blood, and Niklaus Mikaelson [Klaus] in The Vampire Diaries.  This is not an entirely new phenomenon but it is certainly one that has been amplified in the post-9/11 moment.

The characterization of the main male characters in these series is also noteworthy.  Especially in the case of Bill Compton, Stefan Salvatore, and Edward Cullen, these characters represent traditional American values; they are polite, old-fashioned, and chivalrous.  Their depictions, therefore, are much different than those of vampires in past narratives and may be a product of the conservative rhetoric concerning family values that dominated the early and mid-2000s, or shifting conceptualizations of masculinity.  For example, in the Twilight series, Edward’s refusal to have sexual intercourse with Bella until marriage is read as aligning with the abstinence-only education movement popular during this time period.

With this piece I set out to explore the fascination that present vampire narratives have with the Civil War time period and the “traditional” values associated with that bygone era.  Ultimately I suggest that this historical backdrop functions to redirect viewers’ attention to the cultural divides that trouble the country at present in regard to issues including politics, religion, race, gender, and sexuality.  However, this tie to the Civil War also reflects the nostalgia for the past and the current trend of heightened patriotism/nationalism being expressed by subsections of the American public.  As such, these television and film vampire tales continue to function as their ancestor texts have:  they embody the cultural concerns and fears of the time period in which they are created and offer up fascinating critiques in the guise of fiction.