Vampires and the Unconscious: Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Bessie Head

Abstract

The vampire can, it seems, be put to any (perhaps every) use. James B. Twitchell cautions us to “Witness poor Dracula: in our century he has been sent from Transylvania into outer space, into corporate finance, into the antebellum South, into California encounter groups…”.² As part of what we have seen to be Donna J. Haraway’s playful use of fantastic tropes in her work on the ethics of science and technology, in Modest Witness the vampire takes over from the cyborg as a player who flirts with boundary-negotiations such as “category-crossing” and “the pollution of natural kinds”. But the vampire is also intrinsically related to OncoMouse™, both existing as “an invention who/which remains a living animal … subsisting in the realms of the undead”. This preoccupation, in itself, suggests that the fantastic carries along with it an intrinsically ideological aspect which can accommodate speculations beyond the realm of mimesis for, as Ken Gelder claims, “The vampire is not an arbitrarily conceived invention; rather, it is a way of imaging what in a sense has already been vampirized by prevailing ideologies”.³ As all these readings assert, despite the vampire’s impressive historical lineage, Dracula is a figure before his time whose “home” is the twentieth century in which he is “reproduced, fetishized, besequeled, and obsessed over” and hence “less a specter of an undead past than a harbinger of a world to come… ”⁴ Thus as much a time-traveller as many of the characters we encountered in Chapter 2, the vampire’s ongoing relevance to the contemporary is sealed in its importance to recent women’s fantastic fiction.

We pursue objects which sustain our fantasies, but the origins of FANTASY … are unknown and can only ever be encountered as a boundary beyond which nothing can be said.¹