#la morte amoreuse

[immediatebreakfast]

After the slighty yet impossible possibility of the gang being part of the background while the plot of the Murder on the Orient Express plays in their train. I am just obsessed with the idea of all gothic novels crossover, it doesn't matter if the novels happen in different years, or eras. All of them are neighbors, or friends, or they just meet eachother in the weirdest situation possible.

Van Helsing stops before he goes to Jack's asylum to visit his dear old friend Henry Jekyll, they haven't talked in ages. Jack and Victor Frankenstein were classmates in the same university, they made eachother slighty worse. Lucy and Mina and Emily St. Aubert were good friends in school before Emily had to go because her family couldn't afford it anymore.

We know that Clarimonde is just taking her yearly vacations in London, yet her day is ruined when she meets that jackass of Dracula who apparently can't behave normally. Dorian Gray? You mean Jonathan's annoying neighbor who always tried to make Mina angry because he is a little shithead? Carmilla was an acquaintance of Arthur's who he met in a ball once. She misteriously appears again to give him condolences for the death of his beloved Lucy :)

[crucifiedlovers]

...the candles turned pale in their golden sconces, like stars at dawn, and the whole church was enveloped in complete darkness. [She] stood out against that dark background like an angelic revelation; she seemed illuminated by herself, and to shed light rather than to receive it.

Théophile Gautier, "La Morte Amoureuse" from Théophile Gautier's short stories (trans. George Burnham Ives)

[see-arcane]

I don't mean to throw more Spooky Peoples at you but that ask about Clarimonde reminded me that the Spooky Clarimonde I think of first is not at all the one most people do 😅

The one I was first introduced to was from this delightfully dark little tale called The Spider, which I think you might actually enjoy and so I shall include a link here

https://youtu.be/K8PoawN6j5Q?si=vfjbGdf_wRMBZWXR

(Wish the links would actually work in asks but 🤷‍♀️)

Oh, I know Clarimonde the Spider too! I just think of her as Spidermonde 🕷Also thank you for the audio link! I can listen to it for peak arachnophobic vibes c:

Why are all these fine supernatural Clarimondes (affectionate) (terrified) so neglected when it comes to adapting spooky old classics? It's a crime against monster ladies, I tell you. Especially since Spidermonde is one of the few bogeywomen I can think of who aren't in their niche just to be Voluptuous and Romantic at the victim(s), but is legitimately just in it for food and/or being a supernatural serial killer for giggles

[dearorpheus]

What are your favourite vampire stories in all medias — books, movies, anime, non fiction? Love your blog!

literature: la morte amoreuse, théophile gautier the lady of the house of love, angela carter bewitched, edith wharton "the vampire", conrad aiken

non fiction: as always, joyce carol oates' "aesthetics of fear" our vampires, ourselves, nina auerbach vampires, burial and death, paul barber from demons to dracula, matthew beresford "making the implict, explicit: vampire erotica and pornography" by bernadette lynn bosky in the blood is life (i can email this to you if you'd like, i took a scan from my uni's copy)

film, tv, anime: thirst (2009) dir. park chan-wook only lovers left alive (2013) dir. jim jarmusch vampire hunter d: bloodlust (2000) dir. yoshiaki kawajiri fright night (1985) dir. tim holland let the right one in (2008) dir. tomas alfredson ganja & hess (1973) dir. bill gunn the hunger (1983) dir. tony scott a girl walks home alone at night (2014) dir. ana lily amirpour bram stoker's dracula (2000) dir. francis ford coppola the lost boys (1987) dir. joel schumacher penny dreadful (2014-2016) "the wurdulak" from mario bava's black sabbath (1963) la morte vivante (1982) dir. jean rollin nosferatu the vampyre (1979) dir. werner herzog midnight mass (2021) dir. mike flanagan

misc: phillip glass' 1999 ost for dracula witcher 3: the wild hunt's blood&wine dlc: the atmosphere in the night of long fangs quest; the lore of tesham mutna; the bruxae<3; the vocals in the beast of beauclair; regis, dettlaff, orianna...

adjacent/periphery: bataille's blue of noon, kristeva's powers of horror, sade's justine

[cleolinda]

Varney the Vampire: Chapter 1

[I originally posted a shorter recap of this chapter on Livejournal, on December 7, 2010. If you'd like to just read the original, less serious version of the recap, that's here.]

[Content note: I'll talk about this a bit later, but, heads up: this opening chapter describes an assault that’s more vivid than I remembered. That's the second half of the recap.]

I'm not actually going to rewrite all my Varney posts like this, but I'd like to talk not just about the way James Malcolm Rymer wrote the chapter, but also the way I recapped it 12+ years ago.

First off, I don't think I gave Rymer enough credit for the atmosphere of the opening; maybe I just appreciate it more after struggling through some of the filler chapters. I did give him some credit, noting that there are 900 words of gothic effectiveness before anything actually happens—I'll quote the very beginning at some length so you can get a feel for what the next 230+ chapters are like:

The solemn tones of an old cathedral clock have announced midnight -- the air is thick and heavy -- a strange, death-like stillness pervades all nature. Like the ominous calm which precedes some more than usually terrific outbreak of the elements, they seem to have paused even in their ordinary fluctuations, to gather a terrific strength for the great effort. A faint peal of thunder now comes from far off. Like a signal gun for the battle of the winds to begin, it appeared to awaken them from their lethargy, and one awful, warring hurricane swept over a whole city, producing more devastation in the four or five minutes it lasted, than would a half century of ordinary phenomena.

It was as if some giant had blown upon some toy town, and scattered many of the buildings before the hot blast of his terrific breath; for as suddenly as that blast of wind had come did it cease, and all was as still and calm as before.

Sleepers awakened, and thought that what they had heard must be the confused chimera of a dream. They trembled and turned to sleep again.

I summarized this as:

The lightning! The thunder! Ominous calm! The buildings scatter like toy houses! O THE STORMY STORMINESS OF THE STORM. And then the hail starts up, at which point I started laughing, because… hail. Sexy, sexy, stormy hail. Oh the hailiness of the hail, the stormy sexy chunks of ice hailing on your head, yea, unto a mild concussion. In conclusion: hail.

I had some interesting expectations here about gothic atmosphere, or perhaps just the vampire genre itself, necessarily being "sexy." You do see some eroticism in a vampire story like "La Morte amoreuse" (1836), but—remember how I mentioned the cottage industry built on Polidori's "The Vampyre," which ultimately results in Varney the Vampire as a sort of parody? There's no Erotic Biting in any of that. Biting of any nature happens off-page in "The Vampyre," and to my knowledge, Ruthven doesn't manage to bite anyone in spinoffs like The Bride of the Isles. At the time Varney was first published (1845-1847), I don't know if people were expecting scenes like—well, what's about to happen next.

Enter Flora:

And now we meet Our Heroine, Flora Bannerworth, an aptly-named maiden who is "young and beautiful as a spring morning," bare shoulder, sculpted ivory bosom, teeth of pearl, moaning in her sleep, a flood of loosed tresses, so on and so forth. Wind, rain, sexy hail, 600 words, FLASH OF LIGHTNING! SHRIEK!

Okay, I clearly expected the heroine to be eroticized, and I was at least right about that:

The bed in that old chamber is occupied. A creature formed in all fashions of loveliness lies in a half sleep upon that ancient couch -- a girl young and beautiful as a spring morning. Her long hair has escaped from its confinement and streams over the blackened coverings of the bedstead; she has been restless in her sleep, for the clothing of the bed is in much confusion. One arm is over her head, the other hangs nearly off the side of the bed near to which she lies. A neck and bosom that would have formed a study for the rarest sculptor that ever Providence gave genius to, were half disclosed. [...]

Oh, what a world of witchery was in that mouth, slightly parted, and exhibiting within the pearly teeth that glistened even in the faint light that came from that bay window. How sweetly the long silken eyelashes lay upon the cheek. Now she moves, and one shoulder is entirely visible -- whiter, fairer than the spotless clothing of the bed on which she lies, is the smooth skin of that fair creature, just budding into womanhood, and in that transition state which presents to us all the charms of the girl -- almost of the child, with the more matured beauty and gentleness of advancing years.

Y'all.

I had read a lot of Victorian literature by 2010—took graduate classes, even—and was too jaded to be as fazed by this quasi-Lolita mess as I maybe should have been. I remember reading this and thinking, "Yeah, that's standard. Goes on a bit, though."

Having established Flora Bannerworth, Victorian Lolita (she's the only person with any sense for several chapters, don't hold it against her), the story starts to ramp up. Flora sees "a figure tall and gaunt, endeavouring from the outside to unclasp the window" in the next flash of lightning. She's not sure what she really saw; it turns out that the literary point of the hail is that she can't tell if the sound she's hearing is ice raining down on her gothic mansion or vampire fingernails trying to claw the window open. And like, who thinks "Obviously, a vampire is trying to get in"? She saw it so clearly, and yet, storm, darkness, hail, she could just as easily explain it away—how did Ann Radcliffe differentiate terror from horror? Basically, terror is the dreadful lead-up and horror is the shocking revelation? So we switch here from the horror of OH SHIT VAMPIRE AT THE WINDOW back to the dread of waiting to find out what it really was.

Around this point in the original post, I pointed out that there are four elements you might see in a vampire story: the Appearance of the Vampire; the Attack of the Vampire; the Victim's Consumptive Suffering; and the eventual Destruction of the Vampire. You see these pretty reliably in Dracula, for example; you see them subverted in Interview with the Vampire, where the vampire is eventually destroyed by fellow vampires, but then it turns out he wasn't, and he goes on to be vampire king and see Jesus and mess around with the Devil and Atlantis is involved, idk I didn't keep up with those books after the one with the body-thieving. In this particular chapter of Varney, we get the first two elements, and they are honestly very effective: "Frozen with horror!" I said. "Heart beating wildly! The strange reddish light from a burning mill in the distance! The vampyre's nails clattering against the glass as it seeks to open the latch! She tries to scream but cannot to move, but cannot! Her cries for help are but hoarse whispers that no one can hear!" And then:

(I want you to remember Lord Ruthven's "dead grey eyes" here:)

The figure turns half round, and the light falls upon its face. It is perfectly white perfectly bloodless. The eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth the fearful looking teeth projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like.

(Sidebar: This is apparently the first appearance of the word "fang" in vampire literature.)

It approaches the bed with a strange, gliding movement. It clashes together the long nails that literally appear to hang from the finger ends. No sound comes from its lips. [...] The glance of a serpent could not have produced a greater effect upon her than did the fixed gaze of those awful, metallic-looking eyes that were bent down on her face. Crouching down so that the gigantic height was lost, and the horrible, protruding white face was the most prominent object, came on the figure. What was it? what did it want there? what made it look so hideous so unlike an inhabitant of the earth, and yet be on it?

Here I am, making a very good point while being gleefully insensitive:

Panting, repulsion, heaving bosoms, etc. And then begins the slow agony of Flora oozing across the bed in her attempt to escape. Hair streaming (slowly) across the pillows, covers dragging (slowly) behind her, until she gets one foot (slowly) onto the floor. This is one of the few times the paid-per-word aspect works in Varney's favor—it has the endless creep of a nightmare, so let's take a moment to bask in a brief ray of quality. Undaunted by effective writing, the vampyre reaches her and drags her by the hair back onto the bed; "Heaven granted her then power" to scream her head off. And thus follows the most awesome sentence I have yet seen in gothic literature:

With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!

My Hideous Repast is totally the name of my new goth band.

And that was the end of my commentary on the chapter.

I'm torn here because I do think the writing in general is entertainingly overblown, and I do think "my hideous repast" is funny in the abstract. But what I don't understand—not to bring the room down, but I feel like it should be pointed out: when I started recapping Varney the Vampire back in 2010, I completely missed the fact that this opening scene is describing a sexual(ized) assault. Some readers might be really, really uncomfortable with this scene. Why did I not see this?

I came here to have fun and that would not have been fun?

I was approaching the serial from the assumption that it's silly and melodramatic, so anything that happened also would be?

This cover illustration did not exactly set me up to take it seriously?

I was so used to the ravishment fantasies of gothic/vampire media that it didn't strike me as something unpleasant or unusual to read?

It was 2010 and we didn't necessarily question problematic angles as thoroughly as we do now, even though I was already critiquing Twilight in 2008 so that's kind of a bullshit excuse?

I still think the melodramatic writing is pretty funny in places and I'm not sure how I feel about myself for that?

I think at least some of my reaction actually does come from writing about Twilight from 2008 onwards. It was a vampire story that had a marked lack of Erotic Biting scenes, to the point where director Catherine Hardwicke had to add one to the movie: Bella's fainting-couch fantasy of Edward as a classically gothic vampire, which apparently involves shoe-polish hair.

The mood 15 years ago (!) was, some people loved a twinkling repressed sparklepire insisting he mustn't touch his high-school ladylove, he mustn't! but he must!!, and other people were big mad about it. Reading Varney, it felt refreshing to go back to a "traditional" story and say, see, there is bloodshed and it's not sparklewashed and tame, that is what real vampiring looks like. And somewhere along the way, I think I lost sight of the fact that Twilight, for all its many faults, at least involves someone who enthusiastically consents to being bitten. Like, Bella as would-be victim consents when Edward doesn't; the big tension of the series is that Bella is always throwing herself at a hungry vampire who keeps running away from her.

Hey, you might say, in the midst of a cultural moment when everyone’s going wild over the bizarrely chaste story of a teenage girl and her guilt-ridden goody-two-shoes vampire boyfriend,

remember when vampires were actually scary and forced themselves on their victims?

wait what do you mean that's not great

By “not great,” I don’t mean that vampire villains are Problematic™ and should be banned from fiction. I'm saying, that's the point, that it's villainous to force a vampire bite on someone; that's what the horror of the situation is about. That said, one of the unique holds that vampires have on audiences is the moment when “force” becomes ambiguous—ambiguous for the characters, but when we consent, as readers and viewers, to seek out that ambiguity. Like, I’m here for vampires because of that, the psychodrama is the whole point for me; it’s not because I like watching people get chewed on. That ambiguity holds an audience-proxy tension between “I don’t want this” and “but I do want this.”

Case in point, Dracula attacking Mina in the original text: Mina is horrified to find that she’s compelled to submit despite herself (“strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him”), although that scene is heavily weighted towards “I don’t want this”—towards horror. A story like “Carmilla” has Laura feeling confused, conflicted, unsure of what’s even been happening behind the veil of her dreams: Do I want this? What am I even wanting? “Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it”: more of a balance between want and not-want. Whereas Bella immediately wants to be bitten, end of, and spends three books chasing a vampire who is agog at how little she cares for her own life. It's... some kind of tension, for sure.

Thousands of words have been written about how this tension is tied to societal sexual repression, of course. And as the decades went on, as sexual mores loosened throughout the twentieth century and beyond, writers and filmmakers started saying, “Oh, the vampire’s bite is enjoyable and it doesn’t turn you immediately into a vampire, have fun.” (The U.S. seems to be moving politically back towards repression, which makes me wonder how vampire media might change soon.) And this is why Twilight feels like a metaphor for literal chastity: there are immediate consequences for being so much as nicked by a fang, and so all the eroticism is dialed down to teenage makeouts.

And so, in 2010, I was so busy enjoying the literary contrast between Twilight and a book where vampires actually bite people that I lost sight of the fact that what happens to Flora is a particularly cruel and vivid assault. I mean, getting dragged by her hair, Jesus Christ, why was I not more disturbed by that?

What this then makes me ask, though, is how did readers in 1847 take this?

Who was this written for?

Readers who would identify most with Varney—attacking Flora, which is awful, but the action as written is extremely callous?

Readers who would identify most with Flora—being attacked, which suggests a "horror is a safe roller coaster" framing?

Readers who wouldn't really identify with either of them, but instead might picture it as a stage play?

Given that Polidori's Lord Ruthven set off a "vampire craze" onstage, I lean towards the third option. It takes a certain bystander detachment to read this scene and not think of its reality—to empathize—at all. And my "lmao this is so silly" is, in fact, a form of detachment. But all three of those options are possible, all at once.

So: is this opening chapter intended to be funny? (Subsequent chapters are far more intentionally humorous, and I had doubled back to recap this after reading ahead.) Are we meant to laugh, or is the outdated style only unintentionally funny now?

Is it satirizing earlier vampire literature/theater on purpose?

Is humor a way of making it easier to read a scene like this?

Is it not a good thing, really to make a scene of assault "easier to read"?

Did I, a reader who would identify with Flora, need it to be easier to read?

Is it okay to have multiple, conflicting reactions to something?

The only answer I have is "Yes," to that last question. And the only thing I know to do with conflicting feelings about media is to accept them and say, as a data point: here they are. There’s a level to this first chapter that I completely did not grasp 12-13 years ago, when I was 30+ entire years old, and I'm still not sure why that is.

I do think Varney the Vampire is frequently pretty funny; weirdly, the subsequent chapters read like a parody of Dracula if everyone in Dracula except one (1) heroine was completely useless, 50 years before that book was even written. Flora might be the victim in this chapter, but she is not the butt of the jokes. But I guess what we need to think about is—if this book is meant to be parody, why is it funny, who is it making fun of at any given point, and what purpose does that serve?

At this point, the antiquated style is what’s funny to me, and I��m making fun of Rymer. Did Rymer intend his readers to find the opening chapter funny? Maybe not: I think he intended it, certainly, to be titillating, even exploitative—and I was aware of that, but maybe not enough.

We'll resume with Varney trying to get over a garden wall. It will be a shorter, lighter post.

[la-femme-au-collier-vert]

A List of Works Influencing and Referenced by IWTV Season 1

Works Directly Referenced

Marriage in a Free Society by Edward Carpenter

A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Cheri by Collete

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

La Nausee by Jean-Paul Sartre (credit to @demonicdomarmand )

Complete Poetry of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas H. Johnson*

The Book of Abramelin the Mage

Don Pasquale by Gaetano Donizetti with libretto by Giovanni Ruffini

Iolanta by Pyotr Tchaikovsky with libretto by Modest Tchaikovsky

Pelleas et Melisande by Claude Debussy

Epigraphes Antiques by Claude Debussy

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Nosferatu (1922)

Kansas City Stomp by Jelly Roll Morton

Wolverine Blues by Jelly Roll Morton

Works Cited by the Writer’s Room as Influences

Bourbon Street: A History by Richard Campanella (as it hardly mentions Storyville I think interested parties would be better served by additional titles if they want a complete history of New Orleans)

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (This was also adapted into an award winning opera)

poetry by Charles Simic (possibly A Wedding in Hell?)

poetry by Mark Strand (possibly Dark Harbour?)

Works IWTV may be in conversation with (This is the most open to criticism and additions)

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, uncensored (There are two very different versions of this which exist today, as Harvard Press republished the unedited original with permission from the Wilde family.)

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Warsan Shire for Beyoncé’s Lemonade

Faust: A Tragedy by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

La Morte Amoreuse by Theophile Gautier

Carmilla by Sheridan LeFanu

Maurice by E.M. Forster

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Sailing to Byzantium by Yeats

The Circus Animal's Desertion by Yeats

The Second Coming by Yeats

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (credit to @johnlockdynamic )

1984 by George Orwell (credit to @savage-garden-nights for picking this up)

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

Gone With the Wind film (1939)

Hannibal (2013)

Beauty and the Beast by Gabrielle Suzanne de Villenueve

*if collected or in translation most of the best editions today would not have been available to the characters pre-1940. It’s possible Louis is meant to have read them in their original French in some cases, but it would provide for a different experience. Lydia Davis’ Madame Bovary, for example, attempts to replicate this.

** I've tagged and linked relevant excerpts under quote series as I've been working my way through the list.

Season 2 here

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

Although she swallowed only a few drops, the fear of weakening me soon seized her, and she carefully tied a little band around my arm, afterward rubbing the wound with an unguent which immediately cicatrised it. Further doubts were impossible. The Abbé Sérapion was right. 

Notwithstanding this positive knowledge, however, I could not cease to love Clarimonde, and I would gladly of my own accord have given her all the blood she required to sustain her factitious life. Moreover, I felt but little fear of her. The woman seemed to plead with me for the vampire, and what I had already heard and seen sufficed to reassure me completely. In those days I had plenteous veins, which would not have been so easily exhausted as at present; and I would not have thought of bargaining for my blood, drop by drop. I would rather have opened myself the veins of my arm and said to her: ‘Drink, and may my love infiltrate itself throughout thy body together with my blood!’ 

I carefully avoided ever making the least reference to the narcotic drink she had prepared for me, or to the incident of the pin, and we lived in the most perfect harmony.

I’m just saying! Other approaches were already narratively possible!!  (La Morte Amoreuse/Clarimonde, Théophile Gautier, 1836, Lafcadio Hearn translation) 

[wild-oats-and-cornflowers]

I recently purchased a 6 volume poetry collection published in 1950 called “Anthology of the World’s Best Poems,” which is in actuality a collection of 5 volumes of English-language poetry with 1 volume of translated poems from other languages. (In fairness, it is nearly all genuinely excellent poetry.) In any case, the relevant thing about this is that that sixth volume contains an amazing poem by Théophile Gautier, which addresses the following points:

1) Gautier has been reading in bed all night instead of sleeping.

2) He discovers some Mystery Bruises on himself, the origin of which he is at a loss to explain.

3) Naturally, he immediately decides that it’s probably because his dead girlfriend came a-haunting in the night to lay some ghost hickies on him.

So, the poem is titled Clarimonde. I tried to find the original French version online, but I can’t. What I have found is that Gautier published a short story of the same title in 1836, about a priest who falls in love with a vampire. (Well, the English version was published under that title; the original French was published as La Morte Amoreuse.) The story was translated into English by one Lafcadio Hearn, the same person who’s credited with translating the poem in the anthology. I don’t know what the deal is with the poem, but here’s the English version as it appears in the anthology:

With elbow buried in the downy pillow I’ve lain and read All through the night, a volume strangely written In tongues long dead.

For at my bedside lie no dainty slippers; And, save my own, Under the paling lamp I hear no breathing: I am alone!

But there are yellow bruises on my body And violet stains; Though no white vampire came with lips blood-crimsoned To suck my veins!

Now I bethink me of a sweet weird story, The in the dark Our dead loves thus with seal of chilly kisses Our bodies mark.

Gliding beneath the coverings of our couches They share our rest, And with their dead lips sign their loving visit On arm and breast.

Darksome and cold the bed where now she slumbers, I loved in vain, With sweet eyelids closed, to be reopened Never again.

Dead sweetheart, can it be that thou hast lifted With thy frail hand Thy coffin-lid, to come to me again From shadowland?

Thou who, one joyous night, didst, pale and speechless, Pass from us all, Dropping thy silken mask and gift of flowers Amidst the ball?

Oh, fondest of my loves, from that far heaven Where thou must be, Hast thou returned to pay the debt of kisses Thou owest me?

[pilferingapples]

Someone else talking about La Morte Amoreuse/ Clarimonde! Although weirdly briefly?  Most of the video is a quick surface intro on  Gautier that’s ...very surface (as she says, it’s really hard to find stuff on him if you don’t know where to look)  and inadvertently entertaining to me at points for reasons the vidmaker can’t be expected to know ( any time people talk about Gautier’s Wild Dark edginess I can’t help feeling a certain “ Bubbles is HARDCORE!!” mood)  (also lol at “ he had three mistresses”  which ..yes, in the same way I’ve had three birthdays) (fighting my urge to go and gush about Gautier on the comments to the vid so I’m doing that here apparently!) , but it’s a fun and fairly quick little review from someone who isn’t already entirely soaking in French Romanticism  (or at least wasn’t when the vid was posted a year ago!).

[onceuponatimemollywright]

Top 10 Vampire Books

The Vampyre - John William Polidori (1819)

La Morte Amoreuse (The Dead Woman In Love) - Theophile Gauiter (1836)

Varney, The Vampire - James Malcolm Rymer (1845 - 47)

Carmilla - Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)

La Ville-Vampire (Vampire City) - Paul feval (1875)

The Fate Of Madame Cabanel - Lynn Linton (1880)

Dracula - Bram Stoker (1897)

The Blood Of The Vampire - Florence Marryat (1897)

The Moth Diaries - Rachel Klein (2002)

The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova (2005)

[olivemitsuki]

I just had an hour long debate with my Mum about whether or not vampires can get horny. I ended up winning, and the final verdict was that vampires can, indeed, become horny.

[see-arcane]

Are ghoul Harker and Clarimonde-Dracula crossover in either of these?

Clarimonde is a character I want to have everywhere, but I need to know what she's Actually Doing in the context of such-and-such plot. She's floating around at the edges for now, at least until I find the perfect hedonistic niche to drop her in.

Jonathan the Ghoul--and ghouls, plural--are still very much in a mental death grip. Jonathan the Ghoul has best odds of showing up in Death's Dogs (which needs a better title, I know, forgive me) while ghouls en masse deserve a unique story of their own :)

[kashilascorner]

"Oui, j'ai aimé comme personne au monde n'a aimé, d'un amour insensé et furieux, si violent que je suis étonné qu'il n'ait pas fait éclater mon coeur. Ah! quelles nuits! quelles nuits!"

—Téophile Gautier, La morte Amoreuse

[la-femme-au-collier-vert]

(from La Morte Amoreuse by Theophile Gautier 1836) 👀 Could’ve sworn I’ve heard this one before. Did Lestat not come up with his own material. Apparently we haven’t given him credit for reading vampire fiction…

[vampireadamooc]

Opera Per Tutti's seduces listeners with concert performance of vampire opera 'Clarimonde' (review)

A collage of scenes from On Site Opera's recent production of Frederic Chaslin's "Clarimonde." Cleveland-based Opera Per Tutti performed the work last week in concert at Cleveland Public Theatre.

on November 03, 2014 at 9:31 AM, updated November 03, 2014 at 9:39 AM By MARK SATOLA http://www.cleveland.com/musicdance/index.ssf/2014/11/opera_per_tuttis_seduces_liste.html

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Opera per Tutti celebrated Hallowe'en in an appropriate style at Cleveland Public Theatre, with two performances of the opera Clarimonde by French composer and conductor Frédéric Chaslin, to a libretto by P. H. Fisher, who adapted the short story "La Morte amoreuse" (literally, "The Dead Woman in Love") by Théophile Gautier, best known to English-speaking readers in its 1908 translation by the American author Lafcadio Hearn.

Billed as a vampire opera with a twist, "Clarimonde" tells the story of a young priest, Romualdo, newly ordained but sorely tempted by a creature of bewitching beauty, the titular Clarimonde, who seeks to seduce him away from his priestly vows in order to prolong her unnatural life.

The battle for Romualdo's soul is joined by two satellite characters, the Bishop Sérapion Romualdo's mentor, and the Vampire Maker, the latter an expansion by Fisher of a minor character in "La Morte amoreuse," where he is simply a groom, albeit a quite demonic one, who appears on two occasions to aid in the transport of Romualdo to Clarimonde's side.

In Gautier's story, Clarimonde has always existed as an inevitable evil, seducing men for the sake of their life-giving blood. In Fisher's retelling, she is herself the product of a greater evil, personified in the Vampire Maker (an inelegant appellation, unfortunately), which has the effect of making her much more sympathetic.

An orphaned child, Clarimonde was taken by the Vampire Maker and molded into a vampiric goddess. The actual mechanism of transformation from innocent mortal to decadent immortal is never explained; it merely exists as an example of evil for its own sake.

Chaslin limns this tale of heaven and hell with an attractive score that partakes of a fluid and restless tonality, often evoking, but never quoting, modern popular music, in a way that reminds one, not inappositely, of Francis Poulenc.

Opera per Tutti's production presented the work in a concert performance, with costumes and a modicum of stage movement to enhance the drama. The singers were uniformly outstanding, especially tenor Benjamin Bunsold as Romualdo. With his full tone and fine diction, he fully conveyed his character's anguish as he is torn between faith and desire for the beautiful vampiress. As Clarimonde, soprano Rebecca Freshwater was convincing and moving, bringing out the depth of her character's own inner contradictions.

Baritones Benjamin Czarnota as Sérapion and Brian Keith Johnson as the Vampire Maker were also fine, though Johnson's occasional forays into buffo style, especially in a long self-explanatory cavatina describing his creation of Clarimonde, seemed unnecessary.

Particular applause must go to Lorenzo Salvagni, who played the piano reduction of the score with great sensitivity and no flagging of energy during the opera's 80 or so minutes. Katherine Kilburn conducted the performance with a flexible sense of tempo that allowed the music to breathe naturally without losing its drive.

Leah Mulheim designed costumes that were simple but highly effective; Clarimonde's off-the-shoulder concoction of white lace and red satin enhanced the character's sensual appeal. Scott Skiba's light stage action was just enough to suggest what a fully produced version might be like, and the minimal lighting design was effective without being obtrusive.

Opera per Tutti's production was the first after Clarimonde's premiere in August by On Site Opera, which performed it in a concert setting in St. Francis de Sales Church in Phoenicia, New York. Given the opera's musical appeal and its refreshingly direct narrative of good pitted against evil, a fully staged production would certainly be welcome.