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Anne Rice's Vampire Myth and Its Gothic Tradition Soyoung Lee (Sangmyung University) Before the familiar image of Count Dracula was immortalized in literary world during the nineteenth-century, the origin of vampires would be traced back to the far-distant, unknowable past. The vampiric being used to be omnipresent in the human world both in terms of time and place; Bram Stoker created a new type of vampire who was disarmed by dropping old vampiric images such as horror and fear. Genealogically, Anne Rice's vampires, Louis and Lestat, succeeds Count Dracula; they are imbued with Romantic idealism and Decadent spirit, rather than the Medieval images. All Gothic elements such as the fantastic, imaginative, immoral, irrational and negative are associated with the Romantic pioneer, Lord Byron. With his work “The Giaour,” he created the first figure in English literature, representing the paradoxical qualities as a Gothic villain-hero. That is, Lestat echoes Dracula, and Dracula echoes Giaour as ‘Byronic Heroes.’ Understanding the social, moral and literary context covers how Rice's vampires embrace generic and aesthetic Romantic conventions. Gothic spirit celebrates the sublime, which is associated with excessive emotions first, and then, with the supernatural, sensational and superstitious fancies. Excessive emotions erase the proper limits of order, and obscure the boundaries of life: Gothic transgressions bring both an overflow of strong creative force and a fear of moral collapse. Endless inquiries about God and Devil, sexual debauchery, the incestuous relationship, and the game-like killing touch the bottom of corruptible fin de siecle notions. As asserted by Horace Walpole, the Gothic spirit is more related with ‘spreading a pleasure’ than ‘producing a lesson.’ A number of the Victorian writers, however, happily adopted the realism techniques based upon probability in life. The majority of Victorian writers wanted to portray their world as it were: exotic settings were displaced with more familiar realms such as the bourgeois domestic world or the new urban landscape. This is also adopted by Anne Rice to portray her vampiric atmosphere in terms of a compromise between the simple, detailed description and the imaginative expansion in writing. Anne Rice, as a Romantic successor to Stoker, sincerely follows Gothic conventions; she also brings her innovative adaptations of these conventions by moving her figures both temporally and spatially. She makes her vampires humanized to bring them into human society. Today, her vampires are not marginal any more. They are just a bit different from human being, as composites of half-human/half-inhuman entities. They do not convey Victorian issues such as darkness, danger and mystery any more.

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is now considered a groundbreaking work of fiction that humanizes the typically demonized and otherized image of vampires and assigns a sociocultural role of embodying moral and sexual ambiguities in contemporary America. Yet most consider Rice’s vampire characters as glamorous and stylistic modern flâneurs. Rejecting that general consideration, this essay aims to read the novel anew in light of its historical and geographical setting of late-eighteenth-century American South. The essay focuses on the consistently disregarded fact that the main character and first-person narrator Louis is originally a plantation owner in Louisiana, and examines his endeavor to achieve the absolute authority of that identity through his encounters with other vampires and humans. By exposing the futility of such endeavor, this essay ultimately sheds light on Rice’s intention of proposing a vampiric relationship as a productive and even necessary model of life in multicultural and multiracial America.

좀비와 뱀파이어는 고딕공포장르의 대표적 괴물들로, 영화를 비롯한 다양한 문화예술장르를 넘나들며 그 인기를 유지하고 있다. 특히 오랜 시간 장르의 중심에서 꾸준한 인기를 누리던 뱀파이어와 달리 늘 장르의 변방에서 그 명맥을 유지하던 좀비는 새로운 밀레니엄의 묵시록적 분위기를 적극적으로 반영하며 뱀파이어를 제치고 단숨에 문화적 아이콘으로 주목을 받게 되었다. 뱀파이어는 브람 스토커의 소설 『드라큘라』가 처음 제시한 초자연적․귀족적 원형을 유지하면서 시대의 유행에 따라 제한적 변용을 이루며 인기를 지속시켰다. 반면 좀비는 ‘억압받는 노예’라는 초기 원형의 의미는 유지하면서도 시대적 상황에 따라 유연하면서도 때로는 급진적인 변화를 거듭해왔다. 이는 둘의 근본적 신분차이 외에도, 두 괴물이 공유하는 ‘언캐니’와 ‘언데드’라는 개념의 속성이 각각 다르게 적용되는 것에서 그 이유를 유추해볼 수 있다. 뱀파이어는 ‘죽음을 초월한 존재’로서 초인적 힘과 영생이라는, 인간의 신을 닮고자 하는 욕망을 반영하는 존재이자 죽음에 대한 인간의 ‘낯선 두려움’과 매혹이라는 양가적 감정을 불러일으키는 경계인적 존재다. 반면 좀비는 인간의 죽음을 육신으로 드러내며 언젠가는 닥칠 ‘현실적 죽음’을 상징함과 동시에, 묵시록적 세상을 만난 인간의 운명을 반영하는 자기반영적 타자이자 외부인으로 공포의 감정을 불러일으킨다. 이렇듯 뱀파이어가 주는 언캐니한 공포는 이미 거쳐 간 것으로 현대인에게 더 이상 공포의 감정을 불러일으키지 못하는 반면, 좀비가 주는 언캐니한 공포는 당대의 불안과 공포를 담아내는 시대반영적 속성을 가지고 현대인에게 현실적 공포를 전달한다. 그리고 이것이 좀비가 현 시대를 가장 잘 반영하는 아이콘이 된 이유다.

The zombie and vampire are two of the most well known gothic monsters in cinema and other entertainment fields, maintaining its popularity from the beginning. Whereas the vampire had always been a major character in the horror and sometimes comedy genres, the zombie, up to that point, had merely been a minor figure, with an exception of the genre-defining "Night of the Living Dead" directed by George Romero in 1968. When the new millennium began and apocalyptic climate spread over the world, the zombie, reflecting the said climate, quickly adopted and finally overtook the vampire's place as a new cultural icon. The vampire has sustained its popularity through limited characteristic changes, while maintaining its almighty, aristocratic archetype first proposed by Bram Stoker's Dracula. The zombie has sometimes accepted radical changes in its characteristics, while maintaining its initial archetype as "an oppressed slave." Even if the two monsters' horror factors come from the same existential concept of "undead" and "uncanny", its attributes are somewhat different. The vampire is a marginal, "in-between" being whose immortality both attracts and terrifies human beings, while reflecting human desire for becoming God. On the other hand, the zombie represents physical death itself, causing fear of mortality. This uncanny, premodern fear of the vampire is no longer relevant to the moderns, but the era-reflecting fear of the zombie appeals to people who are living in the apocalyptic state of mind. And this is why the zombie has become an ultimate social icon in the western culture now.

Dynamic stability of a high speed train is very important. This paper presents a dynamic stability analysis of K-TGV using Vampire Program. The analysis of stability on this paper is performed in condition of track irregularity, curved track and strong gust. The critical speed of K-TGV is 140m1s, and it is stable when runs on 7000R(cant 150mm) curved track and on linear track with the body exerted 101kN lateral impulse force.

This article aims to interpret Dracula as a figure of Lacanian “objet a”/ “object-cause of desire,” examining the characteristics of the objet a embodied and manifested in Dracula. A subject, according to Jacques Lacan, emerges when it enters the symbolic order which demands the subject to forgo something. The objet a as “something lost” by the “symbolic castration,” therefore, becomes the object and cause of desire. The desire for the objet a, however, is accompanied with pain because the symbolic forbids it. The objet a, therefore, brings about “painful pleasure,” Lacanian “jouissance.” Likewise, characters in Dracula have conflicting attitudes to Dracula for whom they simultaneously feel attraction and repulsion, because Dracula the vampire is an “embodiment of jouissance.” The objet a as “something lost” is “absent” in the symbolic order, but it is also “present” as the “embodiment of the void in the symbolic order” which cannot inscribe the objet a. The location of Carfax, Dracula’s residence in London, is an index to the void in the symbolic order, and Dracula who inhabits Carfax is the embodiment of its void. The objet a ultimately reveals the dividedness of the subject who should undergo symbolic castration that splits him. The acknowledgement of the objet a, therefore, leads to the understanding of the “subject’s very being” which “ex-sists” beyond the symbolic order. The vampire hunters who aim to exterminate Dracula, however, reveal their limited vision by refusing to acknowledge the significance of Dracula/ the objet a as the channel to the “subject’s very being.” Furthermore, they can never carry out their self-imposed mission, because Dracula, as the objet a, is an “undead” which never dies, just as “desire never dies.”

This study addresses how the middle class woman’s adaptation from traditional to modern gender roles affects how they are treated. In Dracula Bram stoker shows his own opinion that how the female character, Lucy, adapts to the role of the New Woman determines the way in which they are treated in the social environment in the novel. This study also examines the three other women in the novel, Dracula’s wives, who are often seen by critics as examples of the sexual predator “New Woman,” but who are really victims of the patriarchal system. Through the novel Dracula, Bram Stoker offers ample opportunity in which the readers can think discourse in the Victorian society relative to the issues of the New Woman, gender roles, and ethnic purity caused by immigration. Through Dracula, he also explores the essence of fear of the Victorian period about women’s changing roles and independence to be able to endanger men’s perceived roles as protector and provider.

Vampires have come a long way. From literary and filmic depictions as black-caped, coffin-dwelling creatures of the night, in recent years vampires have come to live among us. Rather than being seen as threatening predators, contemporary vampires have found ways to live among humans, and are now students, have jobs, have families, and contribute to society. And yet their difference from mortals and their special capabilities give this “new vampire,” often stronger and immortal, the option to do good or evil within human society. The “K-vampire,” the new vampire with a Korean twist, has largely taken shape in the last decade, borrowing primarily from Western examples but also taking a uniquely Korean phenotype. Some of the recent K-vampires are professionals, indeed doctors, priests, prosecutors, and private detectives. In this essay, I focus on the OCN television series Vampire Prosecutor (Season 1, 2011) to explore the meaning of a vampire in the role of a law-enforcer, of a professional tasked with maintaining law and order in human society. The series operates as an explicit critique of corruption in Korean society, and the character in the title role is an impeccable prosecutor who believes in the absolute rule of law despite the prevailing surroundings. What are the options for rule by law in a society where most legal officials may be corrupt, and what does it mean that a vampire is placed in the title role to fight such corruption?

My article discusses the British doctor and eugenic feminist Arabella Kenealy’s fin-de-siecle story “A Beautiful Vampire” (1896) through the lens of gender and aging. Specifically, I examine the Victorian perception of female aging and menopause, read Kenealy’s eugenic feminist response to the issues, and see how her short story enables the elderly female vampire to justify her bodily agency in her fight against the conventional paradigm of the time, within which women are expected to age naturally and gracefully only into wives and mothers. I ultimately suggest that Kenealy’s depiction of the old lady vampire’s unnatural and ungraceful aging?or anti-aging?makes us rediscover the powerfulness of the elderly female sexuality, which is intrinsically non-reproductive and thus non-normative, and that her other literary works about female aging need to be further explored in this lig

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is now considered a groundbreaking work of fiction that humanizes the typically demonized and otherized image of vampires and assigns a sociocultural role of embodying moral and sexual ambiguities in contemporary America. Yet most consider Rice’s vampire characters as glamorous and stylistic modern flaneurs. Rejecting that general consideration, this essay aims to read the novel anew in light of its historical and geographical setting of late-eighteenth-century American South. The essay focuses on the consistently disregarded fact that the main character and first-person narrator Louis is originally a plantation owner in Louisiana, and examines his endeavor to achieve the absolute authority of that identity through his encounters with other vampires and humans. By exposing the futility of such endeavor, this essay ultimately sheds light on Rice’s intention of proposing a vampiric relationship as a productive and even necessary model of life in multicultural and multiracial America.

This paper explores how itinerants, particularly gypsies, strangers, and vagrants, are represented as criminals to imprison and vampires to get rid of, in S. T. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Coleridge and Stoker allow to some extent the presence of itinerants, wanderers, and gypsies in the marginal area of their society as the comforting other, with their ambivalent attitudes, pity and disgust, toward them. If Coleridge, however, allows the Mariner to speak wandering “from land to land,” Stoker creates an international war between the Western European settlers and the Eastern European nomads and makes the Western hunters silence the immigrant Dracula’s voice, finally banishing and staking him into his home country. Most researches on Dracula consider the existence of Szgany gypsies as a minor figure even when Dracula identifies himself as one of the descendents of the Huns, the nomadic people. Szgany gypsies apparently fight for Dracula as loyal servants. I read, however, Dracula as a signifier for the gypsies’ nomadic culture. This paper explores the Szagany gypsies’ relation with Dracula, tracing the British imperialistic middle-class xenophobia to get rid of gypsies and nomadic strangers. It also examines strong echoes and resemblances between Dracula and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel.”

이 논문은 조세프 셰리던 르 파누의 「카밀라」에서 여성 뱀파이어인 카밀라와 그녀의 희생자 로라를 모두 어머니 인물로 읽음으로써, 임신, 출산, 그리고 양육을 하는 어머니의 몸이 뱀파이어와 긴밀히 연결되어 있음을 밝히고, 주체의 경계를 무너뜨리는 아브젝트로서 뱀파이어 어머니의 몸이 빅토리아 시대 가부장제 제국에 갖는 위협을 분석하는 것을 목표로 한다. 레즈비언 연인으로서 카밀라에 관한 연구는 활발하게 진행된 반면, 어머니로서 카밀라가 갖는 의미는 이때까지 크게 주목받지 못했다. 이 글은 뱀파이어 어머니로서 카밀라에 집중하며, 나아가 카밀라뿐만 아니라 모든 여성의 재생산하는몸이 텍스트에서 뱀파이어의 재생산으로 그려지고 있음을 밝힌다. 이 과정에서 어머니의 몸이 어떻게, 그리고 왜 아브젝트가 되는지에 관해 논한 줄리아 크리스테바의 이론을바탕으로, 뱀파이어의 흡혈과 어머니의 재생산하는 육체가 텍스트에서 연결되는 지점을 추적한다. 마지막으로 아브젝트로서 뱀파이어 어머니의 몸이 나와 너의 경계가 무화된, 구분되지 않고 따라서 정의되지 않는 새로운 형태의 ‘주체’를 상상하게끔 만듦으로써, 가정-제국을 수호하는 가정의 천사로서 어머니를 벗어난 ‘어머니’에 관한 새로운 인식에 도움을 주장한다.

By reading both Carmilla, a female vampire, and her victim, Laura, as a mother figure in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla,” this paper aims to reveal that mother’s reproductive body is closely connected to vampirism in the text, and to investigate the threat that the mother’s body poses to the Victorian patriarchal empire as an abject that breaks the subject’s boundaries. While Carmilla as a lesbian lover has been widely studied, Carmilla as a mother has not. Focusing on Carmilla as a vampire mother, this paper further suggests that not only Carmilla but all women’s reproductive body is related to the vampire’s ‘reproduction.’ Specifically, based on Julia Kristeva’s theory on the abject, this paper explores how the text connects the vampirism and the woman’s body which gets pregnant, delivers, and rears a child at the breast. Finally, this paper discusses that the vampire mother’s body as an abject leads to a new perception of a mother other than the Angel in the House who serves the patriarchal family-empire.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the corelation of the two different artistic genre, novel and fine art in teaching “correlative sub- ject.” As a novel of Victorian Age, Bram Stoker’s Dracula portrays the fear and anxiety of British people in general against women’s power and strong voice for rights as well as a possibility of Europe’s attack. Conse- quently Lucy Westenra, a female character presages the advent of ‘New Women’ through her sexuality, which was a prevalent phenomenon in the late 19th century British society. Her death after downfall can be interpreted as a punishment for sexual woman which symbolizes revolt against patriarchal idea of women’s appropriate behavior in Victorian society. On the other hand in Edvard Munch’s <Vampyr>, I can see the artist’s personal fear and horror against women and the general public’s fear and astonishment against the appearance of New Women as well. I can link up two separate artistic works in terms of appearance of New Women and it will lead to the contact point of literature and art.

The problem which this paper addressed was the method with which the South Korean film Thirst portrayed the relationship between man and vampires. From a homocentric perspective, vampire indicated the value of evil, victimizer and abnormality within a dichotomous and hierarchical order, but Thirst attracted attention by deconstructing this binary relationship through a strategy of ambiguity. In Western culture, the term vampire appeared as an imaginary entity on which to displace the responsibility for the catastrophe of the plague, and this process of emergence clearly demonstrates the Otherness of the epistemological object whom man averts and regards with revulsion. The strategy of ambiguity utilized by the film subverted and deconstructed the binary and hierarchical relation between man and vampires. This strategy was largely categorized into two components. The first consisted of the ambiguous character demonstrated by Sang-Hyeon. Though Sang-Hyeon is a Catholic priest and as such is invested with the potential to fulfill the logos of good which defeats evil from the perspective of the Western cultural tradition, he fails to realize the logos of good while living as a Catholic priest and while in the process of transforming into a vampire. Secondly, the portrayal of Tae-Joo and Madame La also illustrated the strategy of ambiguity which unsettles the binary boundary between humans and vampires. As discussed above, the South Korean film Thirst has momentous significance in that the film subverted and deconstructed the binaries established hitherto within Western culture with the oppositions between man/vampire = good/evil = victim/victimizer = normal/abnormal = center/periphery, by drawing upon a strategy of ambiguity.

This thesis is to parallel the otherness of Dracula, who is not incorporated into the fixed category but freely metamorphoses across all boundaries, with a postmodern subjectivity which is not reduced to a unitary identity but consistently re-constructed within the network of differences. Having no singular (gender) identity, Dracula questions about the rigid gender ideology which subordinates women to men and shakes the ground on which (Victorian) patriarchal culture is based. By doing so, Dracula shares the potential to overcome the oppressive Western phallogocentrism with the femininity as a signifier of difference. This is why Dracula infected only women in the text: Lucy and Mina. Lucy, who expressed her secret sexual desire and violated the gender norm, was regarded as a dangerous other and destroyed by the male characters. Mina, representing the ambivalent position between the traditional proper lady and the positive maker of a polyphonic text, shows the contradiction and limits of the Cartesian subject whose violent binary oppositions suppress or appropriate the other. The son of Mina, however, proves that all subjects are the intersection of the discontinuous and heterogeneous flows of otherness. Having the multi-layered blood of all characters―his parents, the Dracula pursuers who transfused Lucy, and even Dracula who bit Lucy and forced Mina to drink his blood, he is rather the sign of the postmodern subjectivity than the symbol of the restored peace and order after Dracula’s disappearance. Dracula reveals that the postmodern subject-in-progress always becomes something else upsetting the logic of sameness, like a vampire who infects the world with the otherness of differences.

This paper offers a psychoanalytic reading of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, a vampire novel from the nineteenth century. Laura, the main protagonist in the novel, feels both attracted and repulsed by the female vampire, Carmilla. The spectre of Carmilla, which haunts Laura’s memories, is similar to the concept of the maternal in Klein’s theory of the good and bad mother. From Klein’s viewpoint, the vampire can be read as a trope for the relationship between mother and infant, and the vampire can represent the ambiguous “splitting” process. The infant in the “paranoid-schizoid position” (during the first three months of life) can split its mother into both a good mother and a bad mother; a witch or a vampire. When the mother is bad, the infant attacks her, but at the same time fears her retaliation. In Carmilla, Laura sees Carmilla as both the good mother, whom Laura feels “drawn towards,” and the bad mother, giving Laura a sense of “antipathy” or “something of repulsion.” Laura fears the retaliation of Carmilla, her bad mother. According to Klein, the infant can move to “depressive position” after the first three months. Here it feels guilt and anxiety for the damage it has inflicted on its mother in the early position. Laura also enters the “depressive position,” yet regresses to the “paranoid-schizoid position” as Carmilla, the vampire mother, instills in her constant feelings of anxiety and negativity.

In Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Camilla overtly reveals homosexual desires unlike her vampiric counterparts in John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In Carmilla, three lesbian stories with similar characters and incidents are intricately entwined and the boundaries between each young lady and the vampire, past and present, and the dream and reality are constantly blurred. This enables the reader to interpret the lesbian vampire as the heroine’s double embodying her repressed homosexual desires and her absent mother. In this paper, referring to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the ‘Uncanny’ and Barbara Creed’s refutation of Freud’s theory, I argue that Camilla’s biting of Laura’s breasts with phallic teeth awakens her repressed homosexual desires and forces Laura to confront her absent mother thrown off in childbirth as the abject. Since Camilla’s vampirism threatens to forestall the patriarchal customs of the exchange of women as a gift given to men in marriage to reinforce male bonding and restore Laura to the matrilineal society, the alliance of authoritative men is established. Through the execution of Carmilla, the lesbian vampire-cum-mother is castrated and expelled. However, Laura is reborn as a vampire and threatens the law of patriarchy.

Christabel’s Silence and Lesbian Vampire Abstract YoungheeSon In this paper, I argue that in Coleridge’s “Christabel,” Christabel’s silence conceals repressed lesbian sexual desires and fear of patriarchal authority and that Geraldine, a lesbian vampire, leads Christabel to confront the causes of her silence. Geraldine represents Mother Nature as opposed to the Law of the Father, a product of Sir Leoline’s hysteria and impulsive rage. While Geraldine liberates Christabel’s lesbian sexual desires, her temptation triggers Sir Leoline’s estrangement from his daughter, frees him from his mourning for his dead wife, and restores libido to his sterile life. As Christabel’s surrogate mother, Geraldine reveals that repressive patriarchal laws have brought about her silence and paves the way for her breaking it. Since Geraldine is implied to be Christabel’s alter ego and claims to be a daughter of Lord Roland, a brotherly figure to Sir Leoline, she is implicitly Sir Leoline’s daughter and niece. Thus Geraldine’s unorthodox sexual relationships with Christabel and Sir Leoline violate patriarchal order. Geraldine’s role as the principle of eros and her threat to orthodox sexuality and patriarchal order are consistent with the theme of vampire literature which became popular in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

This paper aims to examine how the representative motif of vampire of the Gothic has been strategically deployed to introduce transgressive desire and particularly the so-called “unspeakable” desire of homoeroticism through the 19th century in a subtle and covert way, focusing on Polidori’s “The Vampyre, a Tale” and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Taken together, the queer vampires in the Gothic offer themselves as the location of transgression in Victorian culture, and therefore can be an excellent vehicle to interrogate the ideas of what is “normal” and subvert the hegemonic construction of Victorian culture in terms of class, sexuality, gender, nation or race. The sudden advent of Lord Ruthven or Carmilla―the eponymous hero and heroine of the novel respectively―leads to unhinge the life of Mr. Aubrey, one of ordinary English gentlemen or Laura, a typical English maiden unless she has a Styrian-born mother, from its normal course of love and marriage based on heteronormativity. Both Mr. Aubrey and Laura are strangely “drawn” towards that same-sex queer vampire and both of them die without successfully performing their duties as an English subject. For instance, Laura in her late twenties, who has never shown interests in going to a ball or getting married, is still missing her female friend Carmilla at the end of the narrative. She dies single without producing any male inheritor, which implies she tacitly resists the idea of idealistic womanhood as a child breeder. The queer vampire pictured respectively in the works either simply disappears as is the case of Lord Ruthven or goes through the traditional proceeding of its execution as is the case of Carmilla. But they neither disappear nor are punished before they succeed in vamping and, in so doing, infecting the apparently innocent disciples like Mr. Aubrey and Laura with vampirism. Laura, in particular, performs the unfeminine and transgressive act of writing and keeps spreading her unconventional experience of homoerotic desire not only to her female recipient of her letter but also to all the readers of the present time through her writing activity.

스테프니 메이어의『트와일라잇』은 그 세계적인 인기만큼이나 학계의 거센 비판을 받아왔다. 십대 소녀인 주인공 벨라를 흡혈귀 에드워드에게 일방적으로 복종하고 매달리는 모습으로 그려 시대착오적인 반여성주의의 성향을 보인다는 것이다. 이러한 비판은 소설을 ‘흡혈귀 로맨스’라는 장르로 전제하기 때문인데, 이 접근법은 젠더의 이원화를 근간에 두고 있어 소설이 가진 본래의 고유성을 편협하게 왜곡시킨다. 본고는 『트와일라잇』에서 벨라가 그냥 여주인공이 아니라 1인칭 화자라는 사실에 초점을 맞추어, 소설이 여성 대 남성, 혹은 인간 대 흡혈귀라는 이분법적 가치체계를 문제화하고 무력화하는 양상을 살펴보고자 한다.

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight is considered as one of the most successful literary works in the 21th century. That consideration has frequently been questioned by literary scholars who unanimously read the novel as antifeminist. Their questioning is based on the consensus that Meyer describes the main character Bella Swan as hopelessly dependent on, and powerlessly directed by, her vampire lover Edward Cullen. Taking issue with that argument as being trapped within the genre perception of ‘vampire romance,’ this essay proposes re-reading Twilight with focus on Bella’s chief, yet so-far ignored, dramatic function as a first-person narrator. Doing so will shed light on how Meyer problematizes the vampire-romantic assumption of the binary opposition between a female human and a male vampire and how she offers as an alternative Bella’s ontological fluidity that navigates through gender and species distinctions. The essay in fine intends to call for new ways of understanding increasingly diversifying individualities of our posthuman world.