Vampires: What does it feel to get bitten by a creature of the night?
Vampire: A bite to remember..
Ahh Vampires…
If horror movies have taught us anything, it is that a vampire’s bite is not painful.
In fact, these “unfortunate” victims often have a wild look as the vampire prepares to pierce their necks. There is no screaming. The prey does not fight, it does not squirm as it undoubtedly would when attacked by human or animal. Instead, he assumes the elegant posture of surrender, of docility, which is sometimes shifted with some timid gesture of discomfort.
To understand what the vampire bite represents, and why the sensation of being bitten by one could perhaps be recognized by anyone, both in physical and emotional terms, we will take a paradigmatic example: the great gothic novel by Bram Stoker: Dracula (Dracula ), which has served as inspiration for some of the great heels of the genre.
In principle, some questions must be established: Count Dracula does not bite men; he alone to women, first to Lucy Westenra and then to Mina Murray.
Question of principles?
It is probable.
After all, as a prince of vampires we can think that this is his privilege, that is, to choose the victim that best suits his personal tastes, or also that women can become easier prey, but none of these possibilities are logical according to what Bram Stoker raises in the novel.
Take the case of Renfield, in Creole terms, given away in a padded asylum cell.
Dracula does not bite him, despite the fact that he is quite weak as a result of the burning of his lairs by Van Helsing and his group of enthusiasts. In turn, Renfield anxiously awaits that bite, and in several passages he himself slips the certainty that the earl has promised it to him.
Poor deluded.
Bram Stoker goes to great lengths to portray Renfield as a deviant person. His mental illness and his confinement in the asylum remind us of Oscar Wilde’s passage through Reading jail, where he was locked up for committing the crime of loving another man.
Dracula doesn’t bite Renfield. Mind you, he kills him in an atrocious way, basically beating him to death against the bars of the cell.
Renfield’s fate is the most ungrateful in the novel. He is the only character who really wants to be bitten, and the only one who does something voluntarily to help the earl settle in London. Sadly, his deviation prevents him from becoming a full-fledged vampire.
The second example that this story gives us is that of Jonathan Harker, a prisoner in the Transylvanian castle in the first part of the novel: Dracula’s Guest. The count does not bite him either, but hands him over to his hateful but sensual concubines: Dracula’s three girlfriends.
It is in this encounter between Harker and the vampires where Bram Stoker reveals for the first time what it feels like to be bitten by a vampire.
The cinema has taken many precautions to represent this scene, with a Harker trying to hide a grimace of pleasure when being attacked by those three beautiful women; without understanding that, in reality, Bram Stoker completely dispenses with metaphors. The novel specifically describes that encounter is carnal in nature.
The problem, if anything, is that a description in explicit terms for Victorian England sounds somewhat far-fetched to our ears.
“This is what really happened,” the astute directors who have adapted the novel to film seem to tell us, “Harker had a wonderful time with Dracula’s girlfriends.” Of course, with some guilt and trying to repress himself so as not to howl like a condemned man.
Bram Stoker goes much further.
The first thing Harker records in his diary is that one of the vampires — the blonde one — knelt before him and recreated… non judgmentally. There are no metaphors, no allusions to guilt, despite the fact that the act of recreation is excessively careful. Harker is literally narrating what happened but with a terminology, let’s say, a little constipated; typical of a Victorian gentleman who prefers to maintain form.
Then he adds that, while the vampire was enjoying herself, she felt something new: a mixture of excitement and revulsion that made her turn her face away. This movement revealed part of her neck. As Harker notes, the vampires licked each other like wild animals, and even she could see flashes of saliva glistening on her lips and fangs. Only then did the vampires bite him:
I could hear the click of her tongue against her teeth and lips, and her warm breath on my neck. I could feel the soft, trembling brush of lips against the skin of my neck, and the sharp fangs stopping there. I closed my eyes in languid ecstasy and waited with my heart pounding.
By the time Dracula was written, to say that a woman knelt in front of a man and recreated did not require further clarification: Harker had a wonderful time and did not feel a shred of remorse. The only thing that disturbed him was the Count’s untimely interruption.
Stephen King, in the book: Dance Macabre (Dance Macabre), sums up the end of that encounter as follows:
Harker is a bit disappointed when the Count enters the room and interrupts his little tete-a-tete. Probably most of Stoker’s readers as well.
Similarly, Lucy and Mina’s sensations, being bitten by Dracula, are identical to Harker’s. In perfectly stiff terms, Bram Stoker describes both reaching the climax of pleasure.
It is fair to assume that this is what it feels like to be bitten by a vampire: pleasure, at least in those years when a bloodsucker, to be terrifying, had to follow a strict heterosexual diet.
But if we take the vampire bite as a more or less faithful representation of the act of love, we would also be forced to analyze the symptoms of vampirism in the same light, which, without a doubt, would lead us to quite a swampy ground.
Perhaps Lucy’s extreme paleness, something that alarms Van Helsing considerably, is not due to a lack of blood, but to the exhausting double life that the girl must lead: being an elegant and polite English lady during the day, where she also tolerates the unbearable courtship of Arthur Holmwood, her fiancé, and a wild mistress with her dark visitor at night.
https://dimidesan.com/renfield-syndrome-and-vampirism-as-a-mental-illness/
