Post by pjthefey on Jun 7, 2011 20:27:55 GMT -5
Edit: Doh! I thought I was in the sub forum. Can one of the moderators move this for me?
I'm kind of on the fence about this essay. I just wrote it for my final paper in my "The Paranormal Romance" class and part of me really likes it, the other part of me feels as if there's something missing that should have been captured but wasn't. It has not yet been graded. The total length of the paper was supposed to be 10-12 pages.
Gender roles and gender identity are constants that are often taken for granted within the realm of the heterosexual romance. Man meets woman; discontent, precocious heroine meets haughty and insufferable man. The pair fall in love; each person comes to value the uniqueness of the other in the relationship. The story concludes with the heroine, in spite of her strong character, adopting a fairly traditional gender role. When a romance becomes a paranormal romance due to the introduction of Vampirism gender constructs become as seemingly as alien to the traditional romance formula, as the supernatural antagonists are to humanity. Women assume powerful or dominant roles within the storyline, and men who have been affected by vampirism begin to demonstrate traditionally feminine personality traits or assume roles that are often reserved either for the heroine or women acting in accordance with traditional gender roles. Just as the Vampire does not usually abandon its former human shape in its entirety, cease to have at one point in its existence been very much a living human being, or completely abandon acknowledgement of its one time human morality, the transmutation of feminine into masculine or masculine into feminine is not complete. In fact, the waters of gender presentation become as murky as the solution to the conflict the characters must resolve. The warping of gender roles is neither unique to the publication era, story setting, demographic, or composition language of Vampire classics such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and as such this essay will explore the theme of Vampirism as it relates to gender transformation by evaluating Stoker’s work from the late 1800s as well as the Korean film 박쥐 (Bahk-jwee, translated “Bat”) directed by Park Chan-wook which was released in the USA with English subtitles under the name of “Thirst” in 2009.
Thirst is somewhat uncommon amongst vampire stories because at the onset of the tale the hero, Sang-hyun, is a Catholic priest of unwavering faith and is transformed into a vampire when he volunteers to participate in a medical experiment to develop a vaccine for an incurable deadly virus. He has no progenitor and there is not a powerful unknowable villain that must be vanquished except, perhaps, the mutated disease that is responsible for his condition. After the conclusion of the experiment, Sang-hyun becomes known as the only man out of 500 to survive the epidemic, his parishioners believe that he has been given a miraculous gift of healing and is consulted by the desperate mother of his hospitalized younger childhood friend Kang-woo to pray for his recovery. When Kang-woo does recover, the priest is invited to the family’s house to play Mahjong, where he meets the woman who can be named both the story’s heroine and villain Taeju, Kang-woo’s wife.
Taeju is immediately identifiable as the heroine because her story begins very much like that of the traditional formula romance heroine. She is unhappy and abused both verbally and physically by her husband, husband’s family, and their friends. She is vastly more intelligent than her husband. He is of low intellect, and she is far more shrewd than his mother who has provided for the couple. She often complains about her “horrible life” and “idiot husband” when family members are not present, and while Kang-woo seems to have since found a family to care for him, it is readily apparent that Taeju has not prospered in spite of having grown up in the same house as her husband after being in an orphanage. Even her adoptive mother, who also happens to be one and the same as her husband’s, claims to have raised her like a “Daughter and puppy;” a dehumanizing statement. It is very easy to feel sympathy for Taeju in instances where her husband throws her on the floor and her adoptive mother, and a group of their friends point and laugh. She forces herself to turn a would-be slap across his face into a gesture of wiping snot from his upper lip from his running nose. If there is ever a doubt as to whether Sang-hyun is the hero of the story, it is made abundantly clear that this is his role when he is the only one of approximately six people to offer his hand to help her stand from the floor.
In spite of the pity that is inspired, Taeju also has a callous, cynical streak that marks her a potential villain in the story. In the same scene that she is introduced as having a disheveled appearance in contrast to her mother-in-law, and even Kang-woo who is wearing a hospital gown, she quietly scoffs when Father Sang-hyun names her husband “kind hearted” during his bedside blessing while he is still in the hospital. In another scene, while eerily preparing dinner for the Father and her family with extremely docile body language, she meekly refers to the owner of the shop that sold the ingredients for their dinner as “a cocksucker.” Soon after, while gripping cooking sheers in a tight fist she is observed miming stabbing motions into her sleeping husband’s open mouth.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula a passage from Mina Murray’s journal “Lucy…has lately taken to her old habit of walking in her sleep.” (Dracula, 169) serves as an interesting parallel to Thirst. Like Lucy, Taeju is also a sleep walker and in both cases, the women travel outside while wearing white night gowns and sleepwalking causes the human females to encounter vampire men. Likewise, in neither case does the sleepwalking appear to be explicitly caused by a supernatural entity although, in Lucy’s case, once it does begin it does seem to make her more susceptible to Dracula’s influence.
Although not as conservative as Brittan or America in the last nineteenth century, modern Korea is a very conservative country when compared to the United States. The symbolism of a Korean or nineteenth century English woman straying outside in her white nightgown is a significant one because it can be said to symbolize a desire to be liberated from the confines of her gender role. By traveling beyond the walls of the home, she expresses a desire for travel and independence which is reinforced by her socially unacceptable attire for public viewing. In the case of Dracula, in the late 1800s the popular notion that women should be remaining figuratively bound to a single location was being challenged. “In short, more and more women insisted on leaving the house of which they had been appointed angel, the house that, if a refuge for men, became for many middle-class wives and daughters a more or less pleasant prison” (Spencer 206). The act of unconsciously walking beyond the sphere of the home not only serves as a general metaphor for change by the act of relocating, but serves a direct, albeit subconscious, challenge to the established gender customs of the time. There also existed a pervasive fear of female sexuality, or more precisely sexual equality, at the time the book was published. A woman revealing so much of her body, and the shape of her figure in public could be said to be inviting sexual attention, and women who openly professed an enjoyment of sexual activity were condemned by men as having a form of mental defect. Although this condemnation can be said to be a result of the specific fear of sexual equality, this highly focused fear is a symptom of a greater uneasiness over political equality because it represents “the rawest form of revolutionary power” (Marx 407). Modern Korea is neither as phobic or restrictive as the Victorian Era, however discomfort with openly discussing or promoting sexuality still exists. For this reason, the sleep walking metaphor in the case of Taeju’s is better understood as a general metaphor for wanting to exist beyond the scope of her present circumstances. Her adoptive mother and mother-in-law’s suggestion to lock her door from the outside places the act in somewhat literal defiance of one of her oppressors.
In either case, the white color of the night gowns can symbolize the transformation of becoming impure and impending death. In both cases, a woman wearing the color of purity in western culture wanders into an area where her garb can be soiled. Lucy strolls into the garden, and the fair skinned Taeju walks in the street with bare feet. In either case, their whiteness stands to become impure by soil or the grit of the street. Likewise, in each case, a woman wearing the color of death in eastern culture travels beyond the doors of her home into the open for all to see her. While it is doubtful that Stoker created Dracula with any special reference to far eastern philosophy in mind, he does acknowledge the whiteness of death when he describes Lucy’s torpid body as having “pale gums” (Dracula, 276) , “white flesh” (Dracula, 388), and having a “face, which lay in her pillow, almost whiter than the lawn.”(Dracula, 286) The simultaneous metaphors for endangered purity and death cause the respective sleepwalking scenes to act as foreshadowing events.
Sleep is a time when both Dracula and Sang-hyun establish themselves as nocturnal lovers to the women of their desire, although it manifests in very different ways. While Lucy and later Mina’s sleep is characterized by libidinous moaning and writhing in the sheets, Sang-hyun’s seduction initially comes in the form of romantic chivalry by placing his own shoes on the sleepwalking naked feet of Taeju’s. There is a moment at the end of the scene when the camera lingers on Taeju’s small feet standing within Sang-hyun’s large shoes. This is extremely important because it symbolizes the reversal of gender rolls between the characters that is about to occur. From this point forward, Sang-hyun begins to adopt more feminine qualities, and Taeju attains a position of dominance.
The first symptom Sang-hyun’s gender transformation becomes apparent immediately after he feeds from a human being for the first time. After the feeding, the Father confesses what he has become to a blind and crippled clergy member who does not condemn him as evil. Interestingly, Sang-hyun no longer seems to use the masculine honorific, and in fact refers to the other man as Father. When Sang-hyun despairs that he will not be able to feed without committing murder, the his blind crippled friend offers his own blood for the vampire’s taking. When he does so, Sang-hyun lowers himself to the ground, so that his head is at the other man’s waste level and is portrayed as subserviently kneeling on the floor sucking on the opening in the other man’s wrist. It should be noted that the camera angle and closeness crops the disabled man’s hand and figures thus revealing only a smooth roughly cylindrical appendage which Sang-hyun presses his lips to. Given the level of Sang-hyun’s head, this image can be interpreted as a phallic one. Similarly, because he is drinking from a disabled male, the imagery echoes Taeju’s experiences, that, until this point, have been compulsively submissive to her mentally impaired husband and his mother because she depends on them for survival. Likewise, in several scenes prior Taeju can be seen sitting or kneeling on the floor while guests or family members either stand or sit in chairs.
The most powerful and abrupt reversal of gender roles occurs shortly after this scene when, even though Sang-hyun is revitalized and possessed of superhuman endurance from drinking the blood, he is raped by Taeju; their gender roles as prescribed by the romance genre formula are completely inverted. She first acts as a provider buy giving him a new pair of shoes. He lowers his eyes and turns away when she tries to touch him, but in a very awkward surge of assertion confesses that he has never kissed a woman “… until now,” and he tries to place an innocent kiss on her cheek.
Janice Radway indicates that “When rape is included [in a romance], authors of ideal romances always make a clear distinction between men who rape as an act of aggression against women and those who, like their heroes, do so because they misinterpret a woman's actions or find her irresistible." (Radaway, 141) using Radaway’s words as a guide to a traditional Romance formula, the role reversal in this rape scene becomes extremely apparent. In response to this small token of encouragement, Taeju reaches behind his head and pulls his mouth hard against her own lips in a single powerful motion and does not release when he struggles and tries to pull away. Eventually he gives in to her insistence and she leads him to a private room.
There she undresses herself and his enthusiasm fades when he realizes what is happening. He begins to look frightened when she begins to remove his pants while straddling his chest. There is a point in which he obtains a metal ruler, and attempts to beat himself in penance for the sexual contact, however she disarms him. This act of self-punishment further echoes Radaway when she indicates that she “…suspect their willingness to see male force interpreted as passion is also the product of a wish to be seen as so desirable to the ‘right’ man that he will not take ‘no’ for an answer. …the heroine need not take any responsibility for her own sexual feelings. She avoids the difficulty of choosing whether to act on them or not. Although female sexuality is thus approvingly incorporated into the romantic fantasy, the individual ultimately held responsible for it is not the woman herself but, once again, a man.” In this, the woman, Taeju, effectively robs the man of his need for penitence. He squirms, and presses his shaking thighs together while trying to raise his legs to his chest, but she uses her body weight to force them back on to the ground, and advantage his brief emotional paralysis to lower her body on to his. She leaves him alone, stunned, and lying on the floor, and as is customary for heroines that experience rape by the hero in successful romances, in spite his violation, Sang-hyun soon agrees to meet Taeju in secret rendezvous’, and falls in love with his attacker.
The act of penetration is one that marks periods of gender mutation and dominance in both Dracula and Thirst. This commonality also echoes the historic depictions of phallic penetration in ancient Greeks. In his book “Homosexuality in Greece and Rome” by Thomas K Hubbard, “Phalic penetration was an index of sociopolitical empowerment… ‘victims’ of penetration (considered isomorphic to exploitation) were parallel to women … as instrumental foils to the adult citizen males who wielded the political franchise and thereby the right to phallic supremacy.” (Hubbard, 10) To be penetrated, was to become more womanlike in status. Homosexual undertones that are the result of blurred gender identities are made manifest and a source of anxiety not only for the turn of the century characters in Stoker’s novel but in the modern Korean lovers of “Thirst” because the act of penetration “challenge not just the distinction between male and female but … between natural and unnatural as well” (Spencer 206).
In Dracula this shift is especially notable in the scenes following Lucy’s many bloody transfusions. In a fit of uncharacteristic emotion Van Hellsing is described as having“…laughed till he cried, and I had to draw down the blinds lest anyone should see us and misjudge, and then he cried till he laughed again, and laughed and cried together just as a woman does.” (Dracula, 313) and John becomes excessively sentimental upon reflecting “Just so. Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride?”(Dracula, 316) after being penetrated by the transfusion needles.
Furthermore, by the time the coterie is ready to hunt vampires Lucy every one of them has been emasculated by blood transfusions, and Lucy herself has become a gender abomination due to her need to penetrate others. As a vampiric penetrator she has become, by necessity, “a mobile and hungering woman … represented as a monstrous usurper of masculine function” (Craft 115) When explaining to the hunting party Hellsing pronounces that the only way to “save” Lucy is to “…kill her in her sleep. … I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and I shall… [plunge] a stake through her body” (361) It is a phallic course of action that is an extremely potent reclaiming of lost masculinity on the part of the party. “Filling her mouth with garlic” can be said to represent oral sex, performed by apply the mouth to the testicles, and driving a stake through her body is a symbolic act of heterosexual intercourse. It is only after the protagonists have reclaimed some of their lost masculinity, that they choose to pursue Dracula, their larger prey.
In “Thirst,” Sang-hyun and Taeju’s uncommon roles of gender dominance briefly reverse when he bites, and tastes her blood for the first time. As one of the penetrated, she instantly becomes submissive to his touch, moans, and encourages him to continue drinking, undressing, and engaging in sexual intercourse. Sang-hyun however retains some of his feminine delicacy, and Taeju begins to question her own identity with statements like “What’s wrong with me? …Are other women like this? …Am I a pervert?” Considering that she has already cheated on her husband by raping a virgin Catholic priest, it seems as if affectionate nibbling that is just barely able to break her skin should be the provocation that is least likely to catapult her character into an identity crisis. A sudden queering of her gender and sexuality however seems a far more understandable explanation for her reaction considering the comparatively unwelcoming environment for homosexuals in South Korea. If in fact her gender and sexual identity has been muddled to produce this reaction, the only experience she has that can explain its cause is that she has been penetrated by the vampire’s bite.
For a time Taeju retreats to a more traditional feminine role, however upon realizing how powerful Sang-hyun has become, she tries to convince him to transform her into a vampire by challenging him to perform inhuman feats of physical prowess; he becomes consumed by and addicted to her adoration. In time, she succeeds in her objective due to the short lived hope that they will be able to live happily together for an eternity. After her metaphorical rebirth, the couple’s relationship becomes characterized continual struggle for power and dominance. Taeju is violent, aggressive, and intoxicated by her new found vampiric dominance over humanity because she has never been in a position of control. She has never possessed the capacity to lash out at the people who have harmed her. She begins to think of herself as necessarily superior to all human beings, and Sang-hyun, not ready to let go of his human morality tries to convince her to avoid killing.
The vampiric condition is and will continue to be a powerful force of gender mutation, transformation, and reinvention. It is present not only in texts that are century old Eurocentric classics within the English literary canon, but has been demonstrated to exist in vampire stories from around the world that continue to be retold, and created anew. A side-by-side analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the more recent film “Thirst” directed by Park Chan-wook has revealed it is present in two very different works of fiction, and it will continue to remain in others until such time that either our conceptions of gender or vampires are no longer recognizable as what they are today.
Craft, Christopher. “ ‘Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula.” Representations, No. 8. (Autumn, 1984), pp. 107–133.
Hubbard, Thomas K. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: a Sourcebook of Basic Documents. Berkeley [Calif.: University of California, 2003. Print.
Marx, John. “Review: Popular Anxieties Revisited.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Summer, 2000), pp. 407–411.
Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006. Print. Spencer, Kathleen, L. “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis.” ELH, Vol. 59, No. 1. (Spring, 1992), pp. 197–225.
Stoker, Brahm. Dracula. Planet PDF.com. Online.
Thirst. Dir. Chan-wook Park. Prod. Soo-heon Ahn. Perf. Kim Ok-bin, Shin Ha-kyun, Song Kang-ho. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2009. DVD.
I'm kind of on the fence about this essay. I just wrote it for my final paper in my "The Paranormal Romance" class and part of me really likes it, the other part of me feels as if there's something missing that should have been captured but wasn't. It has not yet been graded. The total length of the paper was supposed to be 10-12 pages.
Vampirism and Gender Transmutation in the Paranormal Romance
Gender roles and gender identity are constants that are often taken for granted within the realm of the heterosexual romance. Man meets woman; discontent, precocious heroine meets haughty and insufferable man. The pair fall in love; each person comes to value the uniqueness of the other in the relationship. The story concludes with the heroine, in spite of her strong character, adopting a fairly traditional gender role. When a romance becomes a paranormal romance due to the introduction of Vampirism gender constructs become as seemingly as alien to the traditional romance formula, as the supernatural antagonists are to humanity. Women assume powerful or dominant roles within the storyline, and men who have been affected by vampirism begin to demonstrate traditionally feminine personality traits or assume roles that are often reserved either for the heroine or women acting in accordance with traditional gender roles. Just as the Vampire does not usually abandon its former human shape in its entirety, cease to have at one point in its existence been very much a living human being, or completely abandon acknowledgement of its one time human morality, the transmutation of feminine into masculine or masculine into feminine is not complete. In fact, the waters of gender presentation become as murky as the solution to the conflict the characters must resolve. The warping of gender roles is neither unique to the publication era, story setting, demographic, or composition language of Vampire classics such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and as such this essay will explore the theme of Vampirism as it relates to gender transformation by evaluating Stoker’s work from the late 1800s as well as the Korean film 박쥐 (Bahk-jwee, translated “Bat”) directed by Park Chan-wook which was released in the USA with English subtitles under the name of “Thirst” in 2009.
Thirst is somewhat uncommon amongst vampire stories because at the onset of the tale the hero, Sang-hyun, is a Catholic priest of unwavering faith and is transformed into a vampire when he volunteers to participate in a medical experiment to develop a vaccine for an incurable deadly virus. He has no progenitor and there is not a powerful unknowable villain that must be vanquished except, perhaps, the mutated disease that is responsible for his condition. After the conclusion of the experiment, Sang-hyun becomes known as the only man out of 500 to survive the epidemic, his parishioners believe that he has been given a miraculous gift of healing and is consulted by the desperate mother of his hospitalized younger childhood friend Kang-woo to pray for his recovery. When Kang-woo does recover, the priest is invited to the family’s house to play Mahjong, where he meets the woman who can be named both the story’s heroine and villain Taeju, Kang-woo’s wife.
Taeju is immediately identifiable as the heroine because her story begins very much like that of the traditional formula romance heroine. She is unhappy and abused both verbally and physically by her husband, husband’s family, and their friends. She is vastly more intelligent than her husband. He is of low intellect, and she is far more shrewd than his mother who has provided for the couple. She often complains about her “horrible life” and “idiot husband” when family members are not present, and while Kang-woo seems to have since found a family to care for him, it is readily apparent that Taeju has not prospered in spite of having grown up in the same house as her husband after being in an orphanage. Even her adoptive mother, who also happens to be one and the same as her husband’s, claims to have raised her like a “Daughter and puppy;” a dehumanizing statement. It is very easy to feel sympathy for Taeju in instances where her husband throws her on the floor and her adoptive mother, and a group of their friends point and laugh. She forces herself to turn a would-be slap across his face into a gesture of wiping snot from his upper lip from his running nose. If there is ever a doubt as to whether Sang-hyun is the hero of the story, it is made abundantly clear that this is his role when he is the only one of approximately six people to offer his hand to help her stand from the floor.
In spite of the pity that is inspired, Taeju also has a callous, cynical streak that marks her a potential villain in the story. In the same scene that she is introduced as having a disheveled appearance in contrast to her mother-in-law, and even Kang-woo who is wearing a hospital gown, she quietly scoffs when Father Sang-hyun names her husband “kind hearted” during his bedside blessing while he is still in the hospital. In another scene, while eerily preparing dinner for the Father and her family with extremely docile body language, she meekly refers to the owner of the shop that sold the ingredients for their dinner as “a cocksucker.” Soon after, while gripping cooking sheers in a tight fist she is observed miming stabbing motions into her sleeping husband’s open mouth.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula a passage from Mina Murray’s journal “Lucy…has lately taken to her old habit of walking in her sleep.” (Dracula, 169) serves as an interesting parallel to Thirst. Like Lucy, Taeju is also a sleep walker and in both cases, the women travel outside while wearing white night gowns and sleepwalking causes the human females to encounter vampire men. Likewise, in neither case does the sleepwalking appear to be explicitly caused by a supernatural entity although, in Lucy’s case, once it does begin it does seem to make her more susceptible to Dracula’s influence.
Although not as conservative as Brittan or America in the last nineteenth century, modern Korea is a very conservative country when compared to the United States. The symbolism of a Korean or nineteenth century English woman straying outside in her white nightgown is a significant one because it can be said to symbolize a desire to be liberated from the confines of her gender role. By traveling beyond the walls of the home, she expresses a desire for travel and independence which is reinforced by her socially unacceptable attire for public viewing. In the case of Dracula, in the late 1800s the popular notion that women should be remaining figuratively bound to a single location was being challenged. “In short, more and more women insisted on leaving the house of which they had been appointed angel, the house that, if a refuge for men, became for many middle-class wives and daughters a more or less pleasant prison” (Spencer 206). The act of unconsciously walking beyond the sphere of the home not only serves as a general metaphor for change by the act of relocating, but serves a direct, albeit subconscious, challenge to the established gender customs of the time. There also existed a pervasive fear of female sexuality, or more precisely sexual equality, at the time the book was published. A woman revealing so much of her body, and the shape of her figure in public could be said to be inviting sexual attention, and women who openly professed an enjoyment of sexual activity were condemned by men as having a form of mental defect. Although this condemnation can be said to be a result of the specific fear of sexual equality, this highly focused fear is a symptom of a greater uneasiness over political equality because it represents “the rawest form of revolutionary power” (Marx 407). Modern Korea is neither as phobic or restrictive as the Victorian Era, however discomfort with openly discussing or promoting sexuality still exists. For this reason, the sleep walking metaphor in the case of Taeju’s is better understood as a general metaphor for wanting to exist beyond the scope of her present circumstances. Her adoptive mother and mother-in-law’s suggestion to lock her door from the outside places the act in somewhat literal defiance of one of her oppressors.
In either case, the white color of the night gowns can symbolize the transformation of becoming impure and impending death. In both cases, a woman wearing the color of purity in western culture wanders into an area where her garb can be soiled. Lucy strolls into the garden, and the fair skinned Taeju walks in the street with bare feet. In either case, their whiteness stands to become impure by soil or the grit of the street. Likewise, in each case, a woman wearing the color of death in eastern culture travels beyond the doors of her home into the open for all to see her. While it is doubtful that Stoker created Dracula with any special reference to far eastern philosophy in mind, he does acknowledge the whiteness of death when he describes Lucy’s torpid body as having “pale gums” (Dracula, 276) , “white flesh” (Dracula, 388), and having a “face, which lay in her pillow, almost whiter than the lawn.”(Dracula, 286) The simultaneous metaphors for endangered purity and death cause the respective sleepwalking scenes to act as foreshadowing events.
Sleep is a time when both Dracula and Sang-hyun establish themselves as nocturnal lovers to the women of their desire, although it manifests in very different ways. While Lucy and later Mina’s sleep is characterized by libidinous moaning and writhing in the sheets, Sang-hyun’s seduction initially comes in the form of romantic chivalry by placing his own shoes on the sleepwalking naked feet of Taeju’s. There is a moment at the end of the scene when the camera lingers on Taeju’s small feet standing within Sang-hyun’s large shoes. This is extremely important because it symbolizes the reversal of gender rolls between the characters that is about to occur. From this point forward, Sang-hyun begins to adopt more feminine qualities, and Taeju attains a position of dominance.
The first symptom Sang-hyun’s gender transformation becomes apparent immediately after he feeds from a human being for the first time. After the feeding, the Father confesses what he has become to a blind and crippled clergy member who does not condemn him as evil. Interestingly, Sang-hyun no longer seems to use the masculine honorific, and in fact refers to the other man as Father. When Sang-hyun despairs that he will not be able to feed without committing murder, the his blind crippled friend offers his own blood for the vampire’s taking. When he does so, Sang-hyun lowers himself to the ground, so that his head is at the other man’s waste level and is portrayed as subserviently kneeling on the floor sucking on the opening in the other man’s wrist. It should be noted that the camera angle and closeness crops the disabled man’s hand and figures thus revealing only a smooth roughly cylindrical appendage which Sang-hyun presses his lips to. Given the level of Sang-hyun’s head, this image can be interpreted as a phallic one. Similarly, because he is drinking from a disabled male, the imagery echoes Taeju’s experiences, that, until this point, have been compulsively submissive to her mentally impaired husband and his mother because she depends on them for survival. Likewise, in several scenes prior Taeju can be seen sitting or kneeling on the floor while guests or family members either stand or sit in chairs.
The most powerful and abrupt reversal of gender roles occurs shortly after this scene when, even though Sang-hyun is revitalized and possessed of superhuman endurance from drinking the blood, he is raped by Taeju; their gender roles as prescribed by the romance genre formula are completely inverted. She first acts as a provider buy giving him a new pair of shoes. He lowers his eyes and turns away when she tries to touch him, but in a very awkward surge of assertion confesses that he has never kissed a woman “… until now,” and he tries to place an innocent kiss on her cheek.
Janice Radway indicates that “When rape is included [in a romance], authors of ideal romances always make a clear distinction between men who rape as an act of aggression against women and those who, like their heroes, do so because they misinterpret a woman's actions or find her irresistible." (Radaway, 141) using Radaway’s words as a guide to a traditional Romance formula, the role reversal in this rape scene becomes extremely apparent. In response to this small token of encouragement, Taeju reaches behind his head and pulls his mouth hard against her own lips in a single powerful motion and does not release when he struggles and tries to pull away. Eventually he gives in to her insistence and she leads him to a private room.
There she undresses herself and his enthusiasm fades when he realizes what is happening. He begins to look frightened when she begins to remove his pants while straddling his chest. There is a point in which he obtains a metal ruler, and attempts to beat himself in penance for the sexual contact, however she disarms him. This act of self-punishment further echoes Radaway when she indicates that she “…suspect
The act of penetration is one that marks periods of gender mutation and dominance in both Dracula and Thirst. This commonality also echoes the historic depictions of phallic penetration in ancient Greeks. In his book “Homosexuality in Greece and Rome” by Thomas K Hubbard, “Phalic penetration was an index of sociopolitical empowerment… ‘victims’ of penetration (considered isomorphic to exploitation) were parallel to women … as instrumental foils to the adult citizen males who wielded the political franchise and thereby the right to phallic supremacy.” (Hubbard, 10) To be penetrated, was to become more womanlike in status. Homosexual undertones that are the result of blurred gender identities are made manifest and a source of anxiety not only for the turn of the century characters in Stoker’s novel but in the modern Korean lovers of “Thirst” because the act of penetration “challenge
In Dracula this shift is especially notable in the scenes following Lucy’s many bloody transfusions. In a fit of uncharacteristic emotion Van Hellsing is described as having“…laughed till he cried, and I had to draw down the blinds lest anyone should see us and misjudge, and then he cried till he laughed again, and laughed and cried together just as a woman does.” (Dracula, 313) and John becomes excessively sentimental upon reflecting “Just so. Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride?”(Dracula, 316) after being penetrated by the transfusion needles.
Furthermore, by the time the coterie is ready to hunt vampires Lucy every one of them has been emasculated by blood transfusions, and Lucy herself has become a gender abomination due to her need to penetrate others. As a vampiric penetrator she has become, by necessity, “a mobile and hungering woman … represented as a monstrous usurper of masculine function” (Craft 115) When explaining to the hunting party Hellsing pronounces that the only way to “save” Lucy is to “…kill her in her sleep. … I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and I shall… [plunge] a stake through her body” (361) It is a phallic course of action that is an extremely potent reclaiming of lost masculinity on the part of the party. “Filling her mouth with garlic” can be said to represent oral sex, performed by apply the mouth to the testicles, and driving a stake through her body is a symbolic act of heterosexual intercourse. It is only after the protagonists have reclaimed some of their lost masculinity, that they choose to pursue Dracula, their larger prey.
In “Thirst,” Sang-hyun and Taeju’s uncommon roles of gender dominance briefly reverse when he bites, and tastes her blood for the first time. As one of the penetrated, she instantly becomes submissive to his touch, moans, and encourages him to continue drinking, undressing, and engaging in sexual intercourse. Sang-hyun however retains some of his feminine delicacy, and Taeju begins to question her own identity with statements like “What’s wrong with me? …Are other women like this? …Am I a pervert?” Considering that she has already cheated on her husband by raping a virgin Catholic priest, it seems as if affectionate nibbling that is just barely able to break her skin should be the provocation that is least likely to catapult her character into an identity crisis. A sudden queering of her gender and sexuality however seems a far more understandable explanation for her reaction considering the comparatively unwelcoming environment for homosexuals in South Korea. If in fact her gender and sexual identity has been muddled to produce this reaction, the only experience she has that can explain its cause is that she has been penetrated by the vampire’s bite.
For a time Taeju retreats to a more traditional feminine role, however upon realizing how powerful Sang-hyun has become, she tries to convince him to transform her into a vampire by challenging him to perform inhuman feats of physical prowess; he becomes consumed by and addicted to her adoration. In time, she succeeds in her objective due to the short lived hope that they will be able to live happily together for an eternity. After her metaphorical rebirth, the couple’s relationship becomes characterized continual struggle for power and dominance. Taeju is violent, aggressive, and intoxicated by her new found vampiric dominance over humanity because she has never been in a position of control. She has never possessed the capacity to lash out at the people who have harmed her. She begins to think of herself as necessarily superior to all human beings, and Sang-hyun, not ready to let go of his human morality tries to convince her to avoid killing.
The vampiric condition is and will continue to be a powerful force of gender mutation, transformation, and reinvention. It is present not only in texts that are century old Eurocentric classics within the English literary canon, but has been demonstrated to exist in vampire stories from around the world that continue to be retold, and created anew. A side-by-side analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the more recent film “Thirst” directed by Park Chan-wook has revealed it is present in two very different works of fiction, and it will continue to remain in others until such time that either our conceptions of gender or vampires are no longer recognizable as what they are today.
Works Cited
Craft, Christopher. “ ‘Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula.” Representations, No. 8. (Autumn, 1984), pp. 107–133.
Hubbard, Thomas K. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: a Sourcebook of Basic Documents. Berkeley [Calif.: University of California, 2003. Print.
Marx, John. “Review: Popular Anxieties Revisited.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Summer, 2000), pp. 407–411.
Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006. Print. Spencer, Kathleen, L. “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis.” ELH, Vol. 59, No. 1. (Spring, 1992), pp. 197–225.
Stoker, Brahm. Dracula. Planet PDF.com. Online.
Thirst. Dir. Chan-wook Park. Prod. Soo-heon Ahn. Perf. Kim Ok-bin, Shin Ha-kyun, Song Kang-ho. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2009. DVD.
FYI It is written based on the assumption that the reader if familiar with Bram Stoker's Dracula, but NOT Thirst.