True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society

Abstract

This essay aims at highlighting the different cultural and metaphorical outcomes introduced by the vampire as created by Bram Stoker and by post modern rereadings of the vampire, with a particular focus on the novels The Southern Vampire Mysteries and the American Tv series True Blood which is the transposition of the novels. The preliminary statement of this essay is that the law is a recurrent theme within Gothic literature; the figure of the vampire (canonized by Bram Stoker's Dracula) metonymically stands for the uncertainty of a foreign legal system as opposed to the rationality of the English legal system. Moving to the postmodern age, I will analyse the contemporary manifestation of the Gothic imagination, by focusing on the figure of the vampire, within the context of an encounter with poststructuralist theory and the politics of postmodernity. If Dracula is, from a legal and a social viewpoint, a bounded and controlled entity and identity because he is the only one of his species and, as such, has no other options but to adapt to society itself, in the contemporary rereading of the vampire offered by The Southern Vampire Mysteries and True Blood, the vampire epitomizes the dialogue and relation between cultural diversities. The novels and the Tv series, in becoming a metaphorical reflection on issues linked to multi culturalism, help us reconfigure and redevelop problems of multiculturalism in order to suit changing conditions and create an overarching set of rules and reg ulations that are free from the disadvantages of onesidedness or arbitrariness. The undertaking of elaborating normative recommendations capable of tran scending the barriers of culture, race and religion seems to be full of intellectual, political and legal dangers, since it could be problematic to use conceptual frameworks created by one culture (human culture) to describe and evaluate the reality of another (vampiric culture).