Angels, Vampires and Monsters

One of the courses I will be teaching this semester at UPRM’s English Department/Minor in Film Program is all about archetypal supernatural characters. I’ve been teaching this course for some time now and it’s become a favorite among students. But it’s still surprising to me that I now make a living in part thinking, reading, and talking about angels, vampires, and monsters.

 

HOW DID I GET HERE?

 

When I was doing my B.A. and graduate studies, I read and wrote on “canonical” writers such as Milton, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Chaucer… and I also read Beowulf.  which sure is about some scary monsters!

 

On the other hand, Shakespeare has a collection of quite beautiful supernatural beings in It’s a Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, and Milton goes on for some 10 thousand verses about angels and the fallen type in Paradise Lost. While Cervantes’s monstrous giants emerge from his main character’s fevered imagination and desire to be a noble knight. And Chaucer? Well, I just remember him being very funny.

 

But, when I decided on a topic for my Ph.D. thesis, I chose to write about Caribbean women writers. And it was one of these women who first took me to seriously reflect on angels, vampires, and monsters: Jean Rhys, the Dominican-born writer who published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966.

 

WIDE SARGASSO SEA and NC-17

Let me add an interesting tidbit here: The first film version of Wide Sargasso Sea was finally released in 1993. But it didn’t do that well financially, in part because the film received the NC-17 rating. 

This rating is still controversial, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, it is “box-office poison.”

 

But enough of NC-17!

 

JEAN RHYS

 

Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea while on her self-imposed exile in England, and with it, she created a subversive back-story for the ever-popular (about 20 TV and film adaptations) Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). 

 

This novel tells the story of a Mr. Rochester and the wife he keeps imprisoned in his attic declaring himself a victim and she as a foreign woman, insane and dark, an “Other.” 

 

ZOMBIES

 

Turning things upside down, Jean Rhys’ novel exposed the Caribbean wife’s victimization. The relationship is first presented as a “passionate love” between the second-born-no-title-or-cash Mr. Rochester and the wealthy, free-spirited Creole Antoinette Cosway. Then, because of the Englishman’s prejudices, the “love” quickly (d)evolves into a master/slave relationship in which Rochester appropriates all of Antoinette’s wealth and her liberty.

 

Rochester turns Antoinette into a “walking dead.” And in the Jean Rhys novel, there is plenty of talk of zombies! Not the George Romero (RIP) type, but the original Caribbean zombies. That is, something closer to what was shown in early Hollywood horror films like Edward and Victor Halperin‘s White Zombie. 

 

I first watched White Zombie with my students in a Caribbean literature class. The scene that has stayed with me takes place around minute 13. In it, we see “zombified” Haitians pushing a large, heavy wheel, part of bigger machinery, the international sugar industry. They work without complaint or sound. In fact, the only sound in this scene is the knife-like screechy sound of the turning wheel.

White Zombie is in the public domain and you can watch it here. 

 

Definitely, zombies pushed me closer to developing my course on angels, vampires, and monsters.  And then a graduate student gave me the final shove over the threshold.

 

VAMPIRES

 

One day a young woman walked into my basement office with a bag full of books. She started taking them out one by one while saying things like: “This vampire loved this vampire, but this vampire really loved this other one… it’s all about the human condition.” I was dumbfounded and a bit scared. I held a longstanding dread of vampires thanks to my mother’s late-night watching of one of Christopher Lee‘s films. As a child, one glimpse of his blood-shot eyes drove me to years of pressing two teddy bears against each side of my neck before trying to fall asleep as protection against Dracula’s bite.

 

But I was curious about vampires and I agreed to direct her Master’s Degree thesis on Anne Rice‘s novels. The thesis took a couple of years of research and writing, which meant that as the work progressed both the student and I read quite a bit about vampires and related issues. When completed the thesis was titled “The New Face of the Vampire: Autobiographical Fiction in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles.” Its author, Camille L. Cortés López,  successfully defended it 10 years ago in 2007. From there she went on to complete our Minor in Film and is now working in Los Angeles for Espada P.R.

 

Obviously, by the end of the vampire thesis, my fate was sealed. I turned to the dark side of academia and gave myself over heart and mind to developing the class now titled: Angels, Vampires, and Monsters or De-Cloaking the Human “Other.”

 

During the following weeks, I will write more about my film course.