Yesterday evening San Diego felt a little like L.A.. Freeway shootings led to our own mini "Carmageddon" and while trapped in the traffic jam slowly slumping up the coast I listened to the rather extensive coverage of the release of Amanda Knox from Italian prison. This morning the LA Times had a long op-ed on Knox, "Beauty's Price", which highlighted how the Madonna/Whore complex figured in the coverage and prosecution of Knox, who was figured as a "luciferina" or she-devil. This is all interesting to me as I had just lectured on the ways the Mina and Lucy are depicted in Dracula and how these representations draw on the late 19th century idea of the New Woman, but also on polarized representations of the femme fatale and what Bram Dijkstra calls the "household nun," variations on the Madonna/Whore complex that has existed for centuries.
The femme fatale, the deadly type of beauty that Knox was painted to be, is especially interesting to me as I work on the readings for the next few lectures in my Vampires in Lit. class, when we will read "Lenore," "Wake Not the Dead," "Aurelia" and Twilight. Each of these texts is interested in female desire and each seems to imply that it is, or at least can be, deadly and destructive. There are echoes of fear of female sexuality, of maternity and of death in each text, interwoven into the figure of the vampire. I'm not sure how the figure of the vampire connects specifically with fears about female sexuality and about polarizing representations of women, but some answers seem to lie somewhere in the early German poems and tales.