De-fanging the Vampire: S. M. Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry as Subversive Horror Fiction

Abstract

The Vampire Tapestry¹ is an innovative exploration of the horror genre by Suzy McKee Charnas, American author of the feminist dystopia Walk to the End of the World and its disturbing and ambiguous sequal, Motherlines. Horror literature, like all fantasy,² has the potential to be either a radical exploration of contemporary definitions of the ‘real’ or a conservative affirmation of that ‘real’, via the political ideologies (of gender, race, class) operative in the text. In this essay I analyse Charnas’s textual inflections of these ideologies, principally through her characterisaton of the vampire. This characterisation is remarkable for Charnas’s sophisticated manipulation of textual polyphony, characteristically foregrounded in the fantasy text. Accordingly, her characterisation of the vampire is subject to neither humanist reductionism nor generic stereotyping. Instead Charnas constructs him as a fragmented consciousness, the decentred subject, characteristic of the fantastic in its most radically interrogative mode. By tracing Charnas’s textual strategies and their ideological consequences, I present a case for The Vampire Tapesty as an example of the use of generic fiction by a politically committed writer to raise fundamental debate about social and political ideologies within a popular and accessible fictional format.