Abuse and Vampires: I Am Legend and Let The Right One In

The following was an essay written by me for the Vampire Fictions Module at Edge Hill University. It achieved a First (1:1), grade 81.

‘The characteristics of the vampire legend are compared to those associated with […] abuse’ (Michael R. Bütz). Discuss with reference to any two texts you have studied.

M.R. Bütz argues that ‘the characteristics of the vampire legend are compared to those associated with […] abuse’ and I argue that Bütz’s theory is applicable to John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let The Right One In (2004) and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954).[1] These texts involve abuse that is analogous with the vampire characteristics of fluid consumption and metamorphosis in a way that expresses their author’s anxieties. When understood through the American Gothic and the Nordic Noir, these author’s depiction of abuse as vampiric fluid consumption criticises their nations as being either fraught with or allowing abuse. Lindqvist criticises the failure or absence of social welfare in Sweden, and Matheson criticises the prevalence of racial conflict in America’s history. In addition, the depiction of vampiric metamorphosis in these texts expresses anxieties for the abuse cycle. Matheson expresses a national anxiety in America around the return of racial conflict, which was catalysed by the emergence of Civil Rights issues, and Lindqvist expresses an anxiety about the disintegration of social welfare, similarly expressing a national anxiety in Sweden after the economic recession of the Nineteen-Nineties.

Considering Bütz’s theory, the vampire characteristic that is most comparable to abuse is bodily fluid consumption. Loss of bodily fluids, such as blood, by consumption means a destruction of the body, and this mirrors the bodily destruction of physical abuse. Bütz also states that ‘the vampire may illuminate the tragic interchange between abuser and abused […] that illustrates the use of the vampire metaphor in understanding the abuse cycle.’[2] The vampire characteristic most comparable to the abuse cycle is metamorphosis, where the victim of a vampire’s consumption becomes a vampire, and the locus of that abuse is replicated by abusive actions in a cycle.

These characteristics illuminate the depiction of abuse in these texts as vampiric, and these depictions are linked to the anxieties of their authors, anxieties which are defined by genre. Lindqvist’s anxiety is tied to problems of social welfare in Sweden, when seen through the Nordic Noir, and Matheson’s is linked to racial conflict in American history because of the American Gothic. Keith Hayward and Steve Hall define the Nordic Noir thusly: ‘in the subterranean recesses of the genre […] many of Scandinavian society’s all-too-real yet all-too-often repressed social problems can be glimpsed.’[3] Lindqvist’s description of Blackeberg as an emblem of Sweden’s social welfare programmes is in this Nordic Noir mode, seen in the first line: ‘it [Blackeberg] makes you think of coconut frosted cookies, maybe drugs.’[4] The connection between the white powder imagery of ‘coconut frosted’ and ‘drugs’ links domesticity with crime and shows how Blackeberg holds troubling social issues beneath its exterior. Furthermore, the white powder imagery of the ‘cookies’ and ‘drugs’ mirrors the snow that covers Blackeberg and shows how all of it, and even all of Sweden, is affected by these social issues. In addition, these social problems occur in places of public ownership and the community, such as schools, swimming pools, parks, and housing estates, which pinpoints the locus of social problems firmly with Blackeberg itself, making it the location of social issues and the catalyst of them. By foregrounding the issues of Blackeberg in the Nordic Noir mode Lindqvist expresses an anxiety for the social problems brought by failed or absent social welfare states. This linking of anxiety to wider social issues in Sweden is similar to how the American Gothic genre of I Am Legend links the novel to wider issues of ethnicity in the United States.

Teresa A. Goddu defines American Gothic texts as ones situated ‘within specific sites of historical haunting, most notably slavery’ which in turn ‘criticises America’s national myth of a new-world innocence by voicing cultural contradictions that undermine the nation’s claim to purity.’[5] This genre is not only linked to slavery in I Am Legend but also to America’s colonial expansion. This discussion of race is found in I Am Legend’s references to ethnicity and racial othering in relation to vampires, as Kathy Davis Patterson points out, the ‘vampires [are described] in explicitly xenophobic terms and [this] creates a subtext within the novel that makes racial difference and vampirism synonymous.’[6] Neville describes the vampires as ‘black bastards’, he makes them an evil race and one different to his own.[7] This racial association is contributed to by Neville being defined as a pure white man, he is made of ‘English-German Stock’ and is linked to ideas of racial purity by his Nazi Aryan features of ‘bright blue’ eyes (Matheson 8), which puts him and the vampires in a racial conflict. This conflict is not wholly situated between black and white communities, however, but between white people, defined as the racial norm in the text through Neville, and any other ethnic group, defined as the racially othered vampires that are in opposition to that norm. This discussion of race pinpoints how the text has anxieties around the racial conflict in American history and for how such historical conflict can affect the present.

Both of these genres situate the anxieties of these texts within larger societal issues, and the depictions of abuse as vampiric characteristic of bodily fluid consumption expresses these anxieties. Oskar is abused by bullies in his school and loses his bodily fluids, he ‘got nosebleeds, wet his pants [….] Leaked from every orifice’ (Lindqvist 11). The lack of continence because of abuse is analogous to the act of bloodletting and vampiric consumption as Oskar has blood removed from his body, and because this abuse occurs in a school, it works as a metaphor for how Blackeberg, not the bullies, is the vampire consuming Oskar because it allows his abuse in a public building. Because this lack of bodily continence is not only situated to blood loss but loss from ‘every orifice’ this abuse affects the whole body of what it abuses; the body of Oskar as the abused becomes emblematic of the community of Blackeberg’s citizens, with every one of them falling victim to this vampiric abuser. This abuse creates, as Croft and Rijswijk described, a ‘general psychological and social helplessness’ within the community where all are powerless against it.[8] Blackeberg has failed to protect the vulnerable and instead actively makes them victims. It is the core engine of abuse within the novel, and because of the Nordic Noir, acts as a damning representation of what happens without a functioning social welfare programme.

Lindqvist expresses anxiety around the absence of social welfare. He states how that absence allows communities to become catalysts for abuse and how the vulnerable become victims of that abuse. This interpretation of Blackeberg is in opposition to Croft’s and Rijswijk’s interpretation that ‘Blackeberg is [not] aberrant’ and ‘its citizens are more vulnerable compared to those who live in the surrounding, comfortable suburbs.’[9] It is true the inhabitants are vulnerable, Oskar is because he is a child, but it is also true that the systems in place within Blackeberg, such as its schools, are ignorant of the abuse happening within them. Blackeberg must be ‘aberrant’ because it is absent, and it fails to keep the vulnerable out of the way of abuse.

This imagery of fluid consumption is also in I Am Legend and is similarly situated within a specific site of abuse, that of racial conflict during the colonial era of American history. But instead of coming from outer sources, like Blackeberg, this consumption comes from within in the form of vampiric self-consumption. Neville consumes himself through his alcoholism and abuses himself. Neville’s self-consumption as an addict is best understood through Susan Zieger’s work on addiction narratives, defining them as involving ‘a protagonist […] searching for relief from trauma or pain, questing after euphoria, or seeking something that everyday life does not have.’[10] The ‘something’ Neville does not have is the means to survive in the vampire populated apocalypse, something the vampires already have. Neville is trapped in his house ‘on stormy days’ (Matheson 7) and fights a losing battle at night, as there is ‘no use, you couldn’t beat them at night’ (Matheson 14). The defeatist rhetoric demonstrates how Neville has no agency in this new world and so he turns to the consumption of alcohol to survive. At each moment of trouble caused by his situation he drinks: ‘[A]fter five months, you’d think they’d give up and try somewhere else. He went over to the bar and made himself another drink’ (Matheson 14). The word choices here signify repetitive actions, ‘another’ suggests the drink is just ‘another’ after many, which is a great amount given as the ordeal has lasted for ‘five months,’ demonstrating Neville’s reliance on consuming alcohol. Furthermore, alcohol nourishes Neville and even heals him. After being bitten by a vampire he ‘pours alcohol on the teeth gouges, enjoying fiercely the burning pain in is flesh’ (Matheson 14), the alcohol is a nourishing fluid to him, just as blood is to vampires. But this alcohol-vampirism is abusive and consuming of the self; Neville enjoys ‘fiercely the burning pain in his flesh’, the alcohol causes him pain but he enjoys the sensation and thus the addiction is self-abusive, just as Zieger describes, addiction is an ‘extreme […] self-enslavement.’ [11] This self-abuse comes from a lack of agency and has similarities to the abuse of Oskar, as Croft and Rijswijk state, Oskar ‘does not have the knowledge or skills to help himself, and nor can others help him.’[12] Both protagonists share a lack of agency in their vampiric worlds and are both powerless within them.

The American Gothic context links this self-abuse to the racial history of colonial America as a site ‘of historical haunting.’[13] Neville is comparable to America’s colonial pilgrims. He is European, born of ‘English-German stock’ (Matheson 8) and is consistently described a white, and struggles to survive in a new world that is not ethnically his; the vampires are the Indigenous Americans - described as the ‘black bastards’ (Matheson 30) and a ‘black unholy animal[s]’ (Matheson 106) - who were ethnically othered from the white colonials. Although this wording around the vampires does not explicitly denote Indigenous Americans it does suggest an ethnically different group to white Europeans and can thus be applied to Indigenous Americans, as well as other ethnic groups. These vampires have agency in this ‘savage world’, to echo Patterson, ‘where he [Neville] must learn to adapt’ by attempting to learn the skills of the vampires, such as consuming fluids, similar to how the Indigenous Americans had survival skills and the pilgrims had none until they acquired them from the Indigenous tribes.[14]This colonial allusion is echoed by Zeiger, as the ‘searching’ and the ‘questing’ aspects of addiction mirror colonial exploration, and both involve some sort of conflict, or abuse.[15] Matheson draws upon the beginning of America’s history to retell it and highlight the issues of conflict within it, and this historical allusion is developed by the depiction of Neville as a vampiric consumer.

Neville, and Oskar, after being consumed becomes a consumer. By switching his addiction from alcohol to consuming vampires, Neville moves out of his powerless position. He thinks, ‘there is no solace in liquor’ after he feels a ‘chill creeping up his legs’ (Matheson 27). The feeling of his body becoming like the cold, dead body of a vampire because of the alcohol causes Neville to denounce his alcoholism. He views this loss of his human body to a vampiric state as a loss of his purity as a white American. The ‘whitened fist’ (Matheson 27) of his ethnicity comes down to rectify his addiction, stopping him from being consumed by the ethnically different vampires and allowing him to become their consumer. He kills vampires by ‘cut[ting] their wrists’ and causing a ‘haemorrhage’ (Matheson 136), he extracts fluids from their bodies and metaphorically consumes them. He consumes these vampires to not be like them, but that process of consumption makes him like them. He merely just switches his addiction from alcoholic self-abuse to the abuse of others. This switched dependence mirrors how American history shifted dependence from Indigenous people to African people at the time of slavery. America became addicted to the abuse of slaves just as Neville is addicted to the abuse of vampires, an addiction also defined by Zieger, who states that ‘whipping, the iconic and nauseating spectacle of slavery, is an addictive practice that once begun, demands constant indulgence.’[16] Matheson demonstrates how American history is filled with acts of abuse that the Americans of the past were addicted to and dependent on.

Neville gets out of his powerless position by becoming a victimiser, and so does Oskar when he retaliates against his bully, Jonny, but in doing so he repeats the abuse done to him. The ‘blood trickled out between [Jonny’s] fingers’ (Lindqvist 212) which subverts Oskar’s abuse; Jonny is being consumed and Oskar is vampirically consuming his ‘blood.’ In addition, Jonny loses different bodily fluids, such as a ‘yellow and white coloured’ vomit that ‘gushed out from between his lips’ (Lindqvist 212) which signifies an internal bodily revulsion, reversing what is inside to become outside. This reverse demonstrates a swapping of positions between the two, Oskar changing from abused to abuser and Jonny vice-versa. Oskar becoming a consumer further demonstrates Lindqvist’s criticism of failed or absent welfare states, but specifically towards failed communities. Oskar becomes a consumer and there is no-one around to prevent this as the adults in the area refuse to intervene or are caught up in other social issues. The ‘grown up’ who could resolve this situation instead ‘skated away’ (Lindqvist 212) to the dead body of Jocke, which demonstrates how Oskar’s suffering and the suffering he causes goes unnoticed. Blackeberg simply allows this abuse to happen because it is absent in those moments of abuse.

These changes from abused to abuser are a type metamorphosis and mirror the ‘tragic interchange’ of the abuse cycle, which expresses national anxieties in Sweden and America.[17] Oskar’s metamorphosises is best understood through the Scandinavian Gothic. Yvonne Leffler defines the Scandinavian Gothic as one in which ‘[T]he protagonist is not so much threatened by a distinct monster as by an undefined ever-present force connected to the wilderness.’[18] This ‘wilderness’ is also where protagonists eventual transform ‘into a savage being, a beast of prey, closely connected to the wilderness and the savage rituals of sacrifice and nature worship’ - they exhibit a metamorphosis.[19] This ‘wilderness’ is Blackeberg, which makes Oskar’s metamorphosis from abused to abuser an alignment with that ‘wilderness.’ This metamorphosis leads him to consume Jonny, have an affinity with Eli, and at the close of the novel, become the new Hakan. Oskar becomes a consumer, which demonstrates how Blackeberg failed to protect him, expressing Lindqvist’s anxiety for how absent social welfare creates abusers.

Neville also undergoes a metamorphosis, but this is more explicitly into a vampire. Neville dies a ‘legend’ (Matheson 160), who plagues the civilisation of the human-vampire mutants, and also an consumer of blood, leaving only ‘the bloodless bodies of their [the human-vampire’s] loved ones’ as ‘evidence of his existence’ (Matheson 160), much like Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel. Because he has fully metamorphosed into a metaphorical vampire Neville carries the associations of a lesser, othered ethnic race. He becomes ‘the abnormal one’, his position as the white norm is revoked and he now becomes the racial other, with ‘white’ (Matheson 160) faces looking up at him. Neville destroys the ethnically other vampires and so he is destroyed by them. The ‘burning pain that exploded in his chest’ (Matheson 159) is the stake of the racial abuse that he used to kill which now returns to destroy him. Neville’s metamorphosis and death signify an abuse cycle of racial conflict, as Patterson points out, ‘those [like Neville] who perpetuate racially motivated violence are doomed to become victims of such violence themselves.’[20]

These changes signify an abuse cycle that not only expresses these author’s anxieties for perpetuated abuse but their nations anxieties as well. Lindqvist, in this representation of Blackeberg’s failures, is expressing a deep concern for the impact of absent welfare states and their creation of abuse, and is anxious about the current situation of welfare in Sweden. As critics have stated, ‘the economic recession hit Sweden at the beginning of the 1990s, a period of half a century of continuous expansion and reforms in the welfare sector came to an end.[21] With the setting of the novel being the early Nineteen-Eighties the novel positions itself at a time where social welfare in Sweden was hurtling towards destruction. The breakdown of the welfare state and the allowance of abuse within Blackeberg signifies this later disintegration of the whole welfare system in Sweden. Lindqvist taps into a national anxiety of being left in the ‘wilderness’ when such welfare programmes were revoked. Similarly, Neville’s death signifies an anxiety towards a racialised abuse cycle in America. His death suggests a future where the white community in America experiences the abuse it enacted upon racial monitories and is destroyed by them. Like how Lindqvist is concerned with absent welfare perpetuating abuse in Sweden, Matheson is concerned with the abuse cycle on a national level, as this anxiety was shared by American society at the time with the emergence of Civil Rights issues, due to the Brown Vs Board of Education legal battle.[22] Whether to warn the white population of their imminent doom or to protest against it, Matheson demonstrates that a return to racial conflict is inevitable within American society, and unfortunately he has been proved right.

In conjunction with the literary genres of the American Gothic and Nordic Noir, Bütz’s theory explains how the actions of abuse within these texts as expressive of social anxieties around abuse and its perpetuating, which in turn expresses specific nation-based anxieties.

[1] M.R. Bütz, ‘The Vampire as a Metaphor for Working with Childhood Abuse’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 63 (1993), 426-431 (p. 426). [2] Bütz, p. 426. [3] Keith J. Hayward, and Steve Hall, ‘Through Scandinavia, Darkly: A Criminological Critique of Nordic Noir’, British Journal of Criminology, 60 (2020), 1–21 (p.3). [4] John Lindqvist, Let The Right One In, trans. by Ebba Segerberg (London: Quercus, 2017), p. 23. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text as Lindqvist. [5] Teresa A. Goddu, ‘Introduction to American Gothic (Extract)’, in The Horror Reader, ed. by Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 265-270 (p. 270). [6] Kathy Davis Patterson, ‘Echoes of Dracula: Racial Politics and the Failure of Segregated Spaces in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend’, Journal of Dracula Studies, 7 (2005), 19-27 (p. 20). [7] Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (London: Orion Books, 2001), p. 30. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text as (Matheson). [8] Penny Crofts, and Honni van Rijswijk, ‘"What Kept You so Long?”: Bullying’s Gray Zone and the Vampire’s Transgressive Justice in Let the Right One In’, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 11 (2015), 248-269 (p. 254). [9] Crofts and Rijswijk, p. 253. [10] Susan Zieger, Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008) p. 3. [11] Zieger, p. 6. [12] Croft and Rijswijk, p. 254 [13] Goddu, p. 270. [14] Patterson, p. 21. [15] Zeiger, p. 3. [16] Zieger, pp. 87–88. [17] Bütz, p. 246. [18] Yvonne Leffler, ‘The Gothic Topography in Scandinavian Horror Fiction’, in Domination of Fear, ed. by Mikko Canini (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 43–51 ( p. 46). [19] Ibid., p. 45. [20] Patterson, p. 26. [21] Å. Bergmark, M. Thorslund, and E. Lindberg, ‘Beyond Benevolence – Solidarity and Welfare State Transition in Sweden’, International Journal of Social Welfare, 9 (2000), 238-249 (p. 238). [22] James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), p. xiii.

Bibliography

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