Christopher Castillo4th Period

9/21/11-9/28/11

Just taking out a single preposition with from “nice to eat with you” makes the simple statement much darker and more mysterious. This is a quote that I’m sure is common to many vampire books of Old English like Dracula. Likes that a big deal, who hasn’t, “But vampires are only the beginning; not only that they’re not even the most alarming type.” (Foster 15).

What truly is evil? The Dracula saga shows a young man who robs young women of their “usefulness” to young men and leaves them as helpless followers in his sin. Looking at it closely, “Evil has had to do with sex the serpent seduced Eve” (Foster 16). Evil is just body shame, unwholesome lust, seduction, temptation, danger, among other things.

Vampirism is about vampires, but it’s also about other kinds than literal vampirism: “…selfishness, exploitation, a refusal to respect the autonomy of other people…” (Foster 16) those are just some examples. This principle applies to a lot of other scary things such as ghosts and doppelgangers.

Have you noticed that not all ghosts are there to cause harm? Look at Bob Marley in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, he’s was just a wailing, clanking example that was there to help steer Scrooge right. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde it shows a respectable man of society with a darker more sinister half. Many examples like these can be found by Victorian writers because “Victorians couldn’t write about…chiefly sex and sexuality…found ways to of transforming those taboo subjects and issues into other forms” (Foster 17). Writers will still use all the werewolves, vampires, and evil twins to symbolize various aspect of our more common reality. Try this for a dictum, ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires

A vampire isn’t just an blood-sucking demon sent to spread disarray our world. A vampire is just an old man who steals the youth, energy, and virtue of an young woman, preferably virginal; that all contributes to male’s life force and destroys or kills the female. If you don’t know it yet, “You don’t need fangs and a cape to be a vampire” (Foster 19).

Today vampire stories are “mere gothic cheap trill…short-term commodities” (Foster 21). Many vampire stories are like that and aren't and embedded in your mind as the story of Dracula and other great Victorian author’s stories.

In Great Expectations the vampirism process is reversed as in Pip is the “young woman” and Estella is the “older man.” Pip’s unhealthy obsession over Estella made him plunge into a hole and after a while it sent him in a staggering debt of “’Hundred and twenty-three pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller’s account…’” Dickens 362).

It applies to every person on the planet, there are those who have that unhealthy obsession for someone and it becomes their demise in some way, just like Pip. Wall street is another example, the stock holders don't care if their investors lose money, as long as they profit. Vampirism will stay with us for all eternity until we as humans stop exploiting each other.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: Dover Publications, 2001. Print. Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature Like a Professor. New York: Harper- Collins Publishers, Inc., 2003. Print.