Vampires in Dark Academia: the ideal love interest?
Originally posts as part of a series on our Substack. If you want to be the first to receive these dispatches, as well as join our dark academia community, there’s a space for you saved at the table…
The earliest reference to what would be recognised as a vampire was in Old Russian in 1047 under “upir”, but the first time that “vampire” has been found in a written text was in the 1720s during the Great Vampire Epidemic when a vampire was believed to have appeared and spread disease through a small Slavic village.
Vampires were blamed for disease and misfortune, moral corruption and social degradation and became a significant source of intense fear in Eastern Europe while explanations of germs and bacteria, health and hygiene remained unknown and religious explanations of a lack of purity and godliness reigned supreme.
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Then on a stormy night at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816, a group of revolutionary writers had a contest to write a ghost story. Born of that content was Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘The Vampyre’ by John Polidori, a short story that is widely accepted as the piece of vampire fiction as we recognise it, as a Romance. Our fanged friends have been a looming presence in fiction since then.
While you wouldn’t be calling ‘Dracula’ or ‘Carmilla’ a romance in the modern sense, a Romance (the capitalism is important), they most definitely are. This refers to the movement of art and literature that was in full swing in England and Europe from the very last few years of the 18th Century to the mid-1830s.
Influenced by the French Revolution, the increasing calls for slavery to be abolished and the effects of the Industrial Revolution, the group of artists and writers that came to be known as the Romantics began to challenge societal norms even further. They rebelled against the rigid technology of the industrial boom and with the hint of social revolution in the air, the Romantics wrote and painted of high emotion and intense feeling, focusing on beauty and awe and the preference for nature and the pastoral. They rejected the rules of literature and poetry, the rigidity of how they had been taught to live and feel and create.
The vampire is a Romantic emblem, one that is pure nature and completely unnatural. They live on instinct and literally survive on the blood of others, while veering between ethereal beauty and grotesque monsters, but most of all? They do not live or act in line with the rigid expectations of society. They are governed by their need for blood, their lust for beauty and the animalistic instincts that drive them to want more and more and more.
They can also be elegant, refined creatures demonstrating an outward portrait of intense control while their minds and bodies are clawing for freedom to unleash something more raw on the world. Vampires can live for hundreds, or even thousands, or years and the older they get, the more power and knowledge and riches they acquire. An elegant, rich, powerful and clever man with hidden depths and a murky past is starting to sound a lot like many a love interest and a lot like our beloved dark academia heroes. It really wouldn’t be difficult to imagine Henry Winter as a centuries-old vampire…
It comes down to the figure of the vampire embodying three things that are also essential to dark academia: lust, power, and knowledge. Our protagonists are searching for them, or running from them, and our vampires are wielding them to their best advantage.
Lust
Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ was published in 1872, beating ‘Dracula’ to the punch by 25 years, and though not as widely read as Bram Stoker’s legendary tale, it makes an impact in only 160 pages.
Deep in the forests of Austria, Laura lives alone with her father until a carriage accident brings the pale, mysterious and incredibly alluring Carmilla into their lives. As Carmilla’s actions grow ever stranger, Laura begins to be plagued by nightmares and gets increasingly weaker by the day.
‘Carmilla’ does something shocking for the 1870s: it places the woman as the vampire (I believe for the first time), gives women ownership of their sexuality and paints a portrait of an intimate relationship between women, though this is through subtext rather than written on the page. Carmilla and Laura’s relationship and growing connection is inevitably intertwined with blood and hunger, desire and death; a very common combination of themes for vampire fiction even now.
Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ followed in 1897 and reversed the position of women and their desires and sexuality from Laura and Carmilla. Under Stoker’s pen, the fates of women return to the hands of men and their sexuality is no longer theirs but solely for the purpose of providing for men. ‘Dracula’ perpetuated the ideas of linking hysteria, illness and women’s fragility as effects of close female friendship. This is a tradition that the modern vampire fiction is firmly rewriting, and it’s in the modern vampires that the door is opened for female power in these stories and vampire dark academia love interests.
The lust of vampires - whether for a person or for blood - defines their motivations and puts them into places where satiating their needs is more accessible and easier to disguise.
Power
Power is second only to lust for lots of vampire characters, especially in a dark academia setting, and they’re usually just plain entwined. Lust isn’t always reserved for blood, it’s often for positions of power and everything that they bring.
We’ve seen often in fantasy dark academia and dark academia that crosses into the dark romance space that the love interest is usually a professor, someone significantly older, or in a position of power over the protagonist. He, and it is usually a he, uses his position to form an ecosystem to sustain and protect himself, shielded and enabled by the power over other people in his care.
Though a far cry from a love interest, Count Dracula himself holes up in his own remote castle, Castle Dracula, in Transylvania where his position as a Count allows him a space removed from ordinary village life where he can create a safe space for his kind to indulge in their desires at will and entrap any humans that encroach on this space. It takes removing Dracula from this space of safety in order to take him down. It’s an extreme example, but translatable to an education setting or a secret society.
We often see protagonists getting drawn into a secret society, a play, a group, and many more situations because they’re drawn in by a mysterious person who poses an instant attraction or intrigue. It’s a common set up inside and outside of dark academia. A vampire in this position puts more mystery, more questions, and more potential for danger and discovery in for of the protagonist.
Knowledge
Our vampire’s position has his lust and power covered, so it’s time for the knowledge.
Dark academia is founded on secrets and the pursuit of often dangerous or forbidden knowledge. Knowledge generally comes along with power in a dark academia setting (let’s face it, not so much in the real world…) and it’s another source of hunger for our protagonist.
It could be the knowledge of a secret society or club, the knowledge of a particular field of study, the knowledge of a specific strata of society, or revealing hidden knowledge about the world, the magic system, or their institution. Our protagonist will do anything for this knowledge and in a lot of cases, our love interest holds the keys to it. When we’re looking at vampires who are centuries old, the depth of knowledge and access that vampire has even without the strongholds of position is vast, but with them? A potentially unstoppable force and an inevitable lure for our hungry protagonist. A romance almost feels inescapable and it becomes something driven by lust of the very human kind, but also of the mind; a lust for power and knowledge, something new and different, a lust that will blow the protagonist’s world right open.
Lust, power and knowledge: the perfect making of a dark academia love interest, and a vampire, so why not both? But honestly, I’ll take my vampires however I can get them, dark academia or not.
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