Sex, Blood, Death: Vampires and Child-Rearing

The sexual education of boys and girls has its origins in vampire myths and fairy tales. For this presentation, I propose a comparative cross-national study of child-rearing habits in the nineteenth century. My premise is that a change in social habits, especially living arrangements, after the French Revolution, allowed children a separate bedroom – where there had previously been a communal, family bed – while simultaneously creating a code of conduct that reflected an anti-onanism message, from actual "anti-sexual" devices to parental and societal control through a new system of discipline and punishment that reflected a new cultural context of sexuality. This social order of a nuclear family now divided by walls marked – Michel Foucault's protests of sexual modernity as the fulcrum of modernity notwithstanding – the new marker of modernity, in which a family communicated social values through fables and fairy tales at bedtime and an intrusive entity known as "society" created disciplinary machines mass-produced in industrializing and industrialized economies. To put it simply, the nineteenth-century vampire communicated more than potential immortality; he (and it was usually a male until the next century) communicated that good girls did not allow strangers in their beds, and boys who "self-polluted" were imitating anti-Christian acts of vampirism, allowing their seed to spill where it could only pass away quietly or, worse, mutate into a demonic being. The vampire, a fallen angel of the truest Christian tradition, was born of stolen seed as represented by blood, and became a western European icon for the perils of modernity – all in the act of putting a child to sleep in a separate room.