When I was in high school, a book I absolutely hated reading in English class was The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. Part of it had to do with the fact that it was a classic, and most classics are terrible, but a lot of it had to do with the teacher promoting it as a feminist masterpiece, while getting upset at anyone who pointed out the flaws in the main character. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the book for what it actually is: a peek into the mind of a real-life vampire.
The story primarily focuses on Edna Pontellier, a woman married to a wealthy man in New Orleans who lives in the lap of luxury but is unhappy in her marriage and wants to have a fling with an attractive new man she met on vacation. As the story progresses, Edna grows more and more distant to her husband, avoiding his bed, spending all day painting, and eventually moving out of her husband’s house into a smaller house that he owns. She relies entirely on servants on her husband’s bankroll to take care of everything in the household, and even neglects her own sons, letting nurses and maids take care of them. Like a vampire, she is a parasite, living entirely at the expense of her husband and giving him nothing back in exchange, and justifies this by insinuating that her husband is too controlling. She ignores her sons, and even grows to resent them for being boys, or at least because they might ask her to do some actual parenting.
The funny thing is, the boys never do ask anything of their mother, and her husband never puts up that much of a fuss about Edna’s increasingly hedonistic lifestyle. The worst he ever does is scold her for staying outside late when she could get sick, which she does, and otherwise he tolerates everything else she does (that he knows of) from her decision to move into his other house, her refusal to sleep in his bed, and even the fact that she barely does anything except paint, neglect her children, and sleep through most of chapter 15.
Edna invents reasons in her mind as to why she is a victim, all to justify the one-sided relationship she has with her family. She has affairs with two other men mostly out of boredom, but never divorces the husband that is providing her with the finances for her hedonistic lifestyle. Her belief that her sons will one day demand that she act like an actual mother is really her own mind guilt-tripping her over the fact that she should be taking care of the children she brought into this world, as they had no say in the matter, and have done nothing to deserve her neglect. One theme the author toys with is that Edna never really made an informed decision to get married, and that she lost all her independence when she did, but the book itself shows us that Edna never really had any independence to begin with. Like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, she lives off the kindness of people who don’t know her very well, because anyone who did wouldn’t want anything to do with her.
So what is a vampire, in reality? A vampire is a parasite, who sustains herself by draining the life of others. A vampire is usually undead, which in ancient history meant that she was more likely than not infertile. And yet, outside of the 20th century, most vampires throughout the world were depicted as sexy, at least most of the time. They might have a “true form” where they’re revealed to be a hideous monster, but going all the way back to the lillitu of Ancient Sumeria, the empousa of Ancient Greece, the Aswang of the Philippines (you get the idea), vampires were usually sexy, often female (though male vampires were still common enough), and either could not have children, or ate them. This meant that the sex appeal they displayed, which was usually something like wide birthing hips or youthful fertility in a woman, was no more than a façade; as cheap an imitation as their undeath being a mockery of life itself.
Even the idea of shapeshifting into a monstrous form and reverting back to a public image was pretty common. Like a psychopath who can lie as easy as he breathes, a vampire could become whatever she needed to be to get what she wanted out of her intended victim. If that meant resorting to force and scare tactics, she’d take the form of a monster. If she needed to use sex and sexuality, she could do that too. If she was left alone by herself and shown a mirror, she had no reflection, because there was no “true person” behind all the shapeshifting; your typical sociopath, by definition, has no real depth to their personality. Alternatives might be that a vampire who self-reflects sees only their ugly form, like a narcissist confronted with their inner ugliness.
All of these things reflect upon your typical “dark triad” personality types – sociopaths, psychopaths, and narcissists. While no vampire myth usually fits the entire psychoanalysis, the idea that humans have always feared vampires and had myths like this going all the way back to the first civilizations implies that people were trying to keep an eye out for dangerous people. And this is why vampire myths have lasted for so long: they reflect something a very real type of monster.
Another monster that’s lasted for an incredibly long time is that of the goblin. For the most part, goblins as a whole haven’t changed too much from their original source material: they’re usually depicted as slovenly, short, weak creatures that are often depicted as sneaky. Usually they’re a comical race, but more recently, an anime called Goblin Slayer has turned them into a much more horrifying monster who can only procreate by raping women of other races. On top of this, the goblins are vicious and enjoy torturing their captives, destroying any kind of happiness other people can have, but never being able to build happy lives for themselves.
At first, the show got a lot of flak for creating such a race of monsters and the horror that it unleashes on a fantasy world, as many women in the Goblin Slayer world live in fear of these creatures and have rape as a backstory, as this is an extremely common fate in a world where goblins haven’t already gone extinct. But there’s something darker there, something lurking under the surface. Something about these short, ugly little weak men who live in filth and can only have children through rape reflects part of the real world.
There is no point in Goblin Slayer where we see a goblin try to bathe himself and get a job in civil society. We do not see goblins try to court or flirt civilly with women in the anime or manga, and it’s fairly obvious why: if a goblin tried, he’d probably be killed on the spot, and if he wasn’t, he would never succeed in convincing a woman to marry him and start a family. We do not really know if any goblins have tried to integrate with society, or if they assume they’d fail, but we know that if it’s the latter, the assumption is not without merit. The goblins are also shown to lust after the same kinds of attractive women men in real life find beautiful, rather than being attracted to ugly women who happen to look more like goblins, but their entire race is incapable of producing that kind of beauty. There are no healthy relationships in goblin society, not even between goblins who are friends. They have no interest in capturing women who look as ugly as they do, and underneath it all, the question to ask is: how much of a choice do goblins really have?
Sure, every last one of them we see (barring one, whom I won’t spoil) is unapologetically evil, but they’re also born into this lifestyle. No one would choose to be born a goblin, as it’s shown to be an inherently miserable life, but even if a goblin chose to forgo all the atrocities that makes goblins so terrifying in Goblin Slayer, what happens then? He isn’t going to find a wife or a family, so his line ends with him. If he builds a house in the woods somewhere and lives a quiet life, will he be happier than the rest of his race that abducts and rapes women, and satisfies their hedonistic urges? He will undeniably be alone, and due to his species being physically fairly weak, he’s unlikely to live long this way. At the same time, the option to live this way and allow the goblin species to slowly go extinct by getting more and more goblins to ignore their rapist urges is always available, even if it is unappealing and functionally results in the genocide of their entire race.
The obvious connection I’m making here with goblins is the kinds of men who we usually think of as losers, often short, physically unattractive for reasons that might be beyond their control (like genetics), but also often smelly, maybe overweight, and lacking in anything that could attract a woman he actually would want to date. Even if his problems are all due to his genetics, that just means that if he does get a wife, he’d be passing on those same bad genes to their children, and a lot of women avoid men like this for exactly that reason. He also has no interest in dating an obese woman, or a slovenly woman who is as bad at grooming as he is. And the question of whether he’d be able to get the life he wants by cleaning himself up and working on himself is entirely up in the air. It might work, but it might not, and if he, like the goblins of Goblin Slayer, has weighed his options and decided that the odds that getting a higher salary and a better haircut just aren’t in his favor, he’s not likely to put in the amount of effort that it takes to improve himself. And while we might sympathize with anyone in this situation, we can’t condone them if they snap and try to take what they want by force anymore than we can condone the goblins’ actions in Goblin Slayer. They have a choice, even if it’s a terrible one, and that means they choose whether to be evil.
These are the kinds of monsters that don’t leave your mind after you turn the TV off or put the book down, because they already exist in real life. This is going to be the first in my new set of posts about monsters. I’m going to be spending some more time exploring what makes monsters truly terrifying, and what makes them monstrous to begin with.
