118
Popular Culture Review
Philip Kolin's Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia is a masterpiece of its
kind, lucidly organized, beautifully written, and so interesting that one is hard
pressed to put it down as one entry leads to another.
Felicia F. Campbell, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
The Vampire as Numinous Experience:
Spiritual Journeys with the Undead in
British and American Literature
Beth E. McDonald
McFarland & Company, 2004
Vampires have long held an influential spot in American popular
culture, affecting everything from movies (various originals and remakes) to
music (the goth sound and scene) to literature (“serious” literature and romance).
In response, critics have long wondered what it is about vampires that entrances.
However, in spite of the fascination, vampires have always been problematic:
somehow at once highly seductive yet emblematic of evil.
We just may have an answer in Beth McDonald’s The Vampire as
Numinous Experience as she manages to confront this issue in a wholly
convincing way. Her thesis? Combining psychological and religious literary
theories to interpret various works, she tells us that while vampires are a
negative symbol, they hold within them elements of the sacred, able to give
humans a numinous, transforming experience. It is emphasized that it is the
movement from the known, rational world to the unknown and irrational and
back again that is important to the experience: ‘i t should be noted that a
symbolic border (where the seeker/traveler crosses over from the known to the
unknown) is an important symbol in virtually all journey tales” (93). Another
component of the process is that “an experience of the numinous eventually
must be perceived as real by the character [in a text] and the reader in order that
the anxiety and fear felt through the dynamics of power and powerlessness be at
their greatest strength to lead the subject to a change. . . ” (25).
The author uses three different texts from three different time periods to
illustrate her thesis, moving from the metaphorical (“The Rime of the Mariner,”
chapter two) to the iconic (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, chapter three), ending with
the realistic, contemporary vamps of Anne Rice’s world ( Vampire Chronicles,
chapter four).
The author does an able job with the first text. Unfortunately, calling
“The Rime of the Mariner” a “vampire tale" is achieved only through tenuous
linguistic maneuvering as some scholars have made the vampire connection in