Feminity in the eye of the beholder

" He was often among those females who form the boast of their sex from the domestic virtues. as among those who sully it by their vices (p.7)."The story of the vampyre imagines femininity and womanhood best as being chaste. In Polidori's tale, the vampyre was only attracted to women that fit the gender conforming ideology that exists in present time, of what it is to be a woman. As Lady Mercer "threw" herself at the vampire, she almost seemed detested for her desire. "It was innocence, youth, and beauty, unaffected ....(p.9)."Women are to be void of sexual desire just as children and only celebrated or admired for their youth and beauty. This is played out in the story and in many vampire-esq movies, where the beautiful, unassuming damsel gets the vampires attention and his unyielding and undying love. Hyper-feminism is often a common theme in depicting women. In The Vampyre, Abrey is followed by the light step of a cashmere butterfly chasing woman (p.9).

The vampire image alone is significant to this image because more often than not the vampire character is a male unable to control his lusts and the woman; his lured pry is often some poor soul in need of direction and unaware of her "woman-ness". If a woman is placed in a vampire role, she is a temptress and not to be trusted.

For more interesting information on gender and the vampires http://axwoundzine.com/twd.htm

My Favorite Place

I can say my most favorite place to go is The City Garden in the center of downtown St. Louis. It's an urban art exhibit with a wading pool, active art, sculptures, green space with beautiful plants and flowers

Let Me introduce Myself

First off I have to say that I am totally overwhelmed with the course, already! I'm not a blogger and I can't say that I am "into" vampires, so this semester will be truly challenging for me, but I'm sure I will come away with an understanding of the fascination with Vampires and even blogging.

Three interesting facts about me is that I am an aspiring writer; poetry mostly and short stories. I would love to own a book store one day and live my life writing, exposing and exploring my love of the written word with others and I've always wanted to be a police officer, although Social work will be the field that I will be going into once I graduate.

When I chose to sign up for this course, I thought it would just be a course on various modern novels. Little did I know vampires would be the focus, which I know nothing about other than Twilight and Bram Stocker's Dracula. I'm normally drawn to novels that explore different cultures and triumph over one's self and at the moment by favorite writer is Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's daughter. I have to say that Mama Day by Octavia Butler is my favorite and unexpected novel. I say this because Octavia Bulter's books are on the science fiction side, which is different from what I normally read. I also was surprised and am both intimidated and intrigues about the blogging aspect of the course. Although I, just a few weeks ago, created my own personal blog to expose my writing to others, Blogging is very foreign to me. Like everyone else in the world, possibly, I belong to Facebook. This has been the extent of online communication for me. So I expect to learn a great deal from this course.