Vampires have only recently become a topic that sparks lust and curiosity. Especially after the release of the Twilight series written by Stephenie Meyer, young girls lust after the idea of a vampire. Even just a hundred years ago, vampires were used to inflict fear, but they have recently been romanticized. Readers now are commonly conflicted between whether they should fear vampires or see them as endearing. Readers are increasing hypocritical of their views of vampires because most vampire novels are set in hypocritical societies. Sookie Stackhouse is a perfect representation of the hypocritical society that is shown in Charlaine Harris’s Dead Until Dark. One way that Sookie shows her hypocritical nature is with the supposed internal conflict that she faces when it comes to vampires. She takes this conflict to another level when she becomes a fangbanger. She shames fellow women for getting involved with vampires all while she is involved with Bill. Sookie is also a hypocrite when it comes to her “disability”. She has the ability to hear people’s thoughts, but she calls it a disability and tries to repress it. With all the turmoil in and surrounding her town, Sookie could very easily use her gift to read people’s thoughts to help the police in her town, but she does not. She instead spends her days complaining about how she has to hear everyone’s thoughts and how horrible it makes her life. She complains about how she cannot just live her life without hearing people’s thoughts, but at the same time, she listens to people thoughts that she wants to. Sookie claims that she hears people’s voices and cannot make it stop, but when Sam gives her permission to listen to his thoughts, she refuses. Sookie wants people to think that she is a victim for having this gift that she has classified as a disability.
Sookie, however, is not the only character in the book that is caught being a hypocrite. Many people, especially men, are caught shaming women for getting involved with vampires. If women are caught hooking up with vampires, then they deserve what happens to them. For example, if a woman is involved with a vampire and she ends up dead, it was thought to be her fault. Women in the novel were depicted as sluts who require a male vampire to take interest in them so that they have someone to please. Men, however, are depicted dramatically different in this novel. For example, if a man was caught hooking up or involved with a vampire, then the vampire must have taken advantage of the man and coerced him into getting involved. When men were caught involving themselves with vampires, it was never their fault, and they were never seen as any different or any less than the men that were only involved with humans.
Like many novels, Charlaine Harris’s Dead Until Dark simply takes aspects of the society that we live in today and amplifies them so that they are easier to recognize. In the society that we live in today, people are increasingly more hypocritical, but they refuse to see it. After reading the novel and critiquing Sookie and some of the other characters, my eyes have opened to the fact that the society that we live in is scarily similar to the society on the novel, and that we need to make a point to be less hypocritical.
I think this is an interesting point and comparison to make that I didn’t necessarily notice at first. The novel does put a lot of emphasis on slut shaming for women sleeping with vampires but when men do it there is always an excuse made up for them. I like what you said about how its representative of our society today because that is true, and it can especially be seen with how women and men are viewed differently in terms of sexual activity. If women have sex with lots of men then society labels them as sluts, but if men do it then they’re seen as cool and hyper-masculine sometimes god-like.
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