The Idea of Lost Identity in Fantasy Fiction: Stevenson, Stoker, and Lovecraft

Tekst by professor Timo Airaksinen part no:4.
In fantasy literature, monsters are so terrifying that to meet one leads to insanity and suicide. However, "I am becoming a monster" must feel worse. Thomas Nagel asks, "What is it like to be a bat?"; I ask what it is like to become and be a monster – is it possible to know? To answer, we need semiotic tools. I design a Nagel Test to determine one's ability to formulate de se thoughts and beliefs during and after the monstrous transmogrification. To do this, I will discuss what I call a Perry Case and Perry Tale. Most emphatically, my goal is not to offer new interpretations of the masterpieces of Stevenson, Stoker, and Lovecraft. I use their stories as sources of examples. I sketch a theory of monsters in the fantasy world. My modest main aim is to understand the logic and semiotics of losing one's personal identity and its psychological consequences. I imagine the semantics of a possible world maximally similar to the readers' actual world, except it allows monsters and, because of them, monstrous threats to one's identity. This is the language game played by the classical horror writers I will introduce.
Keywords: Thomas Nagel, de se beliefs, possible worlds, monsters; personal identity; physical identity; horror; suicide, madness, literary strategies, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." (H.P. Lovecraft).
4. Stoker: Vampires as the Bringers of Doom
When vampires arrive, a deadly fear comes with them. They threaten humanity, especially vulnerable young ladies and men, and children. They are frightening, but luckily, we know how to repel them. Use a repellant as if they were bloodsucking insects buzzing around in the heat of the night – they are partly incapacitated by daylight. You only need fresh garlic and a cross; the fiend will panic and vanish. But they also seem to have some hypnotic powers that weaken human resistance. They are capable of fighting back.
The males, like Count Dracula, are vicious and powerful, and they may occasionally look and speak like human persons and show their great strength, but at the same time, they are Others. Ephemeral vampires do not appear in the mirror or cast a shadow. They change their bodily appearance: they may look and fly like bats (Michaud and Pötzsch, 2015; Saler, 2005). This is fascinating: in our fictional world, vampires are real, but they do not physically exist in the same way as humans do. They are borderline creatures in the universe we now discuss, occupying a special niche between existence and illusion, as well as life and death. They are alien beings and malevolent Others who threaten mankind. They need human blood to live and hibernate until blood is again available. Their victims may become new vampires. However, they can be killed by driving a stake through their chest and heart. Count Dracula originates from Transylvania, the land of Vlad the Impaler; thus, ironically, impaling is a fitting end to a vampire (see also Shaw and Gibson, 2022). On the other hand, vampires have existed from the beginning of time. They are undead or dead without dying. They bite the neck, suck blood, and leave freshly invigorated; the victim may subsequently belong to them. – Miss Mina tells what happened when she met the Count:
"I felt my strength fading away, and I was in a half-swoon. How long this horrible thing lasted, I know not, but it seemed that a long time must have passed before he took his foul, awful, sneering mouth away. I saw it drip with the fresh blood!" The remembrance seemed for a while to overpower her, and she drooped and would have sunk down but for her husband's sustaining arm. With great effort, she recovered herself and went on … (Stoker, 1897). Vampires are successful; why? Protecting ladies from them is difficult because a vampire's presence, for some unknown reason, weakens even the strongest will, intelligence, and determination. Perhaps they apply animal magnetism and act as magnetizers: "people [in England] were concerned that the animal magnetists could hypnotize women and direct them at will." (Wikipedia). The guardians fall asleep, allowing the vampire to approach their now unguarded and helpless prey. Professor Van Helsing explains:
If the Count escapes us this time—and he is strong and subtle and cunning—he may choose to sleep him for a century, and then in time, our dear one – he took my hand – would come to him to keep him company, and would be as those others that you, Jonathan, saw. You have told us of their gloating lips; you heard their ribald laugh [. . .] You shudder; and well may it be. Forgive me that I make you so much pain, but it is necessary. (Stoker, 1897). The threat is concrete: the victim loses her blood and, at the same time, herself, her virtue, and her identity as if her soul were in her blood – an ancient belief accepted, for instance, by William Harvey. Using Aristotelian language, he says that "the blood was the first material embodiment of the soul" (White, 1986, p. 239; also, The Blood Project, 2021; Harfouch, 2014). Then the victim may become a vampire; as a vampire, she is now a perfect stranger, an Other, and a soulless monster. She is simultaneously alive and dead, and as a female vampire, a shadowy creature devoid of personal identity. Male vampires, like the Count, look solid and active, unlike females whose place in the universe is undefined.
At the end of his book, Stoker allows the vampire, the Count, to assume a human guise and pose. The same happened in the first chapters that narrate the events in his castle in the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania. A male monster is, at least periodically, like any forceful human, intent on reaching his survival-oriented and thus rational but treacherous goals. However, as we will see, a female vampire's constitution looks much weaker. Applied to vampires, the Nagel Test seems to fail: we may not know what it is like to be a vampire and hence an undead (Astle, 1979). I take this to mean that vampires are dead in the sense that they are soulless, but they still move and act as if they were alive. Van Helsing calls them undead phantoms: "[T]here had been only three of these Un-Dead phantoms around us in the night; I took it that there were no more active Un-Dead existent." But we learn that the Count also appears as a large bat; in this form, he certainly will fail the Nagel Test.
We cannot know what it is like to be a vampire in bat's guise; for instance, how does the Count feel and experience it when he/it turns into a large bat and flies away? My conclusion is that, as a vampire, the Count fails the Nagel Test. Yet, we hear an occasional indexical "I." The Count uses "I," which signifies the speaker in the normal indexical manner when he addresses his gentlemanly enemies. However, we cannot know the signified of this "I." We call him "un-dead" without really knowing what this means. After all, as used by the Count, the "I" of the vampire indicates an alien Other who speaks when he assumes the human guise, but he has no real continuity in time and place, that is, bodily identity as we know it. He is a phantom. His human-like ability to use "I" is illusory, and certainly, a bat does not use "I." – Quincy reports: "I thought it well to know, if possible where the Count would go when he left the house. I did not see him, but I saw a bat rise from Renfield's window, and flap westward. I expected to see him in some shape go back to Carfax, but he evidently sought some other lair. He will not be back tonight, for the sky is reddening in the east, and the dawn is close. We must work tomorrow!" (Stoker, 1897)
Hence, the fear of vampires is real and justified, and to meet one is sheer horror. The unlucky victim may become undead; no longer alive, she becomes ghostly and thus devoid of human identity. This applies to both personal and physical identity: suppose she is now a vampire and, thus, something physically and bodily undefinable. She is like a bad dream, a nightmare phantom that will vanish when the first light of dawn appears. She is a shadow that cannot cast a shadow and, in the mirror, lacks all substance. Moreover, she has no female virtue as a deadly tempter from the other side. After a vampire bite, a lady is no longer the person she was. She is something else we cannot quite understand. The bitten victim feels raped:
Pulling her beautiful hair over her face, as the leper of old his mantle, she wailed out:—"Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgment Day." They all paused. I had thrown myself beside her in an agony of helpless grief, and putting my arms around held her tight. / To one thing I have made up my mind: if we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks. (Stoker, 1897). Afterward, the female vampire openly struts her sexuality, and thus she is an impossible Other in a Victorian horror story. The female is now a sexual monster, and to turn into one is the ultimate female horror. Stoker brilliantly depicts unbridled and forbidden female lust that shocks virgin Jonathan. Luckily, the phantom women fade away.
In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, for, though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no shadow on the floor. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. [. . .] There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt a wicked, burning desire in my heart that they would kiss me with those red lips. They whispered together, and then they all laughed—such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand. (Stoker, 1897).
Bram Stoker is a Victorian writer whose imagination reaches far and wide when he discusses the male personification of the monster but may fail in the case of women. He does not tell what happens to the bitten and lost ladies, except that they harass children (Chapter "A Hampstead Mystery") and become evil tempters of the worst kind who shamelessly tout their flashy but dirty sexuality. This adds to the horror of women readers by showing that female vampires injure and kill children, have no sexual virtue, and, thus, no noble female character and personhood (see the list of female virtues, Proverbs 31/10: "A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies."). Her essential virtues define proper womanhood. An undead has no soul, meaning they have no place in the Good Lord's Upper Room, and they would never pass the Nagel Test. A female vampire's fate on Judgement Day seems unclear at best. Miss Mina fears that "[e]ven the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh!" And her polluted flesh shuns the holy cross. But van Helsing consoles her: "He most surely shall, on the Judgment Day, to redress all wrongs of the earth and of His children that He has placed thereon." God will restore her soul.
Perhaps, we may occasionally signify a vampire by the personal pronoun "s/he,"– and they may use "I." But a mindless monster living at night without a shadow is not a "she" or "he." If this is so, she cannot conclude she is a vampire by saying, "I am now a vampire." She may have no mind or soul, and thus she should be referred to via a definite description like "The only female-like vampire that used to be Miss Mina" – if one hopes to individuate a female vampire. Consider the following Perry Tale. At night, a confused woman wanders around the house and finds blood stains on the floor; she follows them to a lady's bedroom and finds her in deep sleep, pale, and looking dead, her neck carrying the obvious signs of a vampire bite. She now realizes de re that a vampire has visited her. But she tastes fresh blood in her mouth, and glancing at the mirror, she does not see herself.
She thinks de se, "I am the vampire who did this." She also realizes that the blood on the floor came from her mouth when she left the room. However, this Perry Tale of a de se belief may not work if the indexical "I" attaches to nothing. The self and the person that should be signified by the signifier "I" no longer exist. She is now an undead devoid of human identity. She has lost herself and her physical and personal identity. She may occasionally look like the lady she was, but that is a phantom image. She casts no shadow and has no proper body continuously in space and time. A sentence like "Miss Lucy now is an undead" is illogical because the signified of "Miss Lucy" fails to exist. Here van Helsing is guilty of incoherent speech: Ah, you are my favourite pupil still. It is worth to teach you. Now that you are willing to understand, you have taken the first step to understanding. You think then that those so small holes in the children's throats were made by the same that made the hole in Miss Lucy?
Then he specifies: "They were made by Miss Lucy!" It was not Miss Lucy but the undead phantom that once was a fine young lady, Miss Lucy. Van Helsing knew the cause of Lucy's death; why did he not impale her immediately? Vampires as monsters form metonymic pairs, like Miss Lucy and her later vampire incarnation, who conflict and join in their simulated sexual intercourse with a new victim. The vampire will prevail – nevertheless, to call him a person is problematic. The undead are ambiguous as monsters since they are human and alien simulacrums. We may know what it is like to be Mr. Hyde but not what it is like to be the Count, who is a bat-like creature scaling headlong down the bare walls of his high castle in Transylvania.
Fear is a motive for action, unlike horror, which leads to paralysis. Vampires present a threat; therefore, Stoker's heroes experience fear, and therefore, they are, at the same time, motivated to act. Yet, when they meet a vampire, they experience a horrified shock and paralysis. They must mobilize all their willpower and mental strength to act regardless of their emotions. This combination of fear and horror leads to a wild effort to escape, yet panic comes in degrees. Brave people can overcome it and fight their horror. In the end, they destroy the male vampire they originally helped to come to the sacred shores of England from an unholy foreign land, which is a rare ironic twist in the otherwise serious and even solemn story.