The Transformation Of The Vampire In Stephenie Meyer's Twilight

Bella Swan asserts three things about her classmate Edward Cullen in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series: “First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him...that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him” (Meyer 195). In this short passage, Meyer records the strange transformation the vampire undertakes from being a folk figure, to one of horror, to one of sensual and forbidden delight. Series such as Twilight demonstrate modern society’s love affair with the vampire. Hardly anyone who has read Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire or Meyer’s Twilight, or even Bram Stoker’s Dracula, would recognize the vampire’s origins as a bloated, oozing reanimated corpse. The vampire, strained through

The behavior of the vampire can range from bizarre, but harmless practical jokes, household chores, to a mass killing of a village either through throttling or sucking blood. French botanist Pitton de Tournefort recorded an exhumation of a Greek vampire, or vyrkolakas, in the early the 18th century (Barber 21). In his record, the vampire came out at night and “turned over furniture, extinguished lamps, embraced people from behind, and played a thousand little roguish tricks” (qtd. in Barber 21). The vampire’s “roguish tricks” hardly count for significant mental or physical trauma and sound much more like a mischievous ghost than the murderous fiend of other accounts. The trouble-making vampire was eventually exhumed after the “matter became serious when the most respectable people began to complain” (qtd. in Barber 21). de Tournefort then describes the horrific dissection of the corpse with a stench so great that de Tournefort and his associates “almost perished...from it” (qtd in Barber 22). The vampire only proves to be deadly in this case by the mere stench of decomposing entrails. de Tournefort’s vampire demonstrates how the folk vampire was not always malevolent by nature, but simply a