Dear Ms. Harding,

I agree that generalizations should not be made about women's sexuality. For the Daily New article, I certainly didn't say that all women were attracted to the bad boy. I said that some are and, in this format (television or film), it's innocuous.

In real life, these women would need therapy. What I went on to say, which didn't make the pages of the Daily News, was that what I really liked about the new vampire novels, films, and television series, was that they created or rather resurrected a new character type for women, one that is active and empowered, while the male vampire became more vulnerable.

The roles in many vampire stories are reversed. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, Buffy Summers is the Vampire Slayer, the Chosen One, who must save the world. By the end of the series, she has done more rescuing of Angel, her male protecter, than vice-versa. She also realizes that she holds the power, that she is a member of a group of similar women who have the ability to save the world. The archetype of woman-as-savior is from the Goddess period (pre-Christian), when women, not men, held the power of the universe. That's one of the reasons that I study vampires, and why I enjoy writing and teaching about them.

The novels and lore of vampires and other monsters offer a great deal of material to study from folklore to psychoanalytic theory and certainly, feminist theory as well. We learn what it means to be human by studying the monster, "the other." We monsterize that which we do not understand. Those that become other shift through time.

Powerful women have certainly been victims of this theory. Even Joan of Arc couldn't escape. The modern vampire story allows powerful women to regain their foothold, at least for an hour or two in the movie theater or on television.

Dr. Joanne Detore-Nakamura

Associate Professor of Humanities & Communication

smallfox, I grant you that parts of "Buffy" strained credulity, but I found the series as a whole was well-thought-out and far more sophisticated than the typical vampire fare (or teen fare, for that matter).

The "Buffy" universe dealt with teenage trials of finding identity, sexuality, and the other perils of "growing up" in ways that were creative, clever, and painful. The Xander/Anya romance ("I love you, but we can't stay together"); the Willow/Tara relationship (hello, lesbian characters treated with as much respect as straight characters; plus the abusive elements with Willow using magic to control Tara); Buffy finding herself responsible for the household after her mother's death; Xander trying to overcome his crappy childhood; Buffy and Spike together for all the wrong reasons; drug abuse (with magic as them metaphor); adjusting to college life (the mean girls are vampires); and a whole host of other things I'm not remembering at the moment.

Characters were complex, a careful blend of un/predictable, deep, and changeable over time. And while they made plenty of mistakes - sometimes with serious consequences that couldn't be "fixed" - they were strong and vibrant. They were "real" even if they wore too fashionable clothes and had a ready supply of dry, witty quips that James Bond would envy.

(And then we can talk about the craft of the series itself: "Hush" and "Once More with Feeling" were perhaps the 2 best episodes of the series, and among the best of any series; but most episodes were well-written and acted).

You may very well be right. But being myself an admiror of the vampire mystique, I must beg to differ that it doesn't matter that vampires are being used in the metaphor. (I won't speak for Twilight since I haven't read it, though.)

It is true that (a) vampire lore is all made up anyway (blood drinkers who can't stand the sun or holy water? hello?) and (b) each writer will have their vampires as totally different metaphors for what they like. It may very well be true that Twilight is just a romance novel about first lust, Salem's Lot is just a destruction novel about how the universe may conspire to annihilate all that we love, Dracula is a metaphor for how lust is 'the evil within', and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire an attempt at dealing with the depressive aspects of lust and love.

But...

Vampires existed (as legend; as ghouls, infernal minions, the first fashion of undead before they went whole hog on human brains) for quite a while before entering pop culture. Their features -- blood-drinking, no sun, no holy water, no garlic, no stake-through-the-heart -- existed (more or less) before that. Their first incarnations were horrendous, their latest one are alluring and seducing (Bram Stoker being the one who achieved the transition, and Stephen King the one who wants to go Back To Basics). By their mere existence, like many other old legend characters (from werewolves--an old word that, with the Old English word were for 'man', a cognate of Latin virus--to ghosts and other devils), they remind us of things about ourselves that we wish weren't true.

There is something powerful about them, something that goes beyond the varied secondary metaphorical usage that they've been put to. The bones are still smiling somewhere, even under Edward Cullen's romance novel personna.

Or so it seems to me, at least.

Twilight is not a "vampire" series. Meyer has taken a fictitious concept and used it as direct, obvious metaphor for a number of teenage ailments -- the angst of outsiderness, and specifically the emotional strain of trying to remain true to a set of precepts (here Mormonism and abstinence) that run counter to society and one's own deeply seated humanistic impulses. Every vampire writer since Stoker has drafted his or her own metaphor for the vampire, and so comparing Anne Rice to Steven King to Stephenie Meyer is pure apples to oranges. People who complain about the lack of "true" vampire qualities ("he SPARKLES in the sun, wtf!!") are entirely missing the point. ...And forgetting that all vampire lore is entirely made up to begin with!

I'm 25 and picked up the novel with an open mind (I had read enough excerpts to know the prose was terrible, but sometimes I'm not in the mood for Faulkner) and I can see some of the appeal for older readers. I remember what it feels like to be 15 and so deeply in lust, and, of course, female readers have enjoyed inoffensive fantasy-romance-lite novels for decades. That's all Twilight is, really. I frankly like it more than Buffy and Angel's tortured, never-ending, totally unbelievable romance (at least in Twilight, it's clear -- even if Meyer doesn't intend it -- that these characters are experiencing potent first-lust, not deep and meaningful brain-before-groin love). But then, I've also found Buffy unpalatably silly and too much of a strain on credulity to hang together cohesively.