Safe Sex with Defanged Vampires: New Vampire Heroes in Twilight and the Southern Vampire Mysteries

Abstract

Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga and Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries both portray a romance between a human female and a male vampire, borrowing many conventions from romance novels and Gothic fiction. Both series introduce a new breed of vampires that refrain from drinking human blood, betraying the traditional image of vampires as sexually transgressive creatures. The romantic plotlines between the heroines and those safe vampire heroes reflect contemporary women’s lowered sense of danger concerning sexuality and heightened sense of danger in terms of the boundaries of self, yet each of the series shows a completely different development from each other. Twilight ends with a fairytale ending free from worries and responsibilities, while Sookie of the Southern Vampire Mysteries realizes that her safe hero is not safe after all, and that she has to reconsider her perception of sexuality and self in order to negotiate the risk of contemporary romance.

Keywords

• boundaries of self
• chiho nakagawa
• gothic
• hero‐villains
• southern vampire mysteries
• twilight
• vampire fiction