English professor Nina Auerbach pauses in her discussion of Charlotte Bronte's Villette and haphazardly tucks a strand of silver-gray hair behind her ear. With eyes glooming out of tinted yellow and oversized black rimmed glasses, Auerbach looks out at her bewildered class in amusement. "Well, you're looking baleful,"she says emphatically. A sinister-looking class may concern some professors, but for Auerbach, the visions of un-dead students are familiar ground. She's an international expert in the Gothic, the ghoulish and things that go bump in the night. Most people think briefly about the horrid today on Halloween, but this professor revels in the shadows all year round. Auerbach has been teaching students about 19th century Literature since 1972, and over the last decade -- with a wildly popular series of Gothic classes and an acclaimed book on vampires -- she has become the residential spook specialist. "An interest in horror was always my dark life," Auerbach said.
Waking the Dead
Today, vampire classes are becoming widely accepted in academia, but back in 1991, Auerbach's blood-sucking teaching style was unheard of. But, her first enthusiastic look at vampires in literature and film was a hit, and she has been teaching similarly themed classes ever since. Beneath the pristine University walls lies a deep student fascination with the grotesque. "Philadelphia is old, unchanged and obsessed with its past," Auerbach said. "And Penn is such a straight and 'normal' university that it has a dark side. Penn students are remarkably appreciative of horror." Still, she said, students are not true vampire-knowers. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula isn't the definitive word on the demonic creatures, Auerbach said. The crosses, the garlic, the stakes and the coffin beds have seeped into our pop culture, she explained, noting that almost every current film or book uses these images. "Dracula has become like the bible of vampires," Auerbach said. Yet, to Auerbach, the significance of vampires extends far beyond these superstitions. After studying the history and lore of vampires with her first class, she tried to dispel some of the myths with the creation of her 1995 book, Our Vampires, Ourselves. Her classes helped her probe the gruesome subject matter. "The book was soaked in Penn students," she said.
Soul-sucking vampires
Although Auerbach does not believe in "the Vampire" in its mythical fanged and blood-sucking monstrous form, she does think vampires exist symbolically in our society. "We all suck others' life forces or people suck ours. It's the truth about relationships. Vampires are us," Auerbach said. Auerbach believes in what she terms "psychic vampires," people with the non-supernatural ability to drain others of energy and life. In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Auerbach illustrates the concept of the psychic vampire in more depth. "[Vampires] promise escape from our dull lives and the pressure of our times, but they matter because when properly understood, they make us see that our lives are implicated in theirs and our times inescapable." The times -- from disco to grunge -- also influence vampires in our society, Auerbach said. Auerbach views the evolution of vampires as closely linked with the trends and transformation of political power in the United States. She noted that the metamorphosis of the supernatural vampire has been particularly dramatic over the past 30 years. In the 1970s, in a decade following the social revolution and tumultuous political climate of the 1960s, Auerbach points out that vampires were sexy, liberatory, rebellious and "always won." Yet as conservatism gained popularity in the 1980s under Reagan's influence, vampires were weaker and less triumphant. According to Auerbach, in the 1980s, vampires lost their wild immortality and were either killed or redeemed by the goodness and innocence of youth. More recently, in the 1990s, Auerbach has seen a continuing popularity of watered-down vampires. Although she finds the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer clever, she finds the emphasis on purity within the characters strange and naive. "People in America now love monsters. We are losing the whole element of fear in the last 10 to 15 years. Monsters are nice. Everything has a guardian angel. This is a very bland time."
Trapped in the shadows
A lone stuffed black bat rests atop Auerbach's office computer. But it is the only sign of spook in the room. The bat, although beloved by Auerbach, was a present from a student. "I don't have vampire paraphernalia. I love talking about them but I wish George Eliot had the same ardor from University administrators," Auerbach mused. Auerbach admits that her passions lie within the more traditional aspects of Victorian literature, but her spooky seminars have defined her solely as a Gothic-specialist against her will. This semester Auerbach currently teaches two courses: "Gothic Feminism" and "Victorian Reality: Occult and Horror" to undergraduate and graduate students, respectively. She said the horrid and eccentric subjects of her classes just keep sucking students in -- and she is forced to keep teaching from a Goth perspective. But Auerbach is currently moving away from vampires -- at least a small distance. She's working with representations of ghosts in a book entitled Lost Lives. "I just can't beat [horror]. I write other things and no one cares about them."
