What Does the Vampire Want or Need? My Analysis of Theodore Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood
Some of Your Blood
While the vampire is the deviant being who questions
society, breaks society’s norms, asks what is socially acceptable,
controls his/her victims emotionally and psychologically, “marks” his/her
victims and often challenges women’s purity; this being wants what any mortal
being wants-approval, acceptance, a cure for loneliness and love. Bela (“George
Smith”), the protagonist of the novel, Some of Your Blood, is a shy,
misunderstood young man with social anxiety and Post-Traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) who consumes blood of animals and human beings in order to fill his
stomach and cope with his loneliness. George believes
consuming blood is necessary in order to function in his daily life; the woods
serve as his outlet environment.
George is marked a sociopath, due to being a deeply
troubled individual stepping out of society’s path. His obsession with hunting,
beating and killing animals focusing on their blood in the woods gives him
control over who is being punished. The woods are the one place he can avoid
his father, who is the town drunk and abuses George’s mother and being branded
in the small town the family resides in. “The woods in the rain, in the snow,
the woods even when you were hungry,
they couldn’t hurt you the way you might get hurt at home. You might die in the
woods or get killed, but the woods did not drink, the woods did not punch your
mother in the face. You’re always alright if you can get away into the woods”
(Sturgeon, p. 31). This physical environment gives him the sensation to live in
the moment.
George’s preference to be silent, keeping his face
non-expressive, smiling at inappropriate moments, his joy of hunting, his
violent outbursts and his inability to experience empathy are seen as threats to his parents, Dr. Philip
Outerbridge, Al (Dr. Phil’s superior in the military), Aunt Mary, Uncle Jim and
the residents of George’s hometown. The reader is introduced to George’s first
outburst during his time in the military. The major asks him, “What do you hunt
for, George? I mean, just what do you get out of it” (p. 28)? George is unable
to answer the question.
George’s face “was bone-white and little drops of
sweat were all over it and he was shaking and his eyes were half-way closed and
what they call glazed” (p. 28). While he was “staring down at the paper,” the “explosion”
occurred (p. 28). He squeezed the glass of water so hard, “it seemed to
explode” (p. 28). He was about to jump the major, but the blood on George’s
hand caught his attention. His entrancement to the blood is considered odd
behavior; “The blood dripping was what saved the major, because when George
Smith saw it he like forgot there was anyone or anything else there. Slowly he
brought his hand up to his face. He closed his fist and brought it close and
began to smell it. He opened it and along with the outside edge of the hand
under the little finger, blood was pulsing where a little artery was cut.
George put his mouth on that part” (p. 29).
Although George is fully capable of talking, he
chooses to stay silent or respond with short answers. Both his parents
immigrated to the United States from the “old country” (Hungary) knowing very
little English (p. 30). The language barrier his family has along with their
origin and class difference marks them as outsiders in the community. School
was difficult for George due to having to learn “American” to sound like his
classmates and his father being the town drunk (p.32). “Well George has to go
to school like everybody else and that was where he first learned to let other
people do the talking because they did it so easy. George could talk all right,
his father made him do it like in the store and all, but for a long time that
hunky talk lay in his mouth and put a stink on every word that came out and they
laughed. Of course after a while George could talk American as good as anyone
but by that time they whole town was calling the father the town drunk which he
was and any time George opened his mouth he was like to get somebody’s fist in
it” (pp. 32-33).
George’s father’s alcoholism leads the other children
being afraid to go to George’s house. His house “was the one and only place
they were scared of the father” (p. 33). Although his father is drunk and
violent and George claims to hate him; “if he ever hated anything it was the
father,” he yearns for his father’s approval and love. (p. 45). When George
steals groceries from the Acme store delivery wagon to feed his family, his
father replies, “Mabbe ya amoont ta schomthing yat, boy” (p. 45). George ends
up feeling “better than anything in his whole life, and that’s crazy. If ever
there was a man he didn’t give a damn what he thought, it was the father” (p.
45). The father smiling couldn’t keep George from “smiling too” (p. 45).
Dr. Phil calls George’s inability to experience
empathy, “inaccurately non-guilt,” in his notes and letters to Al, while
examining and interviewing George (p. 103). Dr. Phil calls it inaccurate
because George is “completely aware of good and evil as other people judge
them, but he seems burdened not at all by that sense of punishment earned which
afflicts most people in a Judeo-Christian matrix like ours. In George’s case I
feel- almost intuitively-that there is in him no conviction of quid pro quo, punishment for crime.
Punishment he understands, other people’s attitudes toward crime he
understands. But he simply seems not to share the attitude” (p. 103).
Dr. Phil describes George as ‘“tone-deaf’ to a whole
spectrum of commonly-shared feelings-empathy, for a dying animal, squeamishness
in regard to pain, blood, injury or injustice: a protective coating built up
over the years and penetrated apparently only when he saw the casualties” (p.
104). George’s terrible childhood is one factor of him being “tone-deaf.” “Punishment
descended without rhyme or reason, while childish breaches of conduct like
absence at meals or at night, stealing, impertinence, and disobedience were as
often as not overlooked. Punishment did not necessarily follow crime in
George’s cosmos, yet punishment inevitably came, crime or no” (p. 104). George’s
father would beat him and his mother for no reason other than speaking. George
does not feel he deserved the punishment for attacking the major. His “two
environmental poles-the complete license of the outdoors and the world of the
orphanage and the Army” are the only other set of rules he is familiar with; he
never learned the rules of society (p. 105).
Dr. Phil does not treat George like a killer; rather,
George is treated like the troubled young man that he is. Dr. Phil wants to
help George get out of the Army and psychiatric ward. George says, “I trust
Phil. He wants me out and I am sure of that. I also don’t think he wants this
writing of mine to be nothing but the truth” (p. 86). George wants to “be next
to Anna” (p. 86).
Dr. Phil’s trance sessions with George help them find
out why George likes to drink blood. George’s mother blamed him for taking the
life out of her when she was alive; a vampiric act. From birth, he was confused
to be nourished. “She said it right up to the time she, I was so big and …ah
you drank the very blood out of me, she said when she felt bad….Well, I didn’t
mean to” (p. 133). While nursing George, her breasts began to bleed; she
relentlessly fed him. “She said it was her duty, she near died of it. She did
die of it finally” (p. 133).
George’s enjoyment of drinking blood makes him “near
my mother” (p. 135). The Oedipus complex, “the complicated conflicts and
emotions felt by a child when, during a stage of his normal development as a
member of the family circle, he becomes aware of a particularly strong,
sexually tinged attachment to his mother,” offers him a mother substitute in
Anna (Medical-Dictionary, 2015). Anna is the “instigator; he did what she
wanted. He then makes obscure reference to his doing what he wanted; that she
tried to stop him and then permitted it, feeling safe with him” (Sturgeon, p.
106).
Meeting Anna makes George “feel comfortable” (p. 69). He
feels a release with Anna, a security blanket. Their relationship is not based
on sex. During one of their secret meetings in the woods, “she smelled good to
him” (p. 71). The burning in his stomach he receives when he needs to hunt
arrives, but without the anger; the desire to drink her blood arrived. “She
told him no at first, this wasn’t right, but he kept on, and soon she just let
him. Well, she knew he would never hurt her and also that he would never talk
about it” (p.71).
George consumes Anna’s menstrual blood and keeps
monthly track of her period. Consuming Anna’s blood is the key role in giving
him control and the Oedipal complex. Rather than breastfeeding from his mother,
George is receiving maternal love and acceptance from Anna. She is the only
person to accept him and his blood desire. “She knew what he was and she liked
it too and nobody else ever would” (p. 86). With Anna, he gains affection and is no longer
lonely. “That was the best time of George’s whole life” (p. 71).
George becomes angry when Anna “got sick” (p. 78).
Anna being pregnant deprives George of her blood. “She missed her period two
times already, well, he knew that really before she did, she never used to keep
track” (p.79). When she quit showing up to their cave due to being bed sick for
weeks, “it was hard to take. George had grew to need Anna, he could not get
along very easy without he saw her. And he begun to worry either she was so
sick she would not get better and then what would he do” (p. 79)?
Rather than feeling love for his unborn baby, George
begins to “hate that little bugger inside her” (p. 79). He sees the baby as the
thing that ruined his bond with Anna. The fetus will take what was once
George’s-acceptance, love and an end to loneliness.
George’s pleasure of consuming blood is the result of
his lifelong desire for approval, acceptance, love and a cure for loneliness. His
psychological and physical vampiric actions lead him to defy society and gain
approval and acceptance from his father and find a mother substitute in Anna. Rather
than violently hunting animals for their blood in the woods, Anna takes away
the violence and anger through her blood and acceptance.
Link to Kindle Edition of Some of Your Blood
Citations
Oedipal model. (n.d.) Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, Seventh Edition. (2003). Retrieved October 12 2015 from http://medical- dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Oedipal+model
Sturgeon, T. (1961). Some of Your Blood. Lakewood, CO: Millipede Press.
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