Images of Diluted Masculinity of Contemporary Vampire Characters through Racial Discourse in Modern American Gothic

Gothic aesthetics features a series of motifs such as darkness, horror, and the use of space and time in the form of graveyards, cemeteries, or ancient torn castles to reflect upon the forces of destruction and dominance that mirror vampires' personality. Whereas former traditional vampires of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic literature predominantly depict Freudian elements when building their persona, contemporary vampire forms arise from more complex discourses of gender and racial nature that explain the evolution of vampire personality within the Gothic framework. Such external construction of Gothic imagery responds to a gender and race discourse of Gothic vampires' white masculine personality and its evolution into new discourses of morality, ethics, and symbiotic behavior that alter the traditional conceptions of masculinity in order to redefine new grounds in terms of diluted images of masculinity that help shape the vampire beyond its traditional image