there are very rich parallels you can draw between Marius' vampirism and his slave-ownership (parasitism and exploitation) or his sexual abuses (violation of consent and autonomy), but i'm really chewing on Marius' vampiric actions as a form of selfish wastefulness.
after he abandons Pandora, his consumption of human blood and human life in Rome is emotion-driven and outstrips his actual hunger or need.
Marius condemns himself to loneliness because he is too angry and proud to admit his wrongdoing or apologise to the companion he has wronged (not that he necessarily sees the situation as requiring an apology, merely some form of action that will bring Pandora back to him).
instead, he is feeding from and killing humans to satisfy an emotional need (maybe as a proxy for intimacy and companionship, given the constant parallels drawn in this series between vampiric feeding and physical / emotional intimacy, as well as Marius' own linking of his actions to loneliness).
in particular, he is "wasting" human blood (and therefore human lives) by spilling more than he can drink. this is "wasteful" even within the inherently "wasteful" context of the vampire, who - to use Marius' own words - is "a monster who slew humans for his own survival [and has] a greedy mind and heart".
Madeline Potter has a really interesting article about the links between bloodshed, waste, and vampirism. she points to bloodshed as a form of waste (blood is wasted when it is not sustaining the life of the person it belongs to). while medical procedures like blood transfusion can be life-preserving and so not wasteful (see Lucy in Dracula receiving several transfusions), vampiric feeding can be considered wasteful because it is sustaining what is essentially a corpse (because the vampire is undead i.e., it is not alive, but it also occupies a transitional space because it is not fully dead either), which in itself can be considered a form of waste (abject). waste (spilled blood) is feeding waste (dead body).
however, nourishment is not wasteful (even though it is transformed into waste as it nourishes the body and is then eliminated), and so vampiric feeding can be said to confuse this waste / non-waste binary.
...at this point, shed blood ceases to be waste in its primary sense; instead, it is necessary for the sustainment of the vampiric life...When Stoker’s Count bleeds his victims, he does so because he needs their blood to survive; but there is also, inherent in the exchange between vampire and victim, as we see when Dracula feeds on Lucy and Mina, the potential for the victim’s transformation...[Blood] sustains and creates undead life. In this sense, blood is both waste and nourishment...In blurring these distinctions and collapsing the self into the other, Stoker obscures the difference between waste and nourishment, but also between healing and dying.
[...] As we have seen, the Count takes blood from [Lucy] as medicine necessary for his survival. But if the vampire, as an animated corpse, is the fantastical embodiment of Kristevan waste, then the blood Lucy loses is also waste, for it sustains the vampiric corpse in its undead existence... Still...Count Dracula can give back...The very fact that Lucy becomes herself one of the undead is proof of the vampiric generation... The same blood, then, taken from the victim, is given back. As Mina drinks Dracula’s blood, she inadvertently drinks her own blood, for the vampire has been feeding off her. Once again, the boundaries between waste and nourishment fade out, and the self fuses with the other, in a union of life and death.
[...] The intimate exchange between Mina and Dracula has often been read in sexual terms. These sexual undertones are indeed impossible to ignore. In God and the Gothic, Alison Milbank notes how Dracula holds Mina “upon his bosom in a parody of marital affection,” lumping together the sexual implications of their blood exchange and the reversal of the loving bond between spouses.
- 'Body and Blood: Literary Vampirism at the Intersection of Theological Hunger and Physical Waste' by Madeline Potter
among the many interesting things discussed in this article, i find the way Madeline brings together and blurs the dichotomy of life / healing / nourishment / medicine versus death / dying / waste in the vampiric transformation to be particularly compelling, because it touches on the complex feelings evoked by Marius' turning Armand into a vampire (a "parody of marital affection" if ever there was one).
on the one hand, he is undeniably saving Armand's life by turning him (a process which involves feeding Armand his own blood after Marius has already consumed it). on the other hand, all of Marius' actions - including his habitual feeding / predation on Armand and his premeditated intent to turn him, despite his pretense to the contrary - have led to him "wasting" Armand's human life. (this is not to imply anything negative about the worth of Armand's life either before or after his vampirization, just reflecting on the additional layer of analysis this can provide when we try to unpack and articulate the extent of Marius' selfish carelessness.)
it's also interesting that so much of Marius' behaviours that lead to his turning Armand - his hypocritical anger at Armand for sleeping with other people (on Marius' instruction!), his selfish cultivation of Armand as (in Marius' mind) an ~inferior innocent~ that he can mold into the perfect companion (unlike Pandora, who was his social "equal" whom he abandoned in part because of her staunch refusal to be mastered by him) - also stem from his feelings of loneliness, and his decision to "indulge" in behaviours that hurt others so long as they console him, regardless of how selfish or wasteful these actions become. rinse and repeat the cycle.
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