#alinska

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

greg can be a little cool, as a treat

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

Something on which my best friend and I disagree: would Pride flags work against vampires? I was trying to think of a symbol of belief that could work for atheists.

it depends on how you think the mechanics of belief symbols affecting vampires works! i assume from this framing that you're going with the "the belief of the person is what deters the vampire" explanation, but even within that framework there are particulars to work out. is it merely that vampires are affected by a strong belief in anything, or does the person have to believe that the item in question will specifically protect them against evil? in the latter case, it would probably be situational depending on the person, but i think it's definitely not out of the question.

of course, ah, ever since reading the virgin vampire i have adopted a much more cosmic horror-esque approach to how the vampires vs. holy symbols thing works

there's basically 3 explanations for how holy symbols work on vampires, right? (ignoring castlevania's "they're weak to right angles" because that is stupid.) either it's the vampire's faith, the human's faith, or God Is Literally Real. most 19th century vampire stories, being written by christians at a time when christianity had considerably more cultural dominance than it does now (in the west at least), opt for the 3rd option in their lore. this is all very well and good for some french guy in the 1820s, but feels kind of icky now, because generally the assumption that goes along with the God Is Literally Real explanation is that God is the Christian god specifically, and therefore that only christian religious items affect vampires.

but like. throwing authorial intent out the window and boarding it up behind it, the god being presented in The Virgin Vampire is definitely not the one i learned about in sunday school. he's maybe, arguably, a little close to the one in the old testament, but frankly he is much pettier. he's not even trying to guide his chosen people in this story, he is just tormenting a random frenchman through the medium of a random peasant girl who was in love with him, and who has done nothing wrong. at least jeremiah and jonah and those guys were not explicitly damned by their selection as prophets, and while god made them do a lot of wild shit as far as i know they never had to drink anybody's blood. alinska murders a child. In This Story God Makes Alinska Murder A Six Year Old Child.

so here's my pitch. God Is Literally Real, or at least there's some entity filling an analogous role. something is imbuing all these holy objects with the power to burn vampires. according to alinska it's not just crosses and holy water: she cannot be in the presence of a priest, because apparently she is marked in a way that a priest will innately be able to identify as Evil Damned Creature (this is never explained), and she cannot enter a church, because there will be an invisible exterminating angel waiting there to strike her down which only she can see. she also makes constant references to having Knowledge Beyond Mortal Ken as a result of having died and come back.

so essentially, god is radioactive, in an eldritch sort of way. the Presence Of God will burn you, but living beings are shielded from being able to perceive the Presence Of God. vampires, having died and come back, have lost some of that shielding, rendering them susceptible to Godly Radiation. holy items, people, locations, etc. are anything that has been touched by god (leaving them Godly Radioactive). this might include blessed objects of any faith (when you bless something you are inviting god to touch it. he usually does), but might also include other stuff, or arbitrarily exclude certain holy objects. who knows. god's whims are inscrutable and his will incomprehensible. he is not distant or neutral—he does take an interest in human and vampire affairs. very often This Is Not A Good Thing for the people involved.

god seems to attach a lot of importance to 1. pacts and oaths 2. blood 3. justice and balance 4. death and resurrection/rebirth. you can appeal your situation to god at any time, and he might take an interest. but once a Judgment is handed down, there's no going back. alinska learned this the hard way. god decided yes, you will have your revenge. blood will be paid with blood. also i'm making you a vampire.

anyway under this schema a pride flag could very well be used to repel a vampire under the right circumstances. But Watch Out!

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

So both Alinska and Kostaki have an open wound that had killed them. But Kostaki keeps it exposed. I imagine she doesn't. Alinska: Met God, asked for justice, she was bestowed with the mission to deliver his judgement to the end, was destroyed in his temple Kostaki: Technically fought him to the death They have potential to meet too perhaps

Yeah Alinska keeps hers hidden and dislikes showing it to people, although part of this is that she has to pass as human; Kostaki in-story only lasts about 4 days as a vampire, and the only people he interacts with are Hedwig and his family, who already know he's dead. Prominently displaying his gaping wound is probably a power move directed at Gregoriska and, to a lesser extent, Hedwig, and it would prooooobably make more sense for him to not be showing it off all the time years down the line; but then we wouldn't get the scene of him dramatically revealing it to Relia on page 1 of WTCA, would we?

I do want Alinska and Kostaki to meet very badly. They not coincidentally have a lot in common (The Virgin Vampire was definitely a major influence on The Pale Lady), but diverge in personality, with Alinska being much more defeated and resigned to her fate. (Hot take Kostaki is Alinska 5 years on T) I think they could benefit from becoming friends. They should team up to fight God.

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

their relationship makes me insane actually

this will not be coherent.

okay so helene's character is, to a T, the Idealized Female Archetype of the 19th century. you know the type: the Angel of the House, perfectly content in the domestic sphere. she plays music, she embroiders, she reads Good Christian Novels, she scrupulously attends church, she's perfectly kind and patient and gracious to everyone she meets, a doting wife, a loving mother, all that shit. she's a very likable character because she's designed to be: flawlessly kind, and utterly innocent of the destruction alinska is about to bring upon her household. there's definitely a sort of...Cautionary Tale About The Dangers Of Being Too Nice To Outsiders vibe here, but in this post we are going to be ignoring that. the author is dead and his grave is a gender neutral bathroom, and there's enough cracks in the narrative facade for me to deconstruct helene's character and give her a little more juice.

let's talk about neurodivergence. alinska is crazy ND-coded.

Madame Delmont, who would have found herself in absolute seclusion after the departure of her neighbors, was not displeased that Alinska was prolonging her sojourn. It was not, undoubtedly, a very pleasant society; her habitual melancholy, the silence she maintained when she was not asked questions, the brevity of her answers and, even more so, the indefinable air of her physiognomy, were not attractive. She sang, it is true, with style, and accompanied herself on the harp; but it was while she was shut up in her room that she devoted herself to those pastimes. An invincible timidity, she said, did not permit her to play in front of anyone else.

From that moment on, Alinska’s unsociability seemed to increase. She only emerged from her room at meal times; she sat down at the table, where she scarcely took enough nourishment to sustain her existence. She was vainly urged to eat more, obstinately refusing the best dishes, contenting herself with a little meat, which she sucked—for she appeared not to like vegetables at all.

The Hungarian woman rarely put any expression into what she said, or did. One might have thought, most of the time, one examining her actions, that she was not so much a living creature as an animate automaton, solely obedient to the impulse of springs that moved her relentlessly in a uniform manner.

a lot of her character traits read as kind of autistic-coded, although many of them are directly related to her vampirism. she's definitely clinically depressed. the other characters also all interpret her monologues about being dead and damned and forced down the track of vengeance by God and so forth as proof that she is mad. helene herself concludes this shortly upon meeting her, and is a little scared of her, but remains determined to show her compassion:

The latter would have liked to terminate that painful scene, but a sentiment of compassion still controlled her; she feared, in going away, leaving an individual devoid of help whose woeful madness seemed complete. “Aren’t you suffering too much at present to continue your walk?” she said. “Would you permit me to take you back to the place where you’re living?”

the passage that gets me, though, is from much later in the book, when helene is dying, and requests that alinska come visit her and keep her company. alinska, although she seems to be isolating herself in an (unsuccessful) attempt to keep helene safe from her, obliges, resulting in this passage:

A little reflection reminded her of Alinska’s known character; she also recalled the customary strangeness of all her manners, and realized that it was necessary not to take offense at anything she did, for she did not do anything as everyone else did. Hélène had need of company; she was accustomed to hers; ought she complain about finding her with all her eccentricities and unsocial habits?

see, it's not about helene just having sympathy for alinska, or treating her politely; helene accommodates alinska's ways even when they put her at odds with social politeness; she doesn't attempt to make her conform.

As soon as he had gone, Alinska got up and went out, as if to go to her room, without giving any reason for her departure. Madame Delmont knew how the slightest question was capable of displeasing her, so she never asked her any.

it stands out to me starkly because really, this level of compassion for alinska is not expected of an upper-class woman in this time period. alinska is a foreigner, an outsider to the community, a person of low social standing, an antisocial recluse, and to all appearances mad. but helene doesn't just show her charity, she genuinely becomes her friend. she tolerates alinska's deviation from social norms, and adjusts her own behavior to accomodate her friend.

but we can go further. earlier in the story, after learning alinska has left the delmont household, helene tosses off this line:

We’ll need to send on her clothes; doubtless she won’t have taken them, in order to deceive us more effectively.

we know nothing about helene's back story; she only exists in the story as a wife and mother. but she jumps to this idea so immediately that i have to wonder if it comes from personal experience. maybe helene is not as neurotypical as the author would like you to think. maybe she tried to run away as a teenager, or at least thought about running away.

maybe, when helene is transformed by her grief, that is not a new development of her character, but an old one showing itself from behind the mask she's grown accustomed to putting on.

Time had not yet deadened Madame Delmont’s grief, having been unable to gain any purchase on her. She was almost always to be seen in constant immobility, holding a book whose pages she never turned, or inundating an item of embroidery with her tears. A bleak melancholy had taken possession of her; it was only briefly that, recovering the exercise of her consciousness, she testified to her husband that he was still dear to her. She never allowed her daughter to be apart from her. If Juliette, carried away by her natural impetuosity, occasionally forgot her mother’s instruction, the latter, launching herself out of the room in tears, shouted for her loudly, only seeming reassured when the child came back. She examined Juliette’s cheerful face for hours on end; it seemed to her that the little girl was already infected by the deadly malady that had carried off her son; then her despair knew no bounds.

how much of herself does helene see in alinska? how much does she extend to her the treatment she knows she would have wanted at an earlier point in her life? (how much does she still want it?)

there's something so poignant to me about a helene who struggled with mental illness earlier in her life, trying to reassure a young woman she sees herself in. when alinska states matter-of-factly that her lot in life is fixed, that her presence can only bring despair and misfortune, that there is no hope of turning from her course, helene recognizes, or thinks she recognizes, the tunnel vision of depression. she wants to reassure her that it gets better. she doesn't realize that the problem is more than mental illness, that alinska really is trapped in her situation. only in death does she realize the truth of what was happening, what alinska is and why she was there.

and how does she respond? she and her son are dead by alinska's hand. alinska was drawn here by her husband's broken promise, to carry out a destructive revenge against him. what does she feel when, as a spirit, she watches him fall back into love with the woman who murdered her? what does she feel when his obliviousness leads to alinska's death in turn?

can helene forgive her?

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

This translator does plenty of author background check and research, apparently. Not for The Pale Lady, it looks like? Did he have any opinions on the Virgin Vampire?

Stableford not only has not read The Pale Lady, he clearly doesn't even know what it's about lmao

Alexandre Dumas incorporated a tale of a female vampire into the portmanteau work Une Journée à Fontenay-aux-Roses (1849; the vampire story is sometimes reprinted separately as “La Dame blanche”, and in English translation as “The Pale Lady”);

That aside, his research is one of the stronger points of his translations; I find the historical context and author background to be quite interesting and useful.

His takes on The Virgin Vampire are much better than his takes on Captain Vampire. Mainly, he argues that the real villain of the story is its strangely cruel and unmerciful depiction of God, which I pretty much agree with. He gets in some pretty entertaining dunks on the characters and the author, my favorite of which is this description of Edouard:

The reader, of course, can have no sympathy at all for Edouard, who does not have an ounce of moral fiber in him, in spite of all his protestations and posturing; he is essentially fickle, driven by the kind of lust that requires continual visual stimulus for its sustenance, and ever-willing to make hypocritical promises. It is not merely his refusal to believe in vampires that reveals his fundamental lack of imagination.

Get his ass.

His most baffling take, and the one that I least agree with, is this one:

Although [Alinska] certainly knows that she is dead and irredeemably damned, it is not entirely clear that she is conscious of being a vampire, and she does not seem to be fully aware of her responsibility for the deaths of Eugène and Hélène.

I have enough textual evidence against this that I'm putting it under a cut for the sake of post length.

First, from this scene where everyone starts talking about vampires; Alinska reacts dramatically every time they're mentioned, to the point of fainting when Hélène speculates, correctly, that a vampire might have killed her son.

“Vampires, here!” exclaimed Delmont. “Vampires! Is that execrable deceit being propagated in R***? Who can have brought the hideous fables of Greece and Hungary here?” As he finished speaking, the colonel could not help looking at Alinska. He saw that she was upset. Her features were distraught, expressing an unparalleled horror; she had opened her mouth slightly; her eyes were fixed—and by virtue of a rapid impulse, immediately suppressed, she seemed to have intended to get up and leave.

“For God’s sake Madame, don’t manifest a dread similar to that of that population of idiots; you’re too intelligent to believe in such a folly. These demons, these Boucolatres, these Vampires, only ever existed in the imagination of the man who first took it into his head to talk about them.” At his point the Hungarian woman directed a stare at Monsieur de Berneval so lugubrious, accompanied by a smile so frightful, that, in spite of his self-assurance, he stopped in mid-speech, nonplussed, losing along with his words the desire to talk, which had never left him before.

Vampires might exist; perhaps it is to a monster of that species that I owe the unexpected death of my son...” Suddenly, a piercing scream escaped the foreigner. She rose to her feet impetuously, tried to take a step forward, and fell to the floor, deprived of consciousness...

Afterwards, Alinska makes a reference to vampires being used to execute the will of Heaven, which aligns with how she talks about herself:

“Is that what made me faint, Doctor? Wasn’t someone taking about Vampires? Who dared to lift the mysterious veil with which Heaven covers the accomplishment of its terrible will?”

She's also aware that vampirism is a condition of failing to fulfill the blood pact:

No one doubts, in Hungary, that by such an act, two lovers are irrevocably bound to one another; any union that is not contracted between the two of them cannot be happy. Eventually, a female virgin affianced in that fashion may rise from the tomb that covers her after her death, in order to torment, in the fashion of a Vampire, the perfidious man who has abandoned her.

 It was impossible that a daughter of Hungary did not believe in the reality of Vampires; she had talked to him about them on several occasions.

And she is aware that she needs to drink blood:

“Don’t touch me! Run away, instead—you must not see what is going to happen. Ladislas! Ladislas! Come to me, or I shall not be able to carry the mission you have confided to me to its conclusion.” [...] At a turning of the path that bought him almost opposite the place where Alinska was lying on the grass, he thought he might be able to see what was happening there. He saw, or thought he saw, the old servant lean over her to pour a red liquid into her mouth.

“It’s not refreshments I’m asking for! I need blood! Blood! Yours, Edouard!”

I think it probable Stableford is basing his interpretation on this line, when Alinska is being haunted by the ghost of Hélène:

“What can she want with me, with that child who walks with her? Is it my fault if they aren’t three? Why is she opposed to the entire completion of my mission? She knows that we shall never be together again; she will live on high, while I suffer down below.”

But I think he's misinterpreting. She's not confused as to why Hélène is haunting her, she's specifically asking why Hélène and Eugène are blocking her from feeding on and killing Juliette, with the rationale that if Juliette did die, the three of them would be reunited in death. Her remark about "the completion of my mission" makes it clear that she knows she is responsible for their deaths.

Anyway, it's weird to argue that she knows she's dead, but not that she's a vampire. What else would she think she is, if not that? Again, she was raised on vampire folklore; she's intimately familiar with the legends about them.

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

My impression is she's not a voluptuous vampire? Unlike Stoker's giggling, coquettish "sexually forward women are scary and corrupt" trademark Victorian anxiety ones.

Quite the opposite, really, to the point where the other characters go out of their way to point it out (warning: slutshaming abounds in the following passage, it's just not directed at Alinska):

“These visible resources, the talents that the foreigner possesses, and her manners—noble, if a trifle bizarre—already declare that she does not belong to the unworthy class of women seeking to speculate on their charms. Since she has been here she has lived in absolute seclusion; she has obstinately refused all the advances made to her; your neighbors, in spite of their persistence in being drawn toward her, have scarcely been able to catch a glimpse of her in your home. They comprise a numerous society, however, and adventuresses never refuse an opportunity to show themselves in such circumstances, where they might easily encounter some prey.

It's in the name: "la vierge de Hongrie" is saving herself for marriage, even in death, and does not have eyes for anyone except Edouard. Her vampiric targets are Edouard's wife and children; once again, Men Cannot Get Bitten. (But they should have been. My God, they should have been.) She's treated as more of an Ice Queen than a Sexy Seductress, even acquiring a suitor whose advances she steadfastly rejects (he calls her the Cruel One, with capitals, for this. also he is her FUCKING DOCTOR and fell in love with her while she was unconscious having a mortal wound treated. it's so unfair he never got his throat torn out).

Frankly, I don't think she even comes across as all that attracted to Edouard. I can believe that she was at one point, but that affection seems to be rapidly cooling as the book goes on—though some of that may just be me getting increasingly fed up with him. You could easily read her as asexual—although this is not so much a Diversity Win as it is Lamothe-Langon's inability to imagine women as sexual beings.

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

alinska would grand slam that christian baby out of the stadium but she wouldn't do it of her own free will, God Himself would force her to while tears are running down her cheeks as she fruitlessly attempts to bunt

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

@major-knighton moving your ask over to this blog since this is where the context is