The Mother is a Vamp: Explorations in the Mommy-lilt Faction of Paranormal Romance | Michelle De Stefani

Summary: Vampires, Vamps and Va Va Voom | Michelle De Stefani <a name="michelle-de-stefani" id="michelle-de-stefani"><strong>The Mother is a Vamp: explorations into the Mommy-lit faction of Paranormal Romance</strong></a> What do you get if you cross a working-class, forty-something-year-old single mother with a blood-sucking vampire? A whole lot, in fact. The ‘Mommy-lit’ hybrid of Vampire Romance fiction provides a novel platform for discussions of female subjectivity, constructions of motherhood and paranormal twists on the notion of the ‘traditional family’. This paper engages predominately with Michele Bardsley’s <em>Broken Heart</em> series as an inlet into social and psychoanalytic critique of this emerging trend in contemporary romance fiction. It is observed that Vampire Mommy-lit functions as a discourse of patriarchal resistance by embracing the mother-daughter plot as essential female experience, thereby relegating the female’s dependence on males and children to the periphery. The gothic fantasy of ‘the Mother as Vampire’ serves as an inlet back to preoedipal experience, providing a subversion of existing mother-archetypes and new representations of mothering. Michelle De Stefani is a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) graduate in the Department of English and is currently completing a Bachelor of Laws at Monash University. Her research interests include Children’s literature and childhood studies, Victorian Literature, popular and visual culture.