True Blood and Philosophy

Sookie makes her way through the world as a working-class, “disabled” (or psychically gifted) woman, meeting members of other groups that are also struggling for equality and acceptance. An enlightened woman, Sookie wants to support their rights but finds that effort difficult when, for example, she discovers the violent and hierarchical attitudes imbedded within supernatural cultures.¹ Her commitment to diversity is challenged when both supernatural creatures and religious extremists attack her. Take, for instance, Sookie’s discomfort with the Shreveport Were pack’s inclusion of sexual intercourse as part of the initiation of a new pack leader in Dead as a Doornail, the fifth book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries. Her response is similar to the tension felt by many feminists who support the rights of others to determine their own culture while also worrying about groups that still expect women to wear a burka. Sookie’s struggle mirrors that of Hugo, a minor character in season 2 of True Blood and Living Dead in Dallas, the second book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries. “I was convinced vampires had the same civil rights as other people,” he reports, adding that since then he’s concluded that “vampires aren’t American. They aren’t even black or Asian or Indian. They aren’t Rotarians or Baptists. They’re all just plain vampires. That’s their color and their religion and their nationality.”² Hugo suggests that at least some differences shouldn’t be tolerated.

The religious beliefs of some members of the community put them at odds with others whose actions offend their conservative religious sensibilities—not just vampires, but also someone like Lafayette Reynolds, a gay African American man whose clothes and behavior shock his conservative neighbors. The use of the phrase “coming out of the coffin” to describe the public emergence of vampire culture suggests that vampires are similar to homosexuals in their struggle for acceptance.³ And True Blood’s opening title sequence shows a billboard that converts the famous antigay slogan of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, “God hates fags,” to “God hates fangs.”

In the Southern Vampire Mysteries, Lafayette Reynolds is murdered a few pages into Living Dead in Dallas and discussed only in passing to illustrate Sookie’s sympathy for his doubly difficult minority identity. As a major figure in the first two seasons of True Blood, however, Lafayette brings the issue of homosexuality into sharper focus. His expanded story line places him in direct conflict with his foil, Eric. Both are flamboyantly sexual, although with different sexual orientations. Lafayette cooks at a bar, while Eric owns a bar where no food is needed. Lafayette displays himself on the Internet for money; Eric displays himself at Fangtasia for curious fang-bangers. Big problems arise, however, when Eric imprisons Lafayette for weeks, leaving him traumatized. Superficial similarities based on the shared experience of discrimination do not necessarily make for friendship. The lesson seems to be that even two groups whose experiences are roughly parallel may find collaboration difficult.

That victims of discrimination don’t always band together is evident in the fact that many of Sookie’s most difficult conflicts are with other women who—in an ideal feminist world—should be her allies. Disagreements among women pose problems for a united feminist front. Sookie is often threatened by and engages in violence against other women. She fights with Maryann Forrester and Lorena on True Blood, and kills her romantic rival Debbie Pelt in the fourth book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries. Economic boundaries also limit Sookie’s opportunities and bother her most when she compares herself to other women, especially the ones Bill Compton dates after their breakup in the third book. As a white woman, however, Sookie has advantages that other women do not.

Consider the plight of Tara Thornton, Sookie’s best friend on True Blood. Tara is attractive, intelligent, and fiercely independent, but also black, poor, and the daughter of an alcoholic single mother. When viewers meet Tara in the show’s first episode, she’s just about to quit her retail job under circumstances that illustrate the special challenges faced by black women. Tara is reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, a book that shows Tara to be smart and worldly. When she quits her job, she threatens to send her “baby-daddy,” fresh out of jail, to kick in the teeth of her boss and the difficult customer in the store. To her horror, they take her seriously: “Oh my God! I’m not serious, you pathetic racist. I don’t have a baby. Damn! I know you have to be stupid, but do you have to be that stupid?” In one simple statement, Tara breaks down a stereotype about black women. She also associates the practice of stereotyping with white people’s sense of entitlement, as shown in the customer’s expectation that Tara will magically produce plastic sheeting and her reference to her boss’s history of ass-grabbing.

It’s easy to see why Tara and Sookie are friends. They grew up together, facing similar hardships. Sookie’s grandmother seems to have raised both girls. Both Sookie and Tara are intelligent women who work in service industry jobs. It makes sense that with their similar backgrounds, they would have similar roles. But Sookie has certain privileges because she is white that Tara does not. The myth of the single black mother with a violent “baby-daddy” in prison doesn’t haunt Sookie, even though Arlene, another waitress at Merlotte’s, comes close to being the white version of this stereotype. Could this difference be the root of Tara’s defensive, quick-tempered public persona? Is Sookie in a position to recognize the innate unfairness? After all, she gets to be the story’s hero, while Tara does not.

Tara’s efforts on behalf of herself and others often backfire, even when she goes after her goals with the same heroic intentions as Sookie. Tara attempts to better her life and the lives of those around her by, in the first place, trying to reconcile with her mother. In this process, however, Tara sees her mother taken over by religious enthusiasm as Tara herself succumbs to her own problems with alcohol. Landing in jail for drunk driving, she’s “rescued” by Maryann, who seems to represent the possibility of a new and healthier lifestyle. Instead, Tara finds herself participating in orgies, murder, cannibalism, and pagan rituals. Her white “savior,” Maryann, only enables more bad choices that wreck Tara’s life and lead to her being victimized again. Tara’s plight shows that racial inequalities can often complicate a black woman’s attempt to achieve her full potential. In the Southern Vampire Mysteries, Tara is far less developed as a character. She’s described as a high school friend of Sookie’s, and her race and background are not made fully clear (although we do learn that her parents were abusive and neglectful alcoholics). True Blood transforms Tara’s story into a reflection on a core obstacle to any united feminist agenda, the special disadvantages faced by some women on account of their race or cultural background.

True Blood sends a sex-positive message, at least on the surface. The show revels in steamy love scenes, a major source of its wild popularity. Sookie’s growing sexual self-confidence is a central theme of the first season, and the humorous treatment of Lafayette’s prostitution and Internet pornography business recalls those two specific sources of conflict within the “sex wars” while extending the show’s sexual openness beyond heterosexuality. Yet whether sexuality is a source of female empowerment seems unclear in both True Blood and reality.

The show’s most vivid portrayal of sexuality comes with the maenad Maryann, who represents the extreme of pro-sex feminism. Her characterization recalls certain stereotypes of late- 1970s feminism. On the one hand, her household in its calmer moments calls to mind the nurturing and communal mentality of feminist consciousness-raising groups. On the other hand, her rage to sacrifice Sam Merlotte fits the stereotype of the feminist as a man-eater. As Sookie’s adversary, she highlights the risk that uninhibited sexuality poses to society and how it can become a source of violence between men and women. Maryann’s minions blend sex and violence in their supernatural hedonism. In one episode, Tara and her boyfriend, Eggs Talley, beat each other up in a sex-charged encounter fueled by the flavor of Maryann’s cannibalistic “hunter’s soufflé.”⁶ Ultimately, Maryann must be killed to restore order and bring peace to Bon Temps, a plot twist that suggests that wholly unregulated sexuality is dangerous.⁷

Although Maryann has the power to influence others, her worship of the Greek god Dionysus calls her female empowerment into question and hints that her brand of feminism is not as assertive as it appears. In the later episodes of the second season, Maryann reveals that her pursuit of Sam stems from her need for a “vessel” whose sacrifice will summon Dionysus into physical form. Her destabilization of Bon Temps had not been for her own immediate sexual gratification after all, but to create an attractive environment for Dionysus. By the season finale, Maryann is just a supplicant desperately trying to lure back her absent lord and husband. Gored by the horn of the bull she believes to be the god, she’s willing to die happily if she can be “the vessel” for Dionysus. With its strong sexual charge, her death scene even bears a resemblance to the torture porn that is often at the center of feminist challenges to free sexual expression.

In contrast to Maryann, Sookie’s more traditional sexual values allow her to define her own identity, boundaries, and relationships. Still, Sookie’s outlook on love and sex is deeply ambivalent. She’s involved in constant negotiations between her sexual impulses, her desire for independence, and her adherence to conventional morality. This all reflects feminism’s internal debate over sexuality. At the core of the show is Sookie’s growing comfort with her own sexuality in her relationship with Bill, as well as the sexual tension between her and other potential sexual partners like Sam and Eric. But at the same time she expresses anxiety about sex outside of a committed relationship. She explains her conundrum in All Together Dead, the seventh book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries: “I have lust.... Big, big lust. But I’m not a one-night-stand kind of woman.”⁸ Sookie’s values are shaped partly by the conservative social codes that still linger in the Deep South. Tradition is not Sookie’s main challenge, however, nor is her sexual restraint simply an outdated mentality she needs to overcome. It’s a product of personal reflection, as she reveals in Definitely Dead, the sixth book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, where she tells the sexy weretiger Quinn, “I’m not interested in starting that up with someone who’s just horny at the moment.... I want to be sure, if I have sex with you, that it’s because you want to be around for a while and because you like me for who I am, not what I am.” Sookie goes on to muse, “Maybe a million women had made approximately the same speech. I meant it as sincerely as any of those million.”⁹ Her self-respect demands sexual caution.

At times, Sookie’s confusion about how to maintain boundaries in a romantic relationship calls the very coherence of feminist thought into question. A notable example comes when Sookie argues with Bill on a car ride to Shreveport early in Living Dead in Dallas. She’s upset that Bill has offered to pay her shopping tab at the strip mall he owns, in her mind placing her in the degrading role of “kept woman” and turning her sexuality into a commodity. She asserts her independence by storming out of Bill’s car, a bad decision that results in her being attacked by the maenad. But later Sookie suspects that her anger at Bill was irrational. After all, she resents Bill’s making a large financial gift to the Bellefleur family while she has to struggle to pay her own bills, as though she wanted Bill to help her out, too. Baffled, she even wonders whether the “kept woman” fight might have been caused by supernatural influence—although Bill feels sure it wasn’t. In her fight with Bill, Sookie seems committed to the belief that women need to maintain their independence in sexual relationships, but she’s uncertain about what really constitutes independence. Perhaps because its implications are unclear, the “kept woman” argument is left out of True Blood’s depiction of this scene and replaced with a more straightforward argument about whether Sookie has the right to make decisions for herself.

Sookie understandably has misgivings about pursuing a romantic relationship with the man who signs her paychecks. But the deeper she delves into vampire culture, the more she discovers the near impossibility of avoiding the mix of business and pleasure. In True Blood’s first episode, Tara points out Sam’s attraction to Sookie, who replies, “Tara! He is my boss!”¹⁰ Sookie has drawn a clear line between work and romantic relationships, but it’s challenged by ongoing sexual tension with Sam and her attraction to her new employer, Eric. Sookie’s connection to Eric is deepened through job-related interaction. She begins a sexual relationship with Eric while being paid for his care in Dead to the World, the fourth book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, and is forced to accept a blood bond with him to avoid serving Queen Sophie-Anne in All Together Dead. This unnerving scene—presented in a workplace context at the Vampire Summit—highlights Sookie’s powerlessness in both her business and her romantic relationships with vampires. In this murky mixture of sex and work, Sookie resents that her professional commitment to Eric consistently limits her ability to make free choices in her love life.

These conflicts aren’t limited to Sookie’s relationships with men, whether human or vampire. Within the hierarchical vampire culture it’s common to place sexual demands on subordinates. In Dead and Gone, the ninth book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, Sookie learns from Eric’s new bartender that the sheriff is considered a generous leader simply because he doesn’t demand sexual services from anyone unwilling to give them. Female vampires blend sexual pursuit and hierarchical power as freely as their male counterparts. True Blood’s Sophie-Anne highlights vampires’ manipulation of subordinates. In her first appearance, the queen is feeding on a human woman who is summarily dismissed when her services are no longer required. The interaction is both intimate and business-like, with a female authority figure exploiting a less powerful (but presumably willing) human. Lorena also reverses conventional gender assumptions about exploitive power relationships by using as romantic leverage against Bill her status as his maker. In contrast to female vampires like Lorena and Sophie-Anne, Eric and Bill balance personal affection and professional responsibility admirably.

Despite overturning our assumptions about which gender is usually the perpetrator and which the victim in cases of sexual harassment, Sookie’s experience in the vampire world can still be compared to women’s experiences in a patriarchal workplace. It’s possible to interpret vampire-human interactions as a metaphor for the male-female balance of power. Yet Sookie’s conflicted emotions about workplace relationships and her ongoing attraction to vampires complicate the potential of True Blood and the Southern Vampire Mysteries as feminist social commentary. Sookie’s biggest challenge doesn’t seem to be fighting oppression, but sorting out her own desires.

Sookie questions not just her romantic choices, but also whether she’s really bettering her life by pursuing a taxing but well-paid career as a telepath instead of sticking with her lower-status but low-pressure job as a barmaid. In this regard she’s living out one of the great controversies within contemporary feminism. Must women embrace career ambition in order to grow? Sookie wants to work because she prizes her independence and gets satisfaction from a job well done. When Eric offers to support her in Dead and Gone, she quickly declines. Professionalism is a source of pride for Sookie: when she meets Bill in the show’s first episode, she defines herself through her job. “What are you?” Bill asks. “I’m Sookie Stackhouse,” she replies. “I’m a waitress.”¹¹ At the same time, Sookie often worries that her job at Merlotte’s isn’t good enough to earn the respect of others. She’s torn between two career paths that offer different forms of satisfaction.

Sookie’s professional confusion mirrors her story’s ambiguous relationship to feminism and highlights problems of social class. Sookie’s professional identity is deeply tied to her class identity as a barmaid. In Dead and Gone Sookie reflects on educational and professional access during a brief conversation with the new leader of the Shreveport werewolf pack, Alcide Herveaux. He mentions that the pack will raise enough money to send the orphaned son of the former pack leader to college. When Sookie is angered that the boy appears to be receiving preferential treatment over his sister, Alcide hastily adds that there might be enough money to educate the girl, too. Sookie immediately rethinks her reaction, though. Since the boy is a full-blooded werewolf and the girl is not, she isn’t being discriminated against based on gender. Like the “kept woman” debate with Bill in Living Dead in Dallas, Sookie’s conversation with Alcide moves toward an indictment of sexism that’s quickly deflected by other concerns.

Sookie’s career as a telepathic detective brings her into a high-stakes, competitive professional sphere. On True Blood we see her business relationship with Eric defined when she visits Fangtasia to help him question employees about embezzled money. Sookie agrees to work for him again only if he promises to turn the culprit over to the human authorities unharmed. She makes a similar demand in her negotiations with the vampire sheriff Stan in Living Dead in Dallas, once again attempting to mitigate the impact of the vampires’ accustomed “business” strategy. But despite her attempts to protect others, her new professional role regularly thrusts her into violent conflicts, something she finds troubling even when her own violent behavior is in self-defense. In Dead and Gone, for example, Sookie considers that in contrast to her work as a telepathic detective, her original profession of barmaid was a nurturing one. The choice of whether to prioritize her job as barmaid or her role as telepath often comes down to a choice between relating to the world through nurturance or through conflict. Not unlike an ordinary woman deciding between a cutthroat career in business and a lower-paid but more nurturing path like education, Sookie must weigh concerns about salary and respect against other values. For many women and minorities, decisions in this area may be seen as setting precedents for others and having implications for how members of their group are viewed or come to think of themselves. Sookie is concerned more about how her choices will affect her own income and respectability, but she still struggles with anxiety about which career path best allows her to become the woman she wishes to be. Her unwillingness to choose one career over the other shows just how difficult these decisions are.

Incendiary Identities

Supernatural Sex

Vocational Values

More Questions than Answers

NOTES