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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Authentic Dasein and the Anxious Uncanny Chapter 3: Munch - Combining Heidegger and Kant “Let the body die but save the soul.” (Munch, 183) What began as a warm image of a nurturing woman, gently planting a kiss on her lover’s neck, gradually transformed into an evil, life-destroying, and blood-sucking ‘femme fatal’, giving birth to Munch’s Vampire , painted in 1893 (Ingles, 29).

Possessing “a deceptive quality of floating gentleness” (Smith, 66), the work, originally titled Love and Pain , is far from soothing. The spectator is faced with a woman sucking the strength out of the man - enveloping and strangling him with her long fiery-red hair - while he passively submits to his fate (Smith, 66).

The woman’s hair - which can both “envelop and strangle” (Harris, 7) - acts like a net, catching its prey to devour it, while at the same time uniting the figures as one; it also represents the desire for unity as well as the fear or being dominated and destroyed (Schneede, 60). Arne Eggum adds that “the woman dominates . [and] her red hair binds him to her like a Medusa” (qtd. in Nierhoff, 40).

Stanislaw Przybyszwski gives a sharp and descriptive analysis of the painting: There is something terribly peaceful, passionless about this painting, an inexpressible fatality of resignation. The man rolls deeper and deeper into the abyss, powerless. He is happy that he can roll like a stone with no will of its own.

He will never be able to get away from the vampire, nor from the pain, and the woman will always sit there and will bite him for all eternity with a thousand tongues of vipers, with a thousand poisoned teeth. (qtd. in Nierhoff, 39) The embrace of the woman carries an air of the masculine - the dominant one. The male figure, on the other hand, is giving in out of weakness, not trust (Nierhoff, 41). The forceful dark shadow surrounding them ‘outshines’ the tender embrace, setting an anxious mood.

The man is presented as a pitiful object, while the woman in her maturity becomes terrifying (Karpinski, 128). Munch was suspicious of women throughout his life, “describing them as vampires” (Steinberg and Weiss, 413), and thus choosing never to marry. Vampire is an allegory “of the battle between sexes” (Heller, 82 qtd. in Nierhoff, 40), and whether the woman is kissing or biting him remains uncertain to some (Nierhoff, 41).