I Am Legend

         

           I Am Legend by Richard Matheson was on my ‘to read’ pile for quite some time. Considering Matheson had penned some works I’m quite fond of, such as What Dreams May Come and numerous classic Twilight Zone episodes, I had high hopes for his take on the lone survivor battling against legions of vampires. I was disappointed. The story didn’t engage me and the obvious sexism made it a difficult read to push through.

            As with much of Matheson’s work, this book is character intensive. The plot revolves around Robert Neville’s external battle with his mutated vampiric neighbors and his internal battles with his rage and sexual desire. It’s likely the story lacked appeal to me as I didn’t care much about the character of Neville. He is the alpha male banging his chest in every sense, conquering every facet of stereotypical manhood from foraging for materials to construction to physical altercation to scientific discovery. Neville is the concept of manliness amplified to an extreme that creates a self-contained cocoon of male pleasures including steak, whisky, and never stale tobacco.

            Neville’s main weakness is another male stereotype: his dependence on alcohol to suppress his emotions. This is reasonable considering all the turmoil the character has been through. However, his alcoholism isn’t impactful enough to keep him from completing the difficult task of surviving. In fact, he manages to keep up his defenses, kill off vampires, find supplies, and study complex theories all while being inebriated. A hard feat for me to swallow as realistic.

            These machismo elements in themselves would not be as off putting if they were consistent through the story. At some points, Neville is the everyday blue collar man working diligently to keep his defenses up and survive with his tools and self-preservation skills. Sometimes, he is a warrior able to brutally dispatch the sleeping vampires during the day and battle them when necessary. Then, suddenly he is an intellectual that enjoys classical music and manages to figure out the source of the plague through nothing more than books and experimentation. These different identities don’t mesh well together. At times, he is rather dense. For example, he is able to fend of the vampires with crosses and garlic and dispatch them with stakes (all of which me figured out through vampire mythology) yet misses the basic premise of sunlight as a weakness to his enemies. He has to accidently destroy a vampire by sunlight to make that connection. Rather unlikely for a man who later is able to piece together the biological basis for vampirism. He manages to fight off multiple vampires in a scene to get into his house with a hangover but can’t catch a wounded dog in another. Neville despises Ben Cortman for threatening his survival or enjoys the combative relationship like a hardened solider depending on his mood.

The bigger issue with the character for me is his sexist take on women. All the women in this book are either saints that needs protecting or the whore out to get him. His wife, Virginia, and their daughter, Kathy, are flat characters that have no distinct personality. Neville never misses something specific about either of them. He expresses his heartache but never what is unique about them to cause it. Does he miss conversations with his wife? Does he miss the way his daughter hummed when she was happy? Any endearing quirks they had? Neville never supplies any such particulars. Flashbacks show the interacts as a means to show the reader Neville is a good husband concerned for his wife and a devoted father that checks on his sleeping daughter. Yet these scenes give no insight on the women he laments losing. They are reduced to mere plot devices to give Neville inner conflict. Their deaths haunt him not because they meant something to him as individuals but because they belonged to him.

The vampire women are portrayed as temptresses that prey on his near uncontrollable lust. He blames them for his desire. He acknowledges his urge to rape them and yet brushes it off. This is forgivable. After all, they are intended to be monstrous representations of women in vampire form. Yet this malicious femme fatale view extends to the final female introduced in the book, Ruth, in an attempt to make his treatment of her acceptable. After chasing her down and forcing her into his house, Neville responds to her with distrust and cruelty. He regards her with contempt and is disgusted by any “feminine gesture” or “typical feminine question” even discounting oddities in her story and behavior by thinking “she’s just a woman.” He contemplates killing her before checking her blood for infection as he is unsure he even wants a companion and doesn’t find her figure attractive. Furthermore, Ruth is portrayed as the catalyst to Neville’s demise. Even as she is shown trying to help him, it is veiled through a one sided romantic interest in him that implies she is emotionally weak.

I do want to mention that much of my issue with the book in regards to Neville’s character and the portrayal of women may be in part due to personal bias. As a rather feminine woman, Neville is nearly impossible for me to empathize with. Even if parts of his plight I could understand and sympathize with, I couldn’t form any bond that would allow me to care about him. At several points in reading I realized I wasn’t frightened because I couldn’t care less if the man lived or died. The depictions of women were specifically frustrating as a woman. That bias is hard to push aside since it a significant part of how I view myself. Each woman he treated poorly I associated with myself.

My interpretation may be colored with presentism as well. I had to remind myself that this was written in the 1950’s. During this time period, Matheson’s take on men and women is not unusual. Men worked and held a dominant leadership role. Women were submissive and remained in a domestic role. The parts that bothered me in this story were likely accepted views at the time. It’s also quite possible I’m simply not the audience for this book.

My biggest complaint is the weak structure of the narrative. The ending had a great theme and the potential to create a strong statement. It fails to make that impact as there isn’t the foreshadowing and focus on those themes until the end. As it is, Neville is driven by survival and his quest to uncover the logical reasons for the plague. There is no foreshadowing that any living vampires had been self-awareness or had begun building a new community. Any thoughts on the humanity of the vampires or what it means to be a normal part of society are minimal at best throughout the piece. Then we have a sudden twist that makes a point about social structure and what it means to be an outsider. As a writer, it felt to me that Matheson had written himself into a corner and pulled out the twist ending as a way to give Neville’s journey some meaning.