Elizabeth D. Macaluso - Gender, The New Woman, and The Monster-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2019)

Gender, the New
Woman, and
the Monster
Elizabeth D. Macaluso
Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster
Elizabeth D. Macaluso
Gender,
the New Woman,
and the Monster
Elizabeth D. Macaluso
Queensborough Community College
Queens, NY, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-30475-1 ISBN 978-3-030-30476-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8
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Preface
My book considers the way that the figure of the monster contributes
to the debate about the New Woman and gender at the British fin de
siècle. The figure of the monster contributes three conclusions to this
discussion. (1) The figure of the monster reveals that there was a con-
flict in culture in Britain at the fin de siècle between British subjects who
held traditional values (conservatives) and those who exhibited progres-
sive viewpoints (New Liberals, radicals, and socialists). (2) The figure of
the monster collapses social categories and boundaries that traditional-
ists held dear, like race and colonialism (native-ness versus foreignness),
gender and the New Woman, homo/sexuality, and discourses on pov-
erty. (3) The figure of the monster shows that the New Woman and
gender are also indeterminate and liminal subjects. Friendships between
women can be queer. The British populous viewed the New Woman as
either a monstrous figure (a threat to family, nation, and Empire) or a
laudable figure (a role model for New Women and women to emulate).
The foreign and perverse violence of the monster shows that conflict
was embedded in colonialism, the New Woman, sexuality, and poverty
at century’s end. Finally, the figure of the monster demands that New
Women who were racially and ethnically “Other,” or different from the
white English norm, should be incorporated into British society not ban-
ished to its limits.
Queens, USA Elizabeth D. Macaluso
v
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the scholars who helped me to write this

book. Thank you to the tremendously inspirational intellectual commu-
nity at Oberlin College. To Nick Jones, Phyllis Gorfain, Bruce Richards,
Jennifer Bryan, Wendy Kozol, and Kirk Ormand: Without your constant
support and inspiring examples, this book would not have been possi-
ble. Also, I acknowledge the tremendous mentorship I received from
Amy M. King. From you, I learned what it means to be a scholar who
works on women’s lives in the Victorian and British fin de siècle peri-
ods. Also, I thank Steve Mentz, John Lowney, Kathie Lubey, Rachel
Hollander, Steve Sicari, and Derek Owens. You taught me what it means
to be an author, scholar, teacher, and mentor to countless students.
Thank you for your guidance, support, and shining examples of what is
good in humanity. I am also thanking the entire faculty at Binghamton
University, particularly, Melissa Free (Arizona State University), Michael
Conlon, Joseph Keith, Kristi Murray Costello, Praseeda Gopinath,
Jessie Reeder, Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit, and Susan Strehle for their support
of this manuscript, my Ph.D., and my success on the job market. Your
support through this process has been invaluable. I’d also like to give a
special thanks to Maria Mazziotti Gillan who provided countless hours
of encouragement with these and other matters, namely, the publication
of my first volume of poetry, The Lighthouse. Thank you, Maria! Finally,
I acknowledge Lisa Surridge, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Marlene Tromp,
Diana Maltz, and Heidi Kaufmann. Your unfailing support of my man-
uscript and your countless hours of work so freely given to new scholars
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
means more to me, and to our community, than it is possible to express

in words. I thank you for your friendship. Lastly, I thank my friends,
students, and family—because of you, I am a professor, scholar, and
author. These acknowledgments are a testament to what it means to real-
ize one’s dreams and they encourage all to continue this work even in
challenging times.
Contents
1 Introduction: Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster 1

1.1 Methodology 9
1.2 How This Book Engages Scholarly Debates 10
References 15
2 “I Love You with All the Moods and Tenses of the Verb”:
Lucy and Mina’s Love in Bram Stoker’s Dracula 19
2.1 Cultural and Personal Contexts for Lucy and Mina’s
“Intimate Friendship” 20
2.2 Lucy and Mina’s “Intimate Friendship” 23
References 34
3 The Monstrous Power of Uncertainty: Social

and Cultural Conflict in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle 37
3.1 The Novel’s Social Conflicts in Their Historical Context 41
3.2 Homosexuality as an Abomination and a Tool
for Liberation 46
3.3 Holt and the Poor as Undesirable Vagrants and Everymen 50
3.4 British Colonialism in Egypt: A Conversation Between
Jingoism and Anti-imperialism 55
3.5 The New Woman as “Wild Woman” and Rational Agent 59
3.6 Finale: The Power of Marsh’s Monstrous Uncertainty 65
References 67
ix
x CONTENTS
4 The Rise of Harriet Brandt: A Critique of the British

Aristocracy in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire 71
4.1 The Vitriolic Effects of Elinor’s Xenophobia 73
4.2 Phillips’s Injurious Racism and Sexism 80
4.3 Harriet’s Humanity: A Critique
of the British Aristocracy 88
4.4 Finale: Harriet’s Humanity Implores Readers
to Question Her Fate 95
References 96
5 Conclusion 99
References 104
Index 105
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Gender, the New Woman,

and the Monster
At the height of Britain’s power, at the fin de siècle, British subjects were
plagued by specific cultural anxieties that were made in response to very
complex social issues. In the literature of the age, the figure of the mon-
ster became a marker of these cultural anxieties as Britons could project
their fears onto these monsters (Halberstam, 1995, p. 92). Dracula reflects
Britons’ anxieties about the flood of Eastern European immigrants who
made their way back to the British metropole (Arata, 1996, p. 115).1 Stok-
er’s novel expresses real concerns that white, conservative British had about
the aftereffects of British colonization (imperialism and colonialism) (Arata,
1996, p. 107). Additionally, Dracula, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, and Flo-
rence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire are meditations on the significance
of the New Woman. British subjects did not know what to make of New
Women, like Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra, who wished to have control
over their romantic relationships. Neither did they know how to deal with
women who wished to govern their own lives, like Marjorie Lindon, or who
insisted on living independently like Harriet Brandt (prior to her marriage).
Dracula takes on the subject of homosexuality and Dracula, himself, has
been read as a doppelganger for Oscar Wilde (Schaffer, 1994, p. 406). The
Beetle looks closely at the problem of poverty in Britain and aims to address
it by eliciting readers’ sympathy for its indigent protagonist, Robert Holt.
This book, however, will focus on gender and I will argue that the liminal
figure of the monster elicits new conclusions about women’s lives, wom-
en’s issues, the New Woman, and gender at the fin de siècle. I am adding
© The Author(s) 2019 1

E. D. Macaluso, Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_1
2 E. D. MACALUSO
to the debate about gender, made famous by Judith Butler, and am con-
curring with her that gender is an indeterminate social construct that resists
categories and boundaries (1990, p. ii). As opposed to solely focusing on
modern studies of women’s lives and gender theory or Victorian studies of
gender, women’s lives, and female characters’ fictional lives (which I defi-
nitely involve in the book), to add to this already established conclusion, I
am focusing on the special interrelationships that monsters have with female
protagonists of British fin-de-siècle fiction to understand some of the new
ways that gender is indeterminate and resists categories and boundaries in
both fiction and the history of the British fin de siècle.
I will answer the question: How does the figure of the monster
invite conclusions about the indeterminacy of gender in Stoker’s Dracula,
Marsh’s The Beetle, and Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire? My answer to
this question is: the monster shows that female friendships can be almost
lesbian, and that the foreign and perverse monster2 invokes a contentious
debate between fin-de-siècle feminists, who see the New Woman as a role
model for future generations of women, and antifeminists, who see her
as a threat to family, nation, and Empire. My specific contribution to this
well-established history of debate is: the New Woman, like the foreign and
perverse monster (the Beetle), is an indeterminate figure herself and the
foreign and perverse monster incites more debate about her and other
pressing social issues like colonialism, sexuality, and poverty. The monster
figure, and his/her foreign and perverse violence, helps to define her by
inciting and presenting the debate about her to the reader of The Beetle,
so that she (the reader) decides how to understand her. The final focus of
my study is a female monster herself, Marryat’s Harriet Brandt. And, so,
the subjects of gender and the monster become inextricably intertwined.
Instead of writing a plot that solely attempts to get rid of the monster
(like Dracula and The Beetle boast), Florence Marryat makes the monster
female and, in doing so, asks her readers to sympathize with a woman, who
paradoxically has the ability to take the lives of her acquaintances, but is
so accomplished and lovely, otherwise, that it becomes difficult to solely
condemn her. Though the British characters of Marryat’s novel wish to be
rid of Harriet, because to them she bears the curse of heredity, race, and
she is so modern and “New” (independent, wealthy, and accomplished, like
the New Woman), Marryat, through the perspectives of Anthony Pennell
and Miss Wynward, defends her monster by emphasizing Harriet’s good
qualities (her kindness, beauty, talent, generosity and charity, and eventual
maturity and fairness). Thus, instead of engaging in a circuitous debate
1 INTRODUCTION: GENDER, THE NEW WOMAN, AND THE MONSTER 3
about whether Harriet is good or monstrous, Marryat dares to sympathize

with a monster and argues that she (an indeterminate subject), too, belongs
to, and should be incorporated in, British society, and not be banished to
its limits. Marryat even points the finger of “monster” at the other British
protagonists of her novel and asserts that their attempts to castigate Harriet
are “monstrous” themselves. In these ways, the book will also reveal that
gender is related to other issues that may seem tangential but are actually
deeply vetted to gender like sexuality (in the Dracula chapter), race, sexu-
ality, and class (in the Beetle chapter), and race (in the Blood of the Vampire
chapter).
My book’s secondary argument is that the liminal figure of the mon-
ster and the liminal figure of the New Woman present a conflict in fin-
de-siècle culture between conservative Britons who held traditional values
and liberal British subjects who had progressive viewpoints. This conflict
is also embedded in the aforementioned issues of race, gender, sexual-
ity, and class. Traditional Britons were conservatives in Parliament, and
conservatives in the general populous, who believed that imperialism and
colonialism were centrally important to the maintenance of Empire, the
castigation of the New Woman was integral to preserving the traditional
femininity of the British “woman,” the capital and/or criminal punishment
of male homosexuals preserved the purity of the state and the marital rela-
tionships that made it so, and the “hands off” approach to dealing with the
poor strengthened the social makeup of the state. Contrarily, progressive
subjects (radicals and socialists), New Liberals in Parliament, were commit-
ted to anti-imperialist/colonialist agendas and independence movements,
the enfranchisement of the New Woman and all women, the humaniza-
tion of homosexuals, and the unionization of the poor. There were socially
liberal moderates, who lived during Britain’s fin de siècle, but their finan-
cially conservative agendas were swept up in conservative Party politics,
thereby strengthening the schism between traditionalists and progressives
even further.
The liminal figure of the monster collapsed the boundaries of these
aforementioned subjects, or, again, colonialism and race, gender, sexual-
ity, and class.3 Is Dracula a British enthusiast with his British books and
maps, and is the Beetle a British subject, since he/she comes from British-
occupied Egypt, or are they both threatening insurgents from Britain’s
feared Eastern Europe and colonial Egypt? Was the New Woman a terrible
challenge to traditional, Victorian femininity or a role model for women
to lift themselves from obscurity, like Marjorie Lindon, who is criticized
4 E. D. MACALUSO
by her antifeminist father, friend, and captor but supported by her fiancé?
Are Lucy and Mina overly sexual and/or practical women or do they love
in ways that challenge these stereotypes? Is Harriet Brandt a monster or
an angel? Does Dracula’s effeminacy mean that he is gay? Is he gay or
straight? He has both male and female sexual victims. Does the Beetle’s
effeminacy and his/her masculine femininity connote stereotypes about
gay men and women? What does the Beetle’s foreign and perverse attack
on Holt suggest about homosexual men? Are they monsters or benevolent
lovers? Finally, does the Beetle’s foreign and perverse use of Holt suggest
that Holt should be left to live a life as a corruptible vagrant or should his
victimhood mean that he is a sympathetic everyman?
These are the ways that the liminal figure of the monster suggested a
conflict in fin-de-siècle culture and in race, gender, sexuality, and class at
century’s end. The liminality of the monster and the New Woman proves
that these other subjects were unsettled, too, that the violence between
Dracula, Lucy and Mina, the Beetle and Marjorie Lindon and the Beetle
and Lessingham and Holt, and the conflict embedded in Harriet Brandt’s
selfhood, as monster and woman, shows. Dracula triangulates the relation-
ship between himself, Lucy, and Mina and makes their friendship almost
lesbian. The Beetle’s foreign and perverse attack on Marjorie Lindon shows
that the New Woman and colonialism/race, sexuality, and discourses on the
poor are all vexed subjects. Harriet Brandt’s monstrosity/angelic qualities
make her a liminal subject who deserves to be included in British society
not left at its margins.
Scholars who write about late Victorian monsters maintain that their
bodies are often coded to represent what the Victorians feared about
race, gender, sexuality, and class (Halberstam, 1995, p. 92). Halberstam
writes that Dracula evoked anxieties about the Jew (1995, p. 95). H. L.
Malchow adds that the description of Dracula’s body, his aquiline nose, his
black hair and sallow skin, and his long fingernails all match the description
of “The Wandering Jew,” a Jewish character in George Lander’s stage ver-
sion of Eugène Sue’s novel The Wandering Jew (1996, pp. 156–157). Both
authors claim that modern anti-Semitism is literally mapped onto Dracula’s
“Jewish” body (1995, p. 95; 1996, p. 150). Malchow also contends that
Hyde is Jekyll’s fetishized “Other,” the salacious self that Jekyll refuses to
acknowledge (1996, p. 81). Jekyll’s divided self could have many implica-
tions (1996, pp. 82–83). Malchow posits that Jekyll’s monstrosity evokes
perversity and even “Semitic and Negroid features” (1996, p. 82). Finally,
in Marsh’s The Beetle, Holt becomes embroiled in the Beetle’s vengeance
and Holt’s body is used as a conduit for the Beetle’s monstrosity and crim-
inality, showing how Holt’s poverty can be linked to the Beetle’s foreign
and perverse monstrosity.
Most of the scholarship on monsters returns to this same conclusion:
reading the monster’s body will reveal larger truths about race, sexuality,
class, and gender. However, Bram Dijkstra’s work on the female vampire as
insatiable and sexual New Woman enables my own claim about the inter-
relatedness of monster and New Woman. Dijkstra suggests that the female
vampire was a way to speak about the predominant view that late Victo-
rian men had about New Women’s sexualities. Mostly, these men thought
that these women sucked the virility right out of them (Dijkstra, 1986,
p. 348). And, most of the scholarship on the New Woman, as written by
Ledger, Sutherland, Jusova, Ardis, Heilmann, and Richardson and Willis,
explores the New Woman as a subject with a “multiple identity” (Ledger,
1997, p. 1), a social subject whose middle-class work defined her iden-
tity (Sutherland, 2015, p. 1), a subject with colonial ties and implications
(Jusova, 2005, p. 1), and a fierce fiction writer (Ardis, 1990, p. 1; Heil-
mann, 2000, p. 1; Richardson & Willis, 2001, p. 1). However, my study will
contend that the relationship between the monster and the New Woman, in
Stoker’s, Marsh’s, and Marryat’s novels, explores the relationships that New
Women had with other New Women. Instead of focusing on the history of
these relationships in biographies of New Women’s lives, I am looking at
what monstrosity can reveal about these relationships. Monstrosity shows
that friendships between New Women can be lesbian and that these women
are indeterminate subjects. Late Victorian New Women were either mon-
sters or laudable figures in the eyes of the populous (conservatives or New
Liberals). The conflict embedded in fin-de-siècle Britain’s idea of the New
Woman, as shown by the foreign and perverse monster, also reveals the
fraught nature of colonialism, sexuality, and poverty. Finally, these women
deserve to be included in society not exorcised from it.
Dracula explores the ways that New Women secretly loved one another
in the face of so much prejudice and violence. There are other New Woman
novels that deal with relationships between women, like Diana of the Cross-
ways , On the Threshold, and The Image Breakers . However, these relation-
ships are “diluted by the emergence of a male suitor for one of the women”
(Ledger, 1997, p. 125). Lucy and Mina’s friendship, that falls somewhere
between platonic friendship and a lesbian relationship, shows Dracula’s
readers that these relationships between women did exist and are differ-
ent from the relationships depicted in the aforementioned novels even if
6 E. D. MACALUSO
Lucy and Mina do have husbands. Novels like The Moonstone, The Odd
Women, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Jude the Obscure are Victorian
and late Victorian novels that each deal with a particular social issue, like
colonialism, the New Woman, sexuality, and poverty. Marsh’s novel The
Beetle involves all four of these issues and shows how the monster’s foreign
and perverse monstrosity is at the forefront of delineating the complexity
of these issues. Finally, novels that punish monsters, like Dracula and The
Beetle, are eventually upstaged by Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, which
dares to support a monstrous New Woman in the face of the campaign to
eliminate her.
In the paragraphs that follow, I will discuss these concerns more fully
and provide an overview of the book. My Dracula chapter examines female
friendship. Lucy and Mina share a strong and almost lesbian friendship
that conflates sentiments normally found in platonic female friendship
or female marriage. Rather than separate “female friendship” into cate-
gories, as Sharon Marcus does, female friendship (hetero), female marriage
(homo), and unrequited love (other) (2007, p. 43), my book argues that
feelings of friendship, romantic love, passion, and eroticism are conflated
in Lucy and Mina’s friendship. This conflation of sentiments makes their
friendship stronger than sisterly friendship and almost a lesbian relationship.
Dracula, the monster, acts as a romantic/sexual catalyst that brings Lucy
and Mina together. He helps to make their friendship involve romantic,
passionate, and erotic sentiments. He also enables a triangulation between
himself, Lucy, and Mina that makes Lucy and Mina’s friendship as roman-
tically strong as the relationships they have with their fiancé and husband.
Ultimately, Stoker uses this almost lesbian relationship between Lucy and
Mina to argue for a same-sex spiritual or religious love that surpasses the
danger of bodily temptation (which Dracula represents) and instead pro-
duces a new generation of Britons. Stoker’s message is that heterosexual
marriages solely based on work and economics can and should involve love.
He also contends that the queer community should not relinquish their love
relationships even when they are faced with prejudice and violence.
My Beetle chapter focuses on the way that the monster, through his/her
foreign and perverse violence, reveals the contentious debate about the
New Woman and thus her own status as a slippery or indeterminate con-
struct. In the beginning of Marsh’s novel, it seems as though he sides with
Miss Lindon as a New Woman. He has her choosing her own fiancé, the
Liberal MP, Paul Lessingham, in the face of her father’s conservative poli-
tics. He has her participating in politics (through a Working Women’s Club
Meeting and her fiancé’s great speech) and solving the mystery behind the
Beetle’s attacks at great personal peril to herself. However, when the mon-
ster, the Beetle, attacks Miss Lindon, Marsh shows that this monster figure
(this perverse Arab Egyptian Beetle) is so threatened by Miss Lindon’s
modernity that he/she strips Miss Lindon of her hair and clothes, and
dresses her as a man, in order to mock her modernity and identity as a New
Woman and to stop her from figuring out his/her plans for revenge against
Paul Lessingham. This violent moment, characterized by the Beetle’s for-
eignness and perversity (as it is a foreign man/woman who strips Miss
Lindon of her clothes and violates her in a slightly sexual way), shows that
Marsh is conflicted in terms of how he wishes to represent the New Woman.
On the one hand, Miss Lindon is a rational and powerful character that is
a credit to the figure of the New Woman. On the other hand, she is made
into an effigy or a mockery by the Beetle and even by some of her male
friends (her father and Atherton). Is the New Woman a tool for wom-
en’s empowerment and liberation or a monstrous mistake? Marsh does not
provide a clear answer to this question, which supports my reading of Miss
Lindon and the New Woman as indeterminate figures. There is plenty of
evidence to support two views of Miss Lindon, that she has been chastened
in the end, as she returns home to marry and experiences bouts of insanity
after her marriage (to please more mainstream or conservative readers of
the text), or that she is, in fact, a laudable New Woman heroine because she
survives a horrific attack and she still manages to do what she wishes with
her life—marry Paul Lessingham and write (to please the staunch feminist
readers of the text). The violence of the Beetle’s attack on Miss Lindon,
and its foreign perversity, does not only reveal the contentiousness about
the debate over the New Woman, and that she is a nebulous construct,
this violence also reveals the contentiousness of debates about colonialism,
sexuality, and poverty. The Beetle makes war against Paul Lessingham for
Lessingham’s murder of the priestess of Isis, a response to British colo-
nialism in Egypt. Is the British presence in Egypt warranted or is there
another perspective at work, here? Should the British be responsible for
their colonial atrocities and feel the remorse of their actions thereby lead-
ing to debates about anti-colonialism and independence movements? The
Beetle sexually attacks Robert Holt and raises the question: Are gay men
monsters or benign lovers that should be left in peace? The Beetle makes a
mockery of Holt’s poverty and uses Holt to his/her own nefarious ends.
Should the poor be relegated to the whim of the streets or should they be
8 E. D. MACALUSO
taken care of? Should the government decide the fate of the poor or should
Britain’s subjects (working people and philanthropists) do this?
Finally, in The Blood of the Vampire chapter, I argue that the reader is
given the opportunity to sympathize with a female vampire, Harriet Brandt.
This is a rare (and perhaps, an ironic) choice, on Marryat’s part, as most
vampires are unequivocally vanquished in their fin-de-siècle novels, like
Stoker’s Dracula and Marsh’s The Beetle. So, why sympathize with a female
vampire/monster? Even as Harriet unknowingly takes the lives of those she
is closest to, she is good and kind, beautiful, talented, charitable, and, at the
end of the novel, mature and fair. She is Creole, independent, and she does
not discriminate, according to gender, when it comes to selecting acquain-
tances. She is threatening to the other (white) British protagonists because
she is biracial, a New Woman, and talented. The white British protagonists’
prejudices, their xenophobia and racism and sexism, manifest themselves
into petty jealousies and rivalries that attempt to rid Harriet of their soci-
ety. And, this is effectively what occurs in the novel. Harriet is banished, or
ostracized, from the Pullen circle because of her rivalry for Elinor Leyton’s
fiancé, Ralph Pullen, and her racial, ethnic, and foreign differences from the
other British protagonists. She is eventually driven to suicide, after she loses
her husband, Anthony, and her ostracization from the group is complete.
Still, the utter tragedy of Harriet’s suicide (Eldridge, 1998, p. 12), espe-
cially after she has elicited sympathy as a result of her good qualities, forces
a white British establishment to reconsider its cruelty to New Women who
are different, racially “Other,” and independent. This begs the question:
What is the cost of one’s prejudices? At their most extreme, it can mean the
isolation and ruination of a human life. With the end to her novel, Marryat
asks the question: Should our prejudices mean the cost of a human life?
My book will show that the subject of gender, at the fin de siècle, is more
complex than scholars have thought. I am contributing my own scholar-
ship that explores monstrosity’s relationship to gender and their atten-
dant correlations with the liminality of subjects like race/colonialism, the
New Woman/gender, homo/sexuality, and poverty to already established
scholarship on the New Woman and gender, like Ledger’s, Sutherland’s,
Jusova’s, Ardis’s, Heilmann’s, and Richardson and Willis’s. Gender, in fact,
is a slippery concept. It includes talk about almost lesbian relationships
between women, the complicated debate about the New Woman and the
fact that she is an indefinite subject, like the foreign and perverse monster,
and other unspecific subjects (race/colonialism, sexuality, and poverty),
and the call to sympathize with women who are new and different, at cen-
tury’s end, which is a direct challenge to the chauvinistic impulse to destroy
them.
1.1 Methodology
The book draws from multiple disciplines. I use theory, history, literary crit-
icism, and close readings of the novels to inform my work. In my Dracula
chapter, I use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critique of Rene Girard’s original
idea, from Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, that the romantic and sexual bonds
between two male rivals can be as potent as those between these rivals and
a female beloved, to suggest that the bonds between Lucy and Mina are
just as strong as those between themselves and Dracula, which proves the
validity of Sedgwick’s idea that these bonds can forever be reworked to
privilege the person (or persons) who seek/s to be empowered by them
(1985, p. 27). In The Beetle chapter, Raymond Williams’s idea that the
emergent will always seek to rival the dominant informs my approach to
the foreign and perverse monster, the social and cultural complexity of
gender, the New Woman, and other social issues in Marsh’s fictional world
and of the fin de siècle (1977, p. 6). And, finally, in The Blood of the Vam-
pire chapter, I unpack Galton’s theory of eugenics, found in “Eugenics:
Its Scope and Aims,” to uncover how this theory’s sexism alienates British
subjects from one another and destroys them as opposed to strengthening,
and empowering, them and their bonds.
I take into account the history of the period (with a special focus on the
1890s and the year 1897). I uncover the social and cultural complexities
of the fin de siècle and its social movements like imperialism, the wom-
en’s movement, and the labor movement. I also apply history to more fully
understand the British fin de siècle’s social constructs like Empire, the New
Woman, queer Britain, and what was meant by the phrases “poverty” and
“the poor” (and how historical and literary critics discuss these constructs
as twenty-first-century readers). I use history to discuss Angelique Richard-
son’s concept of “eugenic love.” I mine the biographies of the authors that
I focus on to see how their personal histories may have influenced their
novels. I analyze documents that contain accounts of women’s lives, par-
ticularly New Women’s lives (like letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, auto-
biographies, and biographies) and other forms of life-writing that disclose
10 E. D. MACALUSO
period attitudes toward gender, race, Empire, the New Woman, homosex-
uality and queer Britain, eugenic love, eugenics, evolutionary science, and
poverty.4
I situate my writings amidst the work of others, namely literary critics,
who have worked on Dracula, The Beetle, and The Blood of the Vampire. I
rework critical readings of the female protagonists of Dracula to suggest
that they are New Women and they love in vastly different ways than critics
have previously claimed. In my analysis of Dracula, it is my aim to dispense
with reinforcing stereotypes about New Women’s riotous sexualities and
to use the text of the novel to understand how Lucy and Mina love. In my
analysis of The Beetle, I suggest that it is critically important to know how
race and Empire, the New Woman, sexuality, and discourses on the poor
exist, or come to life, in the novel to understand the social and cultural
implications of the debate about the New Woman, invoked by the Beetle’s
foreign and perverse monstrosity, and the other social issues that are in
this novel. And, when I write about The Blood of the Vampire, I use critics’
accounts of the history of “eugenic love” and their writings about how racial
and sexual stereotypes were used to subjugate British subjects who were of
color and independent (or “New” after the New Woman) to suggest my
own ideas about how Harriet’s acquaintanceships with the white British
protagonists are undone by social and cultural biases passed off as science.
Finally, the book deploys close readings to preserve the integrity of the
original texts of the novels and uncover important parts of the texts that
have been overlooked. My close readings of Dracula, The Beetle, and The
Blood of the Vampire consider and challenge previous readings of these nov-
els, focusing on the theories and histories that the original texts invoke, and
questioning a predominantly male-centered tradition of reading Dracula,
The Beetle, and The Blood of the Vampire.
1.2 How This Book Engages Scholarly Debates

At the beginning of her seminal study on gender and the New Woman,
Sally Ledger writes: “The New Woman of the fin de siècle had a multiple
identity” (1997, p. 1). Ledger is absolutely correct in asserting that our
definition of the New Woman must ever be expanding. New scholarship
in the field will find new ways to describe and define her and relate her
significance/s back to the larger debate about gender at the fin de siècle.
This is what my book attempts to do. I take issue with Gillian Sutherland
and her contention that the New Woman can solely be understood through
statistical fact and data (2015, p. 8). My study of the New Woman’s role
in fin-de-siècle monster fiction certainly opens up the ways that we define
and know her and make sense of her meaning/s. And, I am not alone in
my studies. Ann Ardis, Ann Heilmann, and Chris Willis and Angelique
Richardson have all penned studies that examine the role of fiction and its
ways of defining, and making meaning out of, the New Woman. Though
these studies have to do with feminism and feminist activism, the suffrage
movements, education and schooling, employment opportunities, politics,
art, life, fashion, transportation, etc., my study will focus on the significance
of the monster protagonist and what he/she leads us to conclude about the
New Woman and gender at the fin de siècle. My contention is that mon-
ster figures produce Brecht’s “alienation effect” (Booth, 1961, p. 192)
and make strange the world around them so that they reveal truths that are
not always seen by the conventional eye—that friendships between women
can be lesbian, that New Women are more than overly sexual women,
that the debate about the New Woman is expansive. She is an indetermi-
nate construct. Her conflict, and the conflict embedded in colonialism,
sexuality, and poverty, is incited by the Beetle’s foreign and perverse mon-
strosity. And, she deserves to be integrated into society, which necessarily
suggests empowering fates for New Women, as opposed to a tradition of
New Women heroines, like Herminia Barton from The Woman Who Did,
Monica Madden from The Odd Women, and Tess D’Urbervilles from Tess
of the D’Urbervilles who all have terrible fates.
Monster, from the Latin, monstrum, means “an aberrant occurrence,”
and monere, the root of monstrum, means “to warn or instruct.” In Imag-
ining Monsters, Dennis Todd writes that monsters are “liminal creatures,
straddling boundaries between categories we wish to keep distinct and sep-
arate, blurring distinctions, haunting us with the possibility that the cat-
egories themselves are ambiguous, permeable” (1995, p. 156). Even as
Todd’s is a study on the eighteenth century, his words about monsters still
apply to the British nineteenth century, particularly, the fin de siècle. The
monster, a liminal figure, teaches us about the liminality and complexity to
New Women (and women in general), women’s lives and issues, gender,
and the fin de siècle, that a seemingly monolithic society, like the white
male, conservative British fin de siècle, cannot, or will not, see. Is Dracula
straight or gay? He chooses both female and male sexual victims. Is the Bee-
tle male or female? His/her gender is ambiguous. Is Harriet Brandt white
or black? Is she good or bad? Her race and character are also ambiguous.
Again, these liminal monsters invoke equivocal conclusions about their
12 E. D. MACALUSO
female victims. Are Lucy and Mina straight or gay? Is their friendship sis-
terly or lesbian? Is Miss Lindon, as a New Woman, a monster or a role
model/heroine? Is Harriet Brandt a demon or an angel? The answers to
these questions are not clear. Lucy and Mina’s lesbian relationship rids their
world of sexual danger (Dracula) and uses an example of ethical/religious
love to attain virtuous ends—the birth of little Quincey and future gener-
ations of Britons. The debate about Miss Lindon and whether or not the
New Woman is a monster or a laudable figure, incited by the foreign and
perverse monster, reveals that these women (and, perhaps, all women) are
vague constructs that make the debate about them not only contentious
but complex. Finally, it is useless to attempt to categorize women or people
who are different, like Harriet Brandt, as good or bad, and thus worthy of
praise or censure. New Women, like Harriet Brandt, who are also racially
“Other” deserve not to be demonized for their faults or imperfections but
included in society. This shows that gender, at the British fin de siècle,
was, indeed, indeterminate. The New Woman was an indistinct concept.
Women’s friendships could be lesbian. These women should be protected
by society because so much danger was levied at them on a daily basis.
In terms of the specific criticism that I engage with in the book, in
the Dracula chapter, I enter the debate about female friendship and how
exactly the New Women, Lucy and Mina, love in Stoker’s text. Many
critics have contended that Lucy is sexually voracious (Dijkstra, 1986,
pp. 344–345; Hansen, 1996, p. 58; Rance, 2002, p. 445; Senf, 1982,
p. 45; Signorotti, 1996, p. 621; Sparks, 2002, p. 92; Spear, 1993, p. 182;
Spencer, 1992, p. 209; Wall, 2003, p. 29), which is a quality of Linton’s
“Wild Woman,” while others have said that Mina is a typical New Woman:
intelligent and industrious (Johnson, 1984, p. 24; Senf, 1982, pp. 35–36).
My book contends that there is more to their stories and the ways that they
love. Lucy is quite ambivalent about her engagement and marriage and
Mina feels the tug between prioritizing her best friend and her fiancé in
her intimate life. This analysis, from Stoker’s original text, is quite different
from the aforementioned New Woman scholarship on Dracula. Lucy and
Mina are not “Wild Women”; they are just women who love one another
deeply. They share an almost lesbian friendship that combats the sexual
temptation that Dracula represents. Their friendship proposes a same-sex
spiritual love that Stoker argues surpasses the violence and sexual danger
that homosexual culture faced and it encourages heterosexual couples to be
sure that love is involved in their relationships. By the end of Stoker’s text,
Mina admits that her love for Lucy is, in part, spiritual/religious: “and only
there came through all the multitude of horrors, the holy ray of light that
my dear, dear Lucy was at last at peace” (D, p. 262). For Stoker, religion
was a means of ensuring that the queer community retained its dignity,
particularly in its loving relationships, in the face of violence, and to ensure
that it is not abused by that violence, like Dracula is. It is also a means for
heterosexual couples to ensure that love is truly in their relationships.
I am entering the debate about female friendship first theorized by
Faderman, Smith-Rosenberg, Marcus, and Vicinus.5 And, I am contending
that instead of categorizing women’s friendships to find out what is pla-
tonic and what is not, women’s friendships, as shown by Lucy and Mina,
often conflate sentiments of friendship, romantic love, passion, and eroti-
cism.6 Dracula, as monster, acts as a romantic/sexual catalyst that brings
these women together and encourages the conflation of sentiments in their
friendship. These friendships should be understood in all of their com-
plexity. And, in order to continue to diversify the debate about the New
Woman, again, New Women were not overly sexual. They were complex
women who loved in unique ways.
In The Beetle chapter, I reference the debate that scholars have had
about Miss Lindon and whether or not she is a New Woman. Victoria
Margree contends that she is while Harris and Vernooy assert that she is
not (2007, p. 72; 2012, p. 346). In my reading of the novel, Marsh has
made Miss Lindon into a New Woman. She defies her father to marry Less-
ingham, she participates in politics (the Working Women’s Club Meeting
and Lessingham’s great speech), and she promises to get to the bottom
of the mystery behind the Beetle’s attacks. These are all strong actions
that New Women were noted for—independence of thought and choice,
activism, and considerable courage and daring. However, the Beetle’s for-
eign and perverse monstrosity, first theorized by Hurley (1996, p. 133) and
explained more fully by me, incites conservative reactions to Miss Lindon
by the white British men of the novel and the Beetle. As I mentioned earlier,
Miss Lindon’s father and Atherton do not approve of her modern actions.
And, the Beetle makes a mockery of her independence by dressing her
as a man and parading her around London so that she does not inter-
rupt the Beetle’s plans. It’s a foreign and perverse Beetle that violates Miss
Lindon because the Beetle is from the Arab district of Egypt and he/she
violates Miss Lindon by removing her clothes. The foreign and perverse
monster makes the debate about the New Woman very clear in Marsh’s
novel. He/she reveals the indeterminate nature of the construct of the
14 E. D. MACALUSO
New Woman; to the British populous, she is both a monster and an exem-
plary figure. The monster’s foreignness and sexual perversity also reveal the
contentiousness that defined the debates about colonialism, homosexual-
ity, and poverty at the fin de siècle.
In The Blood of the Vampire chapter, readers are asked to sympathize with
a female vampire, Harriet Brandt. This move, on Marryat’s part, is quite
unique and significantly important because most female vampires who were
caricatures or representatives of the New Woman in the periodical press or
in period art were viewed, by British men, as dangerous monsters whose
only desires were to sap healthy and robust British men of their virility
and vitality (Dijkstra, 1986, p. 345). Examples of these vampire women
were found in Edvard Munch’s painting, The Vampire, and in collectible
dolls that were fashioned at the fin de siècle (Dijkstra, 1986, pp. 347,
349). These vampire and New Women were threats to the British state
and Empire because they were thought to ruin the British man and family.
The fact that Marryat makes her female vampire so good, kind, beautiful,
talented, charitable, and mature and fair forces the reader to look beyond
the monster and see the human being in Harriet’s person. This move calls
into question the conservative British values (the xenophobia, racism, and
sexism) that castigate and ostracize Harriet. Instead of condemning these
women to anonymous, obscure, and terrible fates, like Harriet’s suicide,
the state should be theorizing ways to accommodate and assimilate these
women into society. The monster, Harriet Brandt, is made into a real person
and the case for her integration into society is suggested, ironically, by her
suicide.
In conclusion, this book explores how the figure of the monster func-
tions to demonstrate the complexities of gender and the New Woman at
the British fin de siècle. As “structures of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s
phrasing, gender is rarely a straightforward matter (1977, p. 6). It is messy,
complicated, slippery, and indeterminate. Through the liminal figure of the
monster, we see the conflations and confusions of friendships (the “vari-
ations, fluctuations, and mixtures” of sentiments [Bradford, 2004, p. 9])
and the challenges of self-definition in women’s lives.
Notes
1. This is one way of reading Dracula. For a complete history of scholarship
on Dracula, see my Dracula chapter. The examples that I give in this open-
ing paragraph of my introduction are simply ways to open up or begin the
conversation in regard to what I will argue and prove in the entire book
(introduction, Dracula, The Beetle, The Blood of the Vampire chapters and the
conclusion).
2. Kelly Hurley initially describes the Beetle’s foreignness and perversity (133).
She writes that the Beetle’s foreignness (his/her Arab Egyptianness) also con-
notes sexual perversity in Marsh’s novel because the Beetle’s foreign body,
his/her status as an Easterner, also conveys ideas about the East’s sexual per-
versity (133). I am contending that the Beetle’s foreign and perverse mon-
strosity incites debate about the New Woman and suggests that she is viewed as
either a monstrous figure to fin-de-siècle antifeminists or as a role model to fin-
de-siècle feminists. I am also contending that the Beetle’s foreign perversion
makes real the conflict found in social movements and issues like colonialism,
again, gender and the New Woman, homosexuality, and poverty.
3. The Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity collapses these categories in The
Beetle. Dracula’s and Harriet Brandt’s monstrosities make an almost lesbian
relationship between Lucy and Mina and invoke sympathy for a paradoxically
monstrous and human female vampire and encourage her (Harriet’s) inclusion
in fin-de-siècle society.
4. …like scientific treatises, physiognomic evaluations, tracts from the periodical
press, studies on sexuality, Parliamentary records, and personal accounts.
5. Faderman and Smith-Rosenberg asserted that strong feelings were included
in female friendship (1981, p. 16; 1985, p. 1). Marcus defines the “female
identified” or straight woman and her friendships as platonic but have a basis
in the admiration of the female and the feminine (2007, p. 1). These relation-
ships were often formed to help women’s marital relationships, too (2007,
p. 1). Vicinus writes about same-sex love and relationships (proto-lesbian
relationships) (2004, p. xxiv).
6. The difference between my and Faderman’s study is that my contention about
female friendships is that they can be lesbian. Faderman solely contends that
these friendships could be “intense” (16).
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CHAPTER 2
“I Love You with All the Moods and Tenses

of the Verb”: Lucy and Mina’s Love in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula
For many decades, critics have understood Dracula as a novel about sex-
uality or sexual perversity. Christopher Craft (1984) and H. L. Malchow
(1996), for example, identify Dracula’s “red lips” and sharp teeth as the
loci of sexual infection and pollution: For Craft (1984), mixing the blood
of Dracula with that of the Crew of Light allows the male protagonists
to touch one another intimately in a socially sanctioned way (p. 110);
for Malchow (1996), this vampiric mingling of blood elicits late Victo-
rian cultural fears about syphilis (p. 92). Talia Schaffer (1994) argues that,
in the wake of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials for “gross indecency,” Stoker’s
novel reflects the author’s trauma over Wilde’s conviction—a trauma that
indicates, she suggests, Stoker’s closeted homosexuality (p. 381). Indeed,
Stoker wrote romantic letters to Walt Whitman, the openly bisexual Amer-
ican poet (Schaffer, 1994, pp. 383–384). In such critical formulations,
Dracula becomes an exploration of secretive intimacies between the nov-
el’s male characters, including the members of the Crew of Light (con-
nected intimately through blood transfusions) as well as Jonathan Harker
and Dracula. However, little critical attention has been paid to the secretive
intimacies between Dracula’s female characters. In fact, Lucy and Mina’s
intimacies have not even been described as secretive. Lucy has been char-
acterized as “overly sexual” and Mina as a stereotypically practical New
Woman.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_2
20 E. D. MACALUSO
In this chapter, I argue that these female characters, and the ways that
they love, are far more complex than critics have imagined. Drawing on
the work of Sharon Marcus and Martha Vicinus, who analyze historical
female friendships in the nineteenth century, I claim Lucy and Mina’s
friendship as approaching a lesbian relationship or an “intimate friendship”
(Vicinus, 2004, p. xxiv). I demonstrate how Stoker draws on contemporary
late Victorian ideas about women’s friendships, particularly the metaphoric
creation of the family, and the use of metaphoric language and religious
devotion, to suggest this. Analyzing Vicinus’s “intimate friendships” along-
side Stoker’s representation of Lucy and Mina’s friendship suggests how
we might recuperate a fictional model of friendships between late Victo-
rian women that exemplify friendship paradigms laid out by Vicinus. Finally,
Dracula, as monster and beloved, signifies the novel’s allegiance to queer
relationships and reveals that Lucy and Mina’s friendship approaches a les-
bian relationship.
2.1 Cultural and Personal Contexts for Lucy

and Mina’s “Intimate Friendship”
At a time when studies about homosexuality, like Havelock Ellis’s Sexual
Inversion (1897) and Edward Carpenter’s Homogenic Love and Its Place in
a Free Society (1894), were published and seemed to suggest a burgeoning
interest among intellectuals in same-sex love, the 1895 Wilde trials were
an attack on the gay community (Schaffer, 1994, p. 381). The gay and
lesbian communities experienced violence and suppression before and after
the trials. This discrimination is exemplified by the prosecution of Boulton
and Park (Cocks, 2003, p. 105), the incarcerations of hundreds of gay men
(Cook, 2008, p. 109), the pressure for lesbian women to keep their sexual
and intimate relationships completely chaste (Halberstam, 1998, p. 65),
and the demoralizing effects of the obscenity trials over the publication
of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (Miller, 2006, pp. 187–188).
Still, stories of survival, among his friends, attracted Stoker and eventually
served as his rejoinder to a homophobic British society. Edward Carpenter,
and his partner, George Merrill, lived together for the duration of their
lives. And, even as they risked alienation from their families, Rosa Bonheur
and Nathalie Micas and Frances Power Cobbe and Mary Lloyd were in
“female marriages” that lasted until death (Marcus, 2007, p. 2). The Ladies
of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, experienced the most
recorded acceptance of their “female marriage” (Marcus, 2007, p. 2) or
2 “I LOVE YOU WITH ALL THE MOODS AND TENSES OF THE … 21
“intimate friendship” (Vicinus, 2004, p. xxiv). They prompted their friends

to see their relationship as a true marriage between “man and wife” or “wife
and wife” (Marcus, 2007, p. 201). In fact, female same-sex relationships
were often seen as more benign than relationships between men because
there was less evidence of violent sex between women. When Elizabeth
Barrett Browning met Charlotte Cushman and her partner in 1852, she
said of their relationship that it was a “true marriage” (Marcus, 2007,
p. 201). As I will show, Stoker was aware of the power of these female
“friendships” (Vicinus, 2004, p. xxiv). He uses Lucy and Mina’s female
friendship that approaches lesbianism to suggest that same-sex relationships
can be productive. In this way, Stoker privileges same-sex intimacy between
women in Dracula and shows that it is an alternative to a homophobic
culture’s castigation of same-sex love.
Before the 1895 Wilde trials, gay men were accosted and prosecuted
privately by British police officers and solicitors. “Sodomy” took place in
private locations like homes, alleyways, clubs, and even private gardens
(Cook, Mills, Trumbach, & Cocks, 2007, p. 132). Most of gay culture
that subsisted around these practices was secretive. After the Wilde trials,
gay men’s lives were made public with the publication of the trials’ tran-
scripts in the newspapers (Bristow, 2008, p. 237). Violence against gay
men, which had previously been a clandestine affair, was made public. The
Marquess of Queensberry could ruin Oscar Wilde, the police could appre-
hend Boulton and Park, and any member of the British populous could
destroy the lives of gay men. Publically sanctioned violence against gay
men became a recognizable part of fin-de-siècle culture.
Similarly, prior to the Wilde trials, women in proto-lesbian relationships,
or “intimate friendships,” had relative security and privacy in these relation-
ships, because these women were thought to be in “romantic friendships.”
Women expressed romantic and even erotic love for one another, because
this kind of passionate emotion was typically expressed between female
friends (Faderman, 1981, p. 16; Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 1). However,
after the Wilde trials, when lesbianism was being discussed and written
about by sexologists like Krafft-Ebing, these women experienced backlash
over their loving relationships. “Michael Field,” Katherine Bradley, and
Edith Cooper were aunt and niece. They experienced serious disapproval
of their “intimate friendship” from Britons outside of their intimate circle
of friends (Ehnenn, 2008, p. 51). Sarah Geals, who wished to live as a
man to marry her partner “Caroline,” was fired from her job for this wish
(Townsend, 1993, pp. 217–220). Finally, when Radclyffe Hall published
22 E. D. MACALUSO
The Well of Loneliness , a lesbian novel, it was sanctioned to remove it from

the marketplace (Miller, 2006, pp. 187–188).
The British public sanctioned discrimination against gay men and
women at the fin de siècle. Stoker was a part of this culture, because he lived
in it. He may have belonged to the gay and lesbian community, because he
was very close with Oscar Wilde, he exchanged intimate letters with Walt
Whitman, and he lived a life in the theater with Henry Irving, who was
rumored to have been Stoker’s lover. Stoker and Wilde grew up together,
they went to school together (primary school and Trinity College), they
had Christmases together, and they chased the same woman, Florence Bal-
combe (Schaffer, 1994, pp. 381, 390–391). Rene Girard’s theory that
two loving rivals expressed as much passion for each other as they did for
their beloved rings true for Wilde and Stoker, as neither man was truly
interested in Balcombe (Sedgwick, 1985, p. 27). Wilde married another
woman, Constance Lloyd, but immersed himself in having male lovers. He
eventually entered into a serious affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. Stoker
married Balcombe but spent most of his time at the Lyceum Theatre with
Henry Irving whom Stoker worshipped. Stoker even exchanged romantic
letters with Walt Whitman. Whitman spoke openly about his own homo-
sexuality, even his bisexuality, in his lyrical poem, “Song of Myself.” After
reading this poem and Leaves of Grass , Stoker sent Whitman a letter that
said that Whitman validated Stoker’s childhood wishes (Schaffer, 1994,
pp. 383–384).
Stoker wrote about homosexuality, and the possibility of his own homo-
sexuality, in a way that would be palatable to a late Victorian audience.
Lucy and Mina’s friendship that approaches lesbianism recuperates exam-
ples of nineteenth-century love between women, or “intimate friendship,”
that was benign and even attractive to this audience. Stoker used the best
examples of this love to create the friendship between Lucy and Mina.
The “female marriages” between the Ladies of Llangollen, Rosa Bonheur
and Nathalie Micas, Frances Power Cobbe and Mary Lloyd, and Charlotte
Cushman and her partners served as useful examples for this work. Stoker
uses the examples of these women to talk candidly about their love; this
love becomes the basis for the affection between Lucy and Mina.
Very important scholarly research has been done on “romantic friend-
ships” between women in the Victorian period. Lillian Faderman (1981)
and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1985) claimed that passionate emotion and
language were integral parts of friendship between women in the British
nineteenth century (pp. 16, 1). Sharon Marcus and Martha Vicinus have
taken these studies further. Marcus argues that female friendship between
“female identified” women involved socially sanctioned eroticism between
these women (Marcus, 2007, p. 1). And, according to Vicinus, “intimate
friendships” or proto-lesbian relationships did exist at this time. These
“friendships” shared common attributes that made these relationships what
they were (Vicinus, 2004, p. xv).
I am arguing that there is precedence for Vicinus’s case studies in Drac-
ula; my analysis of Lucy and Mina’s friendship that approaches lesbianism
makes this so. Love between women, Lucy and Mina’s love for one another,
is expressed by the metaphoric recreation of the family, metaphoric lan-
guage, and religious devotion in Dracula. While many critics claim that
authors, like Stoker, were not writing about lesbian relationships for the
sake of privacy or the avoidance of scandal, Stoker wrote candidly about
these relationships and even argues that they are the antidote to a loveless
society.
2.2 Lucy and Mina’s “Intimate Friendship”

Instead of privileging a Bildungsroman narrative structure, as in Austen, or
Brontë, Eliot, or Dickens, that uses female friendships as building blocks
to marriage (Marcus, 2007, p. 1), Stoker relies on an almost epistolary
form—a series of personal and disjointed life-writings—to illustrate Lucy
and Mina’s love for one another. Though these female characters start
off engaged and married (and seem to have reaped the rewards of the
marriage plot), Dracula separates them from their fiancé and husband. The
rest of the novel focuses on their same-sex relationship, their friendship
that approaches lesbianism. Stoker, then, shows, through the metaphoric
recreation of the family, metaphoric language, and religious devotion, the
ways that Lucy and Mina love one another. Their love becomes a response
to passionless heterosexual relationships and to violence against the queer
community.
Lucy and Mina’s letters reveal that the two women are focused on one
another (not their men) for psychological and emotional intimacy. Mina
wishes to write to, and see, Lucy, instead of Jonathan, to share all of her
emotions, secrets, and “plans” with her (Stoker, 1998, p. 86).1 In a letter
dated 9 May, Mina tells Lucy that she is overwhelmed with work, because
she is both an assistant schoolmistress and a secretary to Jonathan. How-
ever, she still “longs” to see Lucy so that they can “talk together freely and
build our castles in the air” (D, p. 86). Mina intimates to Lucy that she
24 E. D. MACALUSO
wishes to escape the heterosexual world of work and duty to join Lucy in
their imagined world. This world privileges the women’s creativities and
dreams. Mina wishes to see Lucy “by the sea” (D, p. 86), so they can build
an intimate world together without interruption from a patriarchal Victo-
rian society. Mina’s longings indicate that she and Lucy share a secret life
together, one that does not include men and that solely privileges the bond
that Lucy and Mina have.
Lucy, too, seeks Mina for psychological and emotional succor. Lucy is
deeply anxious about the proposals she receives from Seward, Morris, and
Holmwood. She confesses to Mina that it is very trying to reject Seward
and Morris not a gluttonous pleasure, as Kathleen Spencer (1992) asserts
(p. 210):
Oh, Mina dear, I can’t help crying and you must excuse this letter being all
blotted. Being proposed to is all very nice and all that sort of thing, but it
isn’t at all a happy thing when you have to see a poor fellow, whom you know
loves you honestly, going away and looking all broken-hearted, and to know
that no matter what he may say at the moment, you are passing quite out of
his life. (D, p. 90)
Lucy’s recounting to Mina the sadness that she feels as she rejects her suitors
tells of a phenomenon quite typical of “intimate friendships” at the fin de
siècle. Often, “intimate friends” rejected their male suitors to be together,
as Bessie Raynor Parkes did Samuel Blackwell to be with Barbara Leigh
Smith (Rendall, 1989, p. 144). Lucy rejects her suitors and relies on Mina
to be the confidant for her deepest feelings. Although Kathleen Spencer
(1992), Bram Dijkstra (1986), Tom Hansen (1996), and Nicholas Rance
(2002) have written that Lucy wishes to accept all three suitors, as a prelude
to her more voracious sexuality that appears when she is a vampire (pp. 210,
344–345, 58, 445), Stoker’s text suggests that Lucy is deeply concerned
that she cannot accept all of them. Like lesbian women who have rejected
their suitors and have had so much difficulty loving men, Lucy’s serious
unhappiness over her rejections mimics the lesbian’s sexual paradigm. Like
the lesbian women in Krafft-Ebing’s studies, Lucy has difficulty accepting
the men that she is supposed to marry. And, Lucy looks to her “friend,”
Mina, for the intimacy that she does not find in engagement or marriage.
As Lucy negotiates very difficult relationships with men—first, the rejec-
tions of her suitors and, then, a distant engagement with Arthur, Arthur
leaves Lucy to take care of his dying father (Johnson, 1984, p. 28)—
Mina is the “friend” she turns to for love and care. Lucy and Mina cre-
ate a metaphoric family when they are together. They have intense visits
at Whitby, during which they hold hands. They have a very “severe tea,”
during which their “New Womanish appetites” for food and sex are show-
cased (D, p. 123; Dominguez-Ruè, 2010, pp. 302–303).2 They admire one
another’s beauty and character: “Lucy and I sat a while, and it was all so
beautiful before us that we took hands as we sat … Lucy was looking sweetly
pretty in her white lawn frock; she has got a beautiful colour since she has
been here. … She is so sweet with old people; I think they all fell in love with
her on the spot” (D, pp. 100, 97). Lucy and Mina’s handholding mimics
Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s taking hold of Vernon Lee’s wrist during their
“intimate friendship” (Gardner, 1987, p. 206). And, Mina’s admiration of
Lucy’s beauty also imitates Margaret Leicester Warren’s appreciation for
Edith Leycester’s looks (Marcus, 2007, p. 47). Mina even takes care of
Lucy during, and after, Dracula’s attacks: “Fortunately, each time [Lucy’s
sleepwalking episodes] I [Mina] awoke in time, and managed to undress
her [Lucy] without waking her, and got her back to bed … Lucy walks more
than ever … she is a trifle stouter” (D, pp. 120, 105–106). Vicinus (2004)
claims that the creation of the family, making something familiar out of the
unfamiliar, is what lesbian women, or women in “intimate friendships,” did
with one another to signify their bond:
Neither a pornographic nor a scientific vocabulary provided women with

the language of love, so nineteenth-century educated women fashioned
their sexual selves through metaphor. Women who loved women created
metaphoric versions of the heterosexual nuclear family. Change, especially,
personal change, depends in part on an imaginative reworking of the known.
The non-normative is in dialogue with the normative. (p. xxv)
Dracula, as monster, enabler, “sexual catalyst” (Dominguez-Ruè, 2010,

p. 302), and non-normative “beloved,” brings Lucy and Mina together
and heightens the romance, or the “stronger emotions” (Vicinus, 2004, p.
xxvi), of their friendship. Dracula is the non-normative “beloved” (Sedg-
wick, 1985, p. 27)3 or the monstrous figure that signifies Dracula’s fidelity
to a queer world and queer relationships. He points out that Lucy and
Mina’s friendship is stronger than a sisterly friendship and approaches a
lesbian relationship or an “intimate friendship” (Marcus, 2007, p. 1; Vici-
nus, 2004, p. xxiv). Dracula docks at Whitby, imperils Lucy’s life, and makes
26 E. D. MACALUSO
Mina love, and care for, Lucy as a spouse or family member would—not a
friend. Marcus (2007) explains: “Friends had some of the force and status
of spouses, parents, or children, but without sharing households or sex,
as spouses did, and without immersing themselves in the total caretaking
provided between parents and children” (p. 69). But, Mina does take care
of Lucy; she even lives with her at Whitby. Mina becomes Lucy’s caretaker,
family member, and spouse as a result of Dracula’s attacks. She watches over
Lucy, protects her, notices her beauty, and loves her. This is what makes
Lucy and Mina a metaphoric family. They love one another and take care
of one another, in the face of danger.
Lucy and Mina’s friendship is queer from the very beginning of Stoker’s
text. However, Dracula enables readers to see how this is true. Dracula
declares “Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them
you … shall be mine” (D, p. 347), which implies that he helps to “express
and distort” the stronger emotions that create Lucy and Mina’s friendship
and that this is the effect of his influence over them—the fact that they
are “his” (Craft, 1984, p. 107). For instance, the storm that comes to
symbolize Dracula’s killing of the men of the Demeter rouses Lucy from
her sleep and causes her to sleepwalk thereby solidifying her connection
to Dracula: “Lucy was very restless all night, and I [Mina], too, could not
sleep. The storm was fearful…Strangely enough, Lucy did not wake; but
she got up twice and dressed herself. Fortunately, each time I awoke in
time, and managed to undress her without waking her, and got her back
to bed. It is a very strange thing, this sleepwalking” (D, p. 120). Lucy and
Mina are subject to Dracula’s power as he rouses them from sleep (due to
the storm) and causes Lucy to sleepwalk, which is a telltale sign that he
has chosen Lucy as his first victim and that Mina as her caretaker will be
embroiled in his hunting. More importantly, though, Dracula’s influence
(through the storm and Lucy’s sleepwalking) forces Mina to begin to take
care of Lucy and to love her in this more intimate way than she normally
would if Dracula did not exist.4
Just as there are signs and symbols that signify Dracula’s presence and
his sexual attacks on his victims (an open window, Lucy’s sleepwalking, and
his manifestations as dog, bat, and wolf), there are also signs and codes that
show his influence upon Lucy and Mina’s friendship and this friendship’s
stronger emotions and erotic potential. After Dracula docks at Whitby,
Lucy and Mina have a “‘severe tea’…over the seaweed-covered rocks of the
strand” (D, p. 123). This scene metaphorically shows the encroachment
of Dracula from the Demeter to Whitby; he becomes a presence in Whitby
like the “seaweed-covered rocks of the strand” (p. 123). It is no accident,

then, that Lucy and Mina’s tea, that takes place over the seaweed-covered
rocks, progresses so that the two women exhibit what Mina calls “New
Womanish” appetites (p. 123). On the surface of things, Mina is referring
to her and Lucy’s hunger for food. However, Dominguez-Rué (2010)
asserts that Mina’s reference to “New Womanish” appetites really refers
to the women’s sexual appetites (pp. 302–303), the intensity of which is
expressed between Lucy and Mina alone as the two women dine together
under (or over) Dracula’s influence. This queer coding of food for sex,
intimacy, and stronger emotions not only expresses the significance of Lucy
and Mina’s queer friendship, but also shows the triangular link between
Dracula, Lucy, and Mina, and how Dracula directly influences the bond
between these women. It also shapes the events of the scene on the East
Cliff, which expresses the possibility of sex between Lucy and Mina as well.
Halberstam (1995) and Malchow (1996) famously write about Dracula’s
sexual perversity being mapped onto his monstrous body (pp. 90, 153).
However, they never talk about Dracula’s monstrosity serving as a catalyst
for romantic relations between Lucy and Mina. My use of Girard’s queer
theory, the notion that the two rivals/friends’ relations are just as potent
as those with their beloved is a new way to understand the function of
Dracula’s monstrosity and monstrosity in general.
Dracula demonstrates the queer nature of Lucy and Mina’s friendship by
enabling and enhancing the queer aspect of their friendship and by mak-
ing stronger emotions and sexual desire between Lucy and Mina visible
after Dracula attacks Lucy on the East Cliff.5 This scene between Lucy and
Mina becomes a “theater for female eroticism” (Maltz, 2017, p. 222).6
Sexual desire between Lucy and Mina becomes visible as they experience
what is like sexual orgasm together.7 When Mina discovers Lucy in the
churchyard, Lucy is “breathing - not softly, as usual with her, but in long,
heavy gasps, as though striving to get her lungs full at every breath” (D,
pp. 125–126). As Mina approaches Lucy, Lucy responds by “pulling the
collar of her nightdress close around her throat. Whilst she did so there
came a little shudder through her” (p. 126). As Lucy “shudders” in Mina’s
presence, Mina realizes that Lucy is “unclad” (p. 126). Lucy’s long, heavy
breaths, her shudders in Mina’s arms, and her nakedness are all moments
from Stoker’s text that suggest sexual intimacy even if sex is not actually
occurring in this scene. Additionally, in an effort to “warm” and care for
her, to cover Lucy’s exposed body with clothing, Mina accidentally pricks
28 E. D. MACALUSO
Lucy with a “big safety-pin” (p. 126). Mina’s “pricking” of Lucy sug-
gests female penetration, especially after Lucy “moans occasionally” after
being “pricked” (p. 126).8 Both women recognize the taboo nature of this
encounter as the two women rush to get home; Lucy “trembled[s] a little”
and clings to Mina while Mina’s “heart beat[s] so loud all the time that
sometimes I thought I should faint” (p. 126). Mina even “daubs” her “feet
with mud” to deflect discovery of the illicitness of this encounter (Willis,
2007, p. 316). Both women say “a prayer of thankfulness together” when
they reach home and they vow to keep what has occurred a secret from
everyone (especially Lucy’s mother) (D, p. 127). Both women realize that
what they have experienced together is unspeakable and unpardonable since
Victorian women are not supposed to engage in erotic activities together.9
They cannot deny the illicit nature of their encounter or of Dracula’s influ-
ence,10 and this is what frightens both women into praying vehemently and
keeping their encounter a secret once they reach home. Dracula’s influence
on both Lucy and Mina is certainly evident in this scene. He helps to make
their friendship queer by suggesting sexual desire between the two women,
and he succeeds in intensifying the already strong feelings of friendship that
the two women have for one another.
Like other Victorian women in “intimate friendships,” Lucy and Mina
use metaphoric language to talk about the strength of their friendship and
the love that cements their bond (Vicinus, 2004, p. 233). Even as Lucy
attempts to declare her love for Arthur, she ends up speaking about how
much Mina means to her:
Mina, we have told all our secrets to each other since we were children; we
have slept and eaten together, and laughed and cried together; and now,
though I have spoken, I would like to speak more. Oh, Mina, couldn’t you
guess? I love him [Arthur]. I am blushing as I write, for although I think he
loves me, he has not told me so in words. But oh, Mina, I love him; I love
him; I love him! There that does me good. I wish I were with you, dear,
sitting by the fire undressing, as we used to sit; and I would try to tell you
what I feel. I do not know how I am writing this even to you. I am afraid
to stop, or I should tear up the letter, and I don’t want to stop, for I do so
want to tell you all. Let me hear from you at once, and tell me all that you
think about it. Mina, I must stop. Good-night. Bless me in your prayers; and,
Mina, pray for my happiness. Lucy. P.S. – I need not tell you this is a secret.
Good-night again. “L.” (D, p. 88)
Lucy begins her “confession of love for Arthur” with her recollection
of how much she loves Mina. She speaks of their passionate childhood
together full of shared secrets, meals, and beds. This passion inspires and
fuels her declaration of her love for Arthur. However, her words about
this love, “I think he loves me, he has not told me so in words” reveal
that Lucy is unsure of Arthur’s reciprocal love. She is not certain that he
loves her because he has not told her so. And, Lucy says: “There that does
me good.” It is “good” for Lucy to pronounce her love for Arthur. This
does not necessarily mean that she really loves him. She follows this sus-
pect declaration with how much she wishes to be alone with Mina by a hot
fire, semi-clad, so they can confess their deepest feelings to one another:
“I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing…and I would
try to tell you what I feel.” Lucy alludes to a secretive intimacy that she
cannot name—“the love that dare not speak its name”—and a wish to
understand what this love means with Mina’s help. Like Lucy’s allusion to
a secretive intimacy (one that is unspoken), Vicinus (2004) maintains that
women in “intimate friendships” did not directly speak about their love
for one another (p. 233). Lucy suggests that her deepest feelings, directed
toward Mina, are secretive. She cannot name them: “I do not know how
I am writing this even to you. I am afraid to stop, or I should tear up
the letter.” But, she wants to understand these feelings by talking about
them with Mina. Elizabeth Signorotti (1996) claims that Lucy’s turning
to Mina for emotional and erotic sustenance in this scene reveals Lucy’s
“lesbian tendencies” (p. 622). While Signorotti believes that Lucy’s “les-
bian tendencies” only occur at this moment of the novel, I argue that it is
Stoker’s intention to discuss the ways that lesbianism is made between the
women of Dracula. Lucy struggles with a secretive passion for Mina that
reveals Lucy’s unhappiness with her engagement to Arthur. She is praying
for happiness; she is not actually happy in her life with Arthur. She even tells
Mina that she cannot be happy in her engagement to Arthur until “it can
be all happy” (D, p. 92). In this confession, Lucy is waiting for her mood
to change. She is waiting to come out of depression so that she can feel
happy about her engagement to Arthur. Her secretive intimacy with Mina
is a rival for Lucy’s engagement to Arthur. After all, Lucy’s engagement
is one of esteem, the most “socially advantageous match” (Spear, 1993,
p. 182) made by Lucy’s mother for Lucy11 ; it is not yet passionate love.
Mina, too, uses metaphoric language to talk about her love for
Lucy. She not only wishes to build “castles in the air” with Lucy “by the
sea”; she also tells Lucy “I love you with all the moods and tenses of the
30 E. D. MACALUSO
verb” (D, p. 191). The possibility of erotic, sexual, and passionate love are
all evoked by Mina’s claim since she loves Lucy “with all the moods” of the
verb. In fact, Anna Cogswell Wood asserted that her partner, Irene Leache,
taught her about “love and all its forms” (Faderman, 1981, p. 161), which
also implies romantic and sexual love between two women. Mina expresses
this love to Lucy when she says she loves her. Mina also says that she loves
Lucy with all the “tenses of the verb” as well. Her love for Lucy persists
through time.
Mina also uses metaphoric language and physical description to illus-
trate her admiring love for Lucy. Vicinus (2004) asserts that it was not
uncommon for “intimate friends” to express their love for one another
based on what they said of one another’s beauty (p. 233). Of Lucy, Mina
writes: “Lucy was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock; she has
got a beautiful colour since she has been here. … She is so sweet with old
people; I think they all fell in love with her on the spot” (D, pp. 100, 97).
This admittance of Mina’s, that Lucy looks “sweetly pretty,” suggests that
Mina does admire Lucy’s beauty. Her declaration that anyone falls in love
with Lucy mimics Margaret Leicester Warren’s admission that she loves
her distant cousin, Edith Leycester: “Edith looked very beautiful and as
usual I fell in love with her” (Marcus, 2007, p. 47). Mina even adopts the
erotic gaze of Lucy’s fiancé, Arthur Holmwood, to express her admiring
love for Lucy: “Lucy is asleep and breathing softly. She has more colour
in her cheeks than usual, and looks, oh, so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell
in love with her seeing her only in the drawing room, I wonder what he
would say if he saw her now” (D, p. 123). Mina’s erotic gaze does indicate
that Mina, at times, sees Lucy as more than just a “friend.”
Mina even uses the language of religious devotion to explain her love
for Lucy. Vicinus (2004) argues that this was done between “nineteenth-
and-early-twentieth-century women [who] used the language of religious
love to explain their passionately erotic and spiritual feelings” (p. 86). After
Dracula has killed Lucy, Mina privately confesses to herself that Lucy is the
person that Mina cares about most, even more than herself and Jonathan:
If I hadn’t gone to Whitby, perhaps poor dear Lucy would be with us now.
She hadn’t taken to visiting the churchyard till I came, and if she hadn’t come
there in the daytime with me she wouldn’t have walked there in her sleep;
and if she hadn’t gone there at night and asleep, that monster couldn’t have
destroyed her as he did. Oh, why did I ever go to Whitby? There now, crying
again! I wonder what has come over me today. I must hide it from Jonathan,
for if he knew that I had been crying twice in one morning – I, who never
cried on my own account, and whom he has never caused to shed a tear –
the dear fellow would fret his heart out. I shall put a bold face on, and if I
do feel weepy, he shall never see it. I suppose it is just one of the lessons that
we poor women have to learn… (D, pp. 296–297)
Even though Mina is Anglican, this scene reads like a Catholic confession,
because Mina evaluates her feelings privately and blames herself for Lucy’s
death. Her guilt over Lucy’s death causes her to shed tears. Mina’s grief
over Lucy causes her to reveal that Lucy is the person that Mina cares for
most, even more than Jonathan and herself: “I, who never cried on my
own account, and whom he has never caused to shed a tear.” Mina feels
that she should hide her feelings from Jonathan so as not to frighten him
with her grief. But, this passage, too, might be read more subtly. Late
Victorian women who loved women often had to hide their passions for
one another because their love was not sanctioned by the state (Vicinus,
2004, p. xv). Mina’s hiding her true feelings from Jonathan doubles as one
woman hiding her passion for another woman. And, this is the burden that
women who love other women “have to learn.”
However, Mina turns her love and passion for Lucy into a religious quest
to vanquish Dracula. She convinces the Crew of Light to take up this quest
“for dear Lucy’s sake” out of devotion to Lucy (D, p. 269). Mina takes
up this quest to ensure that Lucy has not died in vain. For Mina, Lucy’s
spiritual redemption and immortality are what also allows Dracula to be
redeemed and commended to heaven:
and only there came through all the multitude of horrors, the holy ray of
light that my dear, dear Lucy was at last at peace (D, p. 262) … I [Mina]
know and you [Crew of Light] know, that were I once dead you could and
would set free my immortal spirit, even as you did my poor Lucy’s (p. 371)
… That poor soul [Dracula] who has wrought all this misery is the saddest
case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he too is destroyed in his
worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. (p. 349)
Mina fantasizes about a spiritual union with Lucy since she cannot have
one on earth. As long as Lucy and Mina’s love is spiritually pure, God and
the Victorian state sanction it. A dream, or a prayer, in which both women
are spiritually removed from their baser selves, or their sexualities, and can
have spiritual immortality, is quite attractive to Bram Stoker and his Victo-
rian readers. Mary Benson, a woman who loved women, also writes about
32 E. D. MACALUSO
her love for her lovers as: “it is all of God. [Not] one whit less than all
you will I have, in that mysterious sacramental union where one can have
all, and yet wrong no other love –” (Vicinus, 2004, p. 94).12 Bram Stoker
was a deeply religious man. His prayer for same-sex love is it can escape
bodily or sinful temptation, represented by Dracula, and actually be quite
pure and productive. After Mina and the Crew of Light commit to Mina’s
spiritual mission to vanquish Dracula for “dear Lucy’s sake” (D, p. 269),
they do, indeed, kill Dracula and rid the world of his sexual danger (Schaf-
fer, 1994, p. 406). But, it is Lucy and Mina’s love that does this. It is Lucy
and Mina’s same-sex love that births little Quincey and benefits the state
by contributing to its subsistence.
This beautiful ending to Stoker’s novel suggests that same-sex love does
not bring about violence. The Crew of Light creates a violent monster
in Dracula, who was a doppelganger for Oscar Wilde or Henry Irving,
Stoker’s gay friend and rumored lover, respectively. This love births future
generations and rids its world of its perils—passionless heterosexual bonds
and violence against the queer community. Even Van Helsing recognizes
this love’s power: “Oh, Madam Mina, by that love [the one between herself
and Lucy], I [Van Helsing] implore you, help me. It is for others’ good that
I ask – to redress great wrong, and to lift much and terrible troubles – that
can be more great than you can know” (D, p. 217). Mina and Jonathan
consummate their marriage with the help of Mina’s love for Lucy. And,
this love stops all of the violence in the characters’ world. This love shows
that same-sex love is just as valuable as love between a man and a woman.
Stoker makes this claim after he watched his friend, Oscar Wilde, be ruined
simply because Wilde loved men. Stoker’s hope is same-sex love, like Lucy
and Mina’s, rids the late Victorian world of its homophobic violence. And,
instead, encourages late Victorians to love in the face of this violence.
Notes
1. Stoker’sDracula (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998) will here-
after be referred to parenthetically as D followed by a page number.
2. Dominguez-Ruè asserts that when Mina talks about her and Lucy’s “New
Womanish” appetites, which they exhibit after a very “severe tea,” (D,
p. 123) this passage is meant to allude to the women’s sexual appetites
(2010, pp. 302–303). Since Lucy and Mina have tea together, they are
expressing sexual appetites toward one another.
3. Dracula is the “beloved” that makes the bond between Lucy and Mina just as
strong as the one between him and the women. This is my conclusion about
Dracula’s role in Lucy and Mina’s friendship. This conclusion is inspired by

Girard’s assertion that the bond between two romantic rivals is as strong as
the bond between the rivals and the “beloved” (Sedgwick, 1985, p. 27).
4. And, this is only one example of Dracula’s symbolic influence on many of
the conditions that create Lucy and Mina’s heightened intimacy with one
another.
5. The etymological connection between the words “monster” and “demon-
strate” is profound, because Dracula as monster and enabler shows that
Lucy and Mina’s friendship is queer; stronger emotions and sexual desire
are present in their relationship. This makes their friendship straddle the
line between heterosexual and homosexual; it also reveals that friendship,
sexuality, and gender are complex matters in Dracula.
6. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Sedgwick
(1985) takes a critical look at the triangle of desire as referenced by Rene
Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and argues that rather than allow a
Platonic triangle to stand for the erotic relations between all people (as the
Platonic triangle privileges the deep bond between male rivals in their rela-
tion to a woman “beloved”), Sedgwick suggests that this triangle, after it
has been re-critiqued by Lacan, Chodorow and Dinnerstein, Rubin, Irigaray,
and others, can actually be “a sensitive register precisely for delineating rela-
tionships of power and meaning, and for making graphically intelligible the
play of desire and identification by which individuals negotiate with their
societies for empowerment” (p. 127). As Girard concluded that “the bond
that links the two [male] rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that
links either of the rivals to the beloved [female],” I suggest, in my reading
of Dracula’s text, that the bond between Lucy and Mina is as intense as the
one that Girard describes between the two males and that Dracula, in turn,
serves as the “beloved” (the “female,” the sexual catalyst [Dominguez-Rué,
2010, p. 302]) that brings these two women together and intensifies their
loving and erotic bond. Stoker, then, privileges this bond and calls special
attention to the power of its queer nature.
7. Lucy and Mina are not literally in the throes of sexual orgasm in this scene.
It should be noted that Stoker is famous for suggesting sexual intimacy even
if he does not rely on an actual occurrence of sexual activity to do it. He does
this in this East Cliff scene between Lucy and Mina. He also does it in an
earlier scene between Harker, Dracula, and the three vampire women when
Harker longs for them to “kiss me [him] with those red lips” (D, p. 69). The
events of Stoker’s novel come to readers in fragments from letters, journals,
and diaries. Readers are familiar with the events of this East Cliff scene from
Mina’s journal. It is her language that also makes this scene passionate and
sexual. In a journal entry dated (August 11), Mina recounts this scene and
it is she who puts what occurs between herself and Lucy in erotic terms.
34 E. D. MACALUSO
8. Mina penetrates Lucy “in the secret places that no boy can fill” (Craft,
1994, p. 87). Just as there is anxiety that surrounds the notion of pene-
tration between males in Dracula (Belford, 1996, p. 9), there is also anxiety
about the penetration that occurs between Lucy and Mina. The penetration
between Lucy and Mina is romantic and benign, but Stoker still shows critics
the culturally conservative impulse to be wary of this type of penetration and
erotic sex scene as Mina does daub her feet in mud to hide her shame and
to deflect public discovery (Willis, 2007, p. 316) and the two say a prayer
of thankfulness once they reach home to atone for what they have done
(D, p. 127).
9. An English magistrate acquitted Woods and Pirie from all of the charges
of sexual misconduct that their student, Cumming Gordon, accused them
of on the grounds that Victorian ladies do not have sex with one another.
This attitude permeated itself into Victorian culture even as it was clear that
Victorian women could share strong affections for one another and even live
together so long as they were perfectly chaste or at least their relationship
looked like it was perfectly chaste (Halberstam, 1998, p. 65).
10. Dracula “expresses and distorts an originally sexual energy” (Craft, 1984,
p. 107, “emphasis mine”).
11. “That was Mr. Holmwood. He often comes to see us, and he and mamma get
on very well together; they have so many things to talk about in common”
(D, p. 87). This passage discloses that Arthur is Mrs. Westenra’s pick for
Lucy’s engagement.
12. Mary Benson even talks about loving women in the face of the compulsory
heterosexual bond with her husband. This is a historical model for Lucy and
Mina’s predicament.
References
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Giant.
Bristow, J. (2008). Oscar Wilde and modern culture: The making of a legend. Athens:
Ohio University Press.
Cocks, H. G. (2003). Nameless offences: Homosexual desire in the nineteenth century.
New York, NY: I.B. Tauris.
Cook, M. (2008). London and the culture of homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cam-
bridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture). Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Cook, M., Mills, R., Trumbach, R., & Cocks, H. G. (2007). A gay history of Britain:
Love and sex between men since the middle ages. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
Craft, C. (1984). Kiss me with those red lips: Gender and inversion in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula. Representations, 8, 107–133.
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ula. In C. Craft (Ed.), Another kind of love: Male homosexual desire in English
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female vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Journal of Gender Studies, 19(3),
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culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
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1867–1896: Aestheticism and arts and crafts (pp. 201–226). Abingdon, UK:
Routledge.
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(Eds.), Sexuality and subordination: Interdisciplinary studies of gender in the
nineteenth century (pp. 136–171). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
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and “Dracula”. Criticism, 38(4), 607–632.
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39(3), 301–325.
CHAPTER 3
The Monstrous Power of Uncertainty: Social

and Cultural Conflict in Richard Marsh’s The
Beetle
The fin de siècle was notable for complex and conflicting attitudes toward
social issues that affected Britain.1 British subjects both embraced and
protested the complex colonial history of its Empire. While Cecil Rhodes
believed in the sanctity of the Empire and its mission to “civilize” its colo-
nial subjects, Mary Kingsley believed that a more equitable treatment of
these same subjects was in order. While General Charles George Gordon
believed in a military show of force to subdue colonial uprisings in Egypt,
Annie Besant believed that a more diplomatic solution was necessary to end
the colonial skirmishes in Egypt. There were cultural conflicts over gender
and sexuality as well. While feminists like Sarah Grand and Mona Caird sup-
ported the cause/s of the New Woman, antifeminists like Henry Maudsley
and Charles Harper insisted that the New Woman threatened family and
British society. While there were women who embraced the popular style
of “rational dress,” which enabled them to perform their particular affini-
ties for female masculinity/ies and empowerment, like Rosa Bonheur and
Radclyffe Hall, there were others who insisted on traditional femininity in
dress, behavior, and heterosexual marriage like Eliza Lynn Linton and Mar-
garet Oliphant. And, while there were men who embraced the lifestyle and
philosophy/ies of the dandy, like Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, there were
other men who insisted on policing these aesthetics and life choices, like the
Marquess of Queensberry and lawmakers who outlawed “sodomy.” These
conflicting attitudes also defined the debate on poor relief in fin-de-siècle

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_3
38 E. D. MACALUSO
Britain. Henry Fleming proposed that the management of outdoor relief

should be centralized (e.g., controlled by the government), while working
men, like Sam Brambley, believed that they had the right to control relief
efforts and to determine wage rates for the poor.
These conflicting relations between “traditional” and “progressive”
members of British society were all the more pronounced during the fin de
siècle, because the British Empire was changing, as it approached the mod-
ern period. Colonial uprisings meant talk of independence movements in
Britain’s colonies, the New Woman meant new ways to define the British
“woman,” the definition of homosexuality meant new ways to concep-
tualize sexuality, and new talks about the poor in Parliament meant new
ways to address the long-standing issue of poverty in Britain. “Traditional”
members of British society embraced the status quo or the conventional
ideas, and ways of doing things, adopted from the early and mid-periods
of the Victorian era. “Traditional” members of British society often sup-
ported imperialism and colonialism, they castigated the New Woman and
the homosexual, and they refused the poor help that would (somewhat)
alleviate the problem of poverty. The members of Parliament who shared
these “traditional” views were often conservatives, who belonged to the
land-owning elite and had a real economic interest in maintaining the sta-
tus quo (they would keep their livelihoods, property, and power). “Tra-
ditional” ideas were popular during the fin de siècle because they repre-
sented a “dying” or a “lost” culture (Arata, 1996, p. 1), a Victorian culture
that believed that its ideology was the most promising of all the world’s
civilizations and, therefore, the most lasting. “Progressive” members of
British society, on the other hand, embraced modernity at the fin de siècle,
anti-imperialism, and independence movements. They supported the New
Woman, they were interested in de-criminalizing homosexuality, and they
made conscious efforts to improve the lives of the poor. The members of
Parliament who shared these “progressive” views were often New Liberals
who were interested in reforming society by adopting “progressive” ideas.
Radicals and socialists also supported New Liberals and were interested in
reforming society by giving control of poor relief to the poor and by imag-
ining a society based on service to one’s fellow man and the state (by reject-
ing capitalist ideology and practice). These “progressive” ideas challenged
the traditional response to social change, which often endorsed the use of
force to solve the problems at hand.2 The progressive response to these
changes was to understand why they were occurring and to accommodate
them. For instance, when the British were faced with colonial uprisings in
3 THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY … 39
Africa and in India, the traditional response was to use force (often military
action) to subdue them (e.g., Gordon’s battles in Egypt, Rhodes’s in South
Africa, and Campbell’s in India). The progressive response was to invent
new ways for colonials and the colonized to interact in order to solve the
problem of the British presence abroad and, in some cases, to act against
it by working for diplomacy like Annie Besant did in Egypt and India and
like Olive Schreiner did in South Africa.
Just as there were traditional and progressive responses to British colo-
nialism at the fin de siècle, there were also traditional and progressive
responses to the New Woman. Punch often caricatured her as a threat to
society in light of her desire to become more educated and independent.
Her effigy was even hung from Cambridge’s Senate House while a vote
was taking place to admit women to the University in 1897 (Sutherland,
2015, p. 138). In contrast to these traditional reactions, many progressive
women revered the New Woman as a means to their own success, as Sarah
Grand embraced the concept of her in order to write her novels. By the
same token, Mona Caird and Ella Hepworth Dixon wrote widely read tracts
about marriage that reconsidered its worth and questioned its hegemony.
At the end of the nineteenth century, “sodomy” was still considered a
crime in Britain even as Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Walter Pater,
and Oscar Wilde were all writing tracts and/or novels that addressed the
issue and, at the very least, humanized it by asking their audiences to
consider homosexuality as “abnormal, but natural” (Miller, 2006, p. 14;
Symonds, 1999, p. 75). In terms of addressing the issue of the poor in
Britain, traditionalists worked to centralize their care of the poor; they
relegated them to institutions and curbed the outdoor relief fund, while
progressive people and politicians worked to give control of the poor’s
money to the poor themselves.
In this chapter, I will identify the traditional and progressive responses
to colonialism, the New Woman, sexuality, and the treatment of the poor
and argue that they are both present in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle; they
come to life in the novel in important ways that allow critics and readers
to understand the complexity of the cultural attitudes that defined the fin
de siècle. Even as cultural responses to social movements of the British fin
de siècle were complex, as Marshall suggests (vii–viii), I contend that they
are still defined by a clash between traditional values and progressive view-
points that emerge as a result of the violence of the liminal figure of the
monster, the Beetle, in The Beetle. The violence of the Beetle’s revenge
against Britain shows that there is an anti-colonial perspective, which fights
40 E. D. MACALUSO
for attention with the conservative support for the British colonial project
and the Beetle’s continued violence against Paul Lessingham, Miss Lindon,
and Robert Holt suggests that this conflict trickles down to other issues like
sexuality, poverty, and the New Woman. The liminal figure of the monster
reveals that there is a complex debate informing the caricature of the New
Woman and that she is a historical and cultural figure and an indetermi-
nate construct. The monster shows that the British populous, at the fin de
siècle, viewed the New Woman as either a monster/social threat or a role
model/commendable figure. Mr. Lindon, Atherton, and the Beetle versus
Miss Lindon champion both perspectives in the novel. This means that
the New Woman was often not valued for her complexity, as Sally Ledger
would have it (1997, p. 1), but for the disparate conservative and New
Liberal ways of viewing her that her paradoxical monstrosity and true value
often represented. The violence of the monster, and his/her3 attack on the
New Woman, Miss Lindon, and the other protagonists, Lessingham and
Holt, also reveals the contentiousness of the debates behind colonialism,
sexuality, and poverty (traditional values versus progressive viewpoints are
delineated in all of these cases). This means that there were real tensions
between jingos and anti-imperialists, antifeminists and feminists, homo-
phobes and allies, and the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These subjects,
too, are nebulous and portrayed strongly in Marsh’s novel.
The monster does more, in this study, than simply represent anxieties
about race, gender, sexuality, and class (Halberstam, 1995, p. 1; Malchow,
1996, p. 8), he/she shows, through his/her violence coupled with his/her
foreignness and “perverse” sexuality, that there was a schism in culture, at
the British fin de siècle, between traditional values and progressive view-
points. He/she reveals the dichotomous way that the British populous
viewed the New Woman (as a monster or admirable figure) and he/she
delineates the ways that colonialism, the New Woman, homosexuality,
and poverty were all subjects that were rife with conflict. As I mentioned
in my introduction, studies have been written about the New Woman’s
relevance to feminism and feminist activism, suffrage movements, edu-
cation and employment, arts and leisure, fashion, entertainment, fiction
and the periodical presses, and transportation. I am adding to the studies
that explore the antifeminist and feminist critiques of the New Woman,
like Ledger’s, Ardis’s, Heilmann’s, and Richardson and Willis’s by writing
about how monstrosity reveals antifeminists’ threatening rhetoric about the
New Woman as enemy to the state and feminist notions of her as “wom-
an’s” heroine. I explore how these discourses manifest themselves in history
and Marsh’s novel.
On a broader scale, the figure of the monster unearths the willful blind-
ness that traditional, white male, conservative British (like Cecil Rhodes)
had toward the social unrest and progressive social change that was altering
their society irrevocably. A monster figure, like Stevenson’s Jekyll/Hyde,
perfectly captures the dual consciousness, or social and cultural conflict, of
the British fin de siècle. On the one hand, Britain, at this time, was like Dr.
Jekyll; it was prosperous and could boast marvelous accomplishments, like
the spoils of Empire. On the other hand, like Hyde, the murderer, it was
responsible for colonial violence, hostility toward women and homosexuals,
and the neglect of the poor. A monster, like the Beetle, and his/her vio-
lence coupled with his/her foreignness and sexual perversity, again, make
the debate about the New Woman, and the fact that she is an indefinite
construct, clear. And, he/she, through violence, foreignness, and sexual
perversity, reveals the contentiousness that defined the debates about colo-
nialism, homosexuality, and poverty and shows that these subjects, too, are
conflicted.
3.1 The Novel’s Social Conflicts in Their

Historical Context
To understand the kinds of cultural conflict that Marsh was writing about in
his novel, it is necessary to understand the complex and conflicting social
and political history that shaped his writings. Marsh’s dramatization of
the traditional forces that attempted to subdue New Women and the pro-
gressive forces that insisted that New Women reformed the position of
women reflects metropolitan Britain’s own ambivalence toward this figure.
Antifeminists, like Eliza Lynn Linton, viewed the New Woman not only
as a threat to traditional femininity but also as the symbol of a movement
to relegate men to a new matriarchal order (Ledger, 1997, p. 12). Linton
was afraid that this would mean the destruction of the British social sys-
tem as she knew it; that the British family and social hierarchy would be
destroyed (12). W. R. Greg and Walter Besant both believed that the family
would be threatened if “redundant” women refused to marry and/or if new
relationships formed as a result of New Women’s independence (12). Mar-
garet Oliphant called New Women, “The Anti-Marriage League,” because
she believed that New Women’s insistence on independence meant the
42 E. D. MACALUSO
destruction of marriage even when some New Women were proponents

of marriage (12). Linton, Greg, Besant, and Oliphant argued that the idea
of the New Woman could not possibly enfranchise and empower fin-de-
siècle women because, to them, the New Woman meant the degradation
of “woman,” the destruction of the family and of metropolitan Britain.
Even with all of these voices attempting to silence New Women, New
Women themselves helped to reform marriage by addressing, and support-
ing, the question of women’s independence in fin-de-siècle Britain. Sarah
Grand, Mona Caird, Ella Hepworth Dixon, and Althea Crackanthorpe (to
name only four) were writing tracts about marriage in the daily newspa-
pers to improve the institution itself and to attempt to make marriage
better for women; this meant reforming marriage after the Married Wom-
en’s Property Act of 1882, which gave women more access to property
(and power) in their marriages. Marriage reform also meant rejecting mar-
riage altogether for a free union, rejecting partnerships entirely, or creating
the conditions for women to be independent. New Women like Frances
Power Cobbe, Edith Simcox, and Emmeline Pankhurst attempted to make
conditions better for women by encouraging more education and employ-
ment opportunities for women, by making these employment opportuni-
ties lucrative and safe, and by encouraging women to fight for suffrage.
Some New Women took advantage of new employment opportunities and
professions by becoming medical doctors like Sophia Jex-Blake and Eliz-
abeth Garrett Anderson. Some women became artists and were examples
of what more education could do for women like the visual artists Mary
Lloyd, Rosa Bonheur, and Anna Klumpke and the poets Amy Levy and
“Michael Field” (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper).
Even as Mr. Lindon and Atherton are threatened by Miss Lindon’s rebel-
liousness as a New Woman—“Don’t talk to me li-ike that, girl! – I [Mr.
Lindon] – I believe you’re s-stark mad!” (B, p. 169)4 —and the Beetle tor-
tures Miss Lindon for her modernity—he strips her of her hair and clothes
and makes her into a man and a mockery of the New Woman—Miss Lin-
don, herself, still represents the New Woman and all of her ambitions for
liberation that we find in Marsh’s novel. All of the ways in which Miss Lin-
don stands up to the male protagonists of the novel show that she really
has an allegiance to the figure of the New Woman. The way that she chal-
lenges her father and Atherton by choosing Lessingham for a fiancé, her
interest and activity in politics, her insistence that she solve the mystery
behind the Beetle’s attacks, even after she endures great personal peril as a
result of this, all signify independent and rebellious actions for which New
Women were noted. Marsh captures the debate about the New Woman
in this way. He identifies her as both a monstrous figure that antifeminists
found to be threatening and a laudable figure that fin-de-siècle and feminist
women, like Miss Lindon, wished to emulate. As I will show in subsequent
paragraphs, the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence against her, and the
other protagonists of the novel, shows the conflicted nature of the debates
over colonialism, sexuality, and poverty as well.
In terms of the social history and conflict that defined the debate about
colonialism in The Beetle, most conservative Britons in Parliament, and
British subjects who supported imperialism and colonialism, supported
Britain’s entry into, and occupation of, Egypt in 1882 (Powell, 2003,
p. 2). Lord Cromer believed that the key to subduing the people of Egypt
and the Sudan lay in abolishing slavery and assuming control of the gov-
ernment, thereby deposing the Egyptians and the Sudanese after British
military forces gained control of the countries’ infrastructures (Egypt in
1882, Sudan in 1898) (5). However, Egyptian nationalists, like the Urabi
rebels, believed that Britain had no legal right and no religious right to
gain control of their nation, and they considered the institution of slavery
a source of unity between Egypt and the Sudan (5). Battles between the
British, the Egyptians, and the Sudanese ensued in these territories until the
British were the ultimate victors, occupying Egypt in 1882 and remaining
the influential power in Egypt and the Sudan well into the 1920s (168).5
Marsh captures the sentiments of the traditional British who believed in
imperialism, and their right to “civilize” and control Egypt, when Atherton
identifies the Beetle as an “Arab of the Soudan” and not the “spick and
span Arab of the boulevard” (B, p. 103). Atherton believes that the Beetle
will only be civilized when he/she cleans him/herself up and removes the
traces of the degradation of the Sudan (the “dirtiness” and the “blackness”)
and embraces the pristine qualities of the Egyptian boulevard (already con-
quered by the British). When the Beetle becomes a threat to Miss Lin-
don, later in the novel, Atherton shows his contempt for the Beetle when
he angrily calls him/her “that humorous professor of hankey-pankey,”
minimizing the Beetle’s mesmeric powers, which the British stereotypi-
cally believed belonged to all “Arabs” (B, p. 286; Winter, 1998, p. 199).
Miss Coleman identifies the Beetle as “that Arab party,” which makes him
“Other” than, different from, and oppositional to “Christian landladies”
who have “their rights … in this country [England]” (B, p. 273; Said,
1978, p. 1). Miss Coleman implies that she is Britain’s enfranchised sub-
ject whereas the Beetle is simply a “foreigner” with no rights in England.
44 E. D. MACALUSO
Lessingham is frightened and enraged by the Beetle, who comes from the
street that reminds him of his murder of the priestess of Isis, the Rue de
Rabagas (B, p. 78), and he shows his rage in his attempt to subdue Holt
(who is under the Beetle’s command). Atherton, Coleman, and Lessing-
ham all express the traditional British belief that foreigners like the Beetle
will degenerate the British race and wreak havoc (as terrorists) upon the
Empire.
And yet, Champnell’s narration highlights, in clear and descriptive
terms, the ambiguity of Lessingham’s attitude. On the one hand, Lessing-
ham wants to kill the Beetle for his/her torture of white, British women
in Cairo; on the other hand, Lessingham feels great remorse for killing
the Beetle’s relative: “His [Lessingham’s] voice faltered. I [Champnell]
thought he would break down” (B, p. 245). While there are frightened
and violent reactions to the Beetle by Coleman, Atherton, and Lessing-
ham, as a result of the Beetle’s disturbances of, and attacks on, them,
there are also moments, as in Champnell’s narration, that evoke sympa-
thy for the Beetle’s motivations, especially when Champnell’s narration
portrays Lessingham’s remorse so precisely. Marsh portrays the conflict
between a traditional, conservative population of Britons who thought that
Britain’s imperial and colonial projects were justified and progressive sub-
jects who thought that Britain’s presence in its colonies should be resisted
and undone. Furthermore, it is the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence
against Holt, Lessingham, and Miss Lindon that also shows this conflict in
cultural attitudes toward colonialism (and, then, the New Woman, homo-
sexuality, and poverty).
After readers witness the violent encounter between Holt and the Bee-
tle, homosexuality in Marsh’s novel is something to be feared and acknowl-
edged. As a result of law enforcement, men could be hanged for commit-
ting homosexual acts up until 1861 (8921 men were prosecuted for sodomy
after 1806, 404 were sentenced to death, and 56 were executed). After this,
men charged with “gross indecency,” like Oscar Wilde, would serve prison
terms. Holt clearly expresses his fear of the sexually perverse, foreign (and
male) Beetle when the Beetle begins to attack and subdue him: “I [Holt]
stood still and bore it all, while it enveloped my face with its huge, slimy,
evil-smelling body, and embraced me with its myriad legs. The horror of
it made me mad” (B, p. 52). On the one hand, this expresses what late
Victorians thought was the unnatural and dangerous nature of homosexu-
ality in these scenes. On the other hand, Holt’s benevolence as a character
raises the question: Are gay men monsters or relatable subjects? Marsh
explores the debate between traditional British subjects, like the Marquess
of Queensberry, who believed homosexuality to be an abomination, and
progressive people like Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward
Carpenter, and Oscar Wilde who knew that homosexuality was inborn and
worthy of acknowledgment and understanding.
The Beetle’s violent attacks on Holt make Holt both an undesirable
vagrant and a sympathetic everyman. Holt represents both the traditional
and progressive attitudes that bourgeois British citizens had toward the
poor even as they worked for the relief of the poor’s suffering. There were
some Poor Law supporters and economic theorists (Spencer, Fleming, and
Longley) who wished to centralize relief efforts for the poor by supporting
the Poor Law Amendment and Act (1834 and 1844), which stipulated that
workhouses, institutions, and asylums were the best places to accommo-
date the poor, and that crusades to end the seemingly arbitrary giving of
outdoor relief were just efforts to ensure that relief was distributed properly
and effectively to those who truly needed it (Hurren, 2007, pp. 17–27).
However, there were others, working people, including laborers them-
selves, who, by century’s end, wished to take control of their rights and the
ways in which relief was being doled out to the poor. They formed unions,
like the NALU (the National Agricultural Labourer’s Union), to ensure
that they were the ones who decided what kinds of relief were (and how
much was) given to them (219). Decisions that were made to centralize
relief to the poor and to end arbitrary outdoor relief were often supported
by conservative members of Parliament as some of these men were mem-
bers of the land-owning elite who liked to ensure that they had most to all
of the control over what they believed the poor needed (39). Giving the
poor ownership of poor relief was a cause that New Liberal members of Par-
liament encouraged as they supported “a right and duty to make the best
of their [paupers’] opportunity” (32). The mixed responses of antipathy
and sympathy to Holt (despised by the workhouse overseer and the Beetle
and liked by Miss Lindon and the other British characters), as a result of
the monster’s foreign and perverse violence against Holt, reflect the con-
flicting views of the poor in fin-de-siècle British society. Holt is both an
undesirable vagrant who must conform to the government’s strict policies
for his containment and one who represents a spirit of reform that dictates
that there must be a better way for the nation to accommodate its paupers.
Marsh engages the conflicting social and political issues mentioned above
by emphasizing some characters’ traditional reactions to the violence of the
46 E. D. MACALUSO
Beetle and colonialism, the New Woman, sexuality, and the plight of the
poor while also supporting progressive points of view.
3.2 Homosexuality as an Abomination and a Tool

for Liberation
The trials of Oscar Wilde were arguably the most notable events that rep-
resented Britons’ fear of homosexuality between men at the fin de siècle.
After a hung jury initially acquitted Wilde, the Marquess of Queensberry
convinced his lawyer, Sir Edward Carson, to ask for a second trial. This
time a combination of statements from young men who subsisted as pros-
titutes and blackmailers and physical evidence from the Savoy hotel con-
victed Wilde of the charges filed against him (Kaplan, 2005, p. 246). Judge
Wills sentenced him to two years of hard labor (247). While in prison,
Wilde wrote De Profundis , a letter to his former lover, Lord Alfred Dou-
glas (Bosie), the son of the Marquess of Queensberry, describing his utter
dejection after being sentenced to live his life as a prisoner (230). Prison
ruined Wilde; it cost him his life. He died of cerebral meningitis after he
completed his sentence. Once the Marquess of Queensberry decided to
ruin Wilde, his cohorts succeeded at this task by slandering Wilde in news-
papers, by following him, and by finding evidence to convict him (246).
Queensberry’s men literally turned the tide of popular and legal opinion
against Wilde, insisting that he should be sentenced to prison (246). The
slandering of Wilde was so severe that even Carson, who prosecuted Wilde,
asked the solicitor general to “‘let up on the fellow now’ on the grounds
that Wilde had already suffered enough” (247). The homophobia and vio-
lence levied against gay men, at the fin de siècle, was now a public affair as
a result of Wilde’s trials.
This same homophobia and violence emerges in Marsh’s text when Holt
exhibits his fear of the Beetle when the Beetle attacks Holt in “his” lair.6
Holt’s fear of the Beetle’s homosexual behavior is coupled with his appre-
hension regarding the Beetle’s “foreignness,” because, as Hurley points
out, “foreignness” connotes “sexual perversity” in Marsh’s novel: “the text
intended to shock the Victorian reader with what would have been an unex-
pected depiction of male homoerotic desire, establishing the general idea
of sexual perversion which is to pervade the novel and associating sexual
perversity specifically with the Oriental” (Hurley, 1996, p. 133). Sander L.
Gilman and Crais and Scully note that “foreignness” (as a result of a fin-
de-siècle stereotype of its “riotous nature”) has been associated with “over-
wrought,” perverse, and even queer sexualities (1985, pp. 79–83; 2009,
pp. 1, 3). It is the Beetle’s “foreignness” and his use of “mesmerism” that
enables “him” to force a homoerotic encounter between “himself” and
Holt. There were documented cases of “sodomy” that involved violence
and assault between one man and another, and, often, the man who was
considered to be the “sodomite” was characterized as an “energetic, pow-
erful, irresistible sodomite” while his partner was a “passive, powerless vic-
tim” (Katz, 2001, p. 52). This is precisely what occurs between the Beetle
and Holt; they take on the roles of the powerful sodomite and his passive
victim. The Beetle uses his leverage as a “foreigner,” who can mesmerize
anyone to submit to his command, to assault and violate Holt in a sexual
way. Marsh aims to convey a violent homoerotic encounter between Holt
and the Beetle by emphasizing the Beetle’s “foreignness” and penchant to
dominate Holt sexually. At first, Holt only sees a pair of eyes that command
him to do their bidding: “Nothing could have exceeded the horror with
which I awaited their [the eyes’] approach – except my incapacity to escape
them” (B, p. 50), and a body with a “peculiar yellow hue” (B, p. 50) that
signifies both the body of the Beetle (as a creature) and his “foreignness,”
as yellow was often used to describe the bodies of foreigners, particularly
the skin color of foreigners from the East (Hurley, 1996, p. 132). This
foreign creature, the Beetle, then, “mounts” Holt “as if I [Holt] had been
horizontal instead of perpendicular” (B, p. 51). He then uses his “spider’s
legs” to “embrace” Holt “softly and stickily” (51). While Hurley deems this
attack to involve “female genitalia” pressed up against Holt’s body (1996,
p. 138), it is not the cavernous imagery of the vagina that is suggested
here but, “spider’s legs” (B, p. 51, “emphasis mine”) that evoke a phallus,
particularly as Holt then describes the “yellow” body as the “monstrous
member” that continues to embrace Holt with its “foetid odour” (51).
This scene and its imagery of a “monstrous member” and “foetid odour”
suggest sex between men. The “stickiness” suggests ejaculation while the
“foetid odour” implies anal sex between men. Similar evidence was used to
convict Wilde of “sodomy” in 1895 (Schaffer, 1994, pp. 406–407). It is
the Beetle’s “foreignness”—his “yellow” body—that establishes the queer
“sexual perversity,” together with the “spider’s legs” and “foetid, mon-
strous member”—that defines this attack on Holt and makes it queer. It
also shows the absolute horror that Holt endures as the Beetle, with his yel-
low eyes and body, approaches him and then violates Holt in a sexual way
48 E. D. MACALUSO
that Holt describes as disgusting and terrifying. This, in turn, demonstrates

the fear with which Holt regards the “foreign and homosexual” Beetle and
the complete repugnance that Holt has for this Beetle and “his” behavior.
This repugnance signifies the fear and loathing that traditional British had
for gay men at the fin de siècle.
Marsh shows Holt’s hatred for, and fear of, the perverse and “foreign”
Beetle in the man’s inability to resist the command of the Beetle’s “foreign”
voice. Holt’s inability to resist this command sets the scene for evidence
of a violation that Holt experiences at the hands of the Beetle. The Beetle
implores Holt to “Undress!” and Holt notes that the voice that commands
him is “foreign” and belongs to a “foreign” body:
When he spoke again that was what he said [Undress!], in those guttural
tones of his in which there was a reminiscence of some foreign land. I obeyed,
letting my sodden, shabby clothes fall anyhow upon the floor. A look came
on his face, as I stood naked in front of him, which, if it was meant for a
smile, was a satyr’s smile, and which filled me with a sensation of shuddering
repulsion. (B, p. 55, emphasis mine)
It is the Beetle’s “foreign voice” that completely mesmerizes Holt and

brings Holt under the Beetle’s homoerotic control so that Holt has no
choice but to “obey” or submit to the Beetle’s homoerotic behavior. But
Holt is utterly “repulsed” by the terrifying power of the Beetle’s homo-
erotic behavior. Holt uses the image of the “satyr”—an ancient Greek deity,
both man and horse, that followed the insatiable Bacchus—to imply the
inhuman (almost), foreign, and homosexual sexuality that the Beetle uses
to completely subdue Holt. Not only does this show the complete terror
that Holt experiences at the Beetle’s charge and the abhorrence with which
Holt regards the “foreign” and perverse Beetle, it also sets the scene for a
complete violation of Holt’s body by the Beetle.
This violation that occurs between the Beetle and Holt truly exemplifies
Holt’s fear of “foreignness” and homosexuality at this moment. Marsh’s
representation of this “foreignness” and homosexuality inspires terror and
abomination. Holt’s violation is complete when: “Fingers were pressed
into my cheeks, they were thrust into my mouth, they touched my staring
eyes, shut my eyelids, then opened them again, and – horror of horrors! –
the blubber lips were pressed to mine – the soul of something evil entered
into me in the guise of a kiss” (B, p. 57). Holt describes the way that the
Beetle assumes mastery of his body by controlling important parts of its
functioning, again, through Eastern mesmerism. And, Holt describes a kind

of rape in this scene when the Beetle presses his lips to Holt’s and something
“evil enters” Holt. The phrase that Marsh uses to describe this moment,
“something evil entered into me,” suggests a forced penetration of Holt
by the Beetle. The utter control of Holt’s body and the penetration that he
endures as a result of the Beetle’s “foreign” and homoerotic domination in
this scene support the traditional idea that homosexuality should be feared,
and that it is a foreign perversion on the part of the Beetle’s violence toward
Holt, that suggests this fear of homosexuality.
Popular reactions to homosexuality between women were much dif-
ferent from reactions to men at the fin de siècle. Earlier in the century,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning visited Charlotte Cushman and her partner in
Paris in 1852. Cushman and her partner chose to live together as “inti-
mate friends,” and of their relationship, Browning had this to say: “they
have made vows of celibacy & of eternal attachment to each other – they live
together, dress alike … it is a female marriage. I [Browning] happened to
say, ‘Well, I never heard of such a thing before,’ to a friend who answered,
‘Oh, it is by no means uncommon’” (Vicinus, 2004, pp. 9–10). Even as
Browning has never heard of a homosexual relationship, or a female mar-
riage (Marcus, 2007, p. 2), between women before, this kind of relationship
is slightly more acceptable than a homosexual relationship between men.
Celibacy, the idea that these women were not having sex, made their rela-
tionship more palatable to a culture of people, like Browning, who were
unfamiliar with, or afraid of, homosexual relationships between women.
In spite of this unfamiliarity and fear, women participated in these rela-
tionships and their friends accepted this. The way that Browning describes
Cushman and her partner’s bond is with sympathy and the desire to really
call it a “female marriage,” which assumes as much fidelity between the
two women as if they had been “man and wife.” By mid-century, “intimate
friends” were a part of social life, of high society, at this time (Vicinus,
2004, p. 10).
After the Wilde trials, women who dressed as, and desired to live as,
men were often prosecuted and incarcerated for attempting to do so and,
in some cases, for claiming employment, better wages, and a legal way
to marry their spouses like Sarah Geals and “Caroline” (Townsend, 1993,
p. 293). Women who did live together as lovers and partners like Rosa Bon-
heur and Anna Klumpke, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (“Michael
Field”), and Frances Power Cobbe and Mary Lloyd often had to face
50 E. D. MACALUSO
discrimination against their partnerships. Anna Klumpke’s and Rosa Bon-

heur’s families did not approve of their relationship, but that did not stop
them from living together either (Klumpke, 1997, p. 68). And, because
Bradley and Cooper were related (they were aunt and niece), there were
many people outside of their intimate circles who also disapproved of their
relationship (Kastan, 2006, pp. 311–312).
Like the women whose homosexual relationships were accepted by soci-
ety and were thought to be benign and non-threatening (like Charlotte
Cushman and her partners and the Ladies of Llangollen), Holt is a benev-
olent character whom the other protagonists esteem. After Miss Lindon
takes Holt into her home, she marvels at his tears that he sheds while she
takes care of him: “When he [Holt] saw me [Miss Lindon], and heard who
I was, the expressions of his gratitude were painful in their intensity. The
tears streamed down his cheeks. He looked to me like a man who had very
little life left in him” (B, p. 208). And, when the Beetle is done using him,
all the protagonists lament Holt’s early death: “‘This time he’s [Holt’s]
gone for good, there’ll be no conjuring him back again.’ I felt a sudden
pressure on my arm, and found that Lessingham was clutching me [Champ-
nell] with probably unconscious violence” (B, p. 306). The reference to
“conjuring” supports the Beetle’s “foreign” and perverse monstrosity as
responsible for Holt’s victimhood. Holt’s vulnerability as a passive subject,
like the sodomite’s victim, suggests that homosexual subjects should be
understood and embraced not castigated as villains or victims. This, nec-
essarily, lends complexity to the debate about homosexuality at century’s
end. Are gay men monsters? Are they benign lovers who should be left
in peace? Marsh does not give an explicit answer to these questions. The
subject of homosexuality remained a vexed and debatable issue until well
into the twentieth century.
3.3 Holt and the Poor as Undesirable Vagrants

and Everymen
Conservative Party politics, lead by Disraeli (1868–1881) and then Salis-
bury (1885–1886, 1886–1892, 1895–1902), took a restrained approach
to the issues of social welfare and poor relief at the fin de siècle. Disraeli
relied on his social welfare credentials to claim to redress “the health of
the nation” (Hurren, 2007, p. 40). In reality, Disraeli performed a copi-
ous amount of political juggling and very little social welfare reform after
his election (40). Though this supported the conservative Party line which
sanctioned the status quo in terms of the organization of the state and
its responsibility to its constituents, it did very little to improve the lives
of the poor in Britain (40). When Lord Salisbury was elected (1885), he
appeased the growing sentiment of liberalism in politics and Britain, by
saying he was committed to poor relief—“he did not shrink from a little
judicious assistance to the poor”—but he really supported the notion that
the poor should help themselves—“self help” (41). These historical facts
exemplify the conservative Party’s “hands off” approach to social welfare
and poor relief, leaving much of the responsibility for this in the hands of
the local workhouse overseers who were in charge of enforcing the current
laws in relation to the poor.
Marsh shows this abuse of the poor most clearly when Holt is dismissed
by the workhouse overseer who denies him shelter at the very beginning of
The Beetle. The overseer “banged the door in my [Holt’s face]” and shouts
“NO room! – Full up!” to let Holt know that he is not welcome at the
workhouse (B, p. 41). Readers do not miss the irony of Holt’s predicament
because the workhouse is the one place that should accommodate the poor,
like Holt, but does not because its overseer claims that the workhouse
simply cannot take anyone else. The rigidity of the overseer is highlighted
by Marsh’s refusal to describe the inside of the workhouse, and whether it
is actually full or not (which suggests that it may not be). Holt’s dismissal
has discouraging and dehumanizing effects on him; he is literally fighting
for his survival after being turned away at the workhouse door:
To have tramped about all day looking for work; to have begged even for a job
which would give me money enough to buy a little food; and to have tramped
and to have begged in vain, - that was bad. But sick at heart, depressed in mind
and in body, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, to have been compelled to
pocket any little pride I might have left, and solicit, as the penniless, homeless
tramp which indeed I was, a night’s lodging in the casual ward, - and to solicit
in vain! – that was worse. Much worse. About as bad as bad could be. (B,
p. 41)
Holt is embarrassed by the loss of his job and his inability to pay for a little
bit of food. However, his loss of self-respect, and “pride,” as a result of
being homeless, and the dejection he feels, calling himself a “tramp” and a
“beggar,” upsets him the most. It upsets him because he has used what little
courage he has left to ask for help at the workhouse. To be turned away
is not only physically and mentally debilitating for Holt, but it suggests
52 E. D. MACALUSO
the sheer inhumanity with which government employees (like workhouse

overseers), who claimed to work for the poor, often treated them.
The poor are often represented in fin-de-siècle novels and periodicals
as belonging to another primitive civilization. In his important text, In
Darkest England and the Way Out, William Booth compared the poor to the
colonized as, according to him, the indigent are to the “pygmies” of Africa
(1890, p. 11). To Booth, the poor, like the colonized, are problems that
must be eradicated for civilization’s sake (11). Indeed, like McLaughlan’s
aforementioned Beetle (2012, p. 189), the man in the “gloomy corner,”
who emerges to try to help Holt get a bed at the workhouse, is represented
as though he belongs to a more primitive and lawless world. He insists on
breaking the law by vandalizing the workhouse to get a bed: “He picked up
two stones, one in either hand. The one in his left he flung at the glass, which
was over the door of the casual ward. It crashed through it, and through
the lamp beyond. … He was earning a night’s rest at a price which, even
in my extremity, I [Holt] was not disposed to pay” (B, p. 44). The man
from the “gloomy corner” risks imprisonment so that he can have a little
food and a place to rest for the night. His actions represent stereotypes that
the British had about the poor; that the primitive poor (like the colonized)
often turned to crime just to survive (Lombroso, 2006, pp. xxiv–xxv).
Holt chooses not to break the law and appears a little more civilized than
the man in the gloomy corner. Holt does not participate in the crime and he
wanders on in search of shelter. However, as Gustavo Generani points out,
Holt’s trip to find shelter, which eventually lands him at the Beetle’s lair, is
“leaving civilization behind me [him],” because Holt travels to a section of
London that is known to be a slum filled with immigrants and impoverished
people not the enfranchised aristocracy (2012, p. 40). Thus, the poor in
Britain are relegated to a world of abjection to the point at which they
are as “low” as the indigenous from the colonies; they were often called
“street Arabs” or “nomads” (40). This is the case for Holt when he ends
up in the Beetle’s lair. Holt and the Beetle might work together because of
their mutual abjection in Britain, but this inference is quickly dashed by the
Beetle’s own reference to Holt as a “thief” (B, p. 62). Even as the Beetle
is a visitor to England, he still identifies Holt as a “thief” and of a class
that even the Beetle “himself” is above. For the Beetle, Holt’s thievery is
also reflective of the British colonial history by which Britain stole spoils
from a land that was not theirs (as in Egypt). However, when the Beetle’s
foreign and perverse body and Holt’s poor body, later described by Miss
Lindon as written all over “with privation,” (B, p. 208) become one in
Lessingham’s study (B, pp. 76, 82), this is a way for Marsh to indicate
that Holt’s poor body and poverty are just as “undesirable” in England
as the threatening foreign body/Beetle. The traditional views of Holt as a
dangerous vagrant reflect Britain’s contempt for the poor at home and its
harsh colonial policies abroad.
However, Champnell’s narration and the Beetle’s foreign and perverse
violence against Holt, highlight Holt’s indigence, sympathize with Holt’s
plight, and take a more serious attitude toward understanding the circum-
stances of the poor in fin-de-siècle Britain. By the fin de siècle, New Liberals
focused on policy to help the poor (Hurren, 2007, p. 37). They determined
that “the New Poor Law was unfair to the vast majority of the labouring
poor whose poverty was involuntary” (37). Champnell’s narration and the
Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence against Holt emphasize Holt’s des-
titution. Readers can see and feel Holt’s degradation. Holt’s difficulties,
his homelessness and abusive treatment by the Beetle, are reflected in the
scene when Miss Lindon takes him from the street to her house:
When he [Holt] saw me [Miss Lindon], and heard who I was, the expressions
of his gratitude were painful in their intensity. The tears streamed down his
cheeks. He looked to me like a man who had very little life left in him. He
looked weak, and white, and worn to a shadow. Probably he had never been
robust, and it was only too plain that privation had robbed him of what little
strength he ever had. He was nothing else but skin and bone. Physical and
mental debility was written large all over him. (B, p. 208)
This scene exemplifies the physical and mental difficulties that Holt expe-
riences as a result of poverty and his vulnerability to the Beetle. Holt’s
weeping in front of Miss Lindon reflects his anguish after working to hurt
a woman who is now helping him. And, his physical description foreshad-
ows his early and untimely death. The words, that he “had very little left
in him,” that he is “weak, and white, and worn to a shadow,” that he is
“skin and bone,” and that “physical and mental debility,” characterize his
appearance and indicate that “privation” has, indeed, robbed him of a life.
Holt is dependent upon others, now, for his survival. And he is fortunate
when his company is Miss Lindon and Atherton who take care of him, but
unfortunate after the Beetle finds him again and insists on using him one
last time to further his/her revenge. Champnell, Atherton, and Lessing-
ham find Holt barely alive after his ordeal with the Beetle. And, they are
also witnesses to Holt’s death, which is heartrending:
54 E. D. MACALUSO
A momentary paroxyism seemed to shake the very foundations of his being.

His whole frame quivered. He feel back on to the bed, - ominously. The
doctor examined him in silence – while we too were still. “This time he’s
gone for good, there’ll be no conjuring him back again.” I felt a sudden
pressure on my arm, and found that Lessingham was clutching me with
probably unconscious violence. (B, p. 306)
Holt’s death is unsettling because it demonstrates the violence that Holt

experiences at the hands of the foreign and perverse Beetle and Holt’s
vulnerability to this violence as a result of his poverty. Lessingham’s reac-
tion—to clutch Champnell aggressively—could be anyone’s reaction after
reading about Holt’s death. The characters and readers see the physical
struggle that Holt endures at the hands of poverty, which, in this scene,
makes him a slave to the Beetle’s violent, foreign and perverse, machina-
tions. These machinations take Holt’s very life. The characters (and readers)
are left to feel sorry for Holt and to be terrified by the way that he dies as
a result of poverty and the Beetle’s murderous and compelling influence.
By concluding that all of this violence is levied against Holt simply
because he is vulnerable and poor makes readers think about the condi-
tion of the poor in fin-de-siècle Britain. Generani writes that “the system
of social assistance is shown as insufficient, dehumanized, and corrupt; …
Marsh has created an ambiguous text that destabilizes many of the chauvin-
istic fundamentals of British imperial ideology by exposing a social system
that produces what it condemns and cannot function as a pristine model of
progress and civilization” (40). The veil of progress is pulled away from fin-
de-siècle Britain to reveal the absolute impoverishment of the poor. Holt’s
poverty evokes sympathy from the other characters of the novel, especially
from Miss Lindon who bathes, dresses, and feeds Holt after she takes him
into her home. This sympathy defines the progressive attitude that the text,
and its emphasis on Holt’s penury, suggests should be taken in relation to
the poor. Marsh suggests, then, that, to truly help the poor, the system
must be reformed. Then, Britain will live up to its model of “progress and
civilization” (40).
The aforementioned scenes of Holt’s indigence and death suggest that
there were, indeed, two ways to view the poor at the fin de siècle; they were
either corruptible vagrants or sympathetic everymen. This contrast is shown
by the monster’s, the Beetle’s, foreign and perverse violence against Holt.
Marsh still insists, though, that not very much was done for the poor at the
fin de siècle. Mostly, they were condemned to live their lives as corruptible
vagrants. However, the sympathy that readers find for Holt suggests the
possibility of a new future. British subjects did feel for the poor and could
learn how to treat them fairly.
3.4 British Colonialism in Egypt: A Conversation

Between Jingoism and Anti-imperialism
In the years following Britain’s occupation of Egypt, Britain established its
rule of law in Egypt. The British felt that it was their duty to abolish slavery
in Egypt so that the Egyptians would become “civilized” and “govern
themselves” (Powell, 2003, p. 2). In reality, this was one way that the British
assumed governing power in Egypt (2). If the British could control such
a huge bartering system in Egypt, like slavery, then they could control the
territory as well (2). Indeed, the British controlled the entire infrastructure
of Egypt after the military occupation in 1882.
When a famous slavery case, regarding Sudanese women who were
smuggled into Egypt by wealthy Egyptians, was brought to trial in 1894,
the British fought the Egyptian pashas who were harboring Sudanese slave
women over who had the authority to control or even eliminate slavery in
Egypt (2). Even though slavery between Egypt and the Sudan had been
an established social custom in Egypt, the British attorneys and officials
who had abolished slavery in Egypt still sentenced the man who admit-
ted to buying and selling a slave woman to five months imprisonment (4).
And, Shaghlub, the man who was responsible for harboring these women,
was sentenced to five years of hard labor (4). This was one way the British
thought they could assert their power over Egypt by punishing those Egyp-
tians who would not conform to Britain’s rule of law (2). By disciplining
the Egyptians in this way, the British asserted a racialized rule of law that
placed the white British in positions of power to “protect” black African
and other Sudanese slave women from “exploitation” by the Egyptians
(2). This “protection,” however, demeaned both the Egyptians and the
Sudanese; it implied that “Arabs” were not fit to make and maintain their
own rule of law in Egypt and that black Sudanese women were so “base”
and “vulnerable” that they needed the white British to keep them from
being enslaved by the Egyptians. This is one productive example of how
race structured power relationships and the law in British-occupied Egypt.
Like the British did to the Egyptians and Sudanese, Atherton, Coleman,
and Lessingham demean the Beetle because he/she is of the Arab Egyptian
race; they attempt to assert their own rule of law in the face of what they
56 E. D. MACALUSO
deem to be a “foreign threat.” Atherton refers to the Beetle as “of the

‘Algerians’ whom one finds all over France, and who are the most persistent,
insolent and amusing of pedlars” (B, p. 103). Atherton’s accusation is racist
and degrading. He insists the Beetle needs civilizing like the Algerians
whom the French have occupied, and he believes that the only suitable
occupation for such a “man” (as the Beetle is a man with Atherton at this
moment of the novel) is that of an “insolent pedlar” or a haughty beggar.
Atherton describes the Beetle as “less gaudy” and much “dingier” than
“Arabs of the boulevard” because of his/her “yellow burnoose” which
signifies an Arab of the Sudan and his/her relationship to other Africans as
opposed to an Arab who has been “civilized” (103). Miss Coleman refers
to “that Arab party” as “the devil himself” which describes her feeling that
the Beetle is “evil” and does not belong in her house or in “Christian”
London (B, p. 275). Lessingham even goes as far as to threaten the Beetle
with violence and imprisonment when he/she calls upon Lessingham in
Lessingham’s study as Holt: “the police shall be sent for, and the law shall
take its course, - to the bitter end!” (B, p. 77). Lessingham, out of fear
of the Beetle’s overtly sexual relatives, particularly the Egyptian women
that Lessingham encounters in a brothel in Cairo, kills the priestess of Isis
after he witnesses what he thinks are white British women being sacrificed
to the altar of these women’s idolatry: “And, unless I [Lessingham] err,
in each case the sacrificial object was a woman, stripped to the skin, as
white as you or I, - and before they burned her they subjected her to every
variety of outrage of which even the minds of demons could conceive”
(B, p. 244). Atherton, Coleman, and Lessingham construct the Beetle’s
foreign and perverse monstrosity as a result of their racism, xenophobia, and
homophobia and create the conditions for the Beetle’s colonial insurgent
violence as a result of their allegiances to the British imperial and colonial
projects.
The Beetle responds to this hatred and the killing of his/her relative by
exacting his/her own revenge against the Englishman, Lessingham, who,
like English women who represented British civilization (Garnett, 1990,
p. 30), has thoughtlessly, vengefully, and in the name of progress taken the
life of the priestess of Isis. The Beetle refers to Lessingham as:
a devil, - hard as the granite rock, - cold as the snows of Ararat. In him there
is none of life’s warm blood, - he is accursed! … Her whom he has taken to
his bosom he would put away from him as if she had never been, - he would
steal from her like a thief in the night, - he would forget she ever was! But
the avenger follows after, lurking in the shadows, hiding among the rocks,
waiting, watching, till his time shall come. And it shall come! – the day of
the avenger! – ay the day! (B, p. 64)
The Beetle accuses Lessingham of being fecklessly English in the sense

that Lessingham has no regard for the Egyptian life that he has taken, or
the colonial thievery that helped him to take it; the Beetle as the avenger
will see to it that Lessingham is punished for his nefarious deeds. The
Beetle demands that Lessingham be responsible for what he has done just
like the British are responsible for the colonial atrocities that occurred in
Egypt. Marsh has clearly captured the tensions between the British and Arab
Egyptians. He renders traditional British attitudes of racism, xenophobia,
and homophobia against a colonial insurgent Beetle, a foreign and perverse
monster, whom they think is responsible for violence against Britain. And,
Marsh captures the Beetle’s own hatred for a British race of people who
have cost him/her a relative, thereby bringing violence to Egypt.
There were British subjects who believed that Britain’s occupation of
Egypt was misguided and even wrong. Annie Besant was one of these
subjects. She claimed that the Arabi Pasha was not “an unscrupulous and
savage adventurer” but a keen nationalist who was acting in Egypt’s best
interest by fighting for its independence (Besant quoted in Burton, 2001,
p. 209). After fighting took place between the British and Egyptians to
possess the Suez Canal (in order to unite their individual empires), she
also wrote that the British anxiety that Egypt would close the Suez Canal
out of greed was simply inaccurate; that it was the British military officials
who threatened to close the canal to gain power in Northern Egypt (ibid.).
Also, she disapproved of Britain’s military actions to force Egypt to pay
its debts to the European nations to which it was responsible, because she
believed that the military use of force to try to ensure this repayment was
a rash sacrifice of young British lives (210). She contended that the claim
of “self-defense,” that some Britons made after the nationalist rebellions in
Egypt, made no sense, because Britain had initially invaded and violently
attacked Egypt (210). Besant argues that there is merit in understanding
these events from the progressive perspective of the Egyptians.
When Lessingham regrets his killing of the priestess of Isis, Champnell’s
narration suggests that the Beetle may have some cause for revenge after
all and that the British have the potential to regret their actions in colonial
Egypt. Lessingham says, and he admits that this recollection is a product
of his own logic: “I knew that I was struggling for more than life, that
58 E. D. MACALUSO
the odds were all against me, that I was staking my all upon the casting of
a die, - I stuck at nothing which could make me victor” (B, p. 245). He
admits that he acted rashly in killing the priestess out of fear for his life.
The tone of Lessingham’s recollection here, and what he says, suggests that
he, in part, regrets his actions: “Tighter and tighter my pressure grew, - I
did not stay to think if I was killing her – till on a sudden –” (B, p. 245).
When he confesses that he disregarded the notion as to whether or not
he was killing her, he admits that this lapse was deplorable. Lessingham’s
physical gestures express his discontent as well: “Mr. Lessingham stopped.
He stared with fixed, glassy eyes, as if the whole was being re-enacted in
front of him. His voice faltered. I [Champnell] thought he would break
down” (B, p. 245). Lessingham regrets killing the priestess of Isis and
his recollection of this event gives him great pause. He is traumatized by
this event, his speech stops, he stares at empty space with tears in his eyes
(hence their “glassiness”), and he almost breaks down over his feelings of
guilt over killing the priestess. He asserts that he felt her life leave her body
and what replaced this was “some wild nightmare” (B, p. 245). Lessingham
is referring to the nightmare of the Beetle’s presence and his/her foreign
and perverse monstrosity. This may also be read, however, as a reflection of
his complete horror at what he has done and the responsibility he carries
for his action—the fact that he killed a monster who is also an Egyptian
woman (in this scene with Lessingham). The entire affair is a “nightmare”
(B, p. 245). He admits that he fled the scene, out of fear and guilt; he
knows that he is answerable for this immoral deed: “I fled as if all the fiends
in hell were at my heels” (B, p. 245). Lessingham’s shameful recounting
of this deed and his regret of his actions make the Beetle’s bid for revenge
understandable. Lessingham’s regret, moreover, resembles the potential for
the British to lament their own actions in Egypt. Annie Besant expresses
this regret and the traditional British convey it with their blamable fear of
“reverse colonization” (Arata, 1996, p. 107).
Marsh leaves his readers with a sense of shame over the way these events
end, which makes them all the more regrettable, and lends support for
those who opposed British colonialism. Readers will both identify the tra-
ditional perspective of the Beetle as a murderous colonial insurgent and
the progressive point of view that understands the Beetle’s bid for revenge
as a response to the violence perpetrated out of greed in his/her home-
land that has taken the life of a relative. The Beetle’s simultaneous foreign
and perverse monstrosity and humanity make colonialism a vexed topic for
conversation and debate in fin-de-siècle Britain. Should Britain support its
efforts abroad or should it alter its colonial plans and support independence
for the territories it possessed?
3.5 The New Woman as “Wild Woman”

and Rational Agent
There was a significant amount of antifeminist response to the New Woman
at Britain’s fin de siècle. Eliza Lynn Linton called these New Women, “Wild
Women,” because they mostly opposed marriage, they wanted too much
education and independence, and they wished for political rights and power
over men (Ledger, 1997, p. 12). To Linton, these women could change
the very fabric of Victorian society, because they refused their “traditional”
positions as wives and mothers (12). To others, like Walter Besant, if women
stopped marrying and having children, the family was threatened (12). In
his famous essay, “Tommyrotics,” Hugh Stutfield contended that the New
Woman’s “sexual license” was a distinct threat to the family (13). Even
though he supported New Women, generally, in his criticism of their nov-
els, W. T. Stead also sanctioned George Egerton’s Keynotes and Discords ,
her collection of short stories, on the grounds that it focused too much on
the “Sex Question” or the study of women’s and men’s sexualities (13).
Henry Maudsley and Charles Harper feared that New Women’s “mascu-
line” bid for more education (e.g., their studying at secondary schools and
colleges for women like Girton) would interfere with their “natural” duties
as child-bearers (18). Maudsley is even famous for writing: “It will have to
be considered whether women can scorn delights and live laborious days
of intellectual exercise and production, without injury to their functions
as the conceivers, mothers and nurses of children. For it would be an ill
thing, if it should so happen, that we got the advantages of a quantity
of female intellectual work at the price of a puny, enfeebled, and sickly
race” (1894, pp. 471–472). Maudsley and Harper believed that furthering
New Women’s educations would only lead to the destruction of the family,
and therefore, the degeneration of the British “race.” It was clear to these
antifeminists that New Women were only rabble-rousers who were akin to
revolutionaries who wanted to destroy British society.
Indeed, conservative Parliamentarians and officers of the law believed
that these New Women, some of whom were clamoring for more rights,
were truly interested in ruining society. In fact, in 1884, after a women’s
suffrage amendment was submitted to the Prime Minister, “the Right Hon-
ourable William E. Gladstone, asking that a women’s suffrage amendment
60 E. D. MACALUSO
to the County Franchise Bill be submitted to the free and unbiased con-
sideration of the House,” Gladstone rejected the amendment and forced
Liberal members of Parliament to vote against it (Pankhurst, 1914, p. 14).
When some women decided to introduce an independent suffrage bill,
Gladstone did not even allow it to be discussed in the House (14).
This condemnation of New Women, some of whom worked as suf-
fragettes, is apparent in Marsh’s novel through Mr. Lindon’s dismissive atti-
tude toward his own, “New,” and modern daughter, Miss Lindon. When
Miss Lindon decides to “go along with” and marry the liberal Lessingham,
a direct challenge to her father’s traditional and conservative politics, she
shows, contrary to the comments of Harris and Vernooy (2012, p. 346),
that she is far more “New” and independent than a girl who simply obeys
her father and fiancé (346). Still, Mr. Lindon’s reaction to Miss Lindon’s
independent choice of Lessingham for her husband is one of great con-
sternation. In Atherton’s account, after Mr. Lindon figures out that Miss
Lindon has deceived him in order to see Lessingham at Lessingham’s great
speech before Parliament, Mr. Lindon, again, reacts angrily toward this:
She [Miss Lindon] had just slipped her arm through Lessingham’s when her
father [Mr. Lindon] approached. Old Lindon stared at her on the Apostle’s
arm, as if he could hardly believe that it was she. “I [Mr. Lindon] thought
that you were at the Duchess’s?” “So I have been, papa, and now I’m here.”
“Here!” Old Lindon began to stutter and stammer, and to grow red in
the face, as is his wont when at all excited. … “I-I-I’ll take you down to it
[the carriage]. I-I don’t approve of y-your w-w-waiting in a place like this.”
“Thank you, papa, but Mr. Lessingham is going to take me down. – I shall
see you afterwards. – Goodbye.” (B, p. 129)
Mr. Lindon clearly expresses his dismay at his daughter’s modern partnering
with Lessingham, stammering while insisting that he escorts her home. The
text also suggests that Lindon objects as much to his daughter’s sense of
independence as he does to her choice of Lessingham as a partner:
Anything cooler in the way in which she walked off I [Atherton] do not think
I ever saw. This is the age of feminine advancement. Young women think
nothing of twisting their mothers round their fingers, let alone their fathers;
but the fashion in which that young woman walked off, on the Apostle’s arm,
and left her father standing there, was, in its way, a study. Lindon seemed
scarcely able to realize that the pair of them had gone. Even after they had
disappeared in the crowd he stood staring after them, growing redder and
redder, till the veins stood out upon his face, and I thought that an apoplectic
seizure threatened. (B, pp. 129–130)
Miss Lindon’s cool act of asserting her independence by walking off with
Lessingham clearly threatens her father. His reaction is one of deep indig-
nation. He stares after them in shock and his face grows extremely red to
the point at which Atherton believes the old man will have a stroke. Mr.
Lindon’s complete disapproval of his daughter’s actions at this moment
reveals the paternal hostility that New Women, like Miss Lindon, faced as
they governed their own lives according to their own wishes.
Other authority figures, including medical doctors, found New Women
so rebellious and menacing to society that they confined these women to
institutions as hysterics. In The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter writes
about this phenomenon:
First of all, doctors had noticed that hysteria was apt to appear in young
women who were especially rebellious. F. C. Skey, for example, had observed
that his hysterical patients were likely to be more independent and assertive
than “normal” women, “exhibiting more than usual force and decision of
character, of strong resolution, fearless of danger” (1985, p. 55). Donkin too
had seen among his patients a high percentage of unconventional women –
artists and writers. From these observations, it was a quick jump to con-
clude that rebelliousness could produce nervous disorder and its attendant
pathologies. (145)
Like the women mentioned in Showalter’s book, Miss Lindon rebels

against her father to marry Lessingham, becomes actively involved in pol-
itics by lecturing at a Working Woman’s Club meeting (like Edith Simcox
who often gave politically charged lectures at the Shirtmakers’ Committee
[B, p. 188; Fulmer & Barfield, 1998, p. 5]), and risks endangering herself
in solving the mystery behind the Beetle’s attacks. Her aggressive behavior
and disregard for danger are abnormal and risky according to the traditional
characters in Marsh’s novel. Atherton, as a scientist, has a particular objec-
tion to Miss Lindon’s rebelliousness and he attempts to curb it. When Miss
Lindon insists on traveling to the Beetle’s hideaway with Holt and Ather-
ton to find out who is responsible for Holt’s, Lessingham’s, and her own
attacks, Atherton tells Miss Lindon that he does not think it is a good idea.
Miss Lindon says to him: “I will come and help you [Atherton] to help him
[Holt] find it [the Beetle’s lair]. Sydney laughed, - but I could see he did
not altogether relish the suggestion” (B, p. 213). When Miss Lindon asserts
62 E. D. MACALUSO
that she will accompany Atherton and Holt on their quest to find the Bee-
tle, Atherton thinks that Miss Lindon is making a joke and he laughs. He
does not take her initiative seriously. When he seriously considers her pro-
posal, it becomes apparent that he does not “relish” the idea (213). Aside
from Atherton’s attempt to limit Miss Lindon’s behavior, he believes that
Miss Lindon should receive “medical assistance” after her “ordeal” with
the Beetle (B, p. 313). To Mr. Lindon and Atherton (antifeminists), Miss
Lindon is the victim of her own bad behavior, in addition to the Beetle’s
foreign and perverse violence and his/her own rebellious behavior, which
is why Miss Lindon must be brought home and treated for trauma. It is
not surprising, then, that readers learn that Miss Lindon has been confined
to her home where she experiences her “insanity” within the safe walls of
Lessingham’s house (B, p. 319).
Additionally, after the Beetle attacks her, Miss Lindon’s strength of char-
acter and her assertive behavior are reduced to ephemera. The Beetle vio-
lently removes her hair and clothes, another indication of the Beetle’s for-
eign and perverse violence (as the Beetle emerges from a foreign rug and
violates Miss Lindon with the removal of her hair and clothes), and Champ-
nell asserts that she is paraded around London as a “tramp” or as an indigent
young boy (B, p. 231, 313). The Beetle completely mocks Miss Lindon’s
bid for modernity, as a New Woman, by dressing her as a man and ensuring
that their roaming around London traumatizes her. This, too, prevents the
Beetle from being apprehended initially. Mr. Lindon’s, Atherton’s, and the
Beetle’s objections to Miss Lindon, as a New Woman, are made very clear
by Marsh’s text and the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity. They
accurately represent the antifeminist population of traditional and conser-
vative British who were at odds with the New Woman and thought she
was a threat to society. However, Marsh’s novel would not represent the
historical period of the fin de siècle and its culture, accurately, if it did not
also portray the progressive population of British who identified with and
supported the New Woman.
Like Miss Lindon, there were New Women at the fin de siècle who advo-
cated for women’s independence and their rights. Though she was a pro-
ponent of marriage, Sarah Grand suggested, in her highly influential novel
The Heavenly Twins, that women should hold their husbands account-
able for their sexual health and disapprove of their philandering. Althea
Crackanthorpe argued that if women could not marry, they should pro-
cure independent lives for themselves by working for a living and earning
a salary that supported them in their single lifestyles (1894, p. 23). Other
New Women like Hepworth Dixon and Caird believed that marriage was
becoming less popular with modern women and that the institution itself
should be reformed. Hepworth Dixon believed that if:
young and pleasing women are permitted to go to college, to live alone,

to travel, to have a profession, to belong to a club, to give parties, to read
and discuss whatsoever seems good to them, and to go to theatres without
masculine escort, they have most of the privileges – and several others thrown
in – for which the girl of 20 or 30 years ago was ready to barter herself to
the first suitor who offered himself and the shelter of his name. (86)
She argued that since women acquired new privileges by fin de siècle’s end,
they had employment, decent salaries, apartments of their own, entertain-
ment and friends that they enjoyed, then, why would they need to marry?
Marriage, according to her, seemed superfluous. To Caird, marriage was
in serious need of reformation. She contended that marriage was only con-
structed as an institution after the reformation (2000, p. 186). According
to Caird, marriage should no longer be a social contract. Instead, it should
simply be a loving bond between two people (197). Caird was responsible
for encouraging women to consider whether they truly benefited from mar-
riage or a single lifestyle. Since social conditions were improving for women,
Sarah Grand thought that the most significant problem for women to be
amended was to encourage men to support women in their independent
endeavors. In fact, in her essay “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,”
Grand writes that New Women should extend: “a strong hand to the child
man” to help him to support women’s rights (1894, p. 273). These women
wrote about these specific issues in periodicals and novels that they pub-
lished during the fin de siècle. They posed a significant challenge to the
dominant discourse on the New Woman.
Marsh, too, challenges the more prevalent and significant voices that
condemned New Women by making his character, Miss Lindon, a New
Woman. As I mentioned earlier, Marsh identifies Miss Lindon as a modern,
or “New,” woman after she leaves Lessingham’s speech at the House of
Commons, arm in arm with him, and Marsh’s text marks her as one who
ascribes to the modern, “New,” or feminist movement: “This is the age
of feminine advancement. Young women think nothing of twisting their
mothers round their fingers, let alone their fathers; but the fashion in which
that young woman [Miss Lindon] walked off, on the Apostle’s arm, and
left her father standing there, was, in its way, a study” (B, p. 129). Marsh
64 E. D. MACALUSO
recognizes Miss Lindon as a woman of “the age of feminine advancement”

and her rebellion against her father signifies her allegiance to this time and
culture.
She is also a New Woman because of her interest in politics. Her second-
ing of a formal resolution for a Working Women’s Club in Westminster,
again, puts her at odds with her father—“I don’t know what papa would
have said” (B, pp. 188–189)—and aligns her with women who were active
in politics at this time—Miss Lindon mentions the Primrose League (B,
p. 189). As Victoria Margree argues, Miss Lindon is a New Woman pre-
cisely because she disobeys her father and is active in politics (2007, p. 72).
It is also Miss Lindon’s fearlessness in her aim to discover who is respon-
sible for the attacks against Holt, Lessingham, and herself that also makes
her a New Woman. Miss Lindon is not deterred by Holt’s body that she
finds in the street or by his horrific calling out of Lessingham’s name (B,
p. 202). She does not let fear stop her from finding out who attacked her
in her home and who attacked Holt and Lessingham. She is the only one
who keeps a rational perspective, when the Beetle is on the loose, suggest-
ing that she accompany Holt and Atherton to find out who is responsible
for the recent attacks: “Of course you understand, Sydney, that I [Miss
Lindon] am coming with you” (B, p. 213). Holt and Lessingham react
with fear when they encounter the Beetle. Holt is terrified during his initial
encounter with the Beetle—“I was trembling so that I could scarcely stand.
I was overwhelmed by a fresh flood of terror” (B, p. 49)—and so is Less-
ingham, even as he attempts to maintain an undisturbed demeanor—“His
[Lessingham’s] very voice seemed changed; his frenzied choking accents
would hardly have been recognized by either friend or foe” (B, p. 77).
Miss Lindon does not let the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity
ruin her life even after he/she attacks her. She dares to survive. And, she
marries the man she loves and continues to write. This is the paradoxical
way that the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity both imperils Miss
Lindon’s modernity as a New Woman and forces Miss Lindon to reassert
that modernity as an act of survival.
Marsh’s support of the women’s movement and the New Woman is evi-
dent when he chooses to make his most rational and powerful character,
Miss Lindon, a member of these movements. Marsh accurately portrays
the cultural conflict surrounding the figure of the New Woman when he
chooses to dramatize reactions to her by traditionalists, like Mr. Lindon,
Atherton, and the Beetle in contrast to Miss Lindon’s progressive narration
and its support of her as a New Woman and her narrative of survival. The
debate between antifeminists and traditionalists and feminists and progres-

sives about the New Woman (and how they view her) is clearly shown by
Marsh’s novel and the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity. The New
Woman is a complicated figure and a conflicted construct as readers see
Miss Lindon as a victim who must be rounded up by her male friends and
an empowered woman who survives a horrific attack, chooses the man she
loves, and gives meaning to the rest of her days by writing. The Beetle’s
foreign and perverse violence, his/her attack on Miss Lindon, allows us to
see this conflict in the representation of the New Woman. His/her foreign
and perverse violence against the other protagonists also allows readers to
see the conflict that defines the debates about colonialism, sexuality, and
poverty.
3.6 Finale: The Power of Marsh’s Monstrous

Uncertainty
Instead of showing allegiance to one cultural perspective in The Beetle,
Marsh creates multiple perspectives. Readers might identify with both the
traditional and progressive perspectives portrayed clearly in relation to the
primary social issues of the text—the New Woman, colonialism, sexual-
ity, and poverty. And though the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence
suggests that the poor should be understood, what should be concluded
about the New Woman, colonialism, and sexuality is less clear. The mon-
ster’s foreign and perverse violence has accurately captured the nationalistic
spirit of the traditional members of British society who believed that for-
eigners were a problem that had the potential to ruin the British nation.
However, when Lessingham almost loses his own sanity over his killing of
the priestess of Isis, the vulnerability of a man of Parliament reveals the
sympathies that some British had for the effort to rethink Britain’s colonial
presence abroad. Still, the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity does
not take an explicit position on this issue of colonialism, because the issue
is fraught with conflict. This is the same for the issues of the New Woman
and sexuality. The jury was still out on the New Woman and whether or
not she was a progressive force for social change or if she was a threat to
Britain. This conflict embedded in the British populous’ views of the New
Woman, again, suggested by the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence,
extended to homosexuals: Were they degenerates who should be brought
to justice, or were they benign lovers who deserved asylum? The answers
to these questions are not clear; they reflect a dominant culture’s attempt
66 E. D. MACALUSO
to accommodate the emergent (Williams, 1977, p. 123). And, as Raymond

Williams argues, the emergent will always vie with the dominant for power
producing an ambiguous “new” culture that reflects both the dominant
and the emergent (124). The Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity
reflects this same measure of cultural conflict and ambiguity. The figure of
the monster, the Beetle, through his/her foreign and perverse violence,
allows readers to see the conflict embedded in these issues and makes the
identity of the British fin de siècle and the subjects of the New Woman,
colonialism, sexuality, and poverty forever controversial.
Notes
1. Gail Marshallwrites that critics can no longer categorize the fin de siècle as of
a particular cultural mode, or movement, or feeling. She writes that the fin
de siècle was rife with many very different movements and complex cultural
responses to all of these movements (movements like the study of psychology,
decadence and aestheticism, the study of sexual identity, socialism and radi-
calism, the study of empire, the study of publishing industries and practices,
the study of the visual arts and poetry, the New Woman, realism, the study of
fantastic fiction, and varieties of performance) (vii–viii).
2. For the rest of the chapter, “traditional” and “progressive” will be referred
to without the quotations.
3. I use the term his/her to refer to the monster, the Beetle, because his/her
gender is ambiguous. He is a man with Holt in the opening and subsequent
scenes of the novel. However, “he” changes into a woman after he/she is
with Atherton in Atherton’s laboratory.
4. Marsh, R. (2004). The Beetle. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, will hereafter
be referred to parenthetically as B followed by a page number.
5. There were other events that defined the colonial tensions between Britain
and Egypt and that helped to make Britain the ruling presence in Egypt.
Britain demonized the Arabi Pasha and his rebels, in the periodical press, for
wishing to reclaim Egypt as their own nation through nationalist rebellions.
The British also attempted to take control of the Suez Canal in Northern
Africa to solidify their power and presence in the region and to ultimately
unit their entire empire. They also engaged in military action to persuade
Egypt to pay its debts to its European creditors and they also made a mockery
of the Egyptian Khedive so that more Egyptians and Britons would support
Britain’s ruling power in Egypt (Powell, 2003, p. 5).
6. In this scene, Holt identifies the Beetle as a male even after Holt is confused
about the Beetle’s gender: “But, afterwards, I knew it to be a man, - for this
reason, if for no other, that it was impossible that such a creature could be
feminine” (B, p. 53).
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the mastery of the Sudan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage.
Schaffer, T. (1994). “A Wilde desire took me”: The homoerotic history of Dracula.
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versity of Chicago Press.
CHAPTER 4
The Rise of Harriet Brandt: A Critique

of the British Aristocracy in Florence
Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire
I can never, never consent to sap your manhood and your brains, which do
not belong to me but to the world, and see you wither like a poisoned plant,
the leaves of which lie discoloured and dead upon the garden path. (Harriet
to Pennell, Marryat, 2010, pp. 166–167)
At the fin de siècle, British subjects were fascinated by Darwin’s theory of

pangenesis—“the belief that all cells of the body carry ‘gemmules,’ trans-
mitters of inheritable properties, and the popular use of blood as a metaphor
for heredity, yielded the common belief that inheritable properties were car-
ried in the blood” (Davis, 2007, p. 42). They were persuaded by Galton’s
theory of “eugenics”—“the study of agencies under social control that may
improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically
or mentally” (Galton, 1904, p. 82). Many subjects who ascribed to pan-
genesis and eugenics believed that if they could control the inheritance of
“good” or “bad” blood, they could control the development or decline
of the British race. As a consequence of these beliefs, romantic relation-
ships, between two loving partners, were occasionally replaced by, what
Angelique Richardson calls, “eugenic love” or “the politics of the state
mapped onto bodies: the replacement of romance with the rational selec-
tion of a reproductive partner in order better to serve the state through
breeding” (Richardson, 2003, p. 9). British bodies were scrutinized based

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_4
72 E. D. MACALUSO
on race, gender, and sexuality to produce the strongest race that was pos-
sible to carry out Britain’s imperial missions of progress and civilization.
Scientists, like Galton, believed that the bodies of British subjects of color
contained “gemmules” that were degenerative due to their proximity to,
and close relationships with, “the lower animals” (McClintock, 1995, p. 37;
Gilman, 1985, p. 83). Similar to what they thought about British subjects
of color, these scientists held that New Women could siphon the life out
of their male partners with their insatiable and “vampire-like” sexualities
(Showalter, 1990, p. 180; Dijkstra, 1988, p. 347). Also, many of these doc-
tors believed that New Women, in close proximity to one another, could
pose a “lesbian threat” that was corrosive to the state because no offspring
would come from these relationships (Macfie, 1991, pp. 60–61).
These scientists’ anxieties over race, gender, and sex—their racism, sex-
ism, and xenophobia wrought by “science”—are the subjects of Florence
Marryat’s fin-de-siècle novel, The Blood of the Vampire. Her novel is about
Harriet Brandt, a Creole woman from Britain’s colony, Jamaica, a “mon-
ster” cursed by birth with the vampire’s blood, who attempts to find
friendship with Margaret Pullen and lasting intimacy with Ralph Pullen
and Anthony Pennell. In spite of Harriet’s attempts to form a friendship
with Margaret, and romantic attachments to Ralph and Pennell, the racist,
sexist, and xenophobic ideologies that Doctor Phillips and Elinor Leyton
espouse (respectively) prevent Harriet from acquiring these attachments
and contribute to her monstrosity, social disciplining, marginalization, and
her suicide. I am arguing that Phillips’s and Elinor’s racist, sexist, and xeno-
phobic ideologies actually have the power to interrupt the intimacies in The
Blood of the Vampire. Additionally, so far as Harriet is monstrous, the text of
Marryat’s novel also indicates that she is kind, talented and accomplished,
beautiful, mature, honorable, and charitable. Harriet’s humanity upends
her monstrosity and makes monsters out of her British compatriots who
willingly castigate her and send her to her death.
Harriet is both a monster and a woman. It is up to the reader to decide
whether she will discipline Harriet or support, and embrace, her. Harri-
et’s monstrosity, her biraciality and her status as a New Woman, allows
readers to see the prejudices of the other British characters, the xenopho-
bia, racism, and sexism passed off as science, and how these prejudices
turn into petty jealousies and rivalries that ultimately separate Harriet from
their social coterie. However, through the perspectives of Anthony Pen-
nell, Miss Wynward, and the power of Marryat’s text, Harriet is lauded for
her good qualities. It becomes difficult to solely condemn Harriet for her
4 THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT … 73
major fault, her cursed nature. According to Eldridge, Harriet’s suicide is

tragic (1998, p. 12), because a vulnerable woman, with so many virtues
and talents, is sacrificed by prejudice. The portion of Harriet that is human
allows readers to see past her monstrosity and, instead, sympathize with
her and even imagine a world that includes her. While Harriet gradually
rises in esteem, the other British characters are exposed as hypocritical,
shallow, and self-interested. Marryat acknowledges the power of scientific
determinism, and Galton’s eugenics, by having Harriet, in part, be defined
by her curse and commit suicide. However, Harriet’s character also calls
the British establishment into question. As Pennell claims, this establish-
ment needlessly casts aspersions upon a woman who is kind, talented and
accomplished, beautiful, mature, honorable, and charitable.
4.1 The Vitriolic Effects of Elinor’s Xenophobia

Harriet’s initial attempts to procure English friendships are met with scorn
by Elinor who only sees Harriet as an unscrupulous and undesirable for-
eigner. Even before Elinor accuses Harriet of eating “like a cormorant,”
or like a rapacious bird or animal, the text indicates that Harriet is racially
“Other” (Said, 1978, p. 1), or different, from the white English women,
Margaret and Elinor. Harriet has “dark eyes,” that signify racial difference
(Willburn, 2008, p. 439), and “lips of a deep blood colour” that denote
a racial stereotype about black African women and their “thick lips” (Mal-
chow, 1993, p. 103). Harriet’s racial difference, and identity as “Other”
(Said, 1978, p. 1), prompts Elinor’s xenophobic reading of her. Elinor
describes Harriet’s eating style as that of “a cormorant” and one that “made
me [her] positively sick” as “I [she] never saw anyone in society gobble her
food in such a manner” (BV, p. 6).1 Elinor suggests that Harriet eats like a
ravenous bird or animal, which indicates that, to Elinor, Harriet’s appetites
are insatiable. Elinor’s interpretation of Harriet’s eating style resembles
Herbert Spencer’s characterization of primitive man’s unappeasable phys-
ical desires (Spencer, 1862, p. 324). Elinor insinuates that Harriet is like a
primitive woman in her display of barbaric eating habits. Also, Elinor’s lit-
eral comparison of Harriet to an animal evokes Mantegazza’s and Cuvier’s
comparisons of black African people to animals. Mantegazza’s “Morpho-
logical Tree of the Human Races” places black Africans at the bottom
of the evolutionary scale along with animals (McClintock, 1995, p. 37).
Cuvier’s assessment concluded that black African women were as sexually
aggressive as the lower animals they lived with (Crais & Scully, 2009, p. 3).
74 E. D. MACALUSO
Because the text indicates a latent racial difference in Harriet, that is cou-
pled with Elinor’s detection of a foreign difference in her, one that does
not uphold the scruples of an English dining table, Elinor deems Harriet
to be unfit for English society and for Margaret’s friendship: “I [Margaret]
feel a little curious [about Harriet] … [Elinor] why on earth do you want
to know?” (BV, p. 6). Elinor continually defies Margaret’s curious interest
in Harriet. Elinor’s xenophobic prejudices keep Margaret from forming
any sort of lasting bond of friendship with Harriet. Elinor’s xenophobia, a
psychosomatic condition that employs fears about racial and foreign forms
of difference (Tromp, 2013, p. 4), is what alienates Harriet and Margaret
from one another and disrupts any real friendship that they might have
with each other.
Elinor’s xenophobic prejudices continue to separate Harriet and Mar-
garet from one another even as Harriet and Margaret attempt to be friendly
with each other. When Elinor hears of Harriet’s independence and her
traveling with another female companion, she declares that this is “very
improper” (BV, p. 9)! Her fear of Harriet’s independence and Harriet’s
choice of a same-sex traveling companion belie supportive references to
the dominant discourse about the New Woman, that the New Woman is
independent to a fault and her independence indicates a blasphemous imi-
tation of masculinity as in the Punch cartoon “The New Woman” (Ledger,
1997, p. 98, Figure 1) (Fig. 4.1).
Elinor’s fear of Harriet’s traveling with Olga Brimont is reminiscent of
vituperative critiques of New Women who elected to live and work with
one another often to privilege the production of “intellectual tracts” over
a “strong race” (Ledger, 1997, p. 18; Maudsley, 1874, pp. 471–472).
Harriet’s differences inspire Elinor to think about her fear of foreign dif-
ferences, in general, and she goes on to refer to the table d’hôte at Heyst
to be a “menagerie” or a grouping of animals. These judgments of Harri-
et’s foreign and gendered differences are formulated to protect Margaret
and Elinor from foreign contamination and degeneration (Nordau, 1998,
p. 471) and to keep Margaret and Harriet from being friends.
By pushing her chair away from Harriet, after Harriet confesses that she
has spent time in a Catholic convent, Elinor indicates that she believes Har-
riet to be contaminated by Catholicism, a branch of Christianity she and
her peers consider inferior to the Church of England (Moorman, 1973,
p. 392). Even as Margaret attempts to be friendly with Harriet by encour-
aging Harriet to tell her story (BV, p. 10), Elinor wishes to put a stop to
this intimacy, because she believes it is dangerous for Margaret to entertain
Fig. 4.1 “The New Woman” cartoon from Punch
a friendship with a foreign woman from Jamaica, who has connections to

Catholicism and to the racial “scourge” that defined slavery and Jamaica’s
colonial system (Zieger, 2008, pp. 199–200). Elinor’s question to
Margaret—“Are you not going to take a walk this evening?”—reflects Eli-
nor’s desire to get Margaret away from a foreign (black and Catholic) influ-
ence, like Harriet, that may be “unhealthy”: “See what you [Margaret] have
brought upon us [Elinor and Margaret]?” (BV, p. 11). Elinor confesses to
Margaret that she is under Ralph’s orders to be wary of any kind of for-
eign influence: “But you [Margaret] must remember how Ralph cautioned
us against making any acquaintances in a foreign hotel” (p. 12). Elinor
is worried about the possibility of Margaret’s, and her own, degeneration
based solely on their proximity to Harriet. Elinor expresses this last worry
to Margaret in her reference to the foreign hotel and when she entreats
Margaret not to tell Harriet of her engagement to Ralph: “Anyway, Mar-
garet, let me entreat you not to discuss my private affairs with this new
protégé of yours [Harriet]” (p. 12). At all costs, Elinor wishes to maintain
her propriety and social position by practicing a strict sense of decorum
in regards to her own engagement. She believes that if her engagement is
kept a secret, foreigners or members of the lower classes will not sully it
76 E. D. MACALUSO
with their gossip: “I don’t want to see her [Harriet’s] saucy eyes goggling
over the news of my engagement” (p. 12). Elinor subscribes to Richard-
son’s “eugenic love,” because it serves her engagement to Ralph and her
loyalty to the state and allows her to keep her ties to the aristocracy and to
perpetuate British aristocratic values (2003, p. 9). She does not wish to be
contaminated by the gossip of foreigners that might make she and Ralph
“‘Arry and ‘Arriet” (BV, p. 12), her impression of working-class affianced
characters that she deplores. She vows to Margaret that there will be no
“signs and symptoms” of her engagement to Ralph to keep her sense of
British aristocracy and identity intact. Elinor’s dislike of Harriet, and her
entreaties to Margaret not to make the young woman a member of their
social set, reflects Elinor’s deep wish to protect the integrity of her English,
aristocratic identity that she believes is imperiled by Harriet’s presence, even
as this identity is really endangered by her family’s loss of money: “[Elinor]
who had not a sixpence to give away herself” (p. 9). Elinor’s fear is one of
contamination “From outside the self or even from within. It [xenophobia]
is a fear of impurities, an anxiety about the corruption and dissolution of
Englishness, even by the English themselves” (Tromp, 2013, p. 4).
Elinor’s xenophobia has consequences: “More than just a mindset,
xenophobia is a practice that results in antagonistic behavior towards
the foreigner. That is, xenophobia is a phenomenon that has very real
consequences and effects – politically, culturally, socially, psychologically,
materially, physically” (Tromp, 2013, p. 4). It protects Margaret, a pris-
tine English lady, from literal illness and metaphorical contamination and
degeneration. Also, it disciplines Harriet into accepting her foreign and
racial difference from Margaret and Elinor, and this effectively marginal-
izes Harriet. Elinor’s xenophobia forces Harriet to detect her ostracization
from Margaret and Elinor (Margaret especially), and this is painful for
Harriet. Harriet feels bad about this even as she does not yet give up her
quest for real friends. Still, Elinor and Margaret’s shunning Harriet after
Harriet makes Margaret ill is the first behavior that makes Harriet feel the
depressing effects of her foreign (and New Womanish) difference from
Elinor and Margaret. When Elinor protects Margaret from further illness,
Elinor implies that it is, in some way, Harriet’s fault, and it is Harriet’s
closeness that makes Margaret temporarily ill: “…but how it [the illness]
happened you [Harriet] should know better than myself [Elinor]. … It
may seem a laughing matter to you, Miss Brandt … but it is none to me
[Elinor]. Mrs. Pullen is very far from strong and her health is not to be
trifled with. However, I shall not let her out of my sight again” (BV, p. 18).
Elinor maintains that it is the lack of “English ceremony” in a foreign hotel,

like the Lion d’Or, that encourages the mixing of foreigners, members of
the lower classes, and the English that procure risky social connections that
cause illness:
No! Thank you, Miss Brandt! Mrs. Pullen would, I am sure, prefer to return
to the Hotel alone with me! You can easily join the Vieuxtemps or any other of
the visitors to the Lion d’Or. There is not much ceremony observed amongst
the English at these foreign places. It would be better perhaps if there were a
little more! Come, Margaret, take my arm and we will walk as slowly as you
like! But I shall not be comfortable until I see you safe in your own room!
(BV, p. 19)
Elinor objects to Margaret walking along with Harriet’s help when she
aims to get Margaret away from Harriet, and the possibility of Harriet’s
poisonous influence, refusing Harriet’s offering of her arm to Margaret and
insisting that Margaret and she travel back to their rooms alone. Elinor’s
friendship with Margaret involves an English purity and exclusivity. Eli-
nor demands that pristine English femininity be protected and preserved
in the face of foreign contamination and degeneration. Elinor entertains
the idea that Harriet’s foreign presence could corrupt Margaret and her
Englishness. This explains why she persists in traveling back with Margaret
to their rooms, to preserve their Englishness in the face of depraved for-
eigners that solely belong in the company of one another and not with
pure, native English women like Elinor and Margaret. Elinor’s xenophobia
protects her and Margaret’s Englishness, their friendship, and it disciplines
Harriet into accepting her own foreignness.
Elinor’s antagonism toward Harriet—leaving Harriet on the Digue
alone without any company—forces Harriet to consider the effects of her
foreignness, and her own marginalization, which, make her quite sad:
So the two ladies moved off together leaving Harriet Brandt standing dis-
consolately on the Digue watching their departure. Mrs. Pullen had uttered
a faint good-night to her but had made no suggestion that she should walk
back with them, and it seemed to the girl as if they both in some measure
blamed her for the illness of her companion. What had she done she asked
herself, as she reviewed what had passed between them, that could in any
way account for Mrs. Pullen’s illness? She liked her so much – so very much
– she had so hoped she was going to be her friend – she would have done
anything, and given anything, sooner than put her to inconvenience in any
78 E. D. MACALUSO
way. As the two ladies moved slowly out of sight Harriet turned sadly and
walked the other way. She felt lonely and disappointed. She knew no one
to speak to and there was a cold empty feeling in her breast as though, in
losing her hold on Margaret Pullen, she had lost something on which she
had depended. (BV, p. 19)
Harriet keenly feels the sting of the social rebuff by the two ladies, again, as
a result of their xenophobia. She feels it when Elinor implies that Harriet
made Margaret ill and, again, when they leave her alone on the Digue.
Harriet feels the enmity of these actions so much that she questions her
own behavior: “What had she done she asked herself… that could in any
way account for Mrs. Pullen’s illness?” Harriet takes the blame from Elinor
and Margaret because she has no one to “speak to,” or talk with, about this
painful incident. She feels “lonely” and “disappointed.” She is forced to sac-
rifice her hope of being friendly with Margaret and the effect of this leaves
not only “a cold empty feeling in her breast” but also an actual acknowl-
edgment that “she had lost something on which she had depended.” This
moment not only indicates Harriet’s sadness but also suggests that Harriet
is now in a precarious position emotionally and socially, which only makes
her all the more vulnerable to the social prejudices of Elinor, Margaret,
Phillips, and Ralph.
Elinor attempts to persuade Margaret to be more careful of Harriet and
to be slightly skeptical about Harriet’s offer of friendship. This attempt,
too, comes from xenophobic, sexist, and homophobic motivations that
intersect with one another. Margaret tells Elinor that she likes Harriet, but
she leaves her feeling extremely weak and depressed (BV, p. 39). Elinor
responds by concurring with Margaret’s hesitance about Harriet, saying:
“‘And no wonder,’ said her friend, ‘considering that she has that detestable
school-girl habit of hanging upon one’s arm and dragging one down almost
to the earth. How you have stood it so long beats me! Such a delicate
woman you are too. It proves how selfish Miss Brandt must be, not to
have seen that she was distressing you’” (p. 39). Elinor contemptuously
refers to Harriet’s “school-girl” habit with Margaret. As Vicinus writes,
girls at English boarding schools often had raves for, or crushes on, other
schoolgirls, and these relationships were normative within the context, and
setting, of boarding-school life (2004, p. 604). However, when school-
girl behavior is exhibited outside of school, in a public context, like at the
Lion d’Or, Elinor deems this behavior to be inappropriate. Though there
is no “lesbian threat” between Harriet and Margaret, as Macfie and Case
would like to assert (1991, pp. 60–61; 1991, p. 9), the female-to-female,
schoolgirlish relationship that Harriet attempts to strike up with Margaret
is improper. Harriet and Margaret’s acquaintanceship is threatening to Eli-
nor because it privileges the potential for an intimate relationship between
women, and this challenges Elinor’s adherence to late Victorian patriarchy
(Heller, 1996, p. 79; Major, 2007, p. 161). That Elinor mentions that Har-
riet “hangs upon one’s arm” and “drags one down almost to the earth”
refers to the actual physical action of one girl dragging the arm of another
girl down. But, the phrase also has a hidden meaning as well. That Harriet
“drags” Margaret “down to the earth” is another expression of Elinor’s
xenophobic anxiety over Margaret’s possible corruption and degeneration
by Harriet. Elinor refers to Margaret as a “delicate woman” that needs to
be protected in the face of a “selfish” West Indian woman who imperils the
life of an English lady.
Elinor compares Harriet to Baroness Gobelli, another character with for-
eign ties, when Harriet and the Baroness form a friendship that, to Elinor,
is worthy of note so that Elinor can imply that the two women deserve one
another. She observes: “the Gobellis and Miss Brandt have evidently struck
up a great friendship” (BV, p. 39). In a scene prior to this one, the Baroness
and Harriet meet and the Baroness succeeds in bringing out Harriet’s “true
nature” and desires, when the Baroness promises to acquaint Harriet with
German princes, who would surely wish to court her (p. 37). Elinor aligns
the Baroness and Harriet, here, because the Baroness’s working-class back-
ground and her choice of a foreign husband match Harriet’s Jamaican for-
eignness and the fact that Harriet might have a bloodthirsty and/or lustful
nature that could be dangerous—“all the Creole in her came to the sur-
face” (p. 111). Elinor suggests that Harriet and the Baroness have compa-
rably corrosive natures that should be prohibited. Elinor implies that Har-
riet’s foreignness and the Baroness’s working-class background are equally
threatening to the British protagonists like Elinor and Margaret. Margaret
merely thinks that Elinor is jealous of Harriet: “did her [Elinor’s] jealousy
of the West Indian heiress render her capable of uttering untruths?” (40).
However, Elinor holds firm in her dislike of Harriet, conveying to Margaret:
“Well! I think she’s altogether odious. … I thought it the first time I saw
her and I shall think it to the last!” (40). Elinor asserts that there is some-
thing nefarious about Harriet’s character—she has seen it in Harriet from
“first” to “last.” Elinor’s words foreshadow, and, perhaps, even shape, the
emergence of Harriet’s “true nature,” her harmful nature that she inher-
ited from her homicidal father and sensuous/greedy mother. This proves
80 E. D. MACALUSO
Elinor’s hypothesis, and the scientific theory, like Galton’s, that Phillips
adopts later, that people with terrible natures will affect those around them
adversely (Stepan, 1982, pp. 111–112; Lombroso, 2006, pp. xxiv–xxx).
Elinor insinuates to Margaret that since there is something wrong with
Harriet’s nature, only violence can come in its wake. It is rather telling,
then, that, in the next scene of the novel, baby Ethel is sick from Harriet’s
attentions and does eventually succumb to them. Harriet’s deadly nature
does, indeed, harm Ethel, and it alienates Margaret and everyone else from
her, just as Elinor and Phillips predict. The cursed and violent parts of
Harriet’s nature, and the construction, and reinforcement, of that nature
by Elinor’s xenophobia, do, indeed, ruin the potential intimacy between
Margaret and Harriet as Harriet takes the life of Margaret’s only child.
Harriet’s foreign, racial, and sexual differences, and their purported per-
ils (as described by Elinor and Phillips), do impede her attachments with
Margaret, Ralph, and Pennell and eventually lead her to her death by her
own hands.
4.2 Phillips’s Injurious Racism and Sexism

Since Margaret suspects Elinor’s motivations for keeping her away from
Harriet and thinks jealousy is behind Elinor’s hatred of Harriet, it takes
Phillips, and his racist and sexist account of Harriet’s personal history and
parentage, to break Margaret’s and Ralph’s affections for Harriet. Phillip-
s’s perpetuation of “Jamaican folklore and racist [and sexist] stereotypes”
of the black African people like Harriet that populated Jamaica together
with his claim that his ideas come from his study of heredity contribute
to Harriet’s marginalization and later her suicide (Haefele-Thomas, 2012,
pp. 114–115). Phillips reveals his unconscious fear of “reverse coloniza-
tion” (Arata, 1996, p. 107) when he recounts how Harriet’s slave grand-
mother was bitten by a vampire bat in Jamaica:
They declared that when her slave mother was pregnant with her, she was
bitten by a Vampire bat, which are formidable creatures in the West Indies
and are said to fan their victims to sleep with their enormous wings whilst
they suck their blood. Anyway the slave woman did not survive her delivery
and her fellows prophecied that the child would grow up to be a murderess.
Which doubtless she was in heart, if not in deed! (BV, pp. 68–69)
Phillip’s fear of the curse of the Jamaican vampire bat is reminiscent of Stok-
er’s British characters’ fears of the effects of Dracula’s vampirism. Accord-
ing to Arata, Dracula’s vampirism signified, in part, Britain’s fear of Eastern
European people, and the Eastern European Jew, coming to Britain and
corrupting Britain’s pristine power and civilization by transferring tainted
foreign blood to British subjects through miscegenation (107). Similarly,
Phillips suggests that the effects of the Jamaican vampire bat (the simi-
lar transference of corrupt blood from black Jamaicans to white British or
the effects of “reverse colonization”) will adversely affect Harriet’s white,
British victims; she will sap their lives without their ever being aware of
it. According to Phillips, Harriet’s vampirism reflects Jamaica’s “reverse
colonization,” and this “reverse colonization” will adversely affect refined
British subjects.
Willburn attests that there are two additional meanings behind Harri-
et’s curse that also suggest Britain’s (and Phillips’s) fear of Jamaica’s “re-
verse colonization.” Firstly, the effects of the violence of Harriet’s Jamaican
vampirism reflect black Jamaicans’ anger about slavery and the murder-
ous atrocities perpetrated by the white English in Jamaica (2008, p. 439).
Hence Margaret’s awkwardness after Harriet discusses her joy in beating
“the little niggers” (BV, p. 17). Secondly, to Phillips, women of color like
Harriet, and her mother, and grandmother have an undeniable link to the
occult because of their practice of “Obeah witchcraft” and their almost
criminal sensuality (2008, p. 438). According to Phillips, witchcraft and
sexuality, too, threaten British subjects, particularly white male British sub-
jects (like Ralph), because these black women can seduce these men and
corrupt them (Mecke, 1979, p. 189).
The power of seduction is Phillips’s ultimate fear of Harriet’s mother
and Harriet herself. Phillips contends that Harriet’s mother’s ability to
seduce slaves and lure them into Brandt’s “Pandemonium” as a result of
her “sensuous, greedy, and bloodthirsty” nature also reflects his fear of
“reverse colonization” (BV, p. 68). Phillips fears that Harriet will seduce
his white British friends in the same way that Harriet’s mother seduced
her slaves. Phillips’s racist and sexist conjecture about Harriet’s mother’s
homicidal abilities matches Lombroso’s assertion about women of color
and criminal women of color. Lombroso believed that black African wom-
en’s atavism and sexuality ultimately brought about their criminality; if they
were not murderers, they were most definitely prostitutes (1895, p. 111).
Phillips echoes Lombroso’s rhetoric as he talks about Harriet’s mother;
she is a “fat, flabby, half case,” who is “sensuous and greedy,” who is
82 E. D. MACALUSO
“bloodthirsty,” and who takes great pleasure in bloodshed (BV, p. 68).

According to Phillips, she is a perfect partner for Brandt as he was famous
for practicing murderous vivisection on his human patients in the name of
scientific discovery; Harriet’s mother was a murderess “in heart, if not in
deed” (BV, pp. 68–69), and Brandt really had a dastardly delight in murder.
When Margaret suggests to Phillips that he might be “a little prejudiced,
dear Doctor” and that Harriet’s parentage and her curse are “not her fault”
(p. 69), Phillips insists that his account of Harriet’s background is based
not on prejudice or personal beliefs but on the science of heredity:
My dear Margaret, are you so ignorant as not to see that a child born under
such circumstances cannot turn out well? The bastard of a man like Henry
Brandt, cruel, dastardly, godless, and a woman like her terrible mother, a sen-
sual, self-loving, crafty and bloodthirsty half-caste … She may seem harmless
enough at present, so does the tiger cub as it suckles its dam, but that which
is bred in her will come out sooner or later and curse those with whom she
may be associated. I beg and pray of you, Margaret, not to let that girl come
near you or your child anymore. There is a curse upon her and it will affect all
within her influence! … We medical men know the consequences of heredity
far more than outsiders do. (pp. 69–70)
Phillips contends that it is heredity, a scientific certainty, supported by Dar-

win’s and Galton’s findings, that verifies his idea that Harriet will most
certainly kill anyone who is intimate with her. Late Victorians, like Phillips,
extrapolated Darwin’s findings about evolution. Instead of understanding
Darwin’s evolution and natural selection as events that took place over
“thousands of generations” (Darwin, 2008, p. 90), late Victorians, like
Phillips, concluded that the principal of “survival of the fittest” informed
life in the fin de siècle. According to Phillips’s ideological application of
the theory, it was late Victorians’ responsibilities to safeguard themselves
against any hereditary threat, like the corrupting influence of Harriet’s
“black blood” and her parents’ murderous legacy as a result of their rela-
tionships to “chattel slavery” (Davis, 2007, p. 42–43; Depledge, 2010,
pp. xxiii–xxiv; Zieger, 2008, pp. 199–200). For Phillips, it is not racist
and sexist bias that informs his conclusions about Harriet’s inheritance of
her mother’s “black blood” and her parents’ “evil doings” (via witchcraft),
or his assumption about Brandt’s profane connection to the murderous
violence of black slavery, that condemn Harriet to social suicide; rather,
it is Phillips’s use of the so-called science of degeneration, combined with
Harriet’s power over people, that makes him appear credible and certain.
These “certainties” convince Margaret to completely sever all ties to

Harriet; Margaret ends their acquaintanceship: “You have made me [Mar-
garet] very uncomfortable, Doctor [Phillips]. … Of course if I had known
all this [Harriet’s parentage] previously I would not have cultivated Miss
Brandt’s acquaintance, and now I shall take your advice and drop her as
soon as possible!” (BV, p. 69). Also, she articulates that Elinor, too, has a
“strange dislike to the girl [Harriet]” (p. 69). Critics see that it is Elinor’s
xenophobia and Phillips’s racist and sexist conjecture about Harriet, her
blood, and lineage that separate Harriet and Margaret. However, Phillips
and, now, Margaret insist that it is heredity, and scientific fact, that warrant
this separation. Separation must also occur between Harriet and Ralph:
“If he [Ralph] will not take my advice [Phillips] you [Margaret] must get
someone with more influence to caution him about it [Harriet’s parent-
age]” (70). Margaret ensures Phillips that she and Ralph will most certainly
drop Harriet’s acquaintance. However, Margaret also notes that this separa-
tion will be hard on Harriet: “Of course I will [sever the acquaintance], but
it seems hard upon her [Harriet]! She has seemed to crave so for affection
and companionship” (70). Margaret recognizes that her giving up Harriet
will have real consequences for Harriet. Margaret says that their separation
will hurt Harriet, and Margaret acknowledges that Harriet will be left alone
(and marginalized) as a result of Margaret’s actions. Margaret is conscious
of the fact that she will deny Harriet the only things she ever wanted, “af-
fection and companionship,” and the result of this will make Harriet feel
deeply her social isolation. This continued social slighting and social disci-
plining of Harriet has real effects for Harriet as she becomes increasingly
vulnerable as the novel progresses. This social vulnerability will eventually
have such an effect on her that she commits suicide.
Phillips even uses his argument about the validity of Darwin’s theory of
heredity to separate Harriet and Ralph, even as readers know that it is really
Phillips’s racism and sexism that alienates the two lovers. Phillips prefaces
his argument to Ralph about the undeniability of Harriet’s hereditary curse,
by saying that he has no doubt of his argument and that, in fact, it is the
truth (so no one need doubt him): When Ralph grows angry over Phillips’s
account of Harriet’s background, Phillips insists: “I can verify everything
I say, and I fear no man’s resentment” (BV, p. 76). Phillips begins his
argument to Ralph about how heredity shapes Harriet’s destiny and will
prove fatal to her friends; he insists that his conclusions about Harriet are
based on science, not prejudice. However, as critics read Marryat’s text
(and Phillips’s explanation of the “facts”), they come to see that Phillips’s
84 E. D. MACALUSO
facts are overladen with racist and sexist conjecture. First, Phillips contends
that there is something abhorrent about Harriet’s parents neglecting her
as a child and of her subsequent associations with the black servants on
Brandt’s plantation: “I [Phillips] was stationed in Jamaica with my regiment
some fifteen years ago when this girl was a child of six years old, running
half naked about her father’s plantation, uncared for by either parent and
associating solely with the negro servants” (p. 76). Phillips’s racist fears
about the effects of Harriet’s early care by black servants are rooted in a lack
of care and breeding in a proper English manner under the watchful eye of
a governess or nurse. Phillips insists that her proximity to the black servants
would have had a corrupting effect on her character and, eventually, on her
friendships. Degeneration cannot occur simply by being close to someone
of a different race, and Phillips’s argument about heredity reflects his racial
and sexual biases.
Again, Phillips revives Lombroso’s stereotype about criminal women of
color, that if they are not murderers, they are most certainly prostitutes
(1895, p. 111), when he says of Harriet’s mother: “The mother was the
most awful woman I have ever seen, and my experience of the sex in back
slums and alleys has not been small” (BV, p. 76). Phillips employs the
image of the prostitute working in back alleys and slums to characterize
Harriet’s mother, because in Phillips’s mind, Harriet’s mother’s blackness
makes her equivalent to these prostitutes. Also, Phillips recuperates the
racial and sexual stereotype that Cuvier created based on his experiments
on black African women and their genitalia (Crais & Scully, 2009, p. 3).
Cuvier concluded that given what he saw as the largeness of black African
women’s genitalia, they must have edacious sexual natures as well (Crais &
Scully, 2009, p. 3). For Phillips, this implies that Harriet’s mother possesses
an aggressive sexual nature (BV, p. 77). Phillips then uses physiognomic
analysis (what was once thought to be scientific method/fact) to identify
the criminal nature of Harriet’s mother, pointing to her “large eyes rolling”
and her “sensual lips protruding” as proof of Harriet’s mother’s diabolism
(p. 76). But these descriptors are drawn from racist and sexist stereotypes.
Also, as Willburn asserts, Phillips’s belief in Harriet’s mother’s connection
to the occult, the fact that she is “Obeah,” reflects Phillips’s belief in the
criminal nature of her blackness (2008, p. 438). When Ralph finally objects
to Phillips’s harsh words about Harriet and her parentage—“I really cannot
see what right you have to give vent to such a sentiment! … What has this
terrible story to do with Miss Brandt?” (BV, p. 77)—Phillips responds to
Ralph by saying that his ideas do not come from his own prejudices but
from the laws of heredity and are thus matters of fact: “‘When the cat is
black, the kitten is black too!’ It’s the law of Nature!” (p. 77). Phillips’s use
of heredity to encourage his friends to drop Harriet’s acquaintance really
and truly comes from nineteenth-century British stereotypes about race,
gender, and sexuality.
Phillips even traces these stereotypes, the marks of heredity (according
to him), in Harriet herself (not just her parents). After Ralph objects to
Phillips’s theories and conclusions, again, by claiming that Harriet does
not resemble the parentage that Phillips ascribes to her (p. 77), Phillips
responds by saying:
The girl is a quadroon, and she shews it distinctly in her long-shaped eyes with
their blue whites and her wide mouth and blood-red lips! Also in her supple
figure and apparently boneless hands and feet. Of her personal character, I
have naturally had no opportunity of judging, but I can tell you by the way
that she eats her food, and the way in which she uses her eyes, that she has
inherited her half-caste mother’s greedy and sensual disposition. And in ten
years’ time she will in all probability have no figure at all! She will run to fat.
I could tell that also at a glance. (p. 77)
Phillips uses the disparaging term “quadroon” to characterize Harriet’s

mixed race parentage. He also assigns the stereotypical marks of racial dif-
ference to her when he talks about her “long-shaped eyes with their blue
whites and her wide mouth and blood-red lips! … [and her] supple figure
and apparently boneless hands and feet” (p. 77). He even admits that he
knows nothing about Harriet’s real nature (her inner nature) because he
does not know her that well. This confession makes critics wonder if he
would draw the same racist conclusions about Harriet if he actually knew
her personally like he does Margaret. Phillips bases his conclusion solely on
Harriet’s appearance and his study of physiognomy, informed by racist and
sexist stereotypes, and what he believes she has physically inherited from
her mother. To Phillips, Harriet must be entirely like her mother—black,
sensuous, and murderous.
As Ralph attempts to defend Harriet, Phillips continues to suggest to
Ralph that Harriet is dangerous, because of her parentage, and that Ralph
should separate himself from Harriet’s intimacy at once. Ralph contends:
“It would be cowardly to desert a girl just because her father and mother
happened to be brutes. It is not her fault!” (p. 78). Phillips reiterates that:
“Neither is it the fault of a madman that his progenitors had lunacy in
86 E. D. MACALUSO
their blood, nor of a consumptive that his were strumous. All the same
the facts affect their lives and the lives of those with whom they come in
contact. It is the curse of heredity!” (p. 78). When Ralph counters Phillips
by exclaiming: “Well! And if so, how can it concern anyone but the poor
child herself?” (p. 78). Phillips reveals the effects of his faith in heredity
(which are really the effects of racism and sexism); he claims that, like the
Vampire or the “deadly Upas tree” (p. 79), Harriet will sap the life out of
those whom she becomes intensely intimate with just like her mother and
grandmother’s heritage foretell (p. 79). Phillips even claims that Harriet
has already adversely affected little Ethel and Ralph himself. Even as Ralph
objects to this theory of Phillips’s by asserting: “Do you know that you
are accusing Miss Brandt of murder – of killing the child to whom she
never shewed anything but the greatest kindness? … And all I can say is
that I should be quite willing to try the experiment” (p. 79), the fact that
baby Ethel does die from Harriet’s attentions and that Ralph finally admits
to himself the effects that Harriet has had on him (and he is ashamed
of them) proves that Marryat, and the text, is somewhat persuaded by
Phillips’s support of scientific fact against more modern, and sympathetic,
voices that support Harriet like Ralph’s (initially), Miss Wynward’s, and
later, Pennell’s.
After baby Ethel dies, Ralph reconsiders his original protection of Har-
riet and regrets it, because he now feels compelled to join Margaret and
their party back to England and to sanction the purposeful separation
between their party and Harriet:
Ralph, remembering the hint the doctor had thrown out respecting her [Har-
riet] being the ultimate cause of the baby’s illness, did not like to bring up
her name again – felt rather guilty with respect to it, indeed – and Doctor
Phillips was only too glad to see the young man bestirring himself to be use-
ful, and losing sight of his own worry in the trouble of his sister-in-law. Of
course he could not have refused, or even demurred, at accompanying his
party to England on so mournful an errand – and to do him justice he did not
wish it to be otherwise. Brussels and its anticipated pleasures had been driven
clean out of his head by the little tragedy that had occurred at Heyst, and his
attitude towards Margaret when they met again was so quietly affectionate
and brotherly that he was of infinite comfort to her. (p. 81)
Ralph remembers Phillips’s words of caution to him about Harriet, and he

considers that, based on Phillips’s diagnosis, Harriet may very well have
caused the death of his sister-in-law’s child. After this moment, after Ralph
accepts what he now believes to be true about Phillips’s words of warning

to him, he decides to give up Harriet’s acquaintance and return with his
family to England. Phillips’s prejudices masked as fact do, indeed, persuade
Ralph to relinquish his ties to Harriet. The text even suggests that Ralph
wishes to do this. He has forgotten his feelings for Harriet and focuses
on being a good brother to Margaret. Perhaps, he even remembers his
duty as an English gentleman, and this, too, causes him to give up Harriet
and be as attentive as he can to Margaret. The intimacy that all of the
characters, Margaret, Elinor, and Ralph had with Harriet is sacrificed in
the name of English duty and family; this also preserves the party’s sense of
its Englishness. They will never be Harriet’s acquaintances again. The literal
separation of these characters and the ocean between them (as Harriet is
still in Heyst when the English party leaves for England) reinforce their
emotional and social separation.
Harriet can no longer have pretensions to being a member of Mar-
garet’s social set. She feels deeply the injury of Margaret, Elinor,
and Ralph’s separation from her. She is shocked after hearing about
Ethel’s death: “Lost, … do you mean that the child is dead?” (p. 88).
And, she immediately demands to know where Margaret has gone:
“Where is she [Margaret] then? Where has she gone?” (p. 88). And,
finally, when Madame Lamont tells Harriet that they have all left,
Harriet is appalled that they would leave her: “I cannot believe what
Madame Lamont says … she declares that they are all gone for good,
Mrs. Pullen and Miss Leyton and Captain Pullen and the doctor! They have
returned to England” (p. 89). By reiterating what Madame Lamont has said
and by telling it to the Baroness, Harriet internalizes the final separation
between herself, Margaret, Elinor, and Ralph. She says that they are “gone
for good” and she is not exaggerating. She clings to the Baroness “with her
eyes wide open and her large mouth trembling with agitation, until even the
coarse fibre of the Baroness’s propriety made her [Harriet] feel ashamed of
the exhibition” (p. 89). She even runs up to her room and “throw[s] her-
self tumultuously upon the bed” because she is so hurt by their disregard
of her. She feels the effects of her marginalization, of her loneliness—the
fact that she is completely alone in almost every respect, in spite of her
friendship with the Baroness. When she is by herself in her bedroom, she
muses: “How lonely and horrible the corridor on which her apartment
opened seemed. Olga Brimont, Mrs. Pullen, Miss Leyton, and Ralph, all
gone! No one to talk to – no one to walk with – except the Baroness and
her stupid husband! … what a barren, dreary place this detestable Heyst
88 E. D. MACALUSO
would seem without him [Ralph]!” (pp. 89–90). Although part of the text
emphasizes Harriet’s sole thoughts about Ralph at this moment, the part
of the text that I cite suggests that Harriet knows that she is friendless.
She attests to this when she says how “lonely” the corridor is; really, she is
referring to herself and how “lonely” and “horrible” she feels. She grieves
the loss of each of her acquaintances when she reiterates their names. And,
she knows that she is truly companionless when she says that she has “no
one to talk to – no one to walk with” (90). She cannot value the acquain-
tance of the Baroness and the Baron, because she views them as below and
so very different from herself. While this vulnerability that Harriet feels, in
this scene, is not deadly yet, it eventually metastasizes after she leaves the
Red House, after she unintentionally takes the life of Bobby Bates and her
husband, Pennell. She does commit suicide after these events have left her
completely bereft and isolated.
4.3 Harriet’s Humanity: A Critique

of the British Aristocracy
Elinor and Phillips attempt to destroy Harriet’s social connections out of
their own prejudices and for their own gains, their criticisms and casti-
gations of her, while they are deeply painful and disturbing to Harriet,
paradoxically have the effect of revealing Harriet’s virtues. The revelation
of these virtues makes Harriet’s suicide all the more tragic. The Blood of the
Vampire is not a novel that solely condemns its monster like Stoker’s Drac-
ula or, as Eldridge writes, Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1998, p. 12). Marryat’s
imbuing Harriet with a great amount of humanity makes her suicide unjust.
Just as Marryat acknowledges Harriet’s monstrosity (her parentage makes
her dangerous [even lethal]), she also reveals Harriet to be a sympathetic
character who has laudable qualities and who finds supporters in Pennell
and Miss Wynward. As Harriet procures sympathy for herself because of
her humanity, the cost of Elinor’s and Phillips’s racisms, sexisms, and xeno-
phobia looms large. Since Harriet comes to see herself as a murderess, her
desire to eliminate herself, to do “what is right,” makes her that much
more sympathetic; Harriet wishes to take responsibility for the deaths she
has caused. This choice makes her that much more human and that much
more pitiable, because she commits suicide out of a sense of honor and
a concern for others, leaving, as well, her estate to Margaret. Therefore,
Harriet’s monstrosity is blunted by her humanity. Her suicide calls the
British establishment into question over how it treats a New Woman who
is racially and ethnically different from them. As horrified as readers may

be by Harriet’s victims’ deaths, they are equally disturbed by her suicide.
Marryat purposely elicits this horror over Harriet’s death to suggest that
New Women of color like Harriet be included in a British society that solely
sought to condemn them.
Harriet’s kindness is noticed and appreciated by Margaret even as Elinor
seeks to lower Margaret’s opinion of Harriet out of xenophobic prejudice
and jealously over the prospect of Harriet replacing Elinor in Margaret’s
esteem. Elinor wishes to discredit Harriet in Margaret’s eyes. But, in the
early stages of the novel (when the three women are getting to know one
another), Margaret is not entirely persuaded by Elinor’s dislike of Harriet.
Margaret even suggests to Elinor that Elinor is slightly jealous of Harriet:
“Did she [Elinor] really mean what she said, or did her jealousy of the West
Indian heiress render her capable of uttering untruths?” (BV, pp. 39–40).
Even though Margaret is not completely taken with Harriet and she does
not see Harriet as a friend (her interest in Harriet is not “titillative and
protective” as Haefele-Thomas claims [2012, p. 110]), she sees no reason
to be unkind or rude to the girl, which makes Elinor’s harping on Harriet
distasteful. When Harriet kindly offers to nurse baby Ethel, Elinor takes
offense: “‘Leave her alone!’ exclaimed Elinor Leyton in a sharp voice. ‘Do
you not hear what Mrs. Pullen says – that you are not to touch her’” (BV,
p. 14). Elinor attempts to protect Margaret from Harriet’s contamination,
and she also attempts to secure Margaret’s friendship and favoritism by
singling Harriet out and making Harriet feel that she will not achieve the
intimacy with Margaret that she wishes for. However, Margaret is aware
of Elinor’s rudeness and Harriet’s goodness which is why she counters
Elinor by saying: “Of course you [Harriet] did not mean anything but
what was kind” (p. 14). And, Margaret makes up for Elinor’s bad behavior
by noting how she—Margaret—has been the object of Harriet’s kindness.
Even if Margaret’s kindness comes from an aristocratic duty to treat Harriet
properly, Harriet is the one who behaves with only benevolent intentions
(even if she is gauche at moments) while Elinor, the “true aristocrat,”
behaves poorly.
Harriet’s talent for music elevates her above her British compatriots as
neither Elinor nor Margaret can “play or sing” (BV, p. 42). Harriet’s talent
is so prodigious she is even described as a professional:
They [Elinor and Margaret] had opened the door and were about to leave
the room when a flood of melody suddenly poured into the apartment. It
90 E. D. MACALUSO
proceeded from a room at the other end of the corridor and was produced by a
mandolin most skillfully played. The silvery notes in rills and trills and chords,
such as might have been evolved from a fairy harp, arrested the attention of
both Miss Leyton and Mrs. Pullen. They had scarcely expressed their wonder
and admiration to each other at the skillful manipulation of the instrument
(which evinced such art as they had never heard before except in public) when
the strings of the mandolin were accompanied by a young, fresh contralto
voice. “O! hush! hush!” cried Elinor, with her finger on her lip, as the rich
mellow strains floated through the corridor. “I don’t think I ever heard such
a lovely voice before.” Whose on earth can it be? … “Some professional must
have arrived at the Hotel,” said Margaret. … “Ah! Gounod’s delicious ‘Ave
Maria’. How beautiful!” (BV, pp. 41–42)
Both Margaret and Elinor praise the skill and beauty of the music that
they hear. They even raise the musician to professional status. They have
implied that the female musician has achieved a career, which not many
women were able to boast at the fin de siècle (Sutherland, 2015, p. 1).
When they find out that the musician is Harriet, they immediately retract
their compliments. Elinor even remarks: “Well! She ought to be able to
sing with that mouth of hers” (BV, p. 43). As a result of Elinor’s cruelty,
Harriet is immediately relegated to the status of “the little West Indian!”
again (BV, p. 43). However, Harriet’s talent, the art of her fingers as they
play the mandolin and the richness of her voice as she sings with a powerful
contralto, overshadows Elinor’s racist comment. The narrative supports
Harriet as a professional musician, first, before it returns to the issue of her
race. As readers, Harriet and her musical skill already enchant us. This takes
precedence over her race. Mrs. Montague articulates this fact perfectly: “O!
Miss Brandt! You are a sly puss! We have all been delighted – enchanted!
What do you mean by hiding your light under a bushel in this way? Do
come in here for a minute and sing us another song!” (BV, p. 43). Harriet
is referred to as an animal, again, a mischievous cat. But, her talent and the
pleasure that the other women take in hearing the skillful, professional, and
beautiful music produced by Harriet supersede this label. Thus, Harriet’s
character, and role within the novel, is elevated to musician whereas Elinor
comes off as an arrogant and racist gossip.
Harriet’s beauty serves to attract men like Ralph and Pennell. However,
it also reveals the part of her character that is good, noble, and worthy of
Pennell’s praises. Pennell describes Harriet’s body as beautiful and worthy
of respect. He inwardly exclaims:
“By Jove! what a beautiful girl!” was Mr. Pennell’s inward ejaculation as he
saw her drawing nearer the spot where he stood. It was strange that his first
judgment of Harriet Brandt should have been the same as that of his cousin,
Ralph Pullen, but it only proves from what a different standpoint men and
women judge of beauty. As Harriet walked over the grass, Anthony Pennell
noted each line of her swaying figure – each tint of her refined face – with
the pretty little hands hanging by her side, and the slumberous depths of her
magnificent eyes. He did not, for one moment, associate her with the idea
which he had formed of the West Indian heiress who was bent on capturing
his cousin Ralph. He concluded she was another young friend who might be
partaking of the Baroness’s hospitality. He bowed low as she entered through
the open French window looking as a Georgian or Cashmerian houri might
have looked, he thought, if clad in the robes of civilization. (BV, p. 128)
As a socialist writer, Pennell believes that all British subjects, even those
who are native to the colonies, serve the state (Hurren, 2007, p. 37). He
concludes, therefore, that the standard of beauty held for Britons—the clas-
sically Grecian ideal (blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin) (McClintock, 1995,
p. 38)—must necessarily be complicated by Harriet’s beauty. He comments
on the “different standpoint” that British men and women must necessar-
ily take to evaluate the beauty of their compatriots. Pennell tells the truth
about Harriet’s beauty. He notices “each line of her swaying figure – each
tint of her refined face – with the pretty little hands hanging by her side, and
the slumberous depths of her magnificent eyes” (BV, p. 128). Instead of
creating a lie about Harriet’s beauty, as Margaret Pullen does to perpetuate
Dr. Phillips’s racist fiction about the degenerative nature of Harriet’s black-
ness “[Harriet has] no complexion and an enormous mouth” (BV, p. 117;
Lombroso, 1895, p. 111; Malchow, 1993, p. 103), Pennell acknowledges
the truth about Harriet’s good looks and “bows low” to her out of respect
for the virtue that was associated with female beauty during the Victo-
rian and late Victorian periods (BV, p. 128; Marcus, 2007, p. 47). When
Pennell thinks about the stereotype of “quadroon” that the other British
characters have levied at Harriet, he says: “they must be fools and blind
…!” (BV, p. 129).
Pennell notices Harriet’s kindness, talent, beauty, and her honorable and
charitable nature, which is why he rails so hard against the British characters
that only see Harriet as a “gauche schoolgirl, a half-tamed savage, or a
juvenile virago” (BV, p. 137). He dares to contradict eugenics by saying that
he “doesn’t believe in stigmas being attached to one’s birth” (BV, p. 139).
92 E. D. MACALUSO
He asks the very important question: Does the rumor of a hereditary taint
mean that Harriet’s noble qualities are any less valuable? Pennell asserts:
What difference did it make to Harriet Brandt herself, that she was marked
with an hereditary taint? Did it render her less beautiful, less attractive, less
graceful and accomplished? Were the sins of the fathers ever to be visited
upon the children? – was no sympathetic fellow-creature to be found to say,
“If it is so, let us forget it! It is not your fault nor mine! Our duty is to make
each other’s lives happy as possible and trust the rest to God.” He hoped,
as he sat there, that before long Harriet Brandt would find a friend for life
who would never remind her of anything outside of her own loveliness and
lovable qualities. (BV, p. 146)
Pennell asks the question: Should an accomplished woman’s life be ruined

because of her background? Pennell maintains that our duty to one another
should be that we protect and value one another for our good qualities,
not condemn each other over pseudoscientific dogma. His wish for Harriet
and himself is that they love one another and only recognize each other’s
laudable qualities for the rest of their lives.
Even when Harriet acts with honor and attempts to protect Pennell from
her lethal nature, Pennell still insists that they remain by one another’s side:
O! Tony! Tony! cannot you read the truth? I love you, dear, I love you! I
never loved any creature in this world before I loved you. I did not know that
it was given to mortals to love so much! And my love has opened my eyes!
Sooner than injure you, whom I would die to save from harm, I will separate
myself from you! I will give you up! I will live my lonely life without you.
I could do that, but I can never, never consent to sap your manhood and
your brains, which do not belong to me but to the world, and see you wither
like a poisoned plant, the leaves of which lie discoloured and dead upon the
garden path. … Never in the course of their acquaintanceship had Harriet
Brandt seemed so sweet, so pathetic, so unselfish to Anthony Pennell as then.
… “I do not believe in the possibility of you harming me,” he replied, “but
if I am to die, which is what I suppose you mean, I claim my right to die in
your arms.” (BV, pp. 166–167)
Harriet’s confession reveals exactly what Pennell claims that she is: She
is honest, honorable, virtuous, and strong, and Pennell recognizes these
qualities as “sweet, pathetic, and unselfish” (BV, p. 167). In this, and the
previous, scene/s, Pennell establishes that Harriet is a sympathetic and
defensible character. He is willing to die in her arms, because she is such a

praiseworthy person.
Even Miss Wynward, the Baroness Gobelli’s servant, is sympathetic to
Harriet because Harriet has only treated her with the greatest kindness.
Even as the reader knows that Harriet is responsible for the death of
Bobby Bates (the Baroness’s son) and for the deaths of Ethel, little Car-
oline, and Harriet’s wet nurse, Miss Wynward views Harriet as innocent.
While Harriet becomes likeable in this scene (even after the revelation of
her parentage), the Baroness is finally chastised for her diabolical nature.
At the moment of Bobby’s death, the Baroness accuses Harriet of killing
him. Miss Wynward is the only character who sees how wrong it is for the
Baroness to blame Harriet for Bobby’s death and question God’s judg-
ment (p. 156). Miss Wynward calls out the Baroness’s bad behavior by
saying: “‘Madame! Madame!’ cried Miss Wynward, ‘is this a moment for
such recrimination? If all this were true [the curse], it is no fault of Miss
Brandt’s! Think of what lies here, and that he [Bobby] loved her, and the
thought will soften your feelings!’” (p. 156) Miss Wynward attempts to
make the Baroness see the folly of defaming Harriet while her son lies dead
on his bed. She even attempts to get the Baroness to see that Harriet is
innocent (it is not Harriet’s fault that her parents were murderous) and that
Bobby loved Harriet. However, the Baroness will not be mollified and her
cruelty comes to the surface in this scene. She comes to be known, now, as
a heartless woman instead of an eccentric. The Baroness goes as far as to
say: “I could kill’ er [Harriet], because she ‘as killed ‘im [Bobby]” (p. 156).
And, she advances toward Harriet with “so vengeful a look that the girl
[Harriet], with a slight cry, darted from the room and rushed into her
own” (p. 156). Miss Wynward reveals that she believes Harriet to be fault-
less in this moment: “How dare you [the Baroness] intimidate an innocent
woman [Harriet] in the very presence of Death?” (p. 156). Miss Wynward
points out the Baroness’s hypocrisy: “You [the Baroness] accuse that poor
girl [Harriet] of unholy dealings – what can you say of your own?” (p. 156).
While Harriet is blameless in Miss Wynward’s eyes, particularly as there is
no physical evidence to link Harriet to these murders (even as readers know
she is responsible for them), the Baroness is finally punished for her illegal
and blasphemous fortune-telling racket that is only aimed at cheating the
aristocracy out of their money.
Miss Wynward and Harriet bond. Miss Wynward cannot believe the
insults that the Baroness levies against Harriet: “The inexcusable manner in
which you [the Baroness] have insulted that poor young lady, Miss Brandt,
94 E. D. MACALUSO
makes me feel that my first duty is to her!” (p. 156). Miss Wynward consoles
Harriet, who is deeply distraught as a result of the new intelligence that
she harms those whom she becomes close with—“O! Miss Wynward, what
did she mean? Can there be any truth in it? Is there something poisonous
in my nature that harms those with whom I come in contact? How can it
be? How can it be?” (p. 157)—and they both ensure that they each have
a place to go to, away from the Baroness, and money to get there. Miss
Wynward will prepare Bobby’s burial and then go to her future husband’s
home while Harriet will contact Pennell and check in at the Langham hotel
(pp. 157–158). But what is most significant about these moments between
Harriet and Miss Wynward is that Miss Wynward, a woman of integrity,
sees Harriet as both kind and deserving of sympathy. She tells Harriet that
she is not responsible for Bobby’s death, and she kisses Harriet for Harriet’s
kind way of ensuring that Miss Wynward is taken care of after she leaves
the Baroness: “‘Cannot you [Harriet] see that it was the Baroness’s temper
that made her speak so cruelly to you?’ … Miss Wynward stooped down
and kissed the girl’s brow. ‘Thank you [Harriet] so much for your kind
thought’” (p. 157). While the Baroness is revealed to be truculent, almost
to the point at which she is fiendish, Harriet, even while she possesses a
lethal nature, is kind, thoughtful of others, honest, mature, and piteous.
Miss Wynward’s support of Harriet and Pennell’s declaration of undying
love for Harriet are why readers find Harriet to be a sympathetic charac-
ter. Pennell articulates this brilliantly when he says: “to me she [Harriet]
represents only a friendless and unprotected woman who has a right to
our sympathy and respect” (BV, p. 144). Robert Eldridge writes that our
sympathy for Harriet is also found in her tragedy (1998, p. 12), because
a friendless woman takes her own life and chooses to be charitable until
the very end of her life. Harriet leaves Margaret Pullen all of her fortune in
exchange for Margaret’s sometime kindness to her at Heyst. This gesture
of Harriet’s is particularly significant, because she is the one who sustains
the British race. Margaret, her husband, and family can now remain in
England and stay together as a result of Harriet’s fortune. This ending
to Marryat’s novel is terribly ironic, because the monster, Harriet, who
has been thought to degenerate and destroy the British race, has actually
maintained and saved it. One might even conclude that Harriet’s virtu-
ous qualities (mapped through her monstrous and beautiful body) suggest
that fin-de-siècle Britain is morally bankrupt. This is why I contend that
Florence Marryat chooses to argue for Harriet’s inclusion in society not
her banishment to its limits. Even if Harriet is in some part monstrous, her
good qualities outweigh the potential she has for destruction and must be
acclimated into society not sacrificed at the hands of its cruelty. And so, the
fate of New Women of color, like Harriet, should not always be relegated
to monstrous tragedy but to redemptive life everlasting.2
4.4 Finale: Harriet’s Humanity Implores Readers

to Question Her Fate
The plot of Marryat’s novel shows Harriet coming to a tragic sense of self—
her capacity to bring death upon the people that she loves. She chooses
suicide when she makes that discovery in Chapter XVIII: “She had killed
him – she, who worshipped him, whose pride was bound up in him, who
was to have helped him and comforted him and waited on him all his
life – she had killed him” (BV, p. 186). In addition to the loss of her
husband, she herself attributes her choice of suicide to her parents and
the “curse of heredity.” Phillips and Elinor consistently act out of self-
interest to isolate Harriet from their circle, and they use faulty science,
which is really racist, sexist, and xenophobic prejudice, to support their
view of her as their inferior. Their hostile behavior toward Harriet has the
ironic effect of raising her up, exposing their hypocritical and racist views,
which the English hide behind their screens of politeness and propriety.
Their behavior also invites questions about how society should respond
to the “deadly” but “innocent” outlier. As the monster becomes human,
generations of New Women, who are racial and ethnic “Others” (Said,
1978. p. 1), are allowed to speak, encouraging tolerance and understanding
in the face of prejudice.
Notes
1. F. Marryat’s (2010) The Blood of the Vampire (Brighton, UK: Victorian
Secrets) will hereafter be referred to parenthetically as BV followed by a page
number.
2. It is not coincidental that Harriet takes her life in Italy surrounded by saints
and nuns. Clearly, Marryat sends a message to her readers that Harriet’s life
is as sacred as these holy women’s. Her suicide is as tragic as Jesus’s parable
and death, because he, too, sacrifices himself for the good of others.
96 E. D. MACALUSO
References
Case, S. E. (1991). Tracking the vampire. Differences, 3(2), 9.
Crais, C., & Scully, P. (2009). Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A ghost
story and a biography. Princeton and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press.
Darwin, C. (2008). On the origin of species: The illustrated edition. New York, NY:
Sterling.
Davis, O. (2007). Morbid mothers: Gothic heredity in Florence Marryat’s the blood
of the vampire. In R. B. Anolik (Ed.), Horrifying sex: Essays on sexual difference
in gothic literature (pp. 40–55). London, UK: McFarland.
Depledge, G. (2010). Introduction. In G. Depledge (Ed.), The blood of the vampire
(pp. iii–xxxvii). Brighton, UK: Victorian Secrets.
Dijkstra, B. (1988). Idols of perversity: Fantasies of feminine evil in fin-de-siècle cul-
ture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Galton, F. (1904). Eugenics: Its definition, scope and aims. Nature, 70, 82.
Gilman, S. L. (1985). Difference and pathology: Stereotypes of sexuality, race, and
madness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Haefele-Thomas, A. (2012). Queer others in Victorian gothic: Transgressing mon-
strosity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Heller, T. (1996). The vampire in the house: Hysteria, female sexuality, and female
knowledge in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872). In B. L. Harman & S. Meyer (Eds.),
The new nineteenth century: Feminist readings of under-read Victorian fiction.
New York, NY: Garland.
Hurren, E. T. (2007). Protesting about pauperism: Poverty, politics and poor relief
in late-Victorian England, 1870–1900. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press.
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CHAPTER 5
Conclusion
This book argues that the liminal figure of the monster serves three impor-
tant functions in the novels by Bram Stoker, Richard Marsh, and Florence
Marryat: (1) the monster enables readers to see both sides of the conflict at
the British fin de siècle provoked by issues of gender and the figure of the
New Woman; (2) the monster demonstrates that the social categories and
movements, the characters in these novels hold dear, are unstable and more
complex than they imagined; and (3) the monster sets into sharp relief the
challenges to received constructions of gender posed by the New Woman.
1. The liminal figure of the monster shows that the culture of fin-de-
siècle Britain was riven by a conflict between subjects who held traditional
values (like Cecil Rhodes) and those who maintained progressive view-
points (like Annie Besant). Cecil Rhodes believed that it was his duty and
right to reap the spoils of the British Empire by instigating an aggressive
imperialistic campaign in South Africa without questioning this “civiliz-
ing mission’s” ethical costs (the maiming, raping, and murdering of South
Africa’s black African people). However, subjects like Annie Besant, who
thought that Britain’s imperial missions were often misguided and wrong,
worked for diplomacy in places like Egypt to lend support to the move-
ments for independence.
Jekyll/Hyde is an apt metaphor and monstrous figure that delineates
the fin de siecle’s cultural conflict quite clearly. On the one hand, Britain
was like Dr. Jekyll as both Jekyll and Britain acquired all the success and
prestige that Britain received as a result of its harsh policies abroad. On

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_5
100 E. D. MACALUSO
the other hand, Hyde, Jekyll’s mysterious “Other” self, shows, in violent
terms, the murderous costs of Britain’s campaign abroad. Though there
were many moderate Britons who worked for a fiscally responsible state and
social liberalism, these agendas were often swept up in conservative financial
agendas and contributed to this great schism between conservatives, and
those who held traditional values, and progressive New Liberals.
2. The liminal figure of the monster also shows the characters in these
novels, and their readers, that the social categories and movements they
hold dear, like colonialism and notions about native-ness versus foreign-
ness, gender and the New Woman, homo/sexuality, and discourses on
poverty are unstable, complex categories; they were far more complex than
these subjects had ever imagined. Stoker’s Dracula, Richard Marsh’s the
Beetle, and Florence Marryat’s female vampire, Harriet Brandt, show that
gender and sexuality are complicated and liminal. Is Dracula straight or
gay, male or female? Dracula is also famous for connoting various races and
cultures. Is Dracula Eastern European, Jewish, Irish, or from an “ambigu-
ous conquering race” (Arata, 1996, p. 113)? Or, is he an English/British
enthusiast as his British books and maps suggest?
Richard Marsh’s Beetle is both male and female, referencing what
Paulina Palmer believes is a transgendered identity (2012, p. 12). However,
the Beetle’s body and his/her monstrosity also evoke the effeminate man
and the masculine woman. Holt describes the Beetle’s masculine effeminacy
(B 53) and Atherton encounters an aggressive female Beetle (B 152). All of
these pieces of evidence point to conversations that Marsh wished to have
about the fluidity of gender and queer sexualities. Additionally, the Beetle’s
British-ness and his/her foreignness are considered in this novel. Though
the Beetle is British, having hailed from British-occupied Egypt, Lessing-
ham, Atherton, and Miss Coleman see the Beetle as a foreigner because
of his/her yellow skin and burnoose, his/her foreign voice or accent, and
his/her strange habits (never emerging from the house that Miss Coleman
rented to him/her). What truly makes a British subject? Is it the white
conservative English identity embodied by Lessingham, Miss Lindon, or
Atherton? Or, is it the population of foreigners that Britain boasts in each
of its colonies? The Beetle’s foreignness and his/her “reverse coloniza-
tion” even showed British subjects that their beloved “civilizing mission”
and Empire had its vulnerabilities and might even be questioned as one of
Britain’s legitimate projects and strongholds. The Beetle’s foreign perver-
sity makes these conflicts in gender and the New Woman, and colonialism,
Empire, and native-ness versus foreignness quite clear. Finally, the Beetle’s
5 CONCLUSION 101
use of Robert Holt, the poor man, suggests that poverty in Britain was a
rampant problem. The conservative decision to relegate the poor to asy-
lums, workhouses, and institutions is shown to be insufficient, dehuman-
ized, and corrupt (Generani, 2012, p. 40). And, a spirit of reform, one
in which British subjects take care of one another (including their poorer
counterparts) is suggested. However, Holt’s body and encounters with the
monster, the Beetle, make readers aware of the dual impulse to mark Holt
as both a threatening vagrant and a British everyman.
Race, as the British knew it, at the fin de siècle, is complicated in Marry-
at’s The Blood of the Vampire, by Harriet Brandt’s biracial body and blood.
Is Harriet black or white? How should a white British population of people
respond/react to her? What about Harriet’s wish to be friends with both
Margaret Pullen and Ralph Pullen/Anthony Pennell? What should British
subjects make of her choice to be friends with both women and men at
the fin de siècle? Finally, Harriet’s status as a New Woman, an extremely
accomplished and independent/wealthy woman, is also threatening to her
British compatriots because she is something “Other” than a traditional,
Victorian lady.
3. The liminal figure of the monster collapses the boundaries of all of
these social categories and movements, and in doing so, shows readers that
the collapsing of these boundaries frightened conservative subjects. But,
like the monster, there was another figure that collapsed the boundaries of
gender—the New Woman. The New Woman was a direct challenge to tra-
ditional, Victorian femininity. She did not wish to stay at home and tend to
a husband and children. She wished to have an education and employment.
She did not wish to be man’s inferior. She wished for enfranchisement and
equality with men. While traditional Victorian women tended hearth and
home, the New Woman spoke out, wrote tracts, was active, and held par-
ties. Essentially, Victorian femininity was challenged by this “New-comer.”
And, Victorian conservatives did not like this challenge by the New Woman,
which is why, she became a threat to family, Empire, and the state even as
many feminist women viewed her as a role model and followed her example.
The monster and the New Woman enable readers to define what conser-
vative late Victorian Britain feared the most—the dissolution of their society
and way of life as they knew it by foreigners, New Women, homosexuals,
and the poor. The monster, together with the figure of the New Woman,
in the three “monster novels” that my book focuses on, reveals these fears
and the conflict embedded in each of these subjects—colonialism, the New
Woman, homosexuality, and poverty.
102 E. D. MACALUSO
The monster and the New Woman challenge the cultural attitudes of
conservative Britons. Colonialism was not the only way to organize a state,
women deserved equality and enfranchisement, homosexuals were human
beings, and the poor were a productive population of people that defined
the state.
The monster and the New Woman reveal that gender was even more
complex for the New Woman at fin de siècle’s end than scholars have
thought. Dracula shows that women’s friendships could approach lesbian-
ism. This happens in the novel between Lucy and Mina and historically
between Vernon Lee and her “friends.” The monster, Dracula, triangulates
the bonds between himself, Lucy, and Mina, and makes their friendship
lesbian by showing that stronger emotions—romance, passion, and eroti-
cism—make a friendship approach lesbianism. This is a new function to
ascribe to the monster. Previously, scholars have returned again and again
to the notion that the monster is “overdetermined” (Halberstam, 1995,
p. 1) or that the monster’s body suggests conclusions about race, gender,
sexuality, and class (Halberstam, 1995, p. 1). However, there haven’t been
too many new conclusions made recently about monstrosity (aside from
popular scholarship on monsters in our contemporary American culture)
and the late Victorian period. This book necessarily adds to the conversa-
tion. Lucy and Mina’s love suggests that Stoker imagined a world in which
heterosexual couples did not just define themselves by the work that part-
ners did together or by economics and arranged marriages but by love.
And, for the queer community, Stoker dared to write about a love that
challenged the pervasive violence levied at these peoples and communi-
ties. Lucy and Mina love in vastly different ways than their stereotypes as
Linton’s “Wild Woman” and Maudsley’s “practical woman” suggest. Lucy
and Mina’s love, wrought by their relationship to the monster, shows late
Victorians and contemporary critics that expressions of love and gender at
the fin de siècle are even more complex than these populations of people
already knew.
The foreign and perverse violence of Richard Marsh’s Beetle, made by
his/her effeminate masculinity and masculine femininity and his/her for-
eignness, shows that the New Woman was also a liminal subject. According
to the views of the British populous at the fin de siècle, she was both a
monster and a laudable figure. She was both a threat to family, nation,
and Empire and a role model for other women to follow. The foreign and
perverse violence that the Beetle commits against Miss Lindon shows that
her modernity as a New Woman is both scorned by Mr. Lindon, Atherton,
5 CONCLUSION 103
and the Beetle and embraced by herself and Lessingham. She embodies
the liminality of the New Woman quite clearly. The violence inflicted upon
these liminal figures—the Beetle and Miss Lindon—comes back to haunt
the white British protagonists and shows that colonialism, sexuality, and
poverty were also vexed subjects. Was British colonialism in Egypt jus-
tified? Was Lessingham’s killing of the priestess of Isis necessary? Or, is
there another perspective at work, here? Is the Beetle defensible in his/her
revenge? Does the Beetle get away with his attack on Holt? Are gay men
monsters or lovers that should be left in peace? Should the poor be con-
demned to the streets or taken care of by British subjects like Miss Lindon?
Just as gender is made complicated by the foreign and perverse violence of
the monster, in this chapter, so, too, are these other issues.
Finally, in The Blood of the Vampire, the monster and the New Woman
are captured in the character—Harriet Brandt. The novel explores the ways
that the conservative and white British populous often made “Others”—
foreigners, New Women, homosexuals, and the poor, but, in Harriet’s case,
foreigners, black women, and New Women—into monsters. The xenopho-
bia, racism, and sexism of Elinor Leyton’s and Dr. Phillips’s views of Har-
riet, that are supposedly based on hereditary science written about by Dar-
win and Galton, disrupt the intimacies that she has with Margaret Pullen,
Ralph Pullen, and Anthony Pennell. However, Harriet’s good qualities
make her a highly sympathetic character and a human subject, so much
so, that her suicide is deeply tragic (Eldridge, 1998, p. 12). Her suicide
calls a British establishment, that marginalizes Harriet, makes her endure
painful isolation, and eventually leads her to take her own life, into ques-
tion. Her suicide removes the term “monster” from Harriet and places
it on the British aristocratic characters who condemn her. Her suicide is
a call to the British aristocracy to understand its “monstrous” others and
to incorporate them into society not to banish them to its limits, thereby
making this society richer and better.
The literary representations of gender in the British fin de siècle are a
much richer subject than critics have shown us. The inclusion of the mon-
ster in the conversation necessarily writes a different study from those that
investigate the New Woman and gender from the perspectives of feminism
and feminist activism, the suffrage movements, education and employment,
art and culture, fiction, newspapers, the periodical presses, and fashion and
transportation. The monster, in the novels, demonstrates that friendships
between New Women in their defiance of accepted categories should be
104 E. D. MACALUSO
included in society after the example of Lucy and Mina’s love in Drac-
ula, Lessingham’s love for Marjorie Lindon in The Beetle, and Anthony
Pennell’s love and loyalty to Harriet Brandt in Marryat’s The Blood of the
Vampire.
References
Generani, G. (2012). The Beetle: A rhetoric betrayed. In P. Marks (Ed.), Literature
and politics: Pushing the world in certain directions (pp. 35–45). Newcastle upon
Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Palmer, P. (2012). The Queer Uncanny: New perspectives on the gothic. Cardiff: Uni-
versity of Wales Press.
Index
A Besant, Walter, 41, 42, 59

Alienation effect, 11 Bildungsroman, 23
Anstruther-Thomson, Kit, 25 Biracial, 8, 101
The Anti-Marriage League, 41
Blackwell, Samuel, 24
Arabi Pasha, 57, 66
Arata, Stephen, 1, 38, 58, 80, 81, 100 The Blood of the Vampire, 1–3, 6, 8–10,
Ardis, Ann, 5, 8, 11, 40 14, 15, 72, 88, 95, 101, 103, 104
Atherton, Sydney, 7, 13, 40, 42–44, Bonheur, Rosa, 20, 22, 37, 42, 49, 50
53, 55, 56, 60–62, 64, 66, 100, Booth, William, 11, 52
102 Boulton and Park, 20, 21
Austen, Jane, 23 Bradford, Mary, 14
Bradley, Katherine, 21, 42, 49, 50
B Brambley, Sam, 38
Balcombe, Florence, 22 Brandt, Harriet, 1, 2, 4, 8, 11, 12, 14,
Barfield, Margaret E., 61 15, 72, 76–79, 81–84, 86, 90–93,
The Baroness Gobelli, 93 100, 101, 103, 104
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 21, 49 Brecht, Bertolt, 11
Barton, Herminia, 11 Brimont, Olga, 74, 87
Bates, Bobby, 88, 93 Bristow, Joseph, 21
The Beetle, 1–11, 13, 15, 39–58, 61,
Brontë, Charlotte, 23
62, 64–66, 100–104
Belford, Barbara, 34 Burton, Antoinette, 57
Benson, Mary, 31, 34 Butler, Eleanor, 20
Besant, Annie, 37, 39, 57, 58, 99 Butler, Judith, 2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 105
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8
106 INDEX
C Dracula, 1, 3–6, 9, 11–13, 15, 19, 20,

Caird, Mona, 37, 39, 42, 63 23, 25–28, 30–34, 81, 100, 102
Carmilla, 88 Dracula, 1–3, 5, 6, 8–10, 12, 15, 19,
Caroline, 21, 49, 93 21, 23, 29, 32–34, 88, 102, 104
Carpenter, Edward, 20, 39, 45
Case, Sue Ellen, 78
Champnell, Augustus, 44, 50, 53, 54, E
57, 58, 62 Eastern Europe, 3
Class, 3–5, 40, 52, 75, 77, 79, 102 Egerton, George, 59
Cocks, H.G., 20 Egypt, 3, 7, 13, 37, 39, 43, 52, 55, 57,
Cogswell Wood, Anna, 30 58, 66, 99, 100, 103
Colonialism, 1–8, 11, 14, 15, 38–41, Ehnenn, Jill, 21
43, 44, 46, 58, 65, 66, 100–103 Eldridge, R.T., 8, 73, 88, 94, 103
Colonized, 39, 52 Eliot, George, 23
Conservative, 1, 3, 5–7, 11, 13, 14, 34, Ellis, Havelock, 20, 39, 45
38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 50, 51, 59, 60, Empire, 2, 3, 9, 10, 14, 37, 38, 41, 44,
62, 100–103 57, 66, 99–102
Cook, Matt, 20, 21 Eroticism, 6, 13, 23, 27, 102
Cooper, Edith, 21, 42, 49, 50 Ethnicity, 8, 95
Craft, Christopher, 19, 26, 34 Eugenic love, 9, 10, 71, 76
Crais, Clifton, 47, 73, 84 Eugenics, 9, 10, 71, 73, 91
Creole, 8, 72, 79 Everyman, 4, 45, 101
Crew of Light, 19, 31, 32
Culture, 3, 4, 12, 21, 22, 34, 38, 40,
49, 62, 64, 65, 99, 100, 102, 103 F
Cushman, Charlotte, 21, 22, 49, 50 Faderman, Lillian, 13, 15, 21, 22, 30
Cuvier, Georges, 73, 84 Female friendship, 2, 6, 12, 13, 15, 20,
21, 23
The Female Malady, 61
D Female marriage, 6, 20, 22, 49
Darwin, Charles, 71, 82, 83, 103 Femininity, 3, 4, 37, 41, 77, 101, 102
Davis, Octavia, 71, 82 Feminism, 11, 40, 103
Degeneration, 59, 74–77, 79, 82, 84 Fin de siècle, 1–3, 8–12, 14, 15, 22,
Depledge, Greta, 82 24, 37–41, 46, 48–50, 53, 54,
De Profundis , 46 59, 62, 63, 66, 71, 82, 90, 99,
Diana of the Crossways , 5 101–103
Dickens, Charles, 23 Fleming, Henry, 38, 45
Dijkstra, Bram, 5, 12, 14, 24, 72 Foreign, 2, 4–13, 15, 43–45, 47–50,
Disraeli, Benjamin, 50 52–54, 56–58, 62, 64–66, 74–77,
Dixon, Ella Hepworth, 39, 42, 63 79–81, 100, 102, 103
Doctor Phillips, 72, 86 Foreignness, 7, 14, 15, 40, 41, 46–48,
Dominguez-Rué, Emma, 25, 27, 32, 77, 79, 100, 102
33 Fulmer, Constance M., 61
INDEX 107
G Hurren, Elizabeth T., 45, 50, 53, 91

Galton, Francis, 9, 71–73, 80, 82, 103
Gardner, Burdett, 25
Garnett, Rhys, 56 I
Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth, 42 Identity, 5, 7, 10, 66, 73, 76, 100
Gay, 4, 7, 11, 12, 20–22, 32, 44, 46, The Image Breakers , 5
48, 50, 100, 103 Imperialism, 1, 3, 9, 38, 43
Geals, Sarah, 21, 49 Intimate friendship, 20–25, 28, 29
Gender, 1–5, 8–12, 14, 15, 33, 37, 40, Irving, Henry, 22, 32
66, 72, 85, 99–103
Generani, Gustavo, 52, 54, 101
Gilman, Sander L., 47, 72 J
Girard, René, 9, 22, 27, 33 Jex-Blake, Sophia, 42
Gladstone, William E., 59, 60 Johnson, Alan, 12, 25
Gordon, Charles George, 34, 37, 39 Jusova, Iveta, 5, 8
Grand, Sarah, 37, 39, 42, 62, 63
Greg, W.R., 41, 42
K
Gross indecency, 19, 44
Kaplan, Morris B., 46
Kastan, David Scott, 50
Katz, Jonathan Ned, 47
H Keynotes and Discords , 59
Haefele-Thomas, Ardel, 80, 89 Kingsley, Mary, 37
Halberstam, Judith/Jack, 1, 4, 20, 27, Klumpke, Anna, 42, 49, 50
34, 40, 102 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 21, 24
Hall, Radclyffe, 20, 21, 37
Hansen, Tom, 12, 24
Harker, Jonathan, 19 L
Harker, Mina, 1, 33 Ladies of Llangollen, 50
Harper, Charles, 37, 59 Late Victorian, 4–6, 22, 31, 32, 44,
Harris, W.C., 13, 60 79, 82, 91, 101, 102
Heilmann, Ann, 5, 8, 11, 40 Leache, Irene, 30
Heller, Tamar, 79 Leaves of Grass , 22
Holmwood, Arthur, 24, 30, 34 Ledger, Sally, 5, 8, 10, 40, 41, 59, 74
Holt, Robert, 1, 4, 7, 40, 44–56, 61, Lee, Vernon, 25, 102
62, 64, 66, 100, 101, 103 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 88
Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Leicester Warren, Margaret, 25, 30
Society, 20 Leigh Smith, Barbara, 24
Homosexuality, 1, 10, 14, 15, 19, 20, Lesbian, 2, 4–6, 8, 11, 12, 15, 20,
22, 38–41, 44–46, 48–50, 101 22–25, 29, 72, 78, 102
Homosexuals, 3, 4, 12, 33, 38, 41, 46, Lessingham, Paul, 4, 6, 7, 13, 40, 42,
48–50, 65, 101–103 44, 50, 53–58, 60–65, 100, 103,
Hurley, Kelly, 13, 15, 46, 47 104
108 INDEX
Levy, Amy, 42 Merrill, George, 20

Leycester, Edith, 25, 30 Mesmerism, 47, 49
Leyton, Elinor, 8, 72, 89, 103 Micas, Nathalie, 20, 22
Liberal, 3, 6, 60 Michael Field, 21, 42, 49
Liminal, 1, 3, 4, 11, 14, 39, 40, 99–103 Miller, Neil, 20, 22, 39
Lindon, Marjorie, 1, 3, 4 Miscegenation, 81
Lindon, Mr., 40, 60, 62 Miss Louisa Coleman, 43, 56, 100
Linton, Eliza Lynn, 37, 41, 42, 59, Miss Wynward, 2, 72, 86, 88, 93, 94
102 Modernity, 7, 38, 42, 62, 64, 102
Lloyd, Constance, 22 Monster, 1–9, 11–14, 20, 25, 30, 32,
Lloyd, Mary, 20, 22, 42, 49 33, 39–41, 44, 45, 50, 54, 57, 58,
Lombroso, Cesare, 52, 80, 81, 84, 91 65, 66, 72, 88, 94, 95, 99–103
Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), 46 Moorman, J.R.H., 74
Lord Cromer, 43 Mrs. Montague, 90
Lord Salisbury, 51 Munch, Edvard, 14
Love, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 15, 20–26,
28–32, 64, 65, 92, 94, 95, 102,
104 N
Lyceum Theatre, 22 National Agricultural Labourer’s
Union (NALU), 45
“The New Aspect of the Woman
Question”, 63
M
New Liberal, 3, 5, 38, 40, 45, 53, 100
Macfie, Sian, 72, 78
New Woman, 1–15, 19, 37–44, 46, 59,
Major, Adrienne Antrim, 79
62–66, 72, 74, 88, 99–103
Malchow, H.L., 4, 19, 27, 40, 73, 91
Nordau, Max, 74
Mantegazza, Paolo, 73
Marcus, Sharon, 6, 13, 15, 20–23, 25,
26, 30, 49, 91 O
Marginalization, 72, 77, 80, 87 Obeah, 81, 84
Margree, Victoria, 13, 64 The Odd Women, 6, 11
Married Women’s Property Acts, 42 Oliphant, Margaret, 37, 41, 42
Marryat, Florence, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 14, On the Threshold, 5
72, 73, 83, 86, 88, 89, 94, 95,
99–101, 104
Marsh, Richard, 1, 2, 4–9, 13, 15, P
39–51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60–66, 99, Palmer, Paulina, 100
100, 102 Pangenesis, 71
Marshall, Gail, 39, 66 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 42, 60
Maudsley, Henry, 37, 59, 74, 102 Parkes, Bessie Raynor, 24
McClintock, Anne, 72, 73, 91 Parliament, 3, 38, 43, 45, 60, 65
McLaughlan, Robert, 52 Passion, 6, 13, 22, 29, 31, 102
Mecke, John G., 81 Pater, Walter, 37, 39
INDEX 109
Patriarchal, 24 Racism, 8, 14, 56, 57, 72, 83, 86, 88,

Pennell, Anthony, 2, 72, 73, 80, 86, 103
88, 90–92, 94, 103, 104 Radicals, 3, 38
Perverse, 2, 4–13, 15, 40, 43–45, 47, Rance, Nicholas, 12, 24
48, 50, 52–54, 56–58, 62, 64–66, Rendall, Jane, 24
102, 103 Reverse colonization, 58, 80, 81, 100
Perversity, 4, 7, 14, 15, 19, 27, 41, 46, Rhodes, Cecil, 37, 41, 99
47, 100 Richardson, Angelique, 5, 8, 9, 11, 40,
Ponsonby, Sarah, 20 71, 76
The poor, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 38, 39, 41, 45, Romance, 25, 71, 102
46, 50–55, 65, 86, 93, 101–103
Poor Law Act, 45
S
Poor Law Amendment, 45
Said, Edward, 43, 73, 95
Poverty, 1, 2, 5–11, 14, 15, 38, 40, 41,
Schaffer, Talia, 1, 19, 20, 22, 32, 47
43, 44, 53, 54, 65, 66, 100, 101,
Schreiner, Olive, 39
103
Scully, Pamela, 47, 73, 84
Powell, Eve M. Troutt, 43, 55, 66
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 9, 22, 25, 33
Power Cobbe, Frances, 20, 22, 42, 49
Senate House, 39
Prejudice, 5, 6, 8, 72–74, 78, 82–84,
Senf, Carol, 12
87–89, 95
Sexism, 8, 9, 14, 72, 80, 83, 86, 88,
Primrose League, 64
103
Progressive, 3, 38–41, 44–46, 54, 57, Sexual Inversion, 20
58, 62, 64–66, 99, 100 Sexuality, 2–8, 10, 11, 15, 19, 24, 33,
Pullen, Margaret, 72, 78, 91, 94, 101, 37–40, 43, 46, 48, 65, 66, 72, 81,
103 85, 100, 102, 103
Pullen, Ralph, 8, 72, 91, 101, 103 Showalter, Elaine, 61, 72
Punch, 39 Signorotti, Elizabeth, 12, 29
Simcox, Edith, 42, 61
Sir Edward Carson, 46
Q Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 13, 15, 21,
Quadroon, 85, 91 22
Queensberry, The Marquess of, 21, 37, Social, 1–3, 5, 9, 10, 15, 37–41, 43,
45, 46 45, 49–51, 54, 55, 63, 65, 71, 72,
Queer, 6, 13, 20, 23, 25–28, 32, 33, 75–78, 82, 83, 87, 88, 99–101
47, 100, 102 Socialists, 3, 38, 91
Queer Britain, 9, 10 Society, 3–5, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 23,
24, 37–39, 41, 45, 49, 50, 59, 61,
62, 65, 73, 74, 89, 94, 95, 101,
R 103, 104
Race, 2–5, 8, 10, 11, 40, 44, 55, 57, Sodomy, 21, 37, 39, 44, 47
59, 71, 72, 74, 84, 85, 90, 94, Song of Myself, 22
100–102 Sparks, Tabitha, 12
110 INDEX
Spear, Jeffrey L., 12, 29 Vicinus, Martha, 13, 15, 20–23, 25,
Spencer, Herbert, 45, 73 28–32, 49, 78
Spencer, Kathleen, 12, 24 Victorian, 2–4, 6, 22, 24, 28, 31, 34,
Stead, W.T., 59 38, 46, 82, 91, 95, 101
Stepan, Nancy, 80 Violence, 2, 4–7, 12, 13, 20, 21, 23,
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 41 32, 39–41, 43–47, 49, 50, 53, 54,
Stoker, Bram, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 19–23, 56–58, 62, 65, 66, 80–82, 102,
26, 27, 29, 31–34, 99, 102 103
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Vivisection, 82
41, 99
Stutfield, Hugh, 59
Suffrage movements, 11, 40, 103 W
Sutherland, Gillian, 5, 8, 10, 39, 90 Wall, Geoffrey, 12
Symonds, John Addington, 39, 45 The Wandering Jew, 4
Sympathy, 1, 8, 15, 44, 45, 49, 54, 55, The Well of Loneliness , 20, 22
88, 94 Westenra, Lucy, 1, 34
Whitman, Walt, 19, 22
Wilde, Oscar, 1, 19–22, 32, 37, 39,
T 44–46
Tess of the D’Urbervilles , 11 Willburn, Sarah, 73, 81, 84
Townsend, Camilla, 21, 49 Williams, Raymond, 9, 14, 66
Traditional, 3, 37–41, 43–45, 48, 49, Willis, Chris, 5, 8, 11, 34, 40
53, 57–62, 65, 66, 99–101 Willis, Martin, 28
Traditionalists, 3, 39, 64, 65 Winter, Alison, 43
Triangulation, 6 Women, 1–5, 7–9, 11–15, 20–25,
Trinity College, 22 27–34, 37, 39, 41–43, 49, 50, 55,
Tromp, Marlene, 74, 76 56, 59–64, 73, 77, 79, 81, 84,
89–91, 95, 101–103
The Woman Who Did, 11
U
Unrequited love, 6
X
Xenophobia, 8, 14, 56, 57, 72–74,
V 76–78, 80, 83, 88, 103
Vagrant, 4, 45, 53–55, 101
Vampire, 5, 8, 14, 15, 24, 33, 72, 80,
81, 86, 100 Z
Vernooy, Dawn, 13, 60 Zieger, Susan, 75, 82

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Gender, the New

ISBN 978-3-030-30475-1 ISBN 978-3-030-30476-8 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Maram_shutterstock.com

Queens, USA Elizabeth D. Macaluso

I would like to acknowledge the scholars who helped me to write this

means more to me, and to our community, than it is possible to express

1 Introduction: Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster 1

3 The Monstrous Power of Uncertainty: Social

4 The Rise of Harriet Brandt: A Critique of the British

Introduction: Gender, the New Woman,

© The Author(s) 2019 1

about whether Harriet is good or monstrous, Marryat dares to sympathize

1.2 How This Book Engages Scholarly Debates

Booth, W. C. (1961). The rhetoric of fiction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

“I Love You with All the Moods and Tenses

© The Author(s) 2019 19

2.1 Cultural and Personal Contexts for Lucy

“intimate friendship” (Vicinus, 2004, p. xxiv). They prompted their friends

The Well of Loneliness , a lesbian novel, it was sanctioned to remove it from

2.2 Lucy and Mina’s “Intimate Friendship”

Neither a pornographic nor a scientific vocabulary provided women with

Dracula, as monster, enabler, “sexual catalyst” (Dominguez-Ruè, 2010,

like the “seaweed-covered rocks of the strand” (p. 123). It is no accident,

Dracula’s role in Lucy and Mina’s friendship. This conclusion is inspired by

Signorotti, E. (1996). Repossessing the body: Transgressive desire in “Carmilla”

The Monstrous Power of Uncertainty: Social

© The Author(s) 2019 37

Britain. Henry Fleming proposed that the management of outdoor relief

3.1 The Novel’s Social Conflicts in Their

destruction of marriage even when some New Women were proponents

3.2 Homosexuality as an Abomination and a Tool

that Holt describes as disgusting and terrifying. This, in turn, demonstrates

It is the Beetle’s “foreign voice” that completely mesmerizes Holt and

functioning, again, through Eastern mesmerism. And, Holt describes a kind

discrimination against their partnerships. Anna Klumpke’s and Rosa Bon-

3.3 Holt and the Poor as Undesirable Vagrants

the sheer inhumanity with which government employees (like workhouse

A momentary paroxyism seemed to shake the very foundations of his being.

Holt’s death is unsettling because it demonstrates the violence that Holt

3.4 British Colonialism in Egypt: A Conversation

deem to be a “foreign threat.” Atherton refers to the Beetle as “of the

The Beetle accuses Lessingham of being fecklessly English in the sense

3.5 The New Woman as “Wild Woman”

Like the women mentioned in Showalter’s book, Miss Lindon rebels

young and pleasing women are permitted to go to college, to live alone,

recognizes Miss Lindon as a woman of “the age of feminine advancement”

debate between antifeminists and traditionalists and feminists and progres-

3.6 Finale: The Power of Marsh’s Monstrous

to accommodate the emergent (Williams, 1977, p. 123). And, as Raymond

Symonds, J. A. (1999). A problem in modern ethics. In C. White (Ed.), Nineteenth-

The Rise of Harriet Brandt: A Critique

At the fin de siècle, British subjects were fascinated by Darwin’s theory of

© The Author(s) 2019 71

major fault, her cursed nature. According to Eldridge, Harriet’s suicide is

4.1 The Vitriolic Effects of Elinor’s Xenophobia

Fig. 4.1 “The New Woman” cartoon from Punch

a friendship with a foreign woman from Jamaica, who has connections to

Elinor maintains that it is the lack of “English ceremony” in a foreign hotel,

4.2 Phillips’s Injurious Racism and Sexism

“bloodthirsty,” and who takes great pleasure in bloodshed (BV, p. 68).

Phillips contends that it is heredity, a scientific certainty, supported by Dar-

These “certainties” convince Margaret to completely sever all ties to

Phillips uses the disparaging term “quadroon” to characterize Harriet’s