(Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature) Brooke Cameron, Lara Karpenko - The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature - A Feast of Blood-Routledge (2022)

The Vampire in
Nineteenth-Century Literature
Against the social and economic upheavals that characterized the nine-
teenth century, the border-bending nosferatu embodied the period’s fears
as well as its forbidden desires. This volume looks at both the range among
and legacy of vampires in the nineteenth century, including race, culture,
social upheaval, gender and sexuality, new knowledge and technology. The
fgure increased in popularity throughout the century and reached its cli-
max in Dracula (1897), the most famous story of bloodsuckers. This book
includes chapters on Bram Stoker’s iconic novel, as well as touchstone texts
like John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s
Carmilla (1872), but it also focuses on the many “Other” vampire stories of
the period. Topics discussed include: the long-war veteran and aristocratic
vampire in Varney; the vampire as addict in fction by George MacDonald;
time discipline in Eric Stenbock’s Studies of Death; fragile female vampires
in works by Eliza Lynn Linton; the gender and sexual contract in Mary Eliz-
abeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne;” cultural appropriation in Richard
Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire; as well as Caribbean vampires and the
racialized Other in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire. While
drawing attention to oft-overlooked stories, this study ultimately highlights
the vampire as a cultural shape-shifter whose role as “Other” tells us much
about Victorian culture and readers’ fears or desires.
Brooke Cameron, PhD in English, University of Notre Dame, is Associate

Professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the
author of Critical Alliances: Economics and Feminism in English Women’s
Writing, 1880–1914 (2020), as well as multiple peer-reviewed articles and
book chapters on gender and economic themes in Victorian literature. She
has published peer-reviewed articles on Dracula, and is currently coediting
a special issue on “Vampires: Consuming Monsters and Monstrous Con-
sumption” for Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural.
Lara Karpenko, PhD in English, University of Notre Dame, is Associate

Professor of English at Carroll University. She has published work in jour-
nals such as the Victorian Review and Nineteenth-Century Contexts and is
the coeditor, along with Shalyn Claggett, of Strange Science: Investigating
the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age (2017). Her current work
explores Victorian posthumanism and feminist aesthetics, and she is editing
a special issue of The Victorian Review on the subject.
Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature
Victorian Pets and Poetry

Kevin A. Morrison
The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and

the Development of Detective Fiction
Samuel Saunders
Doctrine and Difference

Readings in Classic American Literature
Michael J. Colacurcio
The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott

and Christina Rossetti
Azelina Flint
Touch, Sexuality, and Hands in British Literature, 1740–1901

Kimberly Cox
Nineteenth-Century Visions of Race

British Travel Writing about America
Justyna Fruzińska
The Forgotten Alcott

Essays on the Artistic Legacy and Literary Life of
May Alcott Nieriker
Edited by Azelina Flint and Lauren Hehmeyer
The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature

A Feast of Blood
Edited by Brooke Cameron and Lara Karpenko
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Nineteenth-Century-Literature/
book-series/RSNCL
The Vampire in
Nineteenth-Century Literature
A Feast of Blood
Edited by
Brooke Cameron
and Lara Karpenko
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Brooke Cameron and
Lara Karpenko; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Brooke Cameron and Lara Karpenko to be identifed as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-00177-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-00178-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-17308-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083
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Contents
List of Figures vii

Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction 1
B RO O K E C A M E RO N A N D L A R A K A R P E N KO
1 Black Female Vampires in Nineteenth-Century Writing

and Folklore 11
G I S E L L E L I Z A A N AT O L
2 Sicker Ever after: The Invalid as Vampire in Fiction by

Arabella Kenealy and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman 27
B R E N DA M A N N H A M M AC K
3 “The Dropping of Blood from the Clouds”: Imperial

Vampirism in Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire
or Tales of Hindu Devilry 47
A R D E L E H A E F E L E -T H O M A S
4 Curating the Vampire: Queer (Un)Natural

Histories in Carmilla 63
L I N YO U N G
5 The Addict as Vampire 81

REBECCA McLEAN
6 “What a vampire!”: Gender and the Modern Sexual

Contract in Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne” 96
B RO O K E C A M E RO N
vi Contents
7 The Vampire’s Touch in “Olalla” and The Blood
of the Vampire 110
K I M B E R LY C OX
8 “Keep[ing] Time at Arm’s-Length”: Vampire and

Veterans in Varney 125
REBECCA NESVET
9 “A Financial Vampire”: The Aesthetics of Repetition in

Eric Stenbock’s Studies of Death 139
L A R A K A R P E N KO , L AU R E N B R A N D M E I E R , A L E X A L A R S O N ,
L O R A L E AC H , M U R P H Y M c C OY, G A B R I E L M U N D O , A N D
N ATA S H A P E L L E G R I N I
10 The Vampire as Byron: Polidori’s Story Adapted to the

French and British Stage 154
M AT T H E W G I B S O N
11 America’s First Vampire Novel and the

Supernatural as Artifce 170
G A RY D. R H O D E S A N D J O H N E D G A R B ROW N I N G
12 Queerly (Re)Vamped: Women, Men, and Neo-Victorian

Dracula(s) 183
SA R A H E . M A IER
Index 200
Figure
9.1 Eric Stenbock, “Pre-adamite elephant adoring a

sunfower.” Permission provided by David Tibet,
personal collection 149
Notes on Contributors
Giselle Liza Anatol is Professor of English at the University of Kansas.

Her most recent book publication is The Things That Fly in the Night
(2015), which explores representations of female vampires in folklore
and literature from Caribbean and African diasporas. She has also
edited three collections—Bringing Light to Twilight: Perspectives on
the Pop Culture Phenomenon (2011), Reading Harry Potter: Critical
Essays (2003), and Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays
(2009)—and published articles on authors such as Jamaica Kincaid,
Jacqueline Woodson, Nalo Hopkinson, Derek Walcott, and Langston
Hughes.
Lauren Brandmeier received her Bachelor of Arts in English and Writing
from Carroll University in 2019 and her Master of Arts in Technical
Communication from Minnesota State University, Mankato, in 2021.
She currently lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she works as a
technical writer for the diagnostic laboratories at Versiti Blood Center
of Wisconsin.
John Edgar Browning is a Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts
at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Browning has 17 pub-
lished or forthcoming books and over 85 shorter works focusing on
Stoker/Dracula, vampires, zombies, horror, Slasher, monstrosity, and
the Gothic. His works as an editor include The Forgotten Writings
of Bram Stoker (Palgrave Macmillan) and Dracula—An Anthology:
Critical Reviews and Reactions, 1897–1920 (Edinburgh University
Press) as well as critical editions of Montague Summers’s The Vam-
pire: His Kith and Kin and The Vampire in Europe (Apocryphile
Press). With Caroline Joan S. Picart, he coedited Speaking of Mon-
sters: A Teratological Anthology (Palgrave Macmillan); with Darren
Elliott-Smith, coedited New Queer Horror Film and Television (Hor-
ror Studies) (University of Wales Press); and with David J. Skal, the
second Norton Critical Edition of Dracula (2021).
Brooke Cameron is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s Univer-
sity in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Critical Alliances:
Economics and Feminism in English Women’s Writing, 1880–1914
x Notes on Contributors
(University of Toronto Press, 2020), as well as multiple peer-reviewed
articles and book chapters on gender and economic themes in Victo-
rian literature. She has published peer-reviewed articles on Dracula
and is currently coediting a special issue on “Vampires: Consuming
Monsters and Monstrous Consumption” for Revenant: Critical and
Creative Studies of the Supernatural.
Kimberly Cox is Associate Professor of English at Chadron State College

(CSC), where she teaches courses in British literature, gender and sex-
uality, multiethnic literature, the novel, and composition. She received
CSC’s inaugural Outstanding Student Organization Advisor Award
in 2019 and was nominated for the (CSC) Teaching Excellence Award
in 2020. Her work on hands, haptics, and sexuality has appeared in
Victorian Network, Victorians: Journal of Culture and Literature,
Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Nineteenth-Century Gender
Studies, the journal for which she recently coedited the special issue
“‘Teaching to Transgress’ in the Emergency Remote Classroom.” Her
book Touch, Sexuality, and Hands in British Literature, 1740–1901
was published by Routledge in 2021.
Matthew Gibson is Associate Professor of English Literature at the

University of Macau. He is the author of Yeats, Coleridge and the
Romantic Sage (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), Dracula and the Eastern
Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth
Century Near East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and The Fantastic
and European Gothic: History, Literature and the French Revolu-
tion (University of Wales Press, 2013). He is also the coeditor with
Neil Mann and Claire Nally of W.B Yeats’s A Vision: Explications
and Contexts (Clemson University Digital Press, 2012) and more re-
cently, again with Neil Mann, of Yeats, Philosophy and the Occult
(Clemson University Press, 2016), and, with Sabine Lenore Mueller,
of Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World (Clemson University
Press, 2018).
Ardele Haefele-Thomas is the Chair of LGBT Studies at City College of

San Francisco. They received their doctorate in Modern Thought and
Literature with a Minor in History from Stanford University. Haefe-
le-Thomas has published numerous essays on Queer and Trans Gothic
and is the author of Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing
Monstrosity (University of Wales Press, 2012) as well as the author
of Introduction to Transgender Studies (Columbia UP, 2019). They
served as guest editor for Victorian Review’s special edition “Trans
Victorians” (2019) and are currently guest editing Queer Gothic: An
Edinburgh Companion.
Notes on Contributors xi
Brenda Mann Hammack is Professor of English at Fayetteville State
University, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature,
folklore, and the writing of poetry and fction and also serves as co-
ordinator for the BA in Creative and Professional Writing. Hammack
has published scholarly essays on drug-addicted scholars, animal-hu-
man hybrids, feral children, and illustrated novels. She is also a poet,
fction writer, and digital artist. Her creative work can be found in
a variety of journals, including The London Reader, Anthropoid,
Menacing Hedge, NILVX, Rhino, The Hunger, A capella Zoo, Gar-
goyle, and Papercuts. Her book Humbug: A Neo-Victorian Fantasy
in Verse was released in 2013. She is the managing editor and web
designer for Glint Literary Journal.
Lara Karpenko is Professor of English at Carroll University. Her current
work explores Victorian posthumanism and feminist aesthetics. She
has published work in journals such as the Victorian Review and
Nineteenth-Century Contexts and is the coeditor, along with Shalyn
Claggett, of Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge
in the Victorian Age (University of Michigan Press, 2017).
Alexa Larson graduated from Carroll University in 2021 with a Bachelor
of Arts in English and Writing, along with a Minor in Management
and Leadership. She currently lives in southern Wisconsin, where she
works as a Quality Reviewer for Iverson Language Associates.
Lora Leach received her Bachelor of Arts in English and Writing from
Carroll University in 2021.
Sarah E. Maier is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the
University of New Brunswick (Saint John). Her latest books include col-
lections with Brenda Ayres—Neo-Victorian Madness (Palgrave, 2020),
Neo-Gothic Narratives (Anthem, 2020), Animals and Their Chil-
dren in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 2019) and Reinventing Marie
Corelli for the Twenty-First Century (Anthem, 2019) and with Ayres
and Danielle Dove, Neo-Victorian Things (Palgrave, 2022)—as well as
her Neo-Victorian Young Adult Narratives (Palgrave) and co-authored
book (with Ayres), Vindication of the Redhead (Palgrave 2022).
Murphy McCoy is a graduate student at Mount Mary University, where
she studies Clinical Mental Health Counseling. Her academic inter-
ests include attachment theory and trauma. She received her BS in
Psychology and English Literature from Carroll University, which she
attended from 2017 to 2020.
Rebecca McLean is an independent researcher based in the East Neuk of
Fife. Her research interests are Scottish Victorian Literature, Scottish
xii Notes on Contributors
Literature, and the Gothic. Her PhD was on the work of George
MacDonald under the name of Langworthy. Her recent publications
include guest editing the George MacDonald special issue of the Jour-
nal of Scottish Thought and editing Michel Faber Critical Essays.
Her most recently published chapter focused on the work of Michel
Faber. Her current research is based on the depictions of the afterlife
in Margaret Oliphant’s work.
Gabriel Mundo received a bachelor’s degree in English and Writing from
Carroll University in 2016. He was selected as the 2022 winner of
the Scotti Merrill Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary
Seminar. He is currently an MFA degree candidate in poetry at the
University of Mississippi.
Rebecca Nesvet is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Wisconsin, Green Bay. Her research focuses on James Malcolm
Rymer and the penny press and has appeared in journals including
Victorians Institute Journal, Nineteenth Century Studies, Cahiers
Victoriens Et Edouardiens, Victorian Network, Victorian Popular
Fictions Journal, and Scholarly Editing. She has also published, at
Cove Editions, the frst modern edition of Rymer’s penny dreadful A
Mystery In Scarlet. She serves as a Technical Editor at Cove Editions:
www.covecollective.org.
Natasha Pellegrini attended Carroll University from 2017 to 2021 and
graduated with degrees in English and Political Science. Natasha
plans to attend law school in the near future.
Gary D. Rhodes is Associate Professor and Head of Film and Mass
Media at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of over
20 books on the cinema, among them The Perils of Moviegoing in
America, The Birth of the American Horror Film, and (with Robert
Singer) Consuming Images: Film Art and the American Television
Commercial. Rhodes is also the writer-director of various flms, in-
cluding Banned in Oklahoma and Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dracula.
Lin Young’s dissertation examined the dual infuence of science and ob-
ject theory on the 19th-century ghost story. Her dissertation won the
A.C. Hamilton Prize for top English dissertation of 2020 at Queen’s,
as well as Queen’s “Outstanding Humanities Thesis” for the Governor
General Gold Medal Competition in 2020. She has also been awarded
the 2018 Mary Eliza Root Prize from the Victorian Popular Fiction
Association, and is the author of the 2016 Hamilton Prize-winning
essay, “To Talk of Many Things: Chaotic Empathy and Taxidermy
Anxiety in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in Victorian Review.
Introduction
Brooke Cameron and Lara Karpenko
In 1852, Queen Victoria saw Dion Boucicault’s The Vampire at the

Princess’s Theatre in London. Starring Boucicault himself in the role of
the villainous vampire Alan Raby, the play initially thrilled the Queen.
“I can never forget his livid face and fxed look,” she wrote in her jour-
nal “It quite haunts me.” Perhaps what haunted Victoria most was that
Boucicault’s vampire appeared, in her words, as “handsome … [with]
a fne voice,” terrifying not because of his monstrosity but because he
seemed so thoroughly and attractively human.1 And while the trope of
the human-like vampire is familiar to us today, when Boucicault wrote
and acted in this play, it marked a relatively new way of imagining vam-
pirism, one with only about a 30-year history. As scholars such as Nick
Groom recount, prior to the nineteenth century, folktales described the
nosferatu as a repulsive, reanimated corpse, horrifying yet obviously so. 2
The eighteenth-century case of Arnold Paole (Arnont Paule) for instance,
recounted by French monk Augustin Calmet, tells of a corpse returned
from the dead to feed upon family or village friends. 3 It was not until
John William Polidori’s 1819 novella, The Vampyre; a Tale, featuring the
seductive Lord Ruthven, that a new type of vampire dominated the pop-
ular imagination, one whose human appearance allowed him to evade
detection. Sparking a revolution in portrayals of the nosferatu, with
several subsequent imitations and innovations, Polidori helped reimag-
ine the vampire as a fgure that blurred the boundaries between human
and undead, forcing misreading, misdirection, confict, and connection.
Indeed, as this collection emphasizes, nineteenth-century authors and
readers collectively invented the fgure we know today as the vampire.
Focusing on the rise of and range among vampire stories, The Vampire
in Nineteenth-Century Literature examines the creature’s changing cul-
tural roles and legacies. And while no discussion of the vampire fgure
would be complete without reference to Bram Stoker’s iconic novel, this
collection moves beyond Dracula and considers the wide range of vam-
pire stories that inundated the nineteenth century.
As we hint above, Polidori did not just reinvent the fgure of the vam-
pire, he, as Christopher Frayling suggests, “fuse[d] the disparate elements
of vampirism into a coherent literary genre” (108), the modern vampire
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-1
2 Brooke Cameron and Lara Karpenko
story. Polidori’s story was famously conceived in the summer of 1816
when young Polidori accompanied his employer, the notorious Lord By-
ron, on a trip to Italy for a visit with the Shelleys. The weather was
consistently terrible and, inspired by Gothic thunderstorms, the group
of friends decided to hold a sort of ghost story competition. Mary Shel-
ley’s effort culminated in the now iconic story of Frankenstein, while
Bryon offered a short fragment on the vampire. Whereas Bryon’s story
remained unfnished, Polidori continued it and, three years later, pub-
lished a stunning and instantly best-selling account of the frighteningly
human-like modern vampire. Readers were so taken by the charms of
Polidori’s Lord Ruthven that they at frst assumed him to be the creation
of the similarly seductive Lord Byron.
Perhaps, part of the story’s success can be attributed to its connection
with the infamous poet Lord Byron. Indeed, when “The Vampyre” was
frst published, April 1, 1819, in the New Monthly Magazine, it was
falsely described as “a tale written by Lord Bryon.”4 Even after the error
was corrected (after multiple misprintings and a misattributed book edi-
tion by Sherwood, Neely, and Jones [1819]), The Vampyre’s connection
to the Romantic-era libertine could not be shaken. Indeed, the many
subsequent adaptations of, or productions inspired by, Polidori’s tale
seals into collective memory this modern vision of the terrifying and yet
alluring vampire. There was the 1820 novel by Cyprien Bénard, Ruth-
wen ou les Vampires, which was erroneously attributed at the time to
the French author Charles Nodier. And Nodier, in turn, would go on
to stage his own adaptation, Le Vampire, which helped to further pop-
ularize this new genre across Europe. James Robinson Planché would
adapt the French Gothic tale for the London stage in The Vampire; or,
the Bride of the Isles (1820). There were also operatic adaptations of
Polidori’s novel by Heinrich Marschner and W. A. Wohlbrüch (Der
Vampyr [1828]) and Peter Josef von Lindpaintner and Cäsar Max Heigel
(also titled Der Vampyr and staged in 1828, but changing the lead char-
acter to Aubri, not Ruthven). International authors (some of them quite
established) who would try their hand at this new genre of the vampire
story after Polidori include Aleksey Tolstoy (The Family of the Vourda-
lak), Nikolai Gogol (“A Terrible Vengeance,” “Vij,” “Nevsky Prospekt,”
and “The Portrait”), and Alexandre Dumas (“The Pale Lady” [1849] as
well as his own 1852 dramatic adaptation of Polidori’s The Vampire).5
Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s 1852 play The Vampire: A Phantasm
(later, The Phantom) can also trace its origins to Polidori’s tale (four
times removed) and as an adaption of Dumas’s The Vampire through
Planché and Nodier.6 It is also worth mentioning that The Count of
Monte Cristo contains an explicit reference to Lord Ruthven as a per-
sonal acquaintance of “The Comtesse G”).
In addition to this rich tradition of stage adaptation, the modern lit-
erary vampire owes much of its production and popular dissemination
Introduction 3
to the emergence of the modern working-class reader and, more spe-
cifcally, the rise of the penny dreadful, a type of cheap literary serial
magazine that, with its one-penny price tag, was deliberately marketed
to lower-income readers. James Malcolm Rymer’s long-running serial
Varney the Vampire; or the Feast of Blood (1845) is the Urtext within
this tradition.7 In many ways, Rhymer’s vampire—like other gothic
tales in these cheap magazines—was a response to new literary tastes
in tandem with (or as response to) a newly literate working class. In his
study of the penny bloods, John Springhall suggests that the vampire
is a product of the working-class readers’ desire for lowbrow or unre-
fned topics like murder and mayhem. In many ways, too, this vampire
would have tapped into these same readers’ frustrations with political
disenfranchisement and similar social resentments that fueled much of
the class antagonisms throughout the century.8 As Ellen Rosenman ex-
plains of this penny fction (though not Varney, specifcally), frequent
stories of usurpation, predatory landlords, and plot twists in which the
poor subject discovers they are in fact member to a long-lost aristocratic
family would have appealed to the emergent working-class movement.9
Varney would have satisfed these same working-class readers’ demands
for villains representative of their collective cultural history of dispos-
session. The title vampire is, after all, introduced as a predatory aris-
tocrat who terrorizes his less fortunate/impoverished neighbors, the
Bannerworths. Thus, like the villains in so many of the penny bloods
favored by working-class readers, Varney is aligned with an exploitative
socioeconomic structure—he is an outside usurper who would dispose
the sympathetic English family. Further, this vampire born in the pages
of the mass-marketed penny dreadful would have also signaled the rise
of a new genre of horror that takes as its focus questions of class and
exploitation, made all the more pressing following the Industrial Revo-
lution. Erik Butler frames the vampire as a reply to the rise of modern
capitalism and fears of a new consumer economy, with its attendant
traffc in commodities, as objectifying or alienating; Metamorphosis of
the Vampire in Literature and Film, for example, reads this modern rev-
enant as critique of the new bourgeoisie, while The Rise of the Vampire
builds upon Auerbach’s claim that the vampire is a malleable product of
cultural contexts, including our fascination with—and fear of—mass
culture (a fear that persists into the twentieth century).10 Put another
way, then, Varney the vampire, in true shape-shifting form, is able to ex-
ploit working-class readers’ resentment toward the ruling upper classes
and landholding aristocracy, and at the same time, by aligning this same
readership with mass culture, would have likewise stoked fears in the
heart of that governing elite.
In tracing the modern literary vampire’s origins in the nineteenth cen-
tury, this collection also notes the distinctly global exchange of ideas
that played a part in writing the monster as we now know it. Scholars
have long discussed the revenant’s ties to eighteenth-century Eastern
folklore and myth11; vampires also appeared in seventeenth-century
French writings12 and sixteenth-century German legends and litera-
ture.13 And of course, there are accounts of vampires dating back mil-
lennia to the ancient Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, and Mesopotamians.14
However, it is in the nineteenth century where we see this fgure truly
take on the kind of detached and global mobility that has since become
one of the hallmarks of its modernity—for it is in the nineteenth century
that the vampire moves west toward, and extracts life from, the New
World. On this point, recent scholars such as Giselle Anatol encour-
age us to recognize how so much of what we now think of as modern
vampire lore can, in fact, trace its origins back to, and appropriation
from, circum-Caribbean and African diaspora traditions and cultural
histories in the early nineteenth century.15 The “highly politicized trope
of the vampire [as “parasitical people associated with the spillage of
blood”],” writes Anatol, “has been used for decades in the Caribbean
and throughout the African diaspora to comment on the exploitation
of colonized people and landscapes.”16 Thus, it is to these forcibly dis-
placed Africans that modern vampire literature owes a debt for its ac-
count of this monstrous fgure as both a rapacious (global) predator as
well as a powerful narrative entity with the ability to cement cultural
bonds. This cultural bond is multidirectional and not bound to a specifc
locale or period, Anatol elaborates: “the soucouyant stories, unlike a
singular ‘Caribbean’ identity, or a fxed moment in history and one-way
passage from one continent to another, provide multiregistered, multidi-
rectional, repeatable (if not repeating) ties between various geographical
nodes, enhancing a sense of connectivity.”17
At the same time, scholars such as Sam George have persuasively
traced the origins of America’s frst vampire back to the nineteenth-
century and the Haitian revolution in particular. “America’s frst vam-
pire was black and revolutionary,” writes George, in her account of
Uriah Derek D’Arcy’s anti-slavery narrative The Black Vampyre: A
Legend of St. Domingo (1819).18 There is, of course, the obvious refer-
ence to Polidori’s prior text, but with its insertion of race into the title,
D’Arcy’s later story signals its investment in one of the largest global de-
bates of the time—the abolition movement—and British fears following
the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). So, while the revenant of old was
a European/continental fgure, the vampire of the nineteenth century
also moves westward and is, therein, implicated in the trans-Atlantic
slave trade as well as the rise of new nationalist movements at the dusk
of Empire.19
To better understand the nineteenth-century vampire and its ability to
invoke fear, as well as desire, we turn to scholarship on monster theory
interested in not only the material history, but also the abstract psy-
chological and sociological dimensions of this fgure that persist across
Introduction 5
contexts. One of the vampire’s key features is its investment in challeng-
ing (if not destabilizing) such attempts at defnition. Indeed, this idea of
the monster as an elusive fgure who transcends identity categories can
be traced back to some of the earliest or ancient theories of this fgure.
In Religion and Its Monsters, for example, Timothy Beal explains how
the word monster is derived from the Latin “monstrum” and its related
verbs “monstrare” (to “show” or “reveal”) as well as “monere” (which
means to “warn”).20 In the account, monsters cross over from the super-
natural to the human world, usually with, or as embodying, some kind
of warning. In this early defnition, then, the monster is framed as one
who transgresses boundaries or, more specifc to the Ancients, crosses
over into the human world from the divine. 21 Asa Mittman cites Beal’s
work in tracing this monster’s origins to its continued legacy into the
present as united by a continued investment, across periods and narra-
tive iterations, in challenging (if not entirely disrupting) identity catego-
ries and interpretive strategies. 22
In order to understand the vampire, then, we must think in terms of
deconstructing the boundaries that we use to constitute identity forma-
tion. To study the vampire thus means to think less about the monster
itself and more about the cultural fears and desires that go into its con-
struction. This is Mittman’s point in shifting to a cultural context:
Above all, the monstrous is that which creates [a] sense of vertigo,
that which calls into question our (their, anyone’s) epistemological
worldview, highlights its fragmentary and inadequate nature, and
thereby asks us … to acknowledge the failures of our systems of
categorization. 23
To try (and inevitably fail) to capture the monster through defnition or

name is thus to be confronted with the instability of identity categories.
What we fnd, in other words, is a liminal fgure who crosses over and
thereby disrupts the cultural systems and knowledge meant to keep the
Other at bay.
This same investment in a kind of monstrous liminality also informs
our approach to thinking about the vampire’s relationship to time and
history. After all, the vampire is the perfect embodiment of a category
crisis that extends to the temporal distinction between the past (or de-
ceased) and a future-oriented present (alive). As the walking undead,
the vampire instead reminds us of what Jeffrey Cohen describes as a
curious blending of both the present and the past in a way that ulti-
mately disrupts our sense of time or history as progressive and cumula-
tive. “The monster is that uncertain cultural body in which is condensed
an intriguing simultaneously or doubleness,” Cohen continues, “like the
ghost of Hamlet, it introjects the disturbing, repressed, but formative
traumas of ‘pre-’ into the sensory moment of ‘post-’, binding the one
irrevocable to the other.”24 The monster, according to Cohen, then, is
itself a haunting fgure whose presence not only channels the repressed
past but also, ultimately, disrupts any sense of a comfortable or defnite
boundary between the present and what has come before. “Remember
me,” commands the monster; “restore my fragmented body, piece me
back together, allow the past its eternal return.”25 Nowhere is this more
true than in the fgure of the undead vampire who confronts us with the
terrifying truth that the past and the present are interdependent—we
cannot bury and forget the dead. In looking back to the vampire of the
nineteenth century, this collection understands that this fgure not only
continues to haunt—and reproduce itself within—our contemporary
cultural imagination, but also that this haunting signals our continued
conversation with, even if in rejection of, those Victorian narratives that
shape our everyday reality.
Even as the vampire responded to nineteenth-century fears and de-
sires, the very ubiquity of this rapacious fgure reveals that it simul-
taneously operated as an organizing form (in Caroline Levine’s sense
of the term). A fgure able to resist the ravages of time, replicate and
reproduce indefnitely, overpower bodies, and shape-shift at will, the
vampire “order[ed], pattern[ed], and shap[ed]” nineteenth-century con-
ceptions of time, bodies, race, and replication. 26 The collection is struc-
tured into four thematic units meant to highlight the vampire’s ability to
shape and be shaped by nineteenth-century preoccupations, anxieties,
and desires: (1) Racialized and Postcolonial Vampires, (2) Vampires’
Embodied Desire and Sexuality, (3) Vampiric Time and History, and
(4) Vampiric Reproduction and Adaptation. The vampire’s Otherness is
often represented as a question of racial difference. They are outsiders
who threaten to invade the national body. They are the (returned) colo-
nized Other come back to wreak havoc on and disrupt the suppressive
boundaries of empire. And often in such narratives, the vampire’s lust
for blood also becomes a threat of miscegenation, for to drink blood
is also to mix bodily fuids. Giselle Liza Anatol’s chapter “Black Fe-
male Vampires in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Folklore” explores
this question of vampiric miscegenation through a cross-cultural com-
parison of British and Caribbean literature. Anatol argues that novels
such as Jane Eyre and Blood of the Vampire use the Black female fg-
ure as an evil repository of stolen blood, while storytellers throughout
the African diaspora challenged such accounts through their own folk-
lore tradition of the blood-sucking, skin-shedding soucouyant. Brenda
Mann Hammack, in “Sicker Ever After: Diagnosing the Whiteness of
the Female Vampire,” continues this analysis of the vampire and race
with a discussion of White female fragility in British texts. By focusing
on the willful consumptive of Arabella Kenealy’s “The Beautiful Vam-
pire” and the helpless hysteric in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “Luella
Miller,” Hammack examines how eugenic ideology intersects with
Introduction 7
narratives of invalidism, disability, and gender. The final chapter in this
section, “‘The Dropping of Blood from the Clouds’: Imperial Vampir-
ism in Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire or Tales of Hindu
Devilry,” by Ardele Haefele-Thomas, links the figure of the racialized
vampire with Victorian Empire’s practice of cultural appropriation—
ultimately encouraging us to question which is the real monster in this
history. Just as the Hindu nosferatu of Burton’s text sucks the lifeblood
of his victims, so too does his translator practice a form of predation
when he rewrites the Vikram stories for English readers and breathes
new life into the British canon of vampire stories.
Section two looks at the vampire figure as defined by embodied desire.
Vampires are, after all, marked as Other because of their unusual bodily
appetites. These appetites often manifest as gendered or sexual dissi-
dence. The vampire is a figure of unrestrained libidinal desire that defies
structures of sexual classification or suppression. In her chapter titled
“Curating the Vampire: Queer (Un)Natural Histories in Carmilla,” Lin
Young situates Carmilla’s unruly body and sexuality against the “log-
ics of the museum and the larger Victorian preoccupations with data
and display that the museum embodies.” Focusing on the “vampire’s
powers of queer dissolution,” Young shows us how the female vampire’s
predation upon other females culminates in a desire that is fluid rather
than fixed and that actively resists the Victorian obsession with taxon-
omies of bodies and desires. Rebecca McLean’s chapter, “The Addict
as Vampire,” shifts the conversation to addiction as another form of
“vampiric” bodily desire. In her analysis of MacDonald’s fiction (“The
Cruel Painter,” Donal Grant, and Lilith), addiction aligns with vampir-
ism insofar as both represent forms of insatiable bodily appetite, and yet
in an interesting twist, the revelation of addiction also allows the typi-
cally maligned nosferatu to be rewritten as a site of sympathy and even
redemption. Vampiric embodiment is reframed as a question of gender
equality in Brooke Cameron’s chapter, “‘What a vampire!’ Gender and
the Modern Sexual Contract in Braddon’s ‘Good Lady Ducayne.” This
chapter argues that Braddon’s novel uses the figure of the vampire in
order to highlight women’s lack of bodily autonomy (with attendant
rights to contractual sexual exchange) despite late Victorian advances
in marriage reform. According to Kimberly Cox, in “The Vampire’s
Touch,” vampiric predation is characterized not by biting or sucking but
by touching. Looking at tales by Robert Louis Stevenson and Florence
Marryat, Cox suggests that the authors cast “non-British, female tactile
erotics as terrifying, at least in part, because they threatened the ‘proper’
deployment of masculine sexual potency.”
The essays in section three all consider the tensions and confluences
that arise when considering the vampire against the backdrop of these
shifting conceptions of time and history. The nineteenth century over-
saw a temporal revolution—one that replaced the cyclical rhythms of
agrarian life with the linear orientation demanded of industrialized, ur-
ban life, transforming not only the individual, daily experience of time
but also larger, more communal understandings of place and history.
In this sense, the century-long obsession with the vampire, a creature
who exists outside of time, is perhaps unsurprising. Rebecca Nesvet’s
“Keep[ing] Time at Arm’s-Length” argues that the mid-century vampire
fgure offers a way to think through questions of national history and
citizenship or who is counted within linear time; in Varney the Vampire,
the nosferatu and the half-pay soldier (or veteran of the Long War) are
parallel creatures, bound together in their shared sense of being out-
moded and without a place in the forward-looking Victorian period.
Lara Karpenko (“A Financial Vampire”) argues that the fgure of the
vampire thematizes the loss of energy and continuity under capitalism;
focusing on Eric Stenbock’s Studies in Death, this chapter interprets
the vampire as a fgure who, like the modern laborer, is alienated by
the brutal rhythms of capitalism and thus outside the bounds of “time
discipline.”
Like supernatural printing presses, vampires seek to copy themselves,
to reproduce by making uncanny replications of themselves. The es-
says in section four examine the legacy of literary copies inspired by
vampiric villains. Matthew Gibson, in his chapter on “The Vampire as
Byron,” uses adaptation and the history of Byronmania to talk about
the vampire’s reproduction through Romantic-era drama. Thanks to
Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), the modern vampire was rewritten as
a seductive aristocrat modeled after the author’s own notorious em-
ployer; subsequent dramatic adaptations such as “Le Vampire” (Charles
Nodier, 1820) and “The Bride of the Isles” (J.R. Planché, 1820) went
on to lampoon this rakish vampire while also exposing differences
in English versus French cultural absorptions of Byronmania. Gary
D. Rhodes and John Edgar Browning’s chapter on “America’s First
Vampire Novel and the Superfcial as Artifce” asks us to think about
vampiric reproduction in the context of the New World. The Vam-
pire; or, Detective Brand’s Greatest Case presents us with America’s
frst vampire novel, rewriting the monster for a new national setting,
and as Rhodes and Browning continue, encouraging us to question
what is real or artifce, a sham passing itself off as authentic. Finally,
Sarah Maier’s chapter, “Queerly (Re)Vamped: Women, Men and Neo-
Victorian Dracula(s)” considers the nineteenth-century vampire’s leg-
acy through a neo-Victorian adaptation, the “three-part BBC Dracula
(2020) written by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat.” Suggesting that
this “particular adaptation encourages a rereading of the queerness of
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897),” Maier reminds us that the nineteenth
century remains at once alien and familiar, infuencing the narratives
that inundate our own twenty-frst century present. Explicitly connect-
ing the nineteenth and twenty-frst centuries, Maier’s essay is a ftting
Introduction 9
place to end our volume. The vampire remains a fgure as fascinating
to us as it was to nineteenth-century readers and audiences, even as this
very fascination perhaps uncomfortably reminds us that our past, like
the vampire itself, continuously stalks and animates our present.
Notes
1 Cited in Richard Fawkes, Dion Boucicault: A Biography (New York: Quar-
tet Books, 1979), 74–75.
2 Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2018).
3 Groom, The Vampire, 33–39.
4 Groom, The Vampire, 110.
5 See Andrew Swensen, “Vampirism in Gogol’s Short Fiction,” The Slavic and
East European Journal 37, no. 4 (1993): 450–509.
6 Nöel Montague-Étienne Rarignac, The Theology of Dracula: Reading the
Book of Stoker as Sacred Text (Jefferson, NC: Mcfarlane Press, 2012), 203.
7 James Malcolm Rymer, Varney the Vampire; or, A Feast of Blood (New
York: Arno Press, 1970). Accessed November 20, 2021. https://archive.org/
details/varneyvampireorf0002unse
8 John Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to
Gangsta Rap, 1830–1996 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
9 Ellen Rosenman, “Beyond the Nation: Penny Fiction, the Crimean War,
and Political Belonging,” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no.1
(2018): 96.
10 See Erik Butler, Metamorphosis of the Vampire in Literature and Film:
Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732–1933 (Columbia, SC: Cam-
den House, 2010); and The Rise of the Vampire (London: Reaktion Books,
2013).
11 See Groom, The Vampire, especially Part 1: “Circulating,” 21–93; Deborah
Mutch, The Modern Vampire and Human Identity (New York: Palgrave
Press, 2013), 3.
12 See Koen Vermeir, “Vampires as Creatures of the Imagination: Theories of
Body, Soul, and Imagination in Early Modern Vampire Tracts (1659–1755),”
in Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern
Period, ed. Yasmin Haskell (Tunhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2012),
341–373.
13 See Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2010), 5.
14 See Mark C. Jenkins, Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an En-
during Legend (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2011).
15 Giselle L. Anatol, The Things that Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Lit-
erature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
16 Anatol, Things That Fly in the Night, 3–4.
17 Anatol, Things That Fly in the Night, 3. Using an intersectional approach,
Anatol also adds that “individuals familiar with soucouyant tales are
revealed to share a collective identity that exists alongside other collec-
tive identities and can interact with those identities in a multitude of
ways” (3).
18 Sam George, “America’s First Vampire was Black and Revolutionary—It’s
Time to Remember Him,” in The Conversation (October 20, 2020), np.
Accessed November 20, 2021. https://theconversation.com/americas-frst-
vampire-was-black-and-revolutionary-its-time-to-remember-him-149044
19 See also Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Impe-
rialism, 1830–1914 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), especially
Chapter 8: “The Imperial Gothic.”
20 Timothy Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002),
6–7; see also Jeffrey A. Weinstock, “Introduction: A Genealogy of Monster
Theory,” in The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Jeffrey A. Weinstock (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 2.
21 Stephen Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13; Weinstock, “Introduction,” 2.
22 Asa Simon Mittman, “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster
Studies,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Mon-
strous, ed. Asa S. Mittman (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 8.
23 Mittman, “Introduction,” 8.
24 Jeffrey J. Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory:
Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1996), ix.
25 The monster haunts, Cohen continues; ‘it does not simply bring past and
present together, but destroys the boundary that demanded their twinned
foreclosure’ (1996: ix–x).
26 Caroline Levine, Forms Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 3.
1 Black Female Vampires in
Nineteenth-Century Writing
and Folklore
Giselle Liza Anatol
For decades, the term “vampire” and the name “Dracula” were inter-
changeable: H.L. Malchow, for example, identifes Stoker’s Dracula as
“the defning fctional vampire” in popular culture.1 Milly Williamson
comments: “[T]hroughout the twentieth century, Dracula (both Bram
Stoker’s novel and the many screen adaptations) [has] dominated criti-
cal interpretations of the vampire, eclipsing earlier incarnations of the
vampire and their many progeny.”2 Exploring the vampire fction of
three prominent, late twentieth-/early twenty-frst-century Black women
writers, Ingrid Thaler branches out further than Dracula, but still iden-
tifes eastern European folklore and nineteenth-century literature from
western European folklore as the root of contemporary conventions. In
contrast, this chapter argues that people of African descent have long
been integral to vampire narratives; specifcally, I seek to illuminate the
African presence in nineteenth-century considerations of vampirism.
The texts investigated here—many of which predate Stoker’s 1897 novel
and range from newspaper articles about slave revolts, to ethnographic
texts describing the bloodsucking, skin-shedding soucouyant of Carib-
bean lore, to literary works such as Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the
Vampire—employ images of the vampiric Black subject and vampiric
Black women in particular. Because African peoples epitomized excesses
of lust and physicality in the European imagination, and attempts to
prescribe female chastity and sexual submission abounded, Black female
vampire fgures became especially rich for their symbolic signifcance.
These fgures also reveal much about the traumatic experiences of Afri-
can populations who used the idea of bloodsucking/draining to express
their own anxieties.
Early Stories of Caribbean Bloodlust

Long before Stoker’s novel was published, documents about vam-
pirism, cannibalism, and bloodlust in the Caribbean were available
in England, taken down by European landowners, travel writers,
and missionaries. British-born Bryan Edwards, for instance, was a
wealthy Jamaica property owner and merchant who made numerous
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-2
12 Giselle Liza Anatol
observations about plantation life in The History, Civil and Commer-
cial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793). Edwards de-
scribed the events of a 1760 slave revolt in Jamaica, which later came
to be known as Tacky’s Rebellion, in terms of the vampiric consump-
tion of blood:
[The rebels] surrounded the overseer’s house about four in the morn-
ing, in which eight or ten White people were in bed, every one of
whom they butchered in the most savage manner, and literally drank
their blood mixed with rum. 3
Haiti’s 1804 independence from France—viewed by many Europeans

(and, ironically, newly independent Americans) as a key moment of de-
generation in the Caribbean and evidence of African barbarity—was
also tied to bloodlust. Englishman James Anthony Froude connected
the potential of Black rule in the British Caribbean colonies to “child
murder and cannibalism [that] have reappeared in Hayti.”4
Women of African descent were clearly implicated in this discourse
of bloodthirstiness: a London Times account of Jamaican riots in 1865
described how a group of women tore one man’s body apart and dragged
his innards out. Governor Eyre commented that Black women in Jamaica
“were even more brutal and barbarous than the men.”5 Connections
between bloodlust and demonic women are also evident in Sir Hesketh
Bell’s Obeah: Witchcraft in the West Indies (1889). Despite identifying
supernatural stories of Caribbean soucouyants and loogaroos as “ridic-
ulous,” Bell recounts a tale from the West African “Slave Coast” that
concentrates the fears of magical abilities and political rebellion in Black
women: a vessel of enslaved people, taken from Goree Fort in 1696 to
be transported to the French West Indian islands, carried “[s]ome black
women much versed in the diabolical sciences” who prevented the ship
from progressing more than a few leagues from the African shore for
seven weeks, even though winds were favorable for sailing.6 During their
extended time on the ship, some of the slaves accuse one old woman of
threatening “to eat their hearts out.”7 When the accusers mysteriously
perish and their bodies are opened to determine the cause, their hearts
and livers are found drained of blood. The surgeon-major of the ship
brutally beats the old woman and she curses him; he, too, then dies
inexplicably, with desiccated organs. Fearing the rest of the slaves will
revolt if he kills the old woman, the captain negotiates that if she will
let the ship go, she and two or three friends can return to their coun-
try. Before leaving, she promises to show him more of her strength: he
locks several watermelons in a box, and they are later discovered to be
“entirely empty, and nothing but the skin remained, infated like a bal-
loon and dry as parchment.”8 In this way, the tale of the frightening,
vampiric, African (soon to be Caribbean) woman was transmitted to a
Black Female Vampires 13
nineteenth-century European reading public—one eagerly awaiting tales
from the exotic foreign colonies.
In Bell’s story, as in hag lore from around the world, the soucouyant
fgure is not rendered infrm or feeble because she is elderly; instead, old
age becomes a terrifyingly powerful stage in a woman’s life. This power
in the hands of women of African descent, commonly the bottom of
European-constructed social hierarchies, inspires even greater fright.
Travel documents and ethnographic texts such as the ones mentioned here
did not provide the initial lessons on racism and the intersections of racial
and gender oppression, but they certainly buttressed already-held beliefs.
Besides being symbolically tied to bloodthirstiness, vampirism was
linked to hypersexual gratifcations of the body. Edwards recorded a
practice that involved feeding human blood to Black women suspected
of adultery, suggesting uncontainable sexual desires:
Human blood, and earth taken from the grave of some near relation,
are mixed with water, and given to the party to be sworn, who is
compelled to drink the mixture, with a horrid imprecation, that it
may cause the belly to burst, and the bones to rot, if the truth be not
spoken. This test is frequently administered to wives, on the suspi-
cion of infdelity…9
Numerous other documents referred to the “vice” evidenced by African

Caribbean women, most often related to unabashed sexuality. Women’s
ownership of their bodies—a type of freedom that resulted from Eman-
cipation in the British colonies in the early 1830s—became linked to
self-destructive “sensuality” and sexual lust, and this slippage remained in
place in a variety of narratives. For instance, lamenting the participation
of young Black women in Trinidad’s yearly carnival, an 1884 issue of the
Port of Spain Gazette published: “The obscenities, the bawdy language
and the gestures of the women in the street have been pushed to a degree
of wantonness which cannot be surpassed and which must not be toler-
ated.”10 The issue that arises again and again in literature of the long nine-
teenth century is anxiety over African women’s uncontrollable bodies.
The representations cited here clearly reveal the writers’ beliefs about
evil and superstition; they also expose social anxieties about “aberrant”
female behaviors and bodies, as has been investigated by critics like
Sander Gilman, who identifes conceptions of the Black woman as “the
embodiment of sexuality [in] her genitalia” and the emblem “of decay
and destruction.”11 Ideas about the deviant African body were sown
well before most Europeans had ever seen one: Edward Long’s History
of Jamaica (1774), for example, disseminated the notion that people of
African descent possessed extraordinarily sizeable genitals and were
prone to lasciviousness. It is crucial to unravel these ideas since this dis-
course prevailed throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries;
one can easily see how it continues to seep into twenty-frst-century soci-
eties, serving as a means of curtailing Black women’s erotic agency, even
within the private sphere.
Vampires in African Oral Traditions

Because African cultures were primarily oral and literacy was forbidden
among enslaved peoples in the Americas, documents featuring African
and Caribbean vampire fgures in the long nineteenth century—from
the late 1700s to the early 1900s—were transcribed almost exclusively
by middle- and upper-class Whites and by men of the cloth with heavy
investments in spreading Christianity. The voices of African peoples are
clearly mediated in the extant written texts, but traces of them exist. In
1881, for instance, Reverend Charles Dance, a missionary to the West
Indies cited in Roger Abraham and John Szwed’s After Africa: Extracts
from British Travel Accounts and Journals (1983), wrote dismissively
about Guyanese residents’ beliefs in the skin-shedding female vampire
called Old Hag. His documentation, however, features meticulous de-
tails about aged women who can escape their skins with magical words,
fy through their communities in a ring of light, and suck the life out of
babies. Eden Phillpotts’s In Sugar-Cane Land (1890) also includes ref-
erence to the skin-shedding bloodsucker, despite the author’s mocking
tone and careless use of “Ethiopian” to encompass all people of African
descent. He writes about an:
Ethiopian [sic] monster, akin to the vampire or werewolf, [called]

the loup-garou. […] They always take off their skins when at work,
to be cooler no doubt, and they invariably hide these coverings at
the root of a silk-cotton tree. If anybody fnds a skin, he can put the
loup-garou who owns it in an extremely awkward position because,
if not returned, the owner catches a chill and grows faint and poorly
from exposure, and ultimately fades away altogether.12
The work of twentieth-century researchers indicates that tales about

blood- or soul-draining creatures existed among West African popula-
tions before European contact and would have been readily transferred
around the world by enslaved peoples. Guadeloupian novelist Maryse
Condé traces the term soukougnan (an alternate spelling of the soucouy-
ant I explore in my own work) to “the African language of the Tukulör
people, where it designates a spirit that attacks humans and drinks their
blood like a vampire.”13 Trinidadian linguist Maureen Warner-Lewis
links the obayfo/obayifo fgure from Akan folklore to the soucouyant
because of its skin-shedding abilities; the word “soucouyant,” however,
she claims as derived from the Fula/Soninke words sukunyadyo (male)
and sukunya (female), both of which mean “man-eating witch.”14 Jerry
Rafki Jenkins cites numerous other examples, including the asasab-
onsam and the adze from Ghana and Togo, in his contention that vam-
pires are “a widespread presence […] throughout the ancient world” and
not a “white” trope.15
In other words, it is important to note that while the European co-
lonial regime in Africa and the Caribbean ensured the exposure to, if
not absorption of, Eurocentric literary canons, historical narratives, and
social norms by the resident populations (and those bought, sold, and
transported through the slave trade), cultural transmission was not a
one-way process. African and Caribbean stories could just as easily have
been transmitted from colonized populations back to the homelands of
the colonizers. As folkorists of the African Americas such as Melville
Herskovits, and later, Abrahams and Szwed argue: “Peoples cannot live
side-by-side, even in the most extremely restricted situations, and not af-
fect each other culturally.”16 Rather than assume that nineteenth-century
stories of vampires in the Caribbean and other African Americas com-
munities were taken wholesale from European folklore and literature or
that stories should be traced directly back to Africa, one must look at
each location of cultural contact as a crucible for each generation to form
a new legend, one that addressed the dynamics of power, race—the in-
tricacies of blood—and the enactment of gender in very specifc ways.
Therefore, while early European vampire stories cast the vampire’s su-
pernatural occupation of the border between the living and the dead, the
creature’s penetration of others’ bodies, and the ensuing mixture of blood
as monstrous and demonic, the fgure’s existence on a plane between liv-
ing and dying and the draining of a body’s blood would have had distinct
racial and cultural valences for enslaved African peoples during the early
part of the nineteenth century—before the abolition of slavery—and for
the descendants of African peoples in the years that followed. Historical
accounts document that for many of the enslaved, death was preferable to
the brutality of bondage, which drained their literal blood through pun-
ishing beatings and depleted their “lifeblood” or essence of self through
the humiliations of chattel slavery. The notion of demonic bloodsucking
would therefore have been readily incorporated into African Caribbean
vampire stories, but refected a different source of horror.
Black Female Vampires Travel to Europe

Within the borders of the British Isles, concerns expressed through
nineteenth-century vampire fction frequently stemmed from national-
ist anxieties: the frightening piercing of physical bodies corresponded
to foreigners penetrating and overrunning British geographical, racial,
and cultural borders—ideas as threatening as the bite of the vampire
itself. This unease has typically been interpreted as apprehension about
immigration from Eastern Europe, Ireland, or India, but Africa also
contributed to the social distress of the time. Teri Ann Doerksen ex-
plores how both vampires and Africans are mythologized in the Victo-
rian imagination as hideous fgures of darkness and an uncivilized lack
of bodily control:
Vampire texts, which became increasingly popular as the images of

the Dark Continent proliferated, provided an exploration of illicit
sexuality shrouded frst in the construction of metaphorical “crea-
tures of darkness,” to replace the inhabitants of Darkest Africa, and
second in the displacement of the kind of penetration involved in
literal sexuality into the metaphorical realm of a somewhat different
kind of “penetration.”17
In his work on images of race in nineteenth-century British gothic fc-

tion, Malchow discusses how “perverse” sexuality and race were typi-
cally portrayed as monstrous: “The racial fend is often a sexual threat
and the sexual ‘pervert,’ a racial (that is, eugenic) menace. […Both are]
in theory mastered by their lubricious and bestial natures.”18 And the
obsession with the animalized yet sexualized African was by no means
exclusive to Europe. In 1892, The American Journal of Obstetrics and
Diseases of Women and Children published an article by US gynecol-
ogist Robert T. Morris, claiming that the more civilized the group, the
smaller the clitoral glans: “In negresses the glans clitoridis is free [of the
prepuce covering…] excepting a few individuals who probably possess a
large admixture of white blood.” He continued: “In highly domesticated
animals the glans clitoridis is free.”19
In 1896, one year before the publication of Dracula, a group of Ashan-
tis was put on exhibition in Vienna. They were housed in the zoological
gardens and often approached for sex. Gilman reads Peter Altenberg’s
Ashantee (1897) as both a condemnation of this exploitation and a chill-
ing example of the public’s fantasizing about African women and their
genitalia. This fetishization of the disturbing yet alluring African wom-
an’s body was not new: close to a century earlier, the Khoikhoi woman
Sarah (nicknamed Saartjie) Baartman, born in present-day South Africa,
was put on display in England, Ireland, and France. Advertised as part
woman and part animal, she came to be known as the Venus Hottentot.
From 1810 to 1814, customers paid to view her body and could pay an
additional fee to touch her buttocks and genitalia. Concepts of hypersex-
uality, perversion, and an animalistic, predatory, racial menace adhered
to Black people—especially women.
In the longer project from which this chapter is taken, I use the con-
cepts brought forth so far to analyze vampiric Caribbean women in
nineteenth-century British texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
(1847) and J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla (1872). For the sake of brevity,
however, I turn my attention to a lesser known but no less important
novel: Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), published
in the same year as Stoker’s Dracula.
The Maternal Inheritance in The Blood of the Vampire

The Blood of the Vampire details the predatory nature of a beautiful,
young “psychic vampire” from Jamaica—one who drains the energy,
health, and life essence rather than the literal blood of her victims.
This 1897 publication also conveys anxieties about blood “purity”—
particularly the corruption of the British national subject by Black
women—and the notion of taint passed down through the maternal
line. As historian Erlene Stetson asserts, laws supporting the principle
of partus sequitur ventrem, which dictated that children followed in
the condition of the mother in the antebellum US and much of the pre-
abolition Caribbean, made the sexual exploitation of enslaved women
transparent: they tacitly sanctioned sexual intercourse between White
men and female slaves, suggesting that there was no threat of paternal
responsibility or potential decrease in property to the slave owner and
his (ostensibly) legitimate children. Marryat’s novel reveals that this ide-
ology did not end with slavery.
The book did not attract much notice when published; at this point in
her life, Marryat’s reputation as a writer had begun to fade, and she was
known more for her spiritualism. One reviewer supposes Stoker’s Drac-
ula to be the inspiration for The Blood of the Vampire, but given that
both were published in the same year, it seems likely that Marryat had
started the work independently. Catherine Pope, a Marryat scholar who
maintains the author website www.forencemarrat.org, concurs:
[I]t was assumed that Marryat had simply cashed in on the vam-
pire craze, but she must’ve been writing it before ‘Dracula’ was pub-
lished. There’s no evidence that she knew what Stoker was writing.
Although they collaborated on ‘The Fate of Fenella’, they wrote
completely independently and had no need to correspond. 20
Either way, Marryat’s references to the Caribbean and her creation of a

mixed-race female vampiric character point to some of the social preoc-
cupations of her era.
The narrative opens with a group of upper-class British tourists va-
cationing at a seaside resort in Heyst, Belgium. Harriet Brandt, a
19-year-old woman of independent means who has just left convent life
in Jamaica, is revealed to be the central vampire of the tale. Over the
course of the text, readers learn of at least ten victims: two African Ja-
maican wet nurses from Harriet’s infancy; Caroline, the daughter of a
neighboring plantation owner, whom Harriet unknowingly saps of her
“lifeblood” during their youth; Sister Theodosia, who grows grievously
ill after letting the six-year-old Harriet sit in her lap for extended periods
of time; Olga Brimont, a fellow convent student, who describes feel-
ing “such a terrible oppression as though some one were sitting on my
chest—and such a terrible feeling of emptiness,” when she and Harriet
are in the close quarters of their cabin during their voyage to Europe. 21
In Heyst, when Harriet leans affectionately against Margaret Pullen, the
older woman feels faint, as if she has been “scooped hollow”; 22 Mar-
garet’s baby Ethel later starts sleeping excessively and “unnaturally,”23
and, after a period of feverish exhaustion, perishes. Captain Ralph Pul-
len escapes with his life, but the inexperienced Bobby Bates and the no-
ble Anthony Pennell do not. Bobby grows “whiter and more languid
every day” in Harriet’s presence, 24 and upon his death, his mother, the
Baroness Gobelli, accuses: “it’s your poisonous breath that ‘as sapped
‘is! […] She has the vampire’s blood in ‘er and she poisons everybody
with whom she comes in contact.”25 As a “psychic vampire,” Harriet
doesn’t physically bite or drink the blood of any of her victims; she sim-
ply drains the strength, energy, and eventually the literal lives of the
people in her vicinity.
In her critical introduction to the novel, Brenda Hammack discusses
Harriet as a “hypersensual” and “over-sexed female” who saps the
vigor of her male partners; she attributes this representation to late
nineteenth-century views of women as “potential vampires” in all sit-
uations. 26 It should be noted, however, that only three of Harriet’s ten
victims are male. The lesbian subtext is raised explicitly in the novel:
when Harriet looks at Margaret with a gaze of obvious yearning, the
latter feels amused. “She had heard of cases, in which young unsophis-
ticated girls had taken unaccountable affections for members of their
own sex, and trusted she was not going to form the subject for some
such experience on Miss Brandt’s part.”27 Unlike the lesbian subtext
of Carmilla, however, it seems that Harriet’s choices are less dictated
by a homoerotic or homosexual impulse than by greed and the avail-
ability of female victims to a young, unmarried, and unchaperoned
woman.
Other aspects of the novel ensure that Harriet Brandt’s gender, sexual
voracity, race, and vampiric nature are inextricable. The explicitly vam-
piric women of the narrative all hail from Jamaica, reestablishing the
African Caribbean woman as an individual, racial, and national menace
for British subjects. Harriet, although white-complexioned enough to
pass for White, possesses more than the requisite “one drop” of African
blood that would categorize her as Black in mainstream discourse. Miss
Carey, her biracial mother, is maligned for her ferocious bloodlust as
well as her carnal nature: she had sexual relations with Harriet’s Swiss
father for several years out of wedlock. And Harriet’s maternal grand-
mother, bitten by a vampire bat while pregnant with Miss Carey, is de-
picted as an unnamed slave involved with a White “Barbados judge.”28
Hammack insightfully reads the narrative primarily through
nineteenth-century theories of imaginationism: “excessive emotion” ex-
perienced by a pregnant woman was believed to be impressed onto her
fetus. 29 Thus, whereas today’s readers would likely focus on the idea that
the vampire bat corrupted Harriet’s grandmother’s blood with some sort
of poisonous element, Marryat and those of her era would have believed
that a frightening encounter with a bat was traumatic enough to result in
vampirism.30 In other words, Hammack posits that Harriet’s “fgurative
blood lust,” like her mother’s more literal desire to shed blood, can be
interpreted as “transmitted to the fetus in utero.” Because she is both a
product of imaginationism and miscegenation, Harriet “threatens the
mainstream.”31
I wish to push this argument further, linking the threat specifcally to
Harriet’s—and her maternal relatives’—identities as Caribbean women
of African descent. Thus, while Hammack attributes Harriet’s role as
“as much victim as victimizer” to Marryat’s position as a professional
woman and public fgure in an era when society frowned upon asser-
tive women,32 I ascribe the ambiguous portrait of the protagonist to a
more conficted view on race as well as gender norms. Marryat’s portrait
of the vampiric African Caribbean woman defnitively contributes to
the plethora of narratives that feature Black female vampires as com-
pulsively promiscuous and frighteningly uncontained by men, domestic
spaces, their lands of origin, or even death—they are, in almost every
way, abject bodies, out of control.
One might consider that while the vampire bat attack is overtly iden-
tifed as the initial site of trauma in the narrative—one that gets mapped
onto ensuing generations of female bodies—Harriet’s maternal grand-
mother’s identity also warrants attention. The fact that she is depicted
as a nameless Black slave deserves to be interrogated with as much care
as the fact that she is preyed upon by the bat. Marryat leaves open the
possibility that the grandmother was impregnated by the White slave
owner—another type of vampiric assault in that he penetrates her sex-
ually and, as a slave master, symbolically drains her of physical labor
and freedom of choice. This would be an equally, if not more, harrow-
ing experience. Even if the female/enslaved partner were “willing,” the
lack of free will and the power discrepancy between master and slave
implies a vampiric violation—a traumatic encounter that would simul-
taneously leave its impression on the fetus. Harriet’s grandmother dies
in childbirth—perhaps the result of this sexual ordeal, but also possibly
a literary “punishment” for challenging taboos surrounding interracial
sex. Either way, she is removed from further infuence in the narrative.
Interestingly, her daughter, Miss Carey, is also “taken” as a mistress.
The young age of the character—she goes to Henry Brandt when she is
14—would likely have been read by Marryat’s metropolitan readers as
a sign of her sexual vampirism—the promiscuity attributed to all people
of African descent, but especially to Black women’s power to drain the
sexual strength and will to resist from their White male victims. For
today’s readers, however, her age insinuates Henry Brandt’s sexual ex-
ploitation of a minor. His physical penetration of the young woman and
the sapping of her youthful innocence as well as the predatory choice of
someone of the biracial “mulatto” caste, who is ultimately powerless and
voiceless because of inferior social standing, all suggest vampiric acts.
Certain characters in the novel intimate that Miss Carey could not
marry Henry Brandt because of her biracial status; she is, rather, his
mistress, and ostracized by Black and White communities, not consid-
ered fully either. Harriet is similarly rejected for being of mixed race.
When her frst British lover, Capt. Ralph Pullen, learns of her “terrible
parentage,” he quips “it would be impossible for any man in my position
to think of marrying her! One might get a piebald son and heir! Ha! ha!
ha!”33 Notably, it is her blood mixed with his that would cause speckled
appearance in their children, not his blood mixed with hers. And al-
though the morally and physically superior Anthony Pennell does marry
Harriet, their relationship ends tragically before the birth of any off-
spring. He falls victim to her vampiric nature, and she commits suicide
to prevent the deaths of any other innocent people. Each female vampire
in the novel thus follows “in the line of the mother” in terms of the fxed
identity of the child and the traceability of the vampiric condition, a
notion that harkens back to the slave codes where, if liaisons between an
enslaved (typically Black female) and free (typically White male) person
resulted in pregnancy, the child took on the legal status of its mother.
Paternal heritage and infuence went unacknowledged during slav-
ery, because, as Hortense Spillers notes, “[I]f ‘kinship’ were possible,
the property relations would be undermined, since the offspring would
then ‘belong’ to a mother and a father.”34 The conventions of slavery in
the Americas—as rigid, Spillers claims, as grammatical rules—dictated
that the child was legally possessed by the male owner although never
related to him, thus preventing cross-racial claims “of bloodline, of a
patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives
of ‘cold cash.’”35 Green notes that on plantations in the British West
Indies, account books kept by owners and managers “routinely recorded
domestic units as defned by a mother and her children, regardless of the
(usually duly noted) presence of a co-resident male and his biological
relationship to the children.”36 A child was born to a mother but could
never “belong” to her, given her position as a woman in patriarchal so-
ciety and as chattel in slave society.
Dr. Phillips—a character granted great authority in The Blood of the
Vampire by way of his age and experience, his career in the medical es-
tablishment, his membership in the British upper class, and his identity
as a White man—consistently stresses maternal blood inheritance when
discussing Harriet’s monstrous nature. He depicts Harriet’s “terrible
mother” as “a sensual, self-loving, crafty and bloodthirsty half-caste”
in order to stress that while “[Harriet] 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.”37 He continues: “if this girl is
anything like her mother, she must be an epitome of lust.”38 There is no
mention of her father’s infuence at this point; clearly, the inheritance is
a maternal one.
The vampire storyline competes with the racial one, but never over-
shadows it. When Dr. Phillips describes Harriet’s mother as “a revolting
creature,” his language emphasizes her uncivilized, bestial nature. To
him, she is a:
fat, fabby half caste, who hardly ever moved out of her chair but
sat eating all day long, until the power to move had almost left her!
I can see her now, with her sensual mouth, her greedy eyes, her low
forehead, and half-formed brain, and her lust for blood […] [S]he
thirsted for blood, she loved the sight and smell of it, she would taste
it on the tip of her fnger when it came in her way. 39
Miss Carey is portrayed as more animal than human—much like the

product of human and bat, but also highly suggestive of the chattel slave.
Her physical taste for blood is transformed in her daughter into a crav-
ing for life essences, but metaphors involving blood and the repeated
accentuation of Harriet’s mouth continually remind the reader of the
possibility of the consumption of blood. Margaret Pullen, for example,
describes Harriet as possessing an “enormous mouth.”40 When Harriet
discovers that Ralph has left Heyst without leaving word for her, she
takes a pillowcase in “her strong, white teeth, shook it and bit it, as a ter-
rier worries a rat!” suggesting the fanged vampire bite as well as her as-
sociation with a dog.41 And when she turns to the innocent Bobby Bates
in an effort to try to forget Ralph Pullen, she is compared to a “tigress
deprived of blood, [who] will sometimes condescend to milder food.”42
Voracity remains pronounced in both mother and daughter. Harriet
is “greedy by nature,”43 not only at the dining table, in that “she was al-
ways eating, either fruit or bonbons,”44 and in her cravings for love and
attention, but even for words, compliments, and stories. Madame Go-
belli titters that the young girl “swallows everything you tell ‘er.”45 This
gluttony likely led Marryat’s contemporaries to think of insatiable vam-
piric thirst for blood as well as the bloodthirsty cannibalistic yearnings
attributed African and Caribbean “savages,” such as were emphasized
in Froude’s allusions to Haiti. Interestingly, Baroness Gobelli is also cast
as a vampiric female in the novel because of her greed. The book opens
with her characterized in this way, and she is later described as “having
devoured enough cake and bread and butter [at a tea] to feed an ordinary
person for a day.”46 Additionally, when she repeatedly strikes her son
with her walking stick in public, denies him food, and makes him cry,
she symbolically drains him of masculinity. She does the same to her
husband: making all decisions, helping to run the shoe and boot factory,
swearing at him in mixed company. She is White European, but she is
poor—several denigrating remarks are made about her background and
rise in social and economic class—suggesting the collapsing of two cat-
egories of alterity.
White Women’s Bodies and Miscegenation:

A Return to Dracula
As early as the eighteenth century, a national effort was made to control
White, middle-class British women and harness their reproductive po-
tential in the service of the empire. To meet the rising social and political
demands of colonization, including “a large, able-bodied citizenry” for
trade, military service, and civic duties,47 “respectable” women were
encouraged to reproduce while those on the margins of British society
were demonized for their sexual activity: “The idea of aggressive and ex-
cessive female sexuality was predominantly projected […] onto black Af-
rican women, Native American women (as well as poor women),”48 plus
“[a]ndrogynous, transgressive, ‘monstrous,’ lesbian, and working-class
women”—all were aligned as “bawdy women” and “located on the
fringes of respectability akin to brute savagery.”49 White male colonists
in the Americas repeatedly engaged in sexual relations with the African
and Indigenous women to whom they felt entitled, but the stereotype of
the uncontrollable lust of women of color allowed the culpability for de-
sire, the sexual act itself, and sexually transmitted diseases to be placed
squarely on the shoulders of these women and not European men.
Thinking about Stoker’s Dracula, one sees Lucy’s transformation into
the horrifc when her “purity” becomes “voluptuous wantonness”50 —a
sexual and bloodlust that Doerksen asserts make her representative of
the African “savage”: “Lucy represents a devolution, an active move-
ment […] toward the savage, the primitive, the sexual, the uncontrolled.
Clearly the ‘Darkness’ has the potential to infect the ‘Light.’”51 In ad-
dition to her potentially racialized manifestation of the sexual woman,
however, Lucy’s body represents a site of abject horror because of misce-
genation anxieties. The fact that children follow in the line of the mother
guarantees that her body functions as the origin of blood corruption and
the eventual tainting of the entire race.
Part of the fright that Lucy generates obviously centers around her
anti-maternal, sucking children’s blood as the “bloofer lady”: perhaps
more signifcant than her desires to suck blood from men. Her fangs
allow her to pierce the skin, breaking the bodily boundary that is meant
to contain, and she becomes the penetrator rather than the penetrated. A
key part of why Lucy must die, however, is that “foreign” blood muddies
the English blood in her veins, dictating the status of her children. To
cure her waning condition after she has been penetrated by Dracula, she
is given blood transfusions from her fancé Arthur Holmwood, but also
from Drs. Seward and Van Helsing and American Quincey Morris. The
act, an exchange of vital fuids, has been extensively read as a symbolic
manifestation of sexual intercourse. And Stoker’s word choice heightens
the fear of miscegenation rather than of impiety: the male protagonists
must “sterilize,” not “sanctify,” the earth in Dracula’s boxes.52 How-
ever, since Van Helsing is Dutch and Quincey is from the US, worries
are quickly dispelled—all of the men who contribute blood for Lucy’s
transfusions are western European and male and the fuid transfer is
“proper,” in that the blood is being injected into a female body.
Besides being “intimate” with Dracula, Lucy expresses pity for Shake-
speare’s Desdemona—another woman who places herself in the position
to create mixed-race babies. “I sympathize with poor Desdemona when
she had such a dangerous stream poured in her ear, even by a black
man.”53 And as Hughes asserts in Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fic-
tion and its Cultural Context: “The use of ‘blood’ to signify race and
ancestry is pointed” in Stoker’s writings, especially since nineteenth-
century eugenic fears heightened during British conficts in southern
Africa.54 Lucy’s staking, then—ostensibly an act of spiritual purifca-
tion that allows her “holy calm”55 —is doubly signifcant, in that it can
be read as purifying her ethnically tainted blood and stilling the life of a
character who sympathizes with interracial couples. It is this acceptance
that does not allow her to survive, whereas Mina can.
I therefore argue that more than a preoccupation with “the aristoc-
racy and their blood-lines,”56 the obsession over blood and vampirism
in Marryat’s Blood of the Vampire and Stoker’s Dracula is a distinctly
racial and gendered one. Harriet Brandt is an explicitly mixed-race sub-
ject, and Dracula himself can be interpreted as a fgure of miscegena-
tion, especially in light of his peculiar whiteness. Jonathan notes that
the count is not simply pale, but rather “[t]he general effect was one of
extraordinary pallor,” and after his vampiric penetration of Lucy, the
young woman becomes “ghastly, chalkily pale” with an “awful, waxen
pallor.”57 These descriptions stand in stark contrast to the “natural”
blanching and pallor associated with the non-vampires of the book—
those whose blood has not been tainted. Just like Van Helsing turns
“ashen white,” but in response to shock and fear, Arthur, in Lucy’s
tomb, is initially “very pale,” but then blushes momentarily, bringing
blood to his cheeks. 58 Critic John Allen Stevenson also comments on
this aspect of the novel: “Color, […] which is commonly used in attempts
at racial classifcation, is a key element in Stoker’s creation of Dracula’s
foreignness.”59
Race clearly functions on the symbolic register in Stoker’s novel, but
there is something more tangible going on—something that lies at the
heart of Marryat’s narrative as well. Stevenson asserts that race is “a
convenient metaphor to describe the undeniable human tendency to sep-
arate ‘us’ from ‘them’”60 —thus Dracula represents someone of another
race because he is “strange to those he encounters: strange in his habits,
strange in his appearance, strange in his physiology.”61 While Dracula
does provide his partners a “new racial identity” by taking their blood
away,62 his role as a contaminated and contaminating force is much
more palpable, and this makes the connection to Harriet Brandt clear.
Joseph Valente claims that because the longstanding effects of Drac-
ula’s blood exchanges do not involve any permanent “adulteration of
the blood or in any mongrelization of racial or species makeup,” Stok-
er’s novel reads “less like the British fears of admixture than the British
hope […] that sexual commingling with the Irish might tend to their
racial ‘conversion.’”63 I would argue that while this might be the case
with the Irish or other groups whose members phenotypically resemble
the English, it was not so for those of different races and complexions.
Similarly, although Harriet does not physically penetrate or contaminate
the blood of her victims within the scope of the narrative, her draining
the strength of healthy White British subjects means a weakening of the
English race alongside the British Empire. Her physical presence as a
young, attractive woman means the specter of mixed-race babies haunts
each scene. According to the rhetoric of the “one drop rule,” once a
bloodline is corrupted, it cannot be recuperated. Women are the focus of
these narratives of contamination, rendering the control of their behav-
ior essential for the nationalist project.
Notes
1 Howard L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Brit-
ain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 167.
2 Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom
from Bram Stoker to Buffy (New York: Wallfower Press, 2005), 5.
3 Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies
in the West Indies, Vol. 2 (Dublin: Luke White, 1793), 60.
4 James A. Froude, The English in the West Indies; or, The Bow of Ulysses
(London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888), 207.
5 Malchow, Gothic Images of Race, 213.
6 Sir Hesketh J. Bell, Obeah: Witchcraft in the West Indies (London: Sampson
Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1889), 185.
7 Bell, Obeah, 186.
8 Bell, Obeah, 187.
9 Quoted in Roger D. Abrahams and John F. Szwed, eds. After Africa: Ex-
tracts from British Travel Accounts and Journals of the Seventeenth, Eigh-
teenth, and Nineteenth Centuries Concerning the Slaves, Their Manners,
and Customs in the British West Indies (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1983), 69. Emphasis added.
10 Quoted in Belinda Edmondson, “Public Spectacles: Caribbean Women and
the Politics of Public Performance,” Small Axe 7, no. 1 (March 2003): 1.
11 Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality,
Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 124–125.
12 Eden Phillpotts, In Sugar-Cane Land (London: McClure, 1890).
13 Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, trans. Richard Philcox
(New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 186.
14 Maureen Warner-Lewis, Guinea’s Other Suns: The African Dynamic in
Trinidad Culture (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1991), 177.
15 Jerry R. Jenkins, The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire
Fiction (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2019), 2.
16 Abrahams and Szwed, After Africa, 10–11.
17 Terri A. Doerksen, “Deadly Kisses: Vampirism, Colonialism, and the Gen-
dering of Horror,” in The Fantastic Vampire: Studies in the Children of the
Night, ed. James C. Holte (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 140.
18 Malchow, Gothic Images of Race, 148.
19 Quoted in Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire, 20.
20 Email correspondence dated October 20, 2011.
21 Florence Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt
Books, 2009), 27.
22 Marryat, Blood, 21.
26 Brenda Hammack, Introduction to The Blood of the Vampire by Florence
Marryat (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books, 2009), xiv.
29 Hammack, Introduction, x.
30 Hammack, Introduction, xi.
31 Hammack, Introduction, xi and xv.
32 Hammack, Introduction, viii.
33 Marryat, Blood, 81 and 173.
34 Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 75.
35 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 74.
36 Celia A. Green, “‘A Civil Inconvenience’? The Vexed Question of Slave Mar-
riage in the British West Indies,” Law and History Review 25, no. 1 (2007):
para. 92.
47 Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, & Empire in
Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1995), 1.
48 Williamson, Lure, 19.
49 Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 10.
50 Bram Stoker, Dracula: Norton Critical Edition, eds. Nina Auerbach and
David J. Skal (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1997), 187.
51 Doerksen, “Deadly Kisses,” 142.
52 Stoker, Dracula, 213, 255.
53 Stoker, Dracula, 59.
54 William Hughes, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural
Context (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 103.
56 William Hughes and Andrew Smith, eds. Bram Stoker: History, Psycho-
analysis and the Gothic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 6.
57 Stoker, Dracula, 28 and 163.
59 John A. Stevenson, “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula,”
PMLA 103, no. 2 (March 1988): 141.
60 Stevenson, “A Vampire,” 140.
63 Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question
of Blood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 81 and 82.
2 Sicker Ever after
The Invalid as Vampire in
Fiction by Arabella Kenealy
and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Brenda Mann Hammack
Some suffering has long been accepted as obligatory among women

who perceive fashionability as their only means of maintaining or at-
taining societal prestige. For much of the nineteenth century, idealized
representations of feminine frailty, a susceptibility to physiological and
psychological weakness, could be readily found in a wide variety of cul-
tural discourses. In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea
(1835), for example, the potential for queenliness could be recognized
by a candidate’s hypersensitivity.1 Such representations were not limited
to popular fairy tale as heroines in Gothic fctions of the period were of-
ten afficted by swooning tendencies. 2 Indeed, the confation of delicate
appearance and temperamental fragility had been cultivated to such an
extent—in extraliterary experience—that one contributor to The World
of Fashion (1832) pointedly observed that some aspirational ladies could
not “live unless they [were] ill.”3
The sensitivity and instability associated with performative illness
tended to be cast as confrmation of racial superiority. As Julian B.
Carter has observed in The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and
Race in America, 1880–1940 (2007), White people were more likely to
be diagnosed with nervous affictions and affectations than were persons
of other races in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Esteemed
neurologists—like George Beard—ascribed susceptibility to the “civi-
lized, refned, and educated,” rather than to “the barbarous and low-
born and untrained.” Beard also believed the condition to be one that
afficted women more often than men. However, regardless of sexual
designation, feminized features tended to be attributed to nervous suf-
ferers. According to Beard, predispositions to neurasthenia (or nerve ex-
haustion) were frequently detected in persons possessing “fne, soft hair,
delicate skin, nicely chiselled features, small bones, tapering extremities,
and frequently … a muscular system comparatively small and feeble.”5
That diagnosis also depended on the whiteness of a sufferer’s skin is
evident in Beard’s explicit denial of susceptibility among the indigenous
population, despite his insistence on neurasthenia’s American diathesis.
In one anecdote from Sexual Neurasthenia (1884), Beard attributed the
immunity of the “Indian squaw” to an incapacity for strong emotion.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-3
28 Brenda Mann Hammack
He imagined the female “savage,” squatting “in front of her wigwam,”
untroubled by “the exhausting sentiment of love; without reading or
writing or calculating; without past or future and only a dull present.” In
contrast, he portrayed the “sensitive white woman” as a chronically dis-
tressed creature, confned to an indoor habitat, but exposed to “worry,”
“ambition,” and other forms of emotional arousal “at all hours.” Read-
ing and socializing threatened the equanimity of the high-strung White
female, who found “happy or unhappy love” to be equally taxing to her
meager “endowment” of nerve force.6
Paradoxical attitudes can be found in writings by British physicians of
the period as well. As Janet Oppenheim has noted in Shattered Nerves:
Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (1991), “Ner-
vous patients enjoyed a privileged rank among invalidism.” Suffering
bestowed “a badge of honor, to be displayed as a mark of superiority
together with the delicate sensibility that usually accompanied it.”7 But
the distinction between delicacy and derangement wavered. As Oppen-
heim observes, female sufferers might be cast as “helpless neurasthen-
ics” or “monstrous hysterics” depending on their willingness to play
by the rules of male authorities.8 The “[h]ysterical woman evinced, not
too little will, but far too much,” which could lead to the imposition of
“fraudulent symptoms of disease on her body.”9
Given her propensity for exhausting others’ energies (as well as their
patience), there can be little surprise that a White patient’s performance
of femininized fragility was so often framed in vampiric language.
The anti-feminist writer Arabella Kenealy used her fction and nonfc-
tion writings to investigate the link between feminine illness and racial
whiteness. A former physician at the London School of Medicine for
Women, Kenealy blasted public education for degrading the “warm,
iron-rich, magnetic blood” that young White women needed to sustain
reproductive functionality.10 “[H]ow is it possible,” she wondered, “that
such weedy, half-sterilised creatures” could “bear sound and sane and
vigorous offspring?”11 Though Kenealy took especial umbrage with the
supposedly desexed (or masculinized) bodies of strong-minded femi-
nists, she also reproved “Ultra-Feminine” or weak-minded types that
she called “femininists.” Such “parasite-women” approximated a soft
appearance, but indulged in “social frivolities,” “vanities,” “dissipa-
tions,” and “excesses,” thereby succumbing to pathologies that medical
authorities associated with psychological vampirism.12
Kenealy suggested that illness could result from the failure to coor-
dinate Ultra-Feminine and Ultra-Masculine tendencies. As a eugen-
icist, she believed that indeterminant inclinations could be inherited
or acquired through immoral behavior. She had previously presented
such a case in fctional form in The Ludgate in 1896.13 In “The Beau-
tiful Vampire,” Kenealy delineated an early representation of the “New
Bad Woman” that Janet Steiger has identifed with the vamps—those
Sicker Ever after 29
hypersexual, vengeful, and “parasitical spirit[s]”—of early cinema.14
Unlike Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla15 and Bram Stoker’s Lucy West-
enra,16 Kenealy’s Lady Deverish did not owe her powers to the preda-
tions of an undead revenant. Her monstrosity resulted from an inherited
susceptibility to illness, activated by emotional volatility, but sustained
by extravagant engagement in social activities. Like Helen Penclosa
of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Parasite”17 and Etherial Softdown of
Charles Wilkins Webber’s Yieger’s Cabinet,18 Lady Deverish discovered
an ability to prolong her own life via the mesmeric absorption of energy
(or nerve fuid) from persons she compelled to care for her.
A similar but less deliberate capacity for psychic vampirism (that
Webber called “spirit vampirism”) would later be employed by Mary
E. Wilkins Freeman’s Luella Miller (1902).19 Though assumed to be ra-
cially White, Lady Deverish and Luella Miller posed a threat to the sur-
vival of Caucasian-kind as they did not and likely could not reproduce.
In both cases, the chronic nature of their illnesses, confated as nervous
and consumptive, resulted in a disinclination and likely in an inability to
procreate. That Lady Deverish and Luella Miller do not produce human
(or vampiric) offspring might mark them as diseased and/or deviant,
but what renders them monstrous to other characters is their failure to
compensate. Neither of these failed mothers feels compelled to transfer
unsatisfed longings to the care and nurturance of others.
Invalids as Parasites, as Living Vampires

Toward the end of the century, attitudes toward chronic sufferers proved
susceptible to equivocation, with some commentators rejecting lifestyles
that promoted debility while others continued to romanticize even as
they demonized invalid characters. In 1873, Abba Goold Woolson
lamented the complaints of her female peers, who were “constantly ail-
ing” and “incapable of vigorous exertion.” “With us,” she continued,
“to be ladylike is to be lifeless, inane, and dawdling.”20 More ambiva-
lently, Augustus Hoppin cast the titular character of his satirical play A
Fashionable Sufferer (1883) as a livelier, albeit a more dangerous, fgure,
entertaining while enervating her company from the cushioned comfort
of her bed. Hoppin alleged that the fashionably sick personality only ap-
peared to recover from her condition once all of her sympathizers “die[d]
of it.”21 He associated this character with a “new order of invalids.”22
Motivations for adopting (or accepting) the sick role varied. In
twentieth-century studies, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English as-
cribed “the cult of hypochondria” to “boredom and confnement,”23
while Bram Dijkstra emphasized aesthetic cultivation of a “consumptive
sublime.”24 In Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American
Fiction and Culture, 1810–1940, Diane Herndl placed some culpabil-
ity on the conficted messaging of the medical profession as it sought
to convince female patients of the “constant peril of mortal disease”
that required frequent intervention by trained physicians. 25 In a more
recent publication, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Brit-
ain (2004), Maria Frawley noted that attitudes differed, depending on
whether an invalid might be suspected of assuming “the sick role” for
duplicitous purposes. 26 Some women appeared to enjoy the attention
they received. Notably, internal, invisible complaints were only liable
to result in coddling if the patient could be identifed as a middle- or
upper-class White (or passably White) woman, while non-White and/
or working-class women continued to labor both within and outside of
their households until injury or illness left them undeniably incapaci-
tated. Even Florence Nightingale, who usually advocated for patients’
perspectives, acknowledged the tendency of some to enjoy melodrama-
tization. 27 While Nightingale employed a masculine pronoun when de-
scribing the hypothetical pity-seeker, females were more commonly cast
in period discourses as opportunistic invalids who “played sick” in order
to escape domestic responsibilities. 28 Hypochondriacs might have been
perceived as amusingly oversensitive in Jane Austen’s fction, but their
nervous equivalents were more likely to be cast as selfsh, deviant, even
degenerate by the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
centuries. Such invalids were often blamed for acquiring and/or sustain-
ing affictions via unhealthful and immoral behaviors. Even more egre-
gious were the parasitic personalities who manipulated and sapped the
energies of companions who cared for them.
The doctors who treated English or American women suffering from
nervous conditions offered contradictory opinions on the sympathy that
should be accorded to these diffcult patients. In Woman and Her Dis-
eases: From the Cradle to the Grave (1847), Edward H. Dixon recom-
mended compassionate treatment of patients suffering from the “many
troublesome and annoying symptoms” brought on by menstruation
and menopause, discouraging the open expression of “unkind observa-
tions” regarding “exciting cause[s],” including unspecifed but “repulsive
acts.”29 Hysteric illness, Dixon admitted, might originate from unre-
quited affection, but also from spousal mistreatment; he even acknowl-
edged the ingratitude of children as an instigating infuence. 30 Dixon did
not exempt the patient from blame entirely, however, citing “an indolent,
luxurious, and enervating mode of life” as the most common cause of
pathologies that affected women.31 He also warned of the ease with
which a physician could “become a slave to an hysterical patient.”32
Medical writings often invoked the fgure of the monstrous parasite
or the voracious vampire in order to convey the enervating infuence
of such patients. Boris Sidis, the founder of The Journal of Abnormal
Psychology (1906), also warned of the terrorizing tendencies of nervous
patients, whom he described as “parasitic leech[es]” and “psychopathic
vampire[s].”33 In Nervous Ills: Their Cause and Cure (1922), Sidis ac-
cused one patient of manipulating and abusing her husband by subject-
ing him to her fainting and crying fts. “She made him do everything
she pleased,” said Sidis. “She was a regular termagant, a demon incar-
nate.”34 The doctor compounded the impression of prejudicial rancor
by describing this patient as an “egomaniac,” a “Nero,” a “fend,” a
“satan,” and a “frebrand from hell.” He likened her to animals as well
as to persons of non-White races to whom he attributed animalistic at-
tributes. She was a “mule,” a “coyote,” a “tigress,” a “wolf” as well
as an “Indian,” a “savage,” and a “wild brute.”35 Another female pa-
tient was deemed “a regular vampire.”36 Suffering from pathophobia
(extreme fear of disease), she could not bear proximity to others’ illness,
but also could not be left alone. According to the doctor, incessant de-
mands extinguished the “very individuality” of all of the patient’s step-
children, turning one young woman—forced to serve as both day and
night nurse—into “a poor, colorless being.” The patient drained “the
life blood of her family,”37 according to Sidis, who characterized such
pathological dependency as “neurotic parasitism.”38
The female parasite was not confned to representation in medical
writing. In her poetry and prose, Charlotte Perkins Gilman character-
ized economically dependent women as depleting infuences. Unlike the
females of other species, Gilman observed: “It is the female of our [hu-
man] race, / Who holds a parasitic place.”39 Gilman argued that civ-
ilization had led to the hypersexuality of prostitutes, odalisques, and
wives. Dependent on the “exertions” of men, women acquired “powers
of absorption and of tenacity” that enabled them to obtain food through
“sex-relation,” she wrote in Women and Economics in 1898.40 Olive
Schreiner offered a more sustained critique of parasitic relations between
the sexes in Woman and Labour in 1911. Emphasizing the fnancial and
psychosocial exploitation of men by “whitened” and “softened” female
bodies that contributed little beyond “passive fulfllment of sexual func-
tions,” Schreiner warned of the potential cost to empire, as “women of
civilized races are peculiarly tempted, unconsciously, to slip … into a
condition of complete, helpless, and inactive parasitism,” thereby threat-
ening not just Western society, but earth’s “entire body.”41 A similar
but less deliberate capacity for psychic vampirism (that Webber called
“spirit vampirism”) would later be employed by Florence Marryat’s Har-
riet Brandt (The Blood of the Vampire [1897]).42 Although Marryat’s
vampire expressed degenerate, feminist tendencies through intemperate
moods and appetites, Harriet did not assume the role of chronic invalid.
This vampire’s threat depended largely on readers’ and other characters’
fears involving the mixed-race female’s ability to degrade the entire Brit-
ish bloodline by marrying a White male and thereby producing children
capable of passing.
Sexology and Demonology: The Invalid as
Consumptive Vampire
In the most extensive analysis of Kenealy’s short story to date, Kris-
tine Swenson does not focus on Lady Deverish’s reputation as a mor-
ally suspect invalid who is at least devious, at most murderous. In “The
Menopausal Vampire: Arabella Kenealy and the Boundaries of True
Womanhood,” Swenson suggests that Lady Deverish’s monstrosity re-
sults not so much from her behavior as a diffcult patient, but from her
continued interest in sexual relations beyond middle age. Focusing on
passages in which the “brilliantly beautiful”43 lady appears to rapidly
age, following a reluctant fancé’s suicide, Swenson identifes the vampire
as a “post-reproductive woman who sucks energy from those around her
in order to continue to appear reproductively ft.”44
While I do not believe that Lady Deverish’s age could be much above
30, given that she only claims to have extended her life span by ten years
following a near-death experience that preceded her frst marriage,45 I
would agree with Swenson’s position on the threat this living vampire
poses by passing as recovered. Lady Deverish’s sudden pallor and en-
larged eyes, etched by “grey lines,” may also indicate a fare of previ-
ous symptoms.46 It is also possible that her desperate desire for a blood
transfusion47 could be related to the cessation of menstruation, which
need not be precipitated by the aging process. Prolonged and/or serious
illness is known to cause anemia as well as amenorrhea. In other words,
Lady Deverish might experience early menopause due to the wasting
effects of pulmonary tuberculosis, the disease of which she nearly died
before discovering a capacity for “sympathetic clairvoyance,”48 a form
of psychic vampirism, which allowed her to siphon the life force from
family members: her sister, brother, and mother. Following their deaths,
the young woman marries twice, with both husbands succumbing to a
sudden wasting sickness that leads one suspicious employee to ask why
“her two young husbands, as likely men as might be, sicken[ed] the day
she married them, and die[d] consumptive.”49
While understanding of disease and contagion improved as a result of
medical discoveries and innovations over the course of the century, the
link between frailty, whiteness, and pathology would remain constant.
As Katherine Byrne has observed in Tuberculosis and the Victorian Lit-
erary Imagination (2013), the discovery of the pathogen that caused con-
sumption (aka “the white plague”) did not diminish the demonization
of sufferers. By the fn de siècle period, disease progression remained so
unpredictable that it seemed “supernatural” to “physicians and laymen
alike,” contributing to the “pathological [literary] paradigm” of “pallid
and emaciated invalid[s]” as “social vampires.”50 Focusing on the ways
in which textual tropes shifted over the course of the nineteenth cen-
tury, Byrne describes the representation of the tubercular patient as “a
willing embracer” rather than a “passive recipient of disease.”51 Kath-
erine Ott traced a similar development on the other side of the Atlantic
in Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (1996).
From a medical standpoint, Ott explained, the tubercle bacilli could be
characterized as “a parasite” that affected spirit, mind, and body. 52 For
this reason, White females suffering from similar symptoms might be
diagnosed as both consumptive and neurasthenic. 53 Indeed, as Ott ex-
plains, “[C]onsumptive women drifted back and forth into neurasthe-
nia,” especially among the middle classes, as the want of nervous energy
could be attributed to the pressures of civilization and industrialization,
whereas tuberculosis grew more stigmatized, its “toxins” more likely to
be associated with “sexual appetite said to extend almost to the point of
perversion.”54
Another prominent thread in this body of nineteenth-century medi-
cal writing is the distinct and anti-feminist anxiety around or explicit
demonization of feminine illness as a threat to the social body—hence,
these texts sometimes invoke the fgure of the vampire to convey such
fears of morbid decline. In an article published in The Lancet in 1918,
W.A. Jones identifed psychological vampirism as one among a num-
ber of “borderline case[s]” of “psychoneurological errors,” which might
be triggered by “syphilis, tuberculosis, and many other transmissible
diseases.”55 Among the so-called “human vampires,” he included the
“selfsh” type, who committed herself to “enslaving, captivating, or de-
stroying young men, and sometimes older men” by “wiles and witch-
eries.”56 An American physician, William J. Robinson, also drew an
explicit analogy between the vampire and the oversexed woman in his
advice manual for married couples. “Just as the vampire sucks the blood
of its victims in their sleep while they are alive, so does the woman
vampire suck the life and exhaust the vitality of her male partner,” he
wrote.57 While the doctor did address the “unreasonable” demands of
brides who married later in life, he also warned of unusually voracious
young women, who could exhaust young or old husbands by insisting on
relations “ten or twenty times a week,” despite being informed that such
demands could result in their partners’ illness, impotence, and death.
While the “frigid anesthetic woman” could be a “nuisance,” Robinson
cautioned, a “strongly oversexed and inconsiderate woman” qualifed as
a “menace.”58
Lady Deverish’s sexual interests could certainly be deemed menac-
ingly vampiric as they result in the deaths of multiple men. Following
the deaths of two husbands, who turned “consumptive” abruptly after
marriage, the widow (a supposed invalid) appears “fresh and blooming
and gay-spirited.”59 Of course, Lady Deverish’s immune system could
have put forth a stronger response than that of any of her “victims,”
given that a chronic consumptive could live for decades with periods
of relative remission. It is also possible that the deaths were caused by
some other affiction. As Helen Bynum observes in Spitting Blood: The
History of Tuberculosis (2012), the term “consumption” has been used
loosely throughout history to cover:
a disparate range of conditions that exhausted and drained the body

of its life and fesh. Illnesses that heightened the body’s metabolic
demands and/or suppressed the appetite, especially over a prolonged
period—anaemias, cancers, diabetes, low-grade infections—may
have been covered by this umbrella term. Consumption could also
refer to the dissolution of specifc parts of the body: spines, hips,
larynxes, and kidneys. If consumption thus compels a breadth of
meaning, phthisis itself was not a single disease.60
Kenealy’s reference to “consumption” (rather than phthisis or tuberculo-

sis) also seems metaphorically ftting, given that Lady Deverish expects
passion for her to be all consuming. She refuses to release a fancé from
a compelled “infatuation [that] amounts to possession,” despite his pre-
vious commitment to another woman.61 He eventually frees himself by
suicide, to which Lady Deverish responds, “He ought to have thought of
me.”62 Such callousness might be ascribed to malignant narcissism, but
her survival does depend on her ability to attract (and absorb) others’
attentions. When threatened, she cries, “I must have admiration! I love
my beautiful, beautiful body, and the joy of life! I cannot, cannot die.”63
That the maintenance of her life force depends on the annihilation of
others’ makes little difference to her. Accused of hugging two young
children comatose, she scoffs: “What does one expect? Children are ev-
erlastingly teething or over-feeding or having measles.”64
Such anti-maternal sentiment seemed the height of monstrosity in Ke-
nealy’s eugenic perspective. In her view, an ability to nurture infants
placed a close second to woman’s “frst and vital function” of birthing
them.65 Lady Deverish’s failure to conceive by either husband could be
excused, given the seriousness of her previous illness or the brevity of the
marriages. She might be considered less culpable of contributing to de-
generacy, because she does not transmit consumption (or susceptibility)
to her offspring. However, her inability to dote or even to show concern
for an innocent child could only confrm deviance. Like the feminist
viragoes that Kenealy blasted in Feminism and Sex-Extinction, Lady
Deverish proves defcient in “sweetness, softness, imagination, [and]
sensitiveness.” “[I]n a word,” she lacks “Soul.”66 For such spiritual fail-
ings, the wealthy invalid is cast as “Lady Devilish” by one employee.67
Another suggests that no jury would convict a doctor if he managed to
murder her.68
As if in testament to such eugenic truths, Kenealy portrays multiple
characters’ intuitive (or instinctive) recognition of the dangerous—if
not vampiric—effect of Lady Deverish’s feminine illness. Deviance is
detected, for example, in her ladyship’s behavior with the females in
her employ. According to one nurse, Lady Deverish “had a fad about
massage, and insisted on being ‘massed’ morning and night.”69 After
sessions, the nurses appear shaken, even faint, whereas their employer
delights in their discomfort, which she takes as confrmation of infuence.
While animal magnetism, an early form of hypnotism, often involved
the passing of hands over subjects’ reclining bodies, thereby leading to
detractors’ suspicions of erotic intent, Lady Deverish’s practice might be
considered more suggestive of sexual harassment. Her preferred therapy
involves stroking. She needs to touch and be touched.
Lady Deverish also unsettles her employees with intense eye con-
tact. A “curious way of staring” leads to speculation that she might be
“short-sighted,” but resisting eyeglasses “for the sake of her looks.”70
In one scene, housemaids are subjected to a “basilisk stare,” similar to
the “cold” and “relentless gaze” that Kenealy later ascribes to the New
Woman in Feminism and Sex Extinction.71 Lady Deverish’s glare sends
her maids “trembling and stumbling about in curious, aimless fashion.”
In a scene that recalls the thrall of the supernatural vampire, young fe-
males fnd themselves “drawn,” against their will, to sway “motionless
and dazed” at their mistress’ bedside.72
Toward the end of Kenealy’s short story, Lady Deverish resorts to
physical assault. Fearing that her powers have begun to wane, she fings
herself upon a nurse, “press[ing] her lips and cheeks” against the other
woman’s “throat and face.” “Give me some of it,” she demands, alluding
to the other’s apparent health and vivacity, which has been artifcially
enhanced by liquor and rouge to hide the enervating effects of prox-
imity.73 Although the pathophobic invalid has insisted on hiring only
youthful, rose-cheeked, and well-nourished individuals, traumatic inter-
actions result in high turnover. One nurse, a “buxom matron,” deterio-
rates so quickly that she appears “a haggard old woman” within a few
months’ interaction.74 Another requires a full month to recuperate after
an attempted blood-sucking incident.
What distinguishes Lady Deverish from other vampiric invalids is the
deliberation involved in her predation. A doctor who twice attempts
to euthanize the vampire believes his patient to be responsible for the
deaths of a dozen persons. She could “live to be a hundred,” he warns,
since “persons of less assertive selfshness” will always be available to
serve “as reservoirs of vital strength to her.”75 Although a nurse, who
refuses to participate in poisoning the patient, concurs in his estimation
of Lady Deverish’s character, the nurse does not consider the invalid’s ill-
ness to be untreatable. The patient evinces “a monstrous, selfsh sanity”
at times, but the nurse isn’t entirely sure if she’s dealing with “a monster”
or a “monomaniac.”76 Monomania had been described by Jean Étienne
Esquirol in 1845 as a “superstitious and erotic” derangement that might
be driven by “fear, vanity, [or] wounded self-love.” Such a condition, like
tuberculosis, might be managed to some extent, but tended to remain
“fxed and permanent.”77 When subjected to enforced isolation in the
interests of performing a rest cure, the patient dies.
Still, Lady Deverish’s formidable “force of will and concentration”
does allow her to prolong longevity beyond the original prognosis for
her pulmonary affiction.78 Her success depends largely upon her status
as a wealthy widow. Beauty contributes to her ability to seduce men,
but money entices them to marriage. It also allows her to recruit staff,
despite a questionable reputation as a temptress, a “siren of the frst wa-
ter.”79 Gossips also suspect her of playing sick. One observer wonders
that “she wants a nurse at all” as she seems “the picture of health.”
Informed that “she suffers from nerves,” he retorts, “If all of us who
suffer from ‘nerves’ were to have trained nurses looking after us, there
wouldn’t be enough trained nurses to go round.”80 By expressing doubt
over Lady Deverish’s need for private health care, this character raises
a number of concerns refective of conficted attitudes toward chronic
invalidism. Who deserves prolonged care? What qualifes as trained?
And what about the risks involved to the professional or personal, paid
or unpaid individuals who provide supportive care?
Dangerous Sympathy: Babying the Invalid Vampire

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nurses might be
trained to adhere to compassionate but strict regimens. Training schools
aimed to instill the “discipline, self-control, and stamina” necessary to
regulate “a willful patient.”81 However, not everyone could afford in-
home nursing staff. Residents in rural regions could not expect ready
access to practitioners familiar with cutting edge research. Still, individ-
uals deemed delicate as well as deserving of charitable care might expect
to fnd a number of volunteers willing to assume bedside duties in an era
when every woman was expected to be at least superfcially “trained to
the angelic art of managing properly the sick.”82
This community of caregivers surrounding and tending to a fctional
invalid might be read as a micro example of the way in which larger or
macrostructures like gender and medical narrative bound women to the
home for the (reproductive) health of the national body. Indeed, the title
character of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “Luella Miller” benefts from
her communities’ willingness to treat the young widow as “too delicate”
to fend for herself.83 Unlike Lady Deverish, Luella does not appear to
compensate anyone for services rendered. She does not pay with money.
Nor does she repay others’ kindness with payment-in-kind when they
fall sick as a result of tending to her. As Christine Palumbo-DeSimone
observes in her examination of Freeman’s short story, this “emotion-
ally manipulative” character qualifes as “parasitic,” because of her
“inexplicabl[e]” ability to “charm” others into caring for her.84 Initially
hired to serve as the village school teacher, Luella relies on older students
to run the classroom while she dabbles with embroidery.85 Though the
narrator seems to suggest that Luella’s hiring had more to do with her
beauty than with her educational skill set, the reader may also wonder
whether Luella may have benefted from unidentifed socioeconomic ad-
vantages. She can embroider a handkerchief but cannot sew. However,
no other evidence suggests that Luella may have cultivated ornamental
abilities (such as dancing or drawing) before fnding her expectations
disarranged by fnancial misfortune.
Even if such were the case, however, nineteenth-century advice man-
uals frequently recommended that all women be educated in housewif-
ery. In his Lectures on the Sphere and Duties of Woman, the Reverend
George W. Bernap, for example, indicated that he held “the education
to domestic duties” to be “essential and indispensable,” that “[n]o
woman,” wealthy or otherwise, could be called “educated” if she were
“not equal to the successful management of a family.”86 Even when Free-
man’s Luella manages to get out of bed, she seems ill-equipped to cope
with keeping a house, caring for children, or cheering a spouse. Indeed,
the narrator expresses outrage that Erastus Miller, Luella’s husband,
does “the sweepin,” “washin’,” “ironin’,” and “cookin’,” while his sister
does the necessary “sewin’.”87 When tasked with making her own cof-
fee, Luella blinks in “dreadful” astonishment, “I never made the coffee
in all my life…. I don’t believe I can make the coffee, Miss Anderson.”88
By period standards, Luella isn’t just a bad wife. As Palumbo-DeSimone
remarks, this “appallingly dysfunctional” character would hardly be
recognizable as “woman” in “a world where womanhood and house-
wifery are synonymous.”89
While Palumbo-DeSimone views Lydia Anderson, the narrator, as
“the true horror” in Freeman’s story because of the way she turns the
community against another woman who “do[es] not ft conventional
modes of womanhood,”90 I am more interested in Lydia’s inconsistent
response to Luella’s perceived illness. Although Lydia denies that her
feelings for Luella’s husband were romantic, she does not deny holding
a grudge as she suspects Luella for contributing to his death from “con-
sumption of the blood,” which “wa’n’t in his family.”91 Given that the
narrated events occur many years before the discovery of the tubercular
pathogen, Lydia could not be expected to understand that Erastus could
have been the carrier of contagion and that Luella’s supposed laziness
(i.e., her tendency to “lay abed” a little over a year after marriage)92
could be symptomatic of a number of conditions, some of which may be
interrelated. These include morning sickness, miscarriage, depression,
neurasthenia, and/or consumption. Since hemoptysis (hemorrhage of
the lungs) is not reported among Erastus’s symptoms, it is not entirely
clear if pulmonary tuberculosis should be assumed as the cause of death.
A number of other inheritable or transmissible conditions could result
in similar wasting symptoms. While some survivors may come to fear
Luella as a source of contagion or a curse, the term “vampire” is never
applied to her. Despite a reported sighting of her wan but needy specter
lingering in the vicinity, Luella is never rumored to prey on her neighbors
as an undead revenant. She proves, instead, to be more of a threat as a
living but malingering invalid.
While Lydia is especially aggravated by Luella’s “domestic derelic-
tion,” I’m not convinced that the narrator’s “parasitic storytelling”
is primarily motivated by Luella’s usurpation of Erastus’s house, as
Palumbo-DeSimone asserts.93 After all, Lydia continues to engage in
victim-blaming for decades after she could have assumed residence, that
is, if she wanted the domicile rather than the husband. Lydia calls Luella
“a dreadful woman,” but—in the same sentence—concedes her resem-
blance to an infant “with scissors in its hand cuttin’ everybody without
knowin’ what it was doin.”94 The case, then, is complicated by Luella’s
possible mental incompetency. If Luella, unlike Lady Deverish, never
means to hurt anyone, if Luella is incapable of comprehending her ca-
pacity for exhausting and exasperating, can she be held culpable? Lydia
keeps worrying at this problem in the same way the tongue seeks a sore
spot, regardless of the mind’s efforts to avoid it.
Throughout Freeman’s short story, Lydia seems fxated on Luella’s
childish tendencies. With her blue eyes “full of soft pleading” and her
“little slender, clinging hands,” Luella exemplifes the “child-woman,”
an “arrested” type that Claudia Nelson has described as “adorably help-
less.”95 When challenged to do her own housework, Luella blinks “like
a baby who has a rattle shook at it.” When accused of working others to
death, she stares “like a doll-baby that was so abused that it was comin’
to life.”96 On a superfcial level, Luella resembles a sentimental heroine
of Dickensian literature. Decked in “blue muslin with white polka dots,”
“her hair curled jest as pretty,” “there wa’n’t a young girl in the place
could compare with her,” according to Lydia, who suspects the fy in
the candy foss; “[t]here was “somethin’ about Luella Miller seemed to
draw the heart right out of you.”97 In this respect, Luella compares to
the “sweet baby-like vampire.” Though W.A. Jones did not elaborate
beyond expressing an ominous need to beware the type, he included this
diagnosis among the borderline neurological disorders in his previously
mentioned Lancet article.98 Luella’s girlish appearance also recalls the
“doll woman,” described by Eliza Lynn Linton in The Girl of the Period,
and Other Social Essays (1883). “One could not count on this type of
woman in times of need,” warned Linton:
for in distress or sickness she can only sit by you and look as sor-
rowful as her round smooth face will permit but she has not a help-
ing suggestion to make, not a fraction of practical power to put
forth … Many a man’s back has broken under the strain of such a
burden; and many a ruined fortune might have been held together
and repaired when damaged, had it not been of the exigencies and
necessities of the living doll, who had to be spared all want or incon-
venience at the cost of everything else.99
While the British journalist did not use the word “vampire” to describe
this fgure, she did accuse this personality of being little more than
“a living corpse,” who demanded “to be carried on the shoulders of
those who [were] struggling for their own lives.”100 American writers
employed very similar language throughout the nineteenth century to
describe this White middle- and upper-class invalid. A conduct man-
ual from 1848 suggested that young women who exposed themselves
to inclement weather while “thinly clad” risked contracting pulmonary
conditions, thereby rendering themselves burdensome “source[s] of
anxiety and grief” to friends and family members. Through “abuse of
health,” they allowed themselves to become not only “self-murderer[s],”
but, in effect, emotional and economical vampires to those who cared
for them.101 Later in the century, the physician Oliver Wendell Holmes
compared a “hysterical girl” to “a vampire who suck[ed] the blood of the
healthy people about her.”102
Luella’s behavior does suggest invalidic vampirism, in the sense that
she’s starved for sympathy, which serves as her primary source of suste-
nance. But given the hyperbolic language and contradictory guidance of-
fered by popular writers and medical experts alike, it is hardly surprising
that persons witnessing mysterious illness and/or immoderate behaviors
did not know what to believe or how to respond. Lydia alternates be-
tween outrage and confusion. At times, Luella’s distress seems genuine.
When she faints, for example, Lydia admits, “[T]here wa’n’t any sham”
involved.103 At other times, however, Luella appears to be “keepin’ a
sharp lookout” as to how onlookers are receiving her melodrama even as
she continues “laughin’ and cryin’ and goin’ on as if she was the centre
of all creation.”104 Here, Lydia’s description of Luella’s performative be-
havior recalls the theatrical hysterics of Jean-Paul Charcot’s Salpêtrière.
If Lydia had consulted Robert Brudenell Carter’s On the Pathology and
Treatment of Hysteria (1853), she would only confrm fears that en-
abling the “practice of deceit” would worsen the original disease.105 If
she consulted Charles P. Uhle’s essay on “Hysteria” in Godey’s (1870),
instead, Lydia might be led to “indulge” the hysterical woman on “her
aches and pains,” “her whims and caprices,” even if they were imagi-
nary, “since they [were] realities to her.”106
Part of Lydia’s frustration, then, is derived from the way the hysteric
combines, in Carter’s words, “the instability of childhood” with the
“vices and passions of adult age.”107 But Freeman’s parasitic female—
unlike Lady Deverish—does not exhibit hypersexuality, despite Lydia’s
belief that Luella has set her “pretty claw” in the doctor who treats her
after Erastus dies.108 Luella only seems interested in men and women so
far as they can take care of her. According to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg,
some observers perceived the hysteric as “quite sexually stimulated or
attractive” when she was “essentially asexual and not uncommonly
frigid.”109 Though Lydia may see Luella as a “dreadful woman,”110 her
behavior is so incredibly childish that at times, it is diffcult to imagine
the consummation of marriage as anything other than pedophilia or
child rape, whatever her age may be. Other than Erastus, the men who
approach Luella tend to do so in a professional capacity. A doctor plans
to marry her once he realizes that he is dying so that she will be provided
for after his death. Most of the village women treat Luella as they might
a child rather than a romantic rival.
Even Lydia, on one occasion, gives into the babying of the vampiric
invalid when she doses the screeching and sobbing hysteric with valerian
and catnip as one might a child having a tantrum at bedtime. Lydia may
claim that Luella fails to “draw the heart” out of her as she does out of
other empathizers, but she does leave provisions at the Miller house on
one occasion.111 Ultimately, she risks her own health as the only non-
professional to visit Luella on her deathbed. But Lydia has reason to
feel guilty, too. She can be blunt to the point of cruelty, telling Luella:
“You kill everybody that is fool enough to care anythin’ about you and
do for you.”112 When Lydia witnesses Luella, so weak she can “hardly
crawl,” passing on the street, the sterner woman refuses to assist, partly
out of bitter memory of Erastus’ suffering, partly due to belief that the
coddling must stop if Luella is ever going to learn to do for herself.113
Despite warnings from Lydia, Luella (that “poor little lamb”) does
receive care from more charitable females in the community.114 One
determined martyr declares she would die rather than refuse to help
“them that couldn’t help themselves.”115 Had S. Weir Mitchell been con-
sulted, he might have diagnosed this ministering angel as suffering from
“self-sacrifcing love and over-careful sympathy.” In Fat and Blood: An
Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria
(1877), Mitchell expressed reservations as to the effcacy of overly sym-
pathetic health care, whether it be performed by familial or by profes-
sional caregivers, warning that the lives of healthy individuals might be
“absorbed” by patients’ perverse self-interests. While he did not discuss
the absorptive capabilities of hectic or hysteric, selfsh or baby vampires,
Mitchell did observe that “an hysterical, anæmic girl” had been known
to spell the deaths of “three generations of nurses.” 116
As a former physician and dedicated eugenicist, Kenealy held a sim-
ilarly grim attitude toward malingering invalids. Not only is Lady De-
verish a New Bad Woman; she is the ultimate bad patient. She’s a sexual
deviant, unft to reproduce. She should die already; instead, she’s ab-
sorbing energy that ought to be consumed by contributing members of
society. Freeman’s position seems less hostile by comparison, but only
because Luella is less intentional in her predation. She’s willful, but lacks
focus. She’s likely to forget her capacity to harm others if she ever be-
lieves Lydia’s accusations. Freeman suggests that this nervous invalid is
a product of arrested development and, for this reason, unsuitable for
survival in the century in which the sturdier Gibson Girl would soon
become the ideal of healthy womanhood. Luella is a fashionably tired
invalid. She may be young in years, but adopts the fushes and the vapors
of “phthisical heroines.”117 Luella is, in other words, an extremely emo-
tive variation on the “consumptive sublime.”118
An Epilogue
Notably, journalist Dorothy Dix would suggest that the invalid no lon-
ger presented such a danger to the populace, in a piece she wrote for
Good Housekeeping in 1916.119 In “The Girl of Today,” the modern
young woman had come to disdain the “girl of the past” as much as
able-bodied Lydia resented the weak-minded Luella. In many respects,
Dix’s “human éclair covered with pink and white frosting”120 bore a
striking resemblance to Freeman’s “little pink-and-white thing.”121 For
all its snap, Dix’s semi-satire offered insights into the ways in which atti-
tudes toward invalidism ft into the larger gender debates, such as those
regarding fragile, true womanhood versus capable, real womanhood,
which have been characterized in some detail by Martha H. Verbrugge
and Frances B. Cogan.122 For Dix’s glorious American girl (that “living,
palpitating, feminine Fourth of July”),123 sickliness proved “a source
of shame.” She expected the “daughters of a house” to be “quite as
able-bodied as the sons.” In her milieu, the “neurotic, hysterical young
maiden[s],” formerly glimpsed lounging about, were “now almost as un-
common a spectacle as a dodo.”124 Of course, a lack of visibility hardly
proved extinction. Still, one could hardly expect such a girl to be aware
of the continued existence of invalids, those human vampires. And even
if she were aware, such a girl could hardly be capable of caring for them.
Of course, Kenealy would have blasted such a girl as a soulless vampire.
Notes
1 Jack Zipes (ed.), “Princess and the Pea, The,” in The Oxford Companion
to Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 401–402.
2 Douglas Thorpe, “‘I Never Knew My Lady Swoon Before’: Lady Dedlock
and the Revival of the Victorian Fainting Woman,” Dickens Studies An-
nual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 20 (1991): 103–125.
3 The World of Fashion, XI (London: 1832), 263, quoted in Carolyn A. Day,
“Dying to Be Beautiful: The Consumptive Chic,” in Consumptive Chic:
A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (London: Bloomsbury, 2017),
86, Kindle.
4 Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race
in America, 1880–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007),
Kindle.
5 George Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, A
Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (New York: P.T. Putnam, 1881), 26.
6 George Beard, Sexual Neurasthenia (Nervous Exhaustion): Its Hygiene,
Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment (New York: E.B. Treat, 1884), 59.
7 Janet Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in
Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13.
8 Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, 215.
9 Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, 210.
10 Arabella Kenealy, Feminism and Sex-Extinction (London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1920), 84. Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37964l
11 Kenealy, Feminism and Sex-Extinction, 136.
12 Kenealy, Feminism and Sex-Extinction, 252.
13 Arabella Kenealy, “Some Experiences of Lord Syfret: A Beautiful Vam-
pire,” in Supernatural Detectives 3 (Landisville, PA: Coachwhip Publica-
tions, 2011), 275–304.
14 Janet Steiger, Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995),154. Google Books.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Bad_Women/oiO7ybA9PMkC?
hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=New%20Bad%20Women
15 Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla,” in In a Glass Darkly (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1993), 243–319.
16 Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: The Modern Library, 2001).
17 Arthur C. Doyle, “The Parasite: A Story” (1894). Project Gutenberg. http://
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/355
18 Charles W. Webber, Yieger’s Cabinet. Spiritual Vampirism: The History
of Etherial Softdown and Her Friends of the “New Light” (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, Grambo, 1853). HathiTrust Digital Library, https://babel.
hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044013665658
19 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, “Luella Miller” (New York: Doubleday, Page,
1903) in Vampires: Encounters with the Dead, ed. David J. Skal (New
York: Black Dog & Levanthal, 2001), 261–271.
20 Abba G. Woolson, Woman in American Society (Cambridge: Press of John
Wilson and Son, 1873), 189, 192.
21 Augustus Hoppin, A Fashionable Sufferer; Or Chapters from Life’s
Comedy (Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin, 1883), 13, HathiTrust Digi-
tal Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t96689
741&view=1up&seq=5
22 Hoppin, A Fashionable Sufferer, 12.
23 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, Complaints and Disorders: The
Sexual Politics of Sickness (New York: The Feminist Press, 2011), Kindle.
24 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-
De-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29.
25 Diane Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fic-
tion and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1993), 38.
26 Maria Frawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 20, 28. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fayetteville-ebooks/detail.
action?docID=616036
27 Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not (New
York: D. Appleton, 1860), 99. HathiTrust Digital Library, https://babel.
hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t31265w6h&view=1up&seq=7
28 Meredith Conti, Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victo-
rian Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2019), Kindle.
29 Edward H. Dixon, Woman and Her Diseases: From the Cradle to the
Grave: Adapted Exclusively to Her Instruction in the Physiology of Her
System and All the Diseases of Her Critical Periods (New York: C.H.
Ring, 1847), 23, 134. NIH: U.S. Library of Medicine Digital Collections,
https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-67020040R-bk
30 Dixon, Woman and Her Diseases, 135.
33 Boris Sidis, Nervous Ills: Their Cause and Cure (Boston, MA: The Gor-
ham Press, 1922), 134. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/
ebooks/56893
34 Sidis, Nervous Ills, 154.
35 Sidis, Nervous Ills, 155–156.
36 Sidis, Nervous Ills, 159.
39 Charlotte P. Gilman, “Females,” in In This Our World and Other Poems
(San Francisco, CA: James H. Barry and John H. Marble, 1895). Internet
Archive. https://archive.org/details/inthisourworldot00gilmiala
40 Charlotte P. Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Re-
lation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Boston,
MA: Small, Maynard, & Co., 1898), IV. University of Pennsylvania Dig-
ital Library, https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gilman/economics/
economics.html
41 Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (1911), “Chapter II: Parasitism,”
Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1440
42 Florence Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauch-
nitz, 1897). HathiTrust Digital Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/
pt?id=coo.31924013496629&view=1up&seq=9
43 Kenealy, “The Beautiful Vampire,” 281.
44 Kristine Swenson, “The Menopausal Vampire: Arabella Kenealy and the
Boundaries of True Womanhood,” Women’s Writing 10, no. 1 (2003): 32.
45 Kenealy, “A Beautiful Vampire,” 291.
48 William A. Barnes, Psychology, Hypnotism, Personal Magnetism, Clair-
voyance (Boston, MA: A. Mudge and Sons, 1898), Chapter VIII, Section
10. Internet Archive, https://ia802702.us.archive.org/20/items/psychology
hypno00barngoog/psychologyhypno00barngoog.pdf
50 Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 174–175.
51 Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination, 8.
52 Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since
1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1.
53 Ott, Fevered Lives, 4, 1.
54 Ott, Fevered Lives, 71–72, 75.
55 W. A. Jones, “Borderland Cases, Mental and Nervous,” The Journal-Lancet
38 (1918), 561, 562. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?-
i d = P5C I g P D h H y k C & p g= PA 561& l p g= PA 561& d q =%E 2%8 0 %
9CBorderland+Cases,+Mental+and+Nervous%22+Jones&source=
bl&ots=Ys14Ej2AzV&sig=ACf U3U2nuIjj3ugu0Mt5HS01CkngKEQ
PZg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAwdP5i6jzAhV UElkFHa8GB68
Q6A F6 BAg DE A M# v=onepage&q=%E 2%80%9C B orderland%20
Cases%2C%20Mental%20and%20Nervous%22%20Jones&f=false
56 Jones, “Borderland Cases,” 564.
57 William J. Robinson, Married Life and Happiness, or, Love and Comfort
in Marriage (New York: Critic and Guide Company, 1922), 90. HathiTrust
Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011827261
58 Robinson, Married Life and Happiness, 93.
60 Helen Bynum, Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 13. Kindle.
65 Kenealy, Feminism and Sex Extinction, 217.
76 Kenealy, “A Beautiful Vampire,” 291, 287.
77 Jean É. Esquirol, “Monomania,” in Embodied Selves: An Anthology of
Psychological Texts, 1830–1890, eds. Jenny B. Taylor and Sally Shuttle-
worth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 257.
81 Ott, 83; Maria Cutler, “The Sickroom,” Harper’s Bazaar 42 (1908): 505.
Google Books, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Harper_s_Bazaar/
rNkjAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Sickroom
82 William A. Alcott, The Young Housekeeper (Boston, MA: 1838), 47,
quoted in Welter, 61.
83 Freeman, “Luella Miller,” 267.
84 Christine Palumbo-DeSimone, “‘Dreadful Women’: Vampires and Story-
tellers in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s ‘Luella Miller,’” Gothic Studies 22,
no. 2 (2020): 166.
86 George Washington Burnap, Lectures on the Sphere and Duties of Woman:
and Other Subjects (Baltimore, MD: J. Murphy, 1841), 135, CURIOsity
Digital Collections, Harvard Library, https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/
women-working-1800-1930/catalog/45-990022081460203941
89 Palumbo-DeSimone, “Dreadful Women,” 169, 174.
90 Palumbo-DeSimone, “Dreadful Women,” 169.
93 Palumbo-DeSimone, “Dreadful Women,” 177, 178.
95 Freeman, “Luella Miller,” 262; Claudia Nelson, Precocious Children and
Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (Baltimore, MD:
The John Hopkins University Press, 2012), Kindle.
98 Jones, “Borderland Cases,” 565.
99 Eliza Lynn Linton, “Dolls,” in The Girl of the Period and Other Social
Essays, Vol. I (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1883), 235–236. Proj-
ect Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/41735/pg41735-
images.html#Page_234
100 Linton, “Dolls,” 237.
101 Timothy S. Arthur, Advice to Young Ladies on the Duties and Conduct in
Life (Boston: Phillips and Sampson, 1848), Chapter X, Kindle.
102 S. Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood: An Essay on the Treatment of Certain
Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria (Philadelphia, PA: JP Lippincott,
1877), Chapter IV, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/
fles/16230/16230-h/16230-h.htm
105 Robert Carter, On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria (London: John
Churchill, 1853), 133. Google Books, https://books.googleusercontent.
com/books/content?req=AKW5QacZs-vl_8x5x5gsH711bNOkJukD88s
538EdY5C1Uhwf PS1YJ WvziD -apZJp3ngna58H EWs _ JAkDxGFqL
GTCkuh-Q3aiFDFklOuqyHrhEUvAfZnfr1UDTjN3rD9auV6xOuVIINA
u6f8L5khDHWGzExbVAhGwO-yGxwyZZfgMciPispd0QVhiqHRg06s
Ll9yVNHOE_6kOIZyXJS00Tl5_tSTeENwS8QqaPepqFXumf0Sx7KF_
52pNoCcghbWpA8uuDbBYCstx8Nt_y-6nZCYp1bjM5Ag-lzsvAQjEwRy
FscmpseaGgMU
106 Charles P. Uhle, “Hysteria,” Godey’s, 81, no. 482 (September 1870),
279.
107 Carter, On the Pathology, 132.
109 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role
Confict in Nineteenth-Century,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gen-
der in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 202.
116 S. Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood: An Essay on the Treatment of Certain
Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria, 8th ed. (Philadelphia, PA: John P.
Lippincott Company, 1911), Chapter III, Project Gutenberg, https://www.
gutenberg.org/fles/16230/16230-h/16230-h.htm
117 Robert Tomes, The Bazar-Book of Decorum (New York: Harper & Broth-
ers, 1874), 43. Google Books, https://www.google.com/books/edition/
The_Bazar_Book_of_ Decorum/ftvZIdcu_ IsC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=
phthisical%20heroines
118 Djkstra, Idols of Perversity, 29.
119 Dorothy Dix, “The Girl of Today,” Good Housekeeping 62 (March 1916):
288–291.
120 Dix, 288.
122 Martha H. Verbrugge, Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and
Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1988); Frances B. Cogan, All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real
Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (Athens: The Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 1989).
123 Dix, “The Girl of Today,” 288.
124 Dix, “The Girl of Today,” 289.
3 “The Dropping of Blood
from the Clouds”1
Imperial Vampirism in
Richard Burton’s Vikram
and the Vampire or Tales of
Hindu Devilry
Ardele Haefele-Thomas
When Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton frst published Vikram and
the Vampire or Tales of Hindu Devilry in Fraser’s Magazine in 1868, he
was also serving as the vice president of the Anthropological Society in
London.2 This publication came 15 years prior to his translation, also
from Sanskrit, of The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (translated into English
in 1883) and 17 years prior to the beginning of his three-year publi-
cation process for his translation of The Book of a Thousand Nights
and a Night—the ten-volume set more popularly known as The Arabian
Nights (translated into English between 1885 and 1888). 3 Compared to
these latter two translations, Vikram and the Vampire has received lit-
tle attention; in fact, when Vikram is mentioned, it is often within the
context of it being a precursor to The Arabian Nights rather than a pub-
lication worth studying within its own right. Even in the lengthy and
robust biographies of Burton like Mary S. Lovell’s A Rage to Live: A
Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (1998) and Edward Rice’s Cap-
tain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography (1990), his translation and
publication of Vikram and the Vampire are mentioned only briefy. In
Lovell’s text, she includes a short paragraph about Vikram in the context
of spiritualism in the East and Burton’s explanation of it through this
vampire story.4 Rice becomes briefy sidetracked by “The Vampire’s Sec-
ond Story: Of the Relative Villany of Men and Women” which focuses
on a disabled man and Tantric practices. Rice does, however, posit that
Burton’s description of the Tantric practice was not in the original San-
skrit text and that Burton included his own experience in the description.
Furthermore, Rice also notes that Burton’s studies in Hinduism lead his
teacher to bestow a janeo, the Brahminical thread, upon him: “This was
a rare and unheard of honor for a young man from another culture,
a culture that bore much enmity to Hinduism and everything it repre-
sented.”5 (I will return to Burton’s appropriative, intricate, and problem-
atic position as a White British man whose work supported the British
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-4
48 Ardele Haefele-Thomas
imperial project while he simultaneously displayed a fascination if not
respect for Indian religions, spirituality, and cultural practices.) Beyond
these brief notes, Burton’s other orientalist writings receive much more
attention in these two biographies. Vikram has probably been largely ig-
nored because it is seen as an earlier and less refned work than either the
Kama Sutra or The Arabian Nights. (While The Kama Sutra may have
scandalized polite British society, the text certainly never fell into obscu-
rity; and the romance of The Arabian Nights, from the moment it was
published, captured the Victorian public imagination.) There may be,
though, other important reasons why Burton’s Victorian audience would
have found something inherently disturbing in Vikram which led to it
falling into near obscurity, namely the fnal tale’s portrait of the British
nation generally and individual Britons specifcally as vampiric entities
unleashed upon the Indian landscape. The actual monster in Vikram is
not the Baital (a vampire) whom Raja Vikram is tasked to transport on
his back to an awaiting jogi, but rather the East India Company, Queen
Victoria, and all of the Britons who for well over three centuries were
part of the imperial project—and this includes Burton himself. By inves-
tigating Burton’s translation through a postcolonial and de-colonial lens,
we may gain further insight into the complexities of Burton’s imperial
gaze. Did Burton also experience a sense of imperial guilt or is his trans-
lation of Vikram’s fnal story instead an example of his mockery of both
Indian and British culture within the colonial frame?
Historian and cultural theorist Vikram Singh Amarawat’s essay “Cul-
tural Imperialism and Travel Writing: Glimpses of Richard Burton’s
Travelogue” confronts Burton’s lasting legacy as an imperial author. He
notes that:
the writings of Richard Francis Burton were considered as [the] most

powerful account about oriental culture. Burton’s accounts about
India strongly advocated the supremacy of British legacy…his writ-
ings are very important source material for the cultural history of
19th century India.6
Although Amarawat does not focus on Vikram and the Vampire, his as-
sessment of Burton’s other travelogues are useful in understanding Brit-
ish representations of Indian cultural history in the nineteenth century.7
Burton, in many respects, follows in the footsteps of previous British
men who wrote travelogues about their time spent in India. These writ-
ings often exemplify the ways that the British working for the East India
Company and, after the 1857 Uprising, the British Crown misunder-
stood the nuances and complexities of various parts of Indian culture
while also ignoring ancient Indian names, labels, and rituals. Consider
the following from James Forbes, an eighteenth-century travel writer for
“The Dropping of Blood from the Clouds” 49
the East India Company who, in 1813, published a large four-volume set
of Oriental Memoirs:
Among the followers of an oriental camp, at least of the Mahratta

[sic] camp to which we were attached, I must not omit the hermaph-
rodites; there were a great number of them in the different bazaars,
and I believe all in the capacity of cooks. In mentioning these sin-
gular people, I am aware I tread on tender ground; I cannot solve
doubts and diffculties, nor shall I enter into particulars respecting
them. There were a considerable number of human beings called
hermaphrodites in the camp, who were compelled, by way of distin-
guishing them from other castes, to wear the habit of a female, and
the turban of a man. I was called into a private tent, to a meeting
between the surgeon-major and several medical gentlemen of the
army, to examine some of these people: my visit was short, and the
objects disgusting….8
In his description, Forbes employs the Western term “hermaphrodite”

for the Hijras, a group of people who are a third gender and have ex-
isted in India for over 4,000 years.9 Eurocentric terms like “hermaphro-
dite” and “eunuch” (another word that the British often used for Hijras)
completely denigrate and ignore the long-standing cultural importance
of both the term “Hijra” and the historically sacred duties of Hijras:
blessing weddings and births.10 Before the development of the East India
Company, the Hijras also served as money collectors—and were able to
move between castes in this capacity.11 Of course, part of the demoni-
zation and criminalization of the Hijras came about because of Britain’s
capitalist thrust throughout India. I have included Forbes to exemplify
the consistently myopic lens employed by British imperialists as they ap-
proached India’s rich and nuanced spiritual and cultural practices. As
Amarawat writes:
the outside worlds encountered by European travellers were inter-

preted by them through ideological flters or ways of seeing, pro-
vided by their own cultures and societies….the impetus to trade
with, plunder and conquer these lands also provided a new and cru-
cial framework through which they would interpret other lands and
peoples.12
Burton would certainly have been familiar with Forbes’s writings on

India which were very popular in Britain throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury. Burton’s translation underscores “the supremacy of British legacy”;
however, his work also offers a puzzling amalgamation of conficting
points of view.
Whether one has read Burton’s translation of The Book of the
Thousand Nights and One Night (The Arabian Nights)—indeed,
whether one has actually heard the name Scheherazade—the trope of
the story itself remains frmly planted in the Western cultural imag-
ination. To avoid being beheaded by her husband the king for his
unfounded fears that she will commit adultery, Scheherazade tells him
a compelling story each night so that he is hesitant to kill her until
he hears the fnal tale; and at that point, after 1,000 nights, the king
has fallen in love and spares her life. Often considered a precursor to
The Arabian Nights, Vikram and the Vampire also centers around a
storyteller—a Baital (or Vampire)—who attempts to thwart his listen-
ers (Raja Vikram and his son Dharma Dhwaj) from their course of de-
livering him to an awaiting jogi in a cemetery located two miles away
from the Baital’s tree. Raja Vikram and Dharma Dhwaj have been
tasked by the jogi who sits with monsters and ghouls in one unclean
burning ground to deliver the Baital from another unclean cemetery
and promises long life and great fortune to Raja Vikram upon the de-
livery of the Vampire. The assignment seems straightforward enough
to the two men when they cut the Vampire down from his tree, tie him
onto Vikram’s back, and then begin their trek back to the jogi. The
Vampire takes the time of the journey to tell the two royals various
true stories (the Vampire makes it clear to Vikram that these are true
tales) about topics like women deceiving men, men deceiving women,
thieves, and fools. However, there is a caveat: if Vikram verbally re-
sponds to any of the Vampire’s narratives, the Baital will scramble off
of his back and run back to the cemetery and up into the Mimosa tree
where Vikram initially found him. The Baital continually fools Raja
Vikram by asking questions about each story—whether it is about the
moral of what he has heard or if it is appealing to Raja Vikram’s sense
of intellect and duty, the king is called out time and time again as he
answers the Vampire. The moment Raja Vikram responds, the Baital
shudders, jumps off of his back, and sprints back to the tree where he
hangs upside down like a giant bat until Raja Vikram and Dharma
Dhwaj return to cut him down and tie him onto Vikram’s back once
again. Just at the point that it seems like Vikram will not remem-
ber to stay silent, the Baital relates his fnal story—one that takes a
very different tone than the others—which renders Raja Vikram and
Dharma Dhwaj completely silent. The Baital’s fnal story not only
offers a horrifc premonition of the British imperial and colonial vio-
lence to come, but now, in a twenty-frst-century context with a focus
on both postcolonial theory and de-colonial recovery projects, the
Vampire’s fnal tale also offers a scathing look at imperialism gener-
ally and Queen Victoria and her governing offcials specifcally (in-
cluding men like Burton).
Prefaces: Cultural and Linguistic Colonization
Three years following Richard Burton’s death, Isabel Burton, his widow,
wrote a short preface for a memorial edition of Vikram and the Vam-
pire. She refers to the story as “an old, and thoroughly Hindú, Legend
composed in Sanskrit, and is the germ which culminated in the Arabian
Nights, and which inspired the ‘Golden Ass’ of Apuleius, Boccacio’s ‘De-
camerone,’ the ‘Pentamerone,’ and all that class of facetious fctitious
literature.”13 In her writing this, she argues that her husband’s transla-
tions of these tales of the Baital inspired these other classics. Facetious,
fctitious literature holds both a judgmental tone, but also gives credit to
the stories in Vikram for inspiring works that are considered part of the
Western literary canon. She notes that:
The following translation is rendered peculiarly valuable and inter-

esting by Sir Richard Burton’s intimate knowledge of language. To
all who understand the ways of the East, it is as witty, and as full of
what is popularly called “chaff” as it is possible to be. There is not a
dull page in it, and it will especially please those who delight in the
weird and supernatural, the grotesque, and the wild life.14
By noting the supernatural and the grotesque, she also situates the book
within a fn de siècle Gothic context perhaps for a very different group
of readers than the initial 1868 audience. Clearly, Isabel Burton wants
to continue a narrative of her husband’s importance as a translator as
well as an agent of empire. She discusses Burton’s “intimate knowledge”
of Sanskrit, describes Burton as someone who knows the “ways of the
East,” and appeals to other Britons who “understand the ways of the
East” (clearly these translated stories are not actually for the people
of India). Isabel Burton’s narrative utilizes these terms that convey the
monstrous and otherworldly as Eastern descriptors in order to perhaps
titillate new readers into exploring Burton’s translation. She concludes
with “My husband only gives eleven of the best tales, as it was thought
the translation would prove more interesting in its abbreviated form.”15
The complete original version in Sanskrit of Vikram and the Vampire
includes 25 tales of the Baital. Yet, Isabel Burton underscores her hus-
band’s choosing to edit out 14 of the original stories; it appears that he
has also abbreviated the 11 stories he did choose to include. Clearly,
Vikram in the original form for an Indian audience was longer and more
robust. What Isabel Burton does illustrate here—whether she meant to
or not—was a British impatience with a full Eastern story. Burton’s trun-
cation stands as a metaphor for centuries of British impatience with the
complexity of Indian cultures, languages, and religions. Generally, Bur-
ton’s abbreviation exemplifes a British dismissiveness of Indian culture;
it also underscores Burton’s specifc impatience and disregard. In his ab-
breviation, Burton ensures that his Western audience has no chance of
getting the full narration.
Burton’s abilities as a linguist were impressive, and as a translator,
were incredibly important where the British imperial mission in India
was concerned. For example, as Lachman M. Khubchandani notes in
an essay focusing on Burton and the Sindhi language his “views con-
cerning the Sindhi alphabet…had a decisive role in framing the British
policy about Sindhi script.”16 Seen by his fellow Britons as a linguistic
expert (which he was), Burton’s talents became one of the tools of Brit-
ain’s imperial work in India, where at the level of the written word the
British government would decide policies concerning the ancient written
languages of India. This exemplifes one form of Burton’s linguistic col-
onization as he simultaneously contributed to cultural imperialism. Bur-
ton reasoned that in order to learn languages, he needed to completely
disguise himself as a member of the community within the culture. It is
unclear exactly how much of his long experience disguising himself to
enter into the spaces in Sindh (now Pakistan), India, Mecca, and Medina
he shared with his wife. But, Burton consistently cross-dressed to pass
into spaces—sacred and scandalous—where he should not, as a White
Briton, have gone in order to become an “expert” on the Orient.17
Burton’s imperial gaze, though, is complex and nuanced. For example,
in the frst edition of the book Vikram and the Vampire, he begins by
complimenting the stories from Eastern nations and compares them to
and even holds them above stories from Greece.18 He also calls Sanskrit
“the Latin of India.”19 In recounting the genealogy of the rise of Raja
Vikram, the hero of the tales, Burton explains that his name means “Sun
of Heroism,” and that he “plays in India the part of King Arthur.”20
While Burton’s comments are positive, these comparisons exemplify the
ways Burton imposes Western signifers on Eastern stories generally and
the Sanskrit language specifcally. He also claims Raja Vikram as an In-
dian King Arthur. Granted, part of why he employed these comparisons
was to get his British audience interested in reading, but this imbrication
of Western stories, language, and heroes over Eastern stories, language,
and heroes still remains. Burton admits to his readership: “It is not pre-
tended that the words of these Hindu tales are preserved to the letter.”21
He explains further: “I have ventured to remedy the conciseness [em-
phasis mine] of their language, and to clothe the skeleton with fesh
and blood.”22 Burton conveys his biased notion that the Sanskrit is not
hearty enough. Ironically, his translations cannot add “fesh and blood”
when, in fact, he exsanguinates the full story.
In his essay on Burton and his travelogues, Amarawat argues that
Burton’s writings become a part of the construction of a British “colo-
nial epistemology” that further enables “cultural imperialism” and is
“an integral part of… colonial discourse.”23 He discusses Burton’s:
motives behind what is being depicted and the ways in which such
a depiction is used or is liable for use in future…The travelogues of
Burton can be easily seen as a project to provide legitimacy to British
colonial domination over India. 24
Although Vikram is not a travelogue, Burton’s omission of stories and

“remedying the conciseness of their language” underscores Amarawat’s
argument. A large part of this British colonial domination also relied
on Western notions of the gender binary and ideas of Western mascu-
linity specifcally. These gender issues are quite complex and crop up
on numerous occasions throughout Burton’s translation. In the Preface,
the audience is offered a quick glimpse into what feminist de-colonial
scholar Sikita Banerjee calls “muscular nationalism” when Burton ex-
plains the rise of Vikram to the position of Raja when a different ruler
who “reigned 25 years, but giving himself up to effeminacy, his country
was invaded by Shakáditya, a king from the highlands of Kumaon.”25
Banerjee explains that the:
confation of manhood and national progress was an integral part

of British imperial expansion…the linkage between British notions
of hegemonic masculinity and imaginings of empire has been a
topic of contemporary research. Inherent in this relationship is the
pejorative judgement of the conquered. 26
There is a plethora of ways that this ruler could be seen to have “given
himself up to effeminacy.” The Victorian audience could have read this
as code for homosexuality; they could have read this as a descriptor
of his country’s invasion; or this could be another example of a toxic
Western masculinity feeling the need to feminize (perhaps to more eas-
ily colonize) Eastern men. According to Indira Ghose, Burton was im-
patient with Britain’s pre-1857 approach to colonization: “He [Burton]
expatiates at length upon his political views for managing the unruly
population, strongly advocating military rule as the only form of gover-
nance suitable to Orientals.”27
Introducing Raja Vikram, Gothic Landscapes, and a

Chatty Vampire
Burton’s notions of British imperial masculinity are certainly in place as
“ideological flters” when he introduces his audience to Raja Vikram.
He begins the tale in the distant past: “Some nineteen centuries ago,
the renowned city of Ujjayani witnessed the birth of a prince to whom
was given a gigantic name Vikramaditya. Even the Sanskrit-speaking
people, who are not usually pressed for time, shortened it to ‘Vikram,’
and a little further West it would infallibly have been docked down to
‘Vik.’”28 Here, we are introduced to the future Raja Vikram by way
of the Western compression of his name. It is interesting to note that
Burton, for the duration of these tales, goes with the Sanskrit short-
ened version “Vikram” as opposed to moving forward with the Western
“Vik.” Once Vikram becomes Raja Vikram, he spends time wandering
over his lands until he returns home for the Holi Season. Shortly after
this particular Holi Season, Raja Vikram decides to set his sights on
“good government and to eradicating the abuses which had crept into
the administration during the period of his wanderings” and that “he
began the work of reform with an iron hand.”29 In his new aggressive
ruling methods, Vikram becomes more and more misogynistic; he sus-
pects that all women are evil and at the root of wrongdoing where men
are concerned: “For there can be nothing thoroughly and entirely bad
unless a woman is at the bottom of it.”30 The ultra-masculinization of
Raja Vikram supports what Banerjee refers to as a muscular national-
ism; however, Burton adds a layer of complexity to this masculinization
when he alters the wording concerning austere husbandly devotion as
part of their manly duties. Burton includes a footnote where he explains,
“In the original only the husband ‘practiced austere devotion.’ For the
beneft of those amongst whom the ‘pious wife’ is an institution, I have
extended the privilege.”31 Burton invokes the Victorian Angel of the
House for his British audience; he may actually have noted the growing
readership of women by the mid-nineteenth century. These seemingly
disparate views of masculinity, femininity, and proper binary gender
roles in India as well as in Britain that appear in Burton’s translation will
become even more convoluted and complex in the Vampire’s fnal story.
One day, a merchant who is a devotee to Vikram and has bribed the
Raja with pieces of fruit that contain valuable rubies, begs Raja Vikram
and Dharma Dhwaj to meet him at night:
I am about to perform spells, incantations and magical rites on the

banks of the river Godavari, in a large smashana, a cemetery where
bodies are burned. By this means the Eight Powers of Nature will all
become mine. This thing I ask of you as alms, that you and the young
prince Dharma Dhwaj will pass one night with me, doing my bid-
ding. By you remaining near me my incantations will be successful.32
Vikram is not beyond fattery and bribery, so although he is not com-

fortable with the idea of the cemetery, on the appointed night, he and his
son sneak out of the palace—armed with swords—to go to the cemetery
on the riverbank. What they fnd there at the impure ground flls them
both with horror (and tests their masculinity):
There was an outer circle of hideous bestial forms; tigers were roar-
ing, and elephants were trumpeting; wolves, whose foul hairy coats
blazed with sparks of bluish phosphoric light, were devouring the
remnants of human bodies; foxes, jackals, and hyenas were disput-
ing over their prey; whilst bears were chewing the livers of chil-
dren. The space within was peopled by a multitude of fends. There
were the subtle bodies of men that had escaped their grosser frames
prowling about the charnel ground, where their corpses had been
reduced to ashes, or hovering in the air, waiting till the new bodies
which they were to animate were made ready for reception. 33
The tainted ground crawls with hideous beasts and the undead wait-
ing to animate new bodies. In the middle of this horrifc scene sits
Shanta-Shil, a jogi:
clad in the ochre-coloured loin-wrap of his class…his face was

smeared with ashes from a funeral pyre, and his eyes, fxed as those
of a statue gleamed from this mask with an infernal light of hate.
His cheeks were shaven, and he had not forgotten to draw the hori-
zontal sectarian mark. But this was of blood… he was playing upon
a human skull with two shank bones, making music for the horrid
revelry.34
Amarawat notes that “Burton tried to present cultural superiority over

the Oriental world. He was profoundly prejudiced by imperialism and
British colonial concerns. He infers his surroundings for the readers,
displaying his own system of values.”35 The imagery in this scene is rife
with all of the racist Western ideas of cannibalism, including some of
the worst stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as historically described by
colonizers. Note the jogi’s banging on a human skull with shank bones
as drumsticks—whether the beasts or the jogi have killed this person
is unclear. And the jogi has drawn the sectarian mark with what may
presumably be human blood.
Just as Vikram and Dharma Dhwaj are ready to fee the nightmare be-
fore them, the jogi assigns them their mission: walk two miles to another
impure burning ground, fnd a Baital (Vampire) hanging from a Mimosa
tree, cut it down, and then deliver it back and the jogi will ensure they
live long and prosperous lives. Through a raging storm on a road lined
with “unclean goblins” and snakes dripping blood from their mouths,
the father and son eventually reach the second burning ground where
they fnd the Baital hanging in the tree:
by the toe-tips, its drawn muscles stood out as if they were ropes
of coir. Blood it appeared to have none, or there would have been a
decided determination of that curious juice to the head; and as the
Raja handled its skin, it felt icy cold and clammy as might a snake.
The only sign of life was the whisking of a ragged little tail much
resembling a goat’s. Judging from these signs the brave king at once
determined the creature to be a Baital—a Vampire. 36
In a footnote, Burton comments on the Baital’s hair being brown in-

stead of black—he notes that “Hindus admire only glossy black hair; the
‘bonny brown hair’ loved by our ballads is assigned by them to low-caste
men, witches, and fends.”37 This is an interesting distinction between
Anglo and Indian here—Burton notes a racial difference, but this also
hints at the ways that Indians see the British as monstrous. After seven
attempts, the Baital allows Vikram to cut him out of the tree and tie him
onto his back for the two-mile journey back to the jogi. Of course, there
is the caveat that Raja Vikram and Dharma Dhwaj have to listen to the
Vampire’s true stories and that:
Whenever thou answerest me, either compelled by Fate or entrapped

by my cunning into so doing…I leave thee and return to my favou-
rite place…but when thou shalt remain silent, confused, and at a
loss to reply, either through humility or thereby confessing thine
ignorance, and impotence…then will I allow thee, of mine own free
will, to place me before thine employer. 38
The Baital challenges Vikram’s masculinity here and puts him in a

double bind. If Vikram answers the Vampire, it means he has been
outwitted; however, if Vikram chooses silence, it could be out of hu-
mility or it could be because of “ignorance and impotence,” neither
of which exemplifes manliness. Raja Vikram cannot let a social sub-
ordinate best him as a Brahmin and as a fgure of masculine power.
Over the course of ten of these tales that study morality from explo-
rations of the relationships between men and women, a story about a
thief, a story about fools, and even a story about magic pills, Vikram
continually forgets to be silent. Raja Vikram is full of pride and thus
he feels compelled to comment at the end of each one of the Baital’s
tellings—and the Baital also tempts Raja Vikram with questions—
appealing to Raja Vikram’s immense ego by asking for his words of
wisdom at the end of each story. Each time, the Baital goes running
back to the tree and each time Raja Vikram has to extricate his sinewy
body from that tree and carry the Vampire on his back. Finally, the
Vampire lands on a true story that leaves Raja Vikram and Dharma
Dhwaj stunned into silence.
“The Vampire’s Eleventh Story, Which Puzzles

Raja Vikram”
Unlike the previous ten stories which start with the Vampire setting the
scene (the frst story opens in Benares, the second in the city of Bhogavati,
the third in the city of Bardwan, etc.), the tone of the Baital’s voice be-
comes pensive and the audience is not offered a concrete location. The
Vampire simply begins with:
There is a queer time coming, O Raja Vikram!—a queer time

coming… a queer time coming. Elderly people like you talk abun-
dantly about the good old days that were, and about the degeneracy
of the days that are. I wonder what you would say if you could but
look forward a few hundred years. 39
Here, the Baital discusses what Vikram sees as degeneracy in his own
time; however, the degeneracy to come will be what the British impose
on Indian society: their own laws, their own rules, and their own sense
of degeneracy. British degeneracy will be imported to India in the Bai-
tal’s future. The Vampire continues to narrate that:
Brahmans shall disgrace themselves by become soldiers and being

killed, and Serviles (Shudras) shall dishonour themselves by wearing
the thread of the twice-born, and by refusing to be slaves; in fact,
society shall be all “mouth” and mixed castes.40
In other words, Indian traditions will be ignored, which is true once the
British arrive without a complete understanding or respect for the cul-
tures, societies, languages, religions, and diverse communities through-
out India. The Vampire warns Raja Vikram that the entire Indian way of
life will be destroyed, to the point that the Vampire has to stop the tale
because he is overcome by “a severe shaking.”41
There does seem to be a sense of irony when the Baital continues to tell
Vikram that this strange time will see the practice of widow burning and
the burial of live children “become utterly unfashionable.”42 Clearly, the
Vampiric storyteller laments that at least these bad things will come un-
der scrutiny. Burton hints that the arrival of the British will curtail these
barbaric practices. At just the moment when the reader may think that
Burton is ready to make an argument that imperialism is actually good
for India (there is reason to think he did believe this), the Vampire’s story
takes a radical turn when the Baital continues to tell Vikram that “the
consequence of this singular degeneracy, O mighty Vikram, will be that
strangers shall dwell beneath the roof tree in Bharat Khanda (India), and
impure barbarians [emphasis mine] shall call the land their own.”43 In
the following line, the Baital says:
They come from a wonderful country, and I am most surprised that

they bear it. The sky which ought to be gold and blue is grey, a kind
of dark white; the sun looks deadly pale, and the moon as if he were
dead.44
The Vampire juxtaposes this notion of a “wonderful country” wonder-
ing how “they bear it” and then discusses the ways that the very sky,
sun, and moon are devoid of all color—perhaps because they signify a
space that is more unclean (Britain) and that the Britons are more un-
dead than the narrating Baital. He calls out the colonizers as less than
human with their skewed sense of nature and the world. Burton openly
mocks his fellow Britons here; however, this may not be out of any sense
of concern for India, but rather another example of the ways that Burton
constantly few in the face of British convention.
The Vampire continues his description about how White the people
are—men, women, and children—claiming that the children are the
whitest of the White. Although the vampire narrates the story, in reality,
this strange washed-out whiteness of the British signifes their vampir-
ism. They disregard Indian customs, including according to the Baital
that “They will eat all food indifferently, domestic fowls, onions, hogs
fed in the street, donkeys, horses, hares, and (most horrible!) the fesh of
the sacred cow.”45 This list of the food that the “white Pariahs” will eat
offends numerous religions found within India. The mention of the hogs
and cow together, though, would certainly call to mind the catalyst for
the 1857 Uprising when Hindu and Muslim soldiers rebelled after being
informed that their ammunition had been greased by pig and cow fat.
Burton’s translation can be read as satiric in tone, but I think Burton has
removed himself from this Orient/Occident binary by way of satirizing
both. Burton’s actual intent may not be important here; the satire could
have been lost on many of his British readers. In other words, at a literal
level, the British audience could have read itself as devoid of color, de-
void of life—in short, vampiric.
As the Vampire continues his story, the picture of the coming imperial
nightmare becomes even more horrifc and caught up in a discussion
about gender and women in power. He notes that British men are effem-
inized by “their” women:
these wonderful white outcasts will often be ruled by female chiefs,

and it is likely that the habit of prostrating themselves before a
woman who has not the power of cutting off a single head, may
account for their unusual degeneracy and uncleanness.46
White women will be seen as equal to men, which emasculates them.

He refers to the female chiefs helping to cause all of this normative
gender disruption—and again, of course, we are to recall Queen Victo-
ria. Burton continues to rebel against authority by making a mockery
out of Queen Victoria and her rule. This does not, though, necessar-
ily point to any sort of anti-imperial sentiment on Burton’s part. As
Ghose argues, Burton did not necessarily empathize with the people
and the cultures in his travels. She, instead, reads his writings and his
various escapades in disguise as just another form of demonstrating
his belief in the “cultural superiority of the British.”47 The Baital dis-
cusses the fact that these White women will not allow non-monogamy,
and that wives will not be enslaved. So, at the moment that Burton’s
translation may help make British women feel empowered, the Baital
then compares their scolding to a “braying ass” and notes that they
do not cover their White faces but display them “without the least
sense of shame.”48 The Baital claims that the White women will send
their grown children out of the house, which can be read as a direct
criticism of the Victorian Angel of the House narrative. Worst of all,
the Vampire tells Vikram that once the White women are widowed,
they will look to marry again rather than throwing themselves on their
husband’s funeral pyre.49
In this fnal tale, the Baital gives Vikram a future history lesson when
he says that the White Pariahs will frst “hire a shop near the mouth of
mother Ganges, and they will sell lead and bullion, fne and coarse wool-
len cloths, and all the materials for intoxication,” which is sacrilege for
many of the religions in India. 50 Here, the Vampire foretells the coming
of the East India Company and describes the degeneration of the capi-
talist venture that, at least on the surface, presented itself as an arrange-
ment for the trade of goods into a violent military takeover of India.
The Baital’s story mirrors the evolution of imperial violence and colonial
rule as it was rolled out over India—from a 1,600 business enterprise
to Queen Victoria’s reign of pillaging the entire country to become the
Empress of India. The Baital notes that in this evolution, “the power
of their star and the enchantments of their Queen Kompani, a daina or
witch who can draw the blood out of a man and slay him with a look
[emphasis mine], will turn everything to their good.”51 The East India
Company was established under Queen Elizabeth I; however, given the
chronology of the story, it seems that the Baital is, in fact, pointing spe-
cifcally to Queen Victoria. Her ability to “draw the blood out of a man”
gives her vampiric qualities. Ultimately, the Baital discusses India’s mass
destruction at the hands of the British.
This eleventh story is the one that renders Raja Vikram completely
silent. We may wonder why Burton chose to include this eleventh tale.
Amarawat considers the complexity of Richard Burton’s position in the
British imperial project as well as the complexity of his own motives and
feelings within this context:
He conducted an intellectually ambitious, highly provocative in-

quiry into racial, religious, and sexual differences that also exposed
his own society’s norms to scrutiny [emphasis mine]. Richard Bur-
ton turned out as imperial agent from an army subaltern….
Burton’s legacy is more complex than individualism precisely be-
cause in his writing we can fnd exemplifed the struggle between
individualism and a strong feeling of national identifcation with
Europe (specifcally England) as an imperial power in the East.
Burton thought of himself both as a rebel against authority and as
a potential agent of authority in the East. 52
Neither Amarawat nor I make any attempt to reclaim Captain Sir Richard
Francis Burton as some sort of radical underground anti-imperialist—he
certainly beneftted from his orientalist work and he proudly carried out
his various missions for Queen and Crown. But with the eleventh story
in Vikram and the Vampire, we should consider his decision to include
a story that brutally and honestly pinpoints the British as the true vam-
piric entity which consumed India through a slow and brutal process
lasting over 400 years that drained the language, culture, and religion
out of the region. Burton may have, on some level, experienced a sense
of imperial guilt. I think it is more likely though that Burton’s transla-
tion of Vikram and the Vampire was just another linguistic adventure in
which he manipulated the Sanskrit language to entertain (and even make
fun of) his British audience—many of whom were armchair adventurers.
What we are left with is a precise depiction of Britain’s long and tortuous
bloodletting of India.
Notes
1 Sir Richard F. Burton, Isabel Burton, and Ernest Griset, The Memorial Edi-
tion of the Works of Captian Sir Richard F. Burton; Volume V. Vikram and
the Vampire, or Tales of Hindu Devilry (London: Tylston and Edwards,
1870, reprinted by Leopold Classic Library), 228. All references to Vikram
and the Vampire will be to this reprint of the 1870 frst edition of the book.
2 Fraser’s Magazine. April 1868. Accessed March 19, 2021. https://burtoniana.
org/minor/by-year/1860-1869/burton-1868-frasers-vikram.pdf. WhileVikram
and the Vampire is a translation of the Indian Vampire (Baital) tales, it is crit-
ical to remember that Burton viewed his work—whether translating fction,
writing travelogues, or studying various cultures around the world—through
a Western Eurocentric anthropological lens.
3 Richard F. Burton, The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. Accessed March 22,
2021. https://burtoniana.org/books/1883-Kama%20Sutra/index.htm
The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night. Accessed March 22,
2021. https://burtoniana.org/books/1885-Arabian%20Nights/.
4 Mary S. Lovell, A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 643.
5 Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography (Cam-
bridge, MA: De Capo Press, 1990), 75.
6 Vikram S. Amarawat, “Cultural Imperialism and Travel Writing,” Proceed-
ings of the Indian History Congress 77 (2016): 648–649.
7 In the context of the publication of Burton’s translation of Vikram, frst in
Fraser’s Magazine in 1868 in London and in the frst edition book form in
1870, it is critical to consider the historic context of the rapidly changing
imperial and colonial relationship between Britain and India at this time.
Following the Indian Uprising of 1857, the British changed their approach
to imperial rule. The East India Company, which had been in existence since
1600 under Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, no longer governed India and the power
was transferred to the Crown. Twenty years after the 1857 Uprising, Queen
Victoria becomes the Empress of India on January 1, 1877. See Lottie Gold-
fnch, “Queen Victoria: How and Why Did She Become Empress of India?”
History Extra: The Offcial Website for BBC History Magazine and BBC
History Revealed. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.historyextra.
com/period/victorian/victoria-rise-of-an-empress/. This 20-year period was
marked by fuctuating approaches to imperialism. From the East India Com-
pany, which had been established to take advantage of trade (capital) to
Queen Victoria becoming Empress of a country she never set foot in, the
ways colonization shifted also changed the ways that Britons understood
imperialism in India. And, of course, the changing and increasingly violent
approaches (particularly following the Uprising) negatively affected the peo-
ple of India on a daily basis. Burton would have been translating Vikram
and the Vampire in the years following the initial Indian Uprising.
8 James Forbes, Oriental Memoirs: Selected and Abridge from a Series of Fa-
miliar Letters Written during Seventeen Years Residence in India: Includ-
ing Observations on Parts of Africa and South America, and a Narrative
of Occurrences in Four Indian Voyages, 4 vols. (London: Printed for the
Author by T. Bensley, Bolt Court. Published by White, Cochrane, and Co.
Horace’s Head, Fleet Street, 1813), 2:62. Available at Stanford University
Special Collections.
9 See Serena Nanda’s various works on Hijras, specifcally her 1990 ethnog-
raphy Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India (Belmont, CA: Wad-
sworth Press, 1990).
10 Many of the colonial anti-sodomy laws that the British imported to India
threw Hijras under the “sodomite” umbrella because they were defned as
“hermaphrodites” and/or seen as “cross-dressers” which was “proof” of
homosexuality in nineteenth-century Britain. This consistently happens
throughout imperial history—the misunderstanding of gender diversity for
homosexuality—and the laws are swift to punish gender nonconformity,
which is measured against Western White notions of normative masculinity
specifcally.
11 Laurence W. Preston, “A Right to Exist: Eunuchs and the State in
Nineteenth-Century India,” Modern Asian Studies 21, no. 2 (1987): 371–387.
12 Amarawat, “Cultural Imperialism,” 646.
13 Sir Richard F. Burton et al., Vikram and the Vampire, xi.
14 Burton, Vikram, xii.
15 Burton, Vikram, xii.
16 Lachman M. Khubchandani, “Sir Richard Burton and Sindhi Language,”
Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 66, no. 1/4 (1985):
261.
17 See Indira Ghose, “Imperial Player: Richard Burton in Sindh,” Travel Writ-
ing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Spaces, ed. Tim Youngs
(London: Anthem Press, 2006), 71–86. Ghose discusses Burton’s numer-
ous cross-dressing escapades to gain access into various spaces he should
not have entered: a harem, Mecca (this is probably the most well-known
example), and an Indian boy brothel. Burton’s outrageous actions (seen as
outrageous by the British as well as the people in the places where Britons
were not meant to go) exemplify his cultural disregard and disrespect while
still stoking the imagination of a particularly romanticized toxic White mas-
culinity. An example of the latter is Chris Parker’s 2016 essay for Adventure
Journal entitled “Historical Badass: Explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton.”
Accessed July 1, 2021. https://www.adventure-journal.com/2016/06/
historical-badass-explorer-sir-richard-francis-burton/.
18 Burton, Vikram, xiii.
19 Burton, Vikram, xvii.
20 Burton, Vikram, xviii.
21 Burton, Vikram, xxi.
22 Burton, Vikram, xxi.
24 Amarawat, “Cultural Imperialism,” 644–645.
25 Burton, Vikram, xix.
26 Sikata Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire
in India and Ireland, 1914–2004 (New York: New York University Press,
2012), 21.
27 Ghose, “Imperial Player,” 75.
28 Burton, Vikram, 1.
31 Burton, Vikram, 13 (footnote 1).
33 Burton, Vikram, 31–32.
36 Burton, Vikram, 35–36.
37 Burton, Vikram, 35 (footnote 2).
47 Ghose, “Imperial Player,” 77.
52 Amarawat, “Cultural Imperialism,” 645–646.
4 Curating the Vampire
Queer (Un)Natural Histories
in Carmilla
Lin Young
Joseph Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla ends with a question of categori-

zation. As the narrator Laura thinks back on her relationship to the
fendish and romantic vampire Carmilla, she is torn between remem-
bering her as “sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes
the writhing fend.”1 This failure of categorization is the culmination
of a book obsessed with the vampire as a fundamentally uncategorize-
able creature—both through the pseudoscientifc reports of Laura’s male
companions designating the vampire as a horrifc monster and through
Laura’s own narrative attempts to reconstruct Carmilla’s beauty and ro-
mance via the unstable province of memory. In many ways, the book
functions as a project of warring defnitions. While the men attempt to
categorize and catalogue the vampire as a scientifc object that can be
understood and vanquished, Laura’s own narration, with its slow em-
brace of paradoxical ambiguities, frequently blurs and undermines their
efforts. As such, we must place this battle of categorization into context
with one of the most powerful modes of data organization popular in
the nineteenth century: the museum.
The Victorian natural history museum was built on principles pertain-
ing to the organized display of nature. Such discourses of arrangement
and categorization, shaped by the advancement of Victorian science,
were symbolic of England’s power over nature. These categorical im-
pulses in Carmilla are embodied by the male scientists, doctors, and
specialists around her, who continually attempt to intrude upon Laura’s
narrative. The vampire, after all, poses a particular challenge to the cu-
rator and their categorical systems of arrangement—is it living or dead?
Animal or human? Human or monster? The vampire’s disruptions of the
novel’s categorical arrangements both frustrate the museum impulses of
the text’s scientifc curators and also establish her as an actively Queer
infuence on the text. Queerness, as it is modelled through the “uncate-
gorizeable” vampire state in the novella, is represented as a persistent de-
stabilization of all forms of categorization—be they sexual, biological,
or sociological. As Patricia MacCormack writes, “Defning, signifying,
classifying, and placing certain kinds of subjects into a hierarchy is an
act, which is based not on the quality or essence of an entity but by the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-5
64 Lin Young
powers that constitute the capacity to defne.”2 Similarly, MacCormack
writes that “Queer theory emerged as a response to the persistence of
polarity in sexual identity, suggesting that sexuality is mobile, meta-
phoric, and ambiguous,”3 which might also describe several qualities
that defne the vampire state in Carmilla. From the perspective of the
text’s male characters, the vampire’s frustration of museum defnitions
of the natural world is monstrous specifcally because of its inherently
Queer powers of disassembly, which work against the paternalistic
systems of museum arrangement and defnition. In comparison, Lau-
ra’s own narrative contributions are notably less structured. Her use of
dreams, phantasmagorias, and nebulous chronology refects a resistance
to maintaining logical order, assembly, and sequence that is refective
of a failed curatorial gaze. Instead, over time, Laura’s narration slowly
begins to favour the vampire’s more radical dissolution of boundaries,
structures, and categories. This chapter thus examines the infuence of
the museum gaze on Laura’s narrative attempts to ‘curate’ the vampire
through a conscious breakdown of narrative order that refects the vam-
pire’s own uncategorizeability. In this way, Laura’s ambivalent sympathy
for the ‘uncategorizeable’ Carmilla represents an engagement with the
question of sure categorization as defned by the museum—examining
both the joys and terrors of confronting a lack of stability in all forms of
biological and social categories.
This chapter seeks to establish the logics of the museum (and the
larger Victorian preoccupations with data and display that the museum
embodies) as underlying inspirations for boundary-dissolving monsters
such as the vampire. First, it suggests that the vampire’s state of being is
horrifc specifcally because it frustrates all forms of data and categori-
cal arrangement, undermining the power structures inherent in the mu-
seum. Second, this dissolution of categories presents an inherently Queer
outlook that is not only potently signifed by Carmilla’s sexuality, but
also extends to include a resistance to all categories and binaries. Third,
the vampire’s powers of Queer dissolution are positioned by the text as
most dangerous due to its ability to force its mortal victims to confront
their own personal lack of stable categories. This chapter reads the novel
as a battle between the power of categorical knowledge (represented by
the male characters’ devotion to museum categorization) and a resis-
tance to stable categorical knowledge (personifed by Laura’s ambivalent
and paradoxical refusal to commit to museum categorization in her own
narration) over the novel’s central problem: defning the vampire.
The Museum Gaze

Victorians attached a lot of meaning to museums. Generally, they fa-
voured a mode of observational learning inspired by orderly arrange-
ments of specimens. A Visit to the British Museum claims that the
Curating the Vampire 65
“modern” museum’s “arrangement, preservation, and exhibition of the
objects” was an improvement on the museums of the ancient world,
which merely employed “persons…[from] whom visitors…receive[d]
oral instruction.”4 Instead, the nineteenth-century museum favoured
“printed works” and “[d]escriptions or rather notices of the curiosi-
ties.”5 It also sought to legitimize collecting as a scientifc discipline and
delegitimize the curiosity cabinet of former centuries, which contained
specimens selected for their novelty as opposed to their logical arrange-
ment. Yanni writes that the “cabinet of curiosity—a glorious summation
of knowledge for the Renaissance or Baroque collector—was disorga-
nized and nearly useless by the standards of the nineteenth century.”6
Victorian curators preferred a strict system of categorization that would
contextualize what visitors saw in the displays. The emergence of the
natural history museum in the nineteenth century was thus designed not
only to collect but to curate, establishing rational categories for the ob-
jects that museums were amassing. Yanni writes: “Behind such technical
concerns as…display techniques lay questions of the deepest concern to
Victorians: …how could nature best be presented…?”7 The Victorian
impulse both to categorize and control the natural world thus under-
pinned every decision of the museum. In 1862, the superintendent of
the natural history department of the British Museum, Richard Owen,
wrote that to “bring together collections of objects from the different
kingdoms of Nature, and to arrange them in an orderly series, with a
view to minister… the instruction… and innocent pleasures of the peo-
ples”8 is the chief goal of the museum. Siegel writes: “Owen aims for
a middle ground between the cabinet of curiosity and the scientifc re-
search museum. He describes a form of display that will provoke wonder
and provide instruction for the general public.”9 To defne and order the
natural world in a way that would communicate meaning to the general
population was, to curators like Owen, the museum’s responsibility.
The philosophies of the museum so permeated English-speaking so-
ciety as to infltrate multiple facets of daily life, from the specialized
sciences to household management. As Black writes: “Victorian soci-
ety constructed museums, celebrated and criticized museums, attended
museums, worked in museums, wrote about museums, and collected in
homage to museums.”10 This extended from public museum to private
museum, as “[m]iddle and upper-class parlours commonly displayed an
aquarium, terrarium, or shell collection… [exhibits of] ornamental taxi-
dermy, often a collection of birds,”11 etc. Cassell’s Household Guide in-
cludes instructions for taxidermy and aquariums, writing that “the study
of all animal and vegetable life” was an “elevating infuence”12 and “the
particularities of the class to which the plants belong… are…a source
of endless…education.”13 Black writes that Richard Kerr’s The English
Gentleman’s House (1865), which describes the ideal room-by-room ar-
rangement of English households, “reveals the museum’s infuence” as
66 Lin Young
something “more deeply embedded” in a “vision of the British domestic
space.”14 This vision extended to include the museum’s powers of so-
cialization. Black describes the museum as being part of “the nationalist
commitment to improved public taste through mass education.”15 In On
the Educational Uses of Museums (1853–1854), Forbes, for example,
praised the museum for its use of taxidermy to impart lessons on human
social structures. He writes: “It is not the objects themselves that [man]
sees there and wonders at… so much as the order and evident science
which he cannot but recognize in the manner in which they are grouped
and arranged.”16 Swinney suggests such language reveals that “the or-
dered arrangement of the museum menagerie (as a whole) has vitality in
directing (human) social structures,” wherein the visitor recognizes “his
proper place in the natural order of the world—a place from which he
should not seek to stray.”17 In 1847, W.I. Bicknell highlighted the British
museum’s systems of categorization as both educational and socializing,
writing that “it is delightful to see what a moral renovation is being
accomplished amongst the working classes.”18 These quotes illustrate
the ways in which the categorical arrangement of the museum sought to
position Victorian socialization as inherently good, natural, and power-
ful through the juxtaposition of the ordered natural world alongside the
similarly ordered world of civilization. Here, the museum reveals itself
as a space wherein nature can be organized not merely as a method of
asserting human dominance and power, but also as a means by which
arrangement worked to maintain the structures of human society itself.
In this way, we can observe how the museum’s goals to order and ar-
range the natural world were largely motivated by a paternalistic, colo-
nialist ego. As MacCormack writes, the “history of teratology has been
a history of powers,”19 and Black adds that “Victorian culture was a
museum culture brought to fruition by key…social and cultural forces,”
including both “advances in science and changing attitudes about
knowledge” and “British involvement in imperialism.”20 The ordered
museum, and the mastery over nature it implied, stood as a materializa-
tion of Britain’s empire. Its organization and rhetoric relied on narratives
of control and categorization as a means of establishing British knowl-
edge as immense and superior and its peoples as evolved due to their un-
derstanding of Britain’s social structures as similarly natural, rational,
and stable. To Owen, the museum embodied an essential narrative of
British supremacy, as the “greatest commercial and colonizing empire
of the world…ennoble[s] herself with that material symbol of advance
in the march of civilisation which a Public Museum of Natural History
embodies.”21 W.S.W. Ruschenberger, in an 1876 museum guide, claims
“to expose Truth in her nakedness, stripped of the distorting disguises
[…that…] hide her charms from the gaze of mankind, are among the
objects of the natural sciences,”22 depicting the museum’s work as akin
to voyeurism and domination. Here, the natural sciences are depicted as
a powerful, truth-seeking force, likening the acquisition of knowledge
to the exposure of ‘unknowable’ but feminized bodies. Forbes similarly
depicts the museum in language that blurs boundaries between pater-
nalism and ecology: the museum must “cast the seeds of science over the
broad felds of British Industry… especially in those places where there is
a good soil thirsting for their germination.”23 These curators depict the
museum as a visualization of might, ego, dominance, and paternalism—
the very qualities of British Imperialism.
The writings of men like Forbes, Ruschenberger, and Owen, which
oversaw the rise of the museum into a major social force, thus represent
the origins of a ‘museum gaze’—a gaze that connects looking and cate-
gorizing to successful social and cultural dominance. This gaze, which
uses the language of the museum and specifcally the curator, sees myr-
iad connections between biological categories and social ones. The ‘mu-
seum gaze’ thus seeks to consolidate power and control through strict
and stable defnitions of categorization, utilizing authority over the nat-
ural world as a model for authority over social structures. Crucially, the
museum gaze Gordon Fyfe and Max Ross argue that museum visiting,
even today, is “a social practice which varies between groups in terms of
their underlying dispositions to look.”24 These practices, Fyfe and Ross
argue, reveal that the “theoretical signifcance of the museum is partly
that it is a meeting point of the social organization of visual capacities
and the visualization of social relations.”25 By looking to the nineteenth
century, we can begin to understand how the language of the museum
was often appropriated to hierarchize such social relations, applying the
then-new scientifc logics of the natural world to human social systems.
Carmilla Beneath the Museum Gaze

While Carmilla does not feature any museums, it nevertheless centres
around the categorization of both natural and ‘unnatural’ subjects. One
of the frst concerns of the novella has to do with Englishness itself as a
category. One of Laura’s frst descriptions of herself is “My father is En-
glish, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England.”26 In
this description, Laura both is and is not English, socialized in English
culture (speaking English with her father “from patriotic motives”27)
without ever having been to England. The categorical label here bears
more power than geographical space or experience, and introduces an
early preoccupation with categorization in the text. Thus, while le Fanu
himself was Irish, I argue that such examples demonstrate the infuences
of a widespread global museum gaze on Carmilla.
More broadly, Carmilla is awash in the scientifc jargon of the mu-
seum. The narrative is structured as one of Dr. Hesselius’s pseudosci-
entifc case studies, an attempt to treat the “mysterious subject” of the
vampire “with his usual learning and acumen.”28 This frame invokes
68 Lin Young
scientifc curation overtly by situating the vampire as the unknowable
‘subject’ to the learned curator and Dr. Hesselius as a specialist in ‘un-
natural’ history. The Baron is another curator who has “devoted himself
to the minute and laborious investigation of the marvellously authenti-
cated tradition of Vampirism” and who “had at his fngers’ ends all the
great and little works upon the subject.”29 Having taken up his own
systematic study, his musings on the vampire’s biological functions are
reliant upon “a thousand” texts through which he has devised “a system
of principles that appear to govern—some always, and others occasion-
ally only—the condition of the vampire.”30 His questions are deeply en-
gaged in scientifc inquiry: “How does it begin, and how does it multiply
itself?”31 He further catalogues the “amphibious”32 vampire’s habits,
making claims about “the nature of vampires to increase and multiply…
according to an ascertained and ghostly law.”33 In this description, the
Baron depicts the vampire’s ‘nature’ as categorizable, but still funda-
mentally ‘unnatural.’ It nevertheless exists, he argues, according to a
particular system of laws which are not yet fully understood.
Both Hesselius and the Baron, bracketing Laura’s narrative, seek to
catalogue and defne the ‘unknowable.’ Laura’s doctor and father vocal-
ize this same tension:
“…I do wonder at a wise man like you. What do you say to hippog-
riffs and dragons?”
[…]
“Nevertheless life and death are mysterious states, and we know
little of the resources of either.”34
Here, Laura’s father positions learned wisdom against belief in the fan-
tastical. However, the doctor suggests that life and death, processes of
the natural world, are themselves unknowable, as men know “little”
of their “resources.” This establishes the goal of the men in the text:
to understand Carmilla, and thus the vampire, as a specimen who il-
luminates the unknowable resources of life and death, and thus turn
the unknowable fantastic into the knowable scientifc. Their attempts to
categorize the vampire’s existence must thus be considered in the context
of Victorian science and its quest to categorize and therefore dominate
the natural world through categorization. The male curators in Car-
milla often invoke the paternalistic power systems inherent in museum
arrangement, against which Carmilla frequently transgresses.
Carmilla’s Transgressions
In Carmilla, vampirism, and the myriad hybridities the vampire embodies
serve as the embodiment of an ideological Queerness—a determination
to destabilize boundaries and transgress binary categories, as defned by
MacCormack as a resistance to “Defning, signifying, classifying, and
placing certain kinds of subjects into a hierarchy.”35 This positions the
vampire as a Queer threat to the politics of mastery and categorization
inherent in the museum gaze, but also with the socialization that the
museum sought to impose. Carmilla frequently undermines the poten-
tial power of this categorical museum gaze. Throughout the narrative,
she frustrates categories of both social identity and biology. She is even
“limited to a name which must be “reproduce[d], without the omission
or addition of a single letter.”36 Amy Leal observes that “the clues to
Carmilla’s identity as well as her sexuality lie in deciphering the origin
and meaning of her original name.”37 These ever-shifting names suggest
the absurdity of arrangement and the easy manipulation of linguistic
and categorical meaning. Carmilla’s vampiric ‘villainy’ is thus illustrated
by her persistent relabelling of herself, suggesting a logical pattern (the
same repeating letters) but resisting permanent arrangement.
Carmilla’s Queer sexuality constitutes the most potent and obvious
transgression of boundaries in the text, as she frustrates gender and
sexual categories. Carmilla’s vampiric predation targets female victims
seemingly exclusively. Signifcantly, Terry Castle writes that female love
has historically been erased rather than defned, writing that “Lesbian-
ism manifests itself in the Western literary imagination primarily as…
a kind of love that, by defnition, cannot exist.”38 This establishes Car-
milla’s romantic interest in women as phantasmagoric in its own right,
concerned with destabilizing museum-style boundaries between natural
and ‘unnatural,’ what cannot exist and what simply cannot be defned
via stable biological and social categories. More than her association
with female love, however, I argue that the more potent transgression
is Carmilla’s expression of a sexuality that is shifting and indefnable
in a traditional ‘social museum’ framework. Despite Carmilla’s love for
female victims, her romantic history documents at least one male lover,
establishing her as a creature of fuid (pan)sexual possibility that both
does and does not conform to Victorian binaries of normative or non-
normative sexuality. If we return to MacCormack’s claim that “Queer
theory emerged as a response to the persistence of polarity in sexual
identity, suggesting that sexuality is mobile, metaphoric, and ambigu-
ous,”39 then we can situate Carmilla’s resistance to polarities at large as
a broader embrace of the ambiguous and the metamorphic.
Similarly, Laura initially describes Carmilla’s courtship through a lens
of Victorian binarism, approaching Carmilla’s gender as a focal point
of her prolonged study, writing of her “very extraordinary manifesta-
tions” that she “strove in vain to form any satisfactory theory.”40 She
writes of suspecting Carmilla of being “a boyish lover” in disguise, be-
fore declaring that “there were many things against this hypothesis.”41
She adds that “I could boast of no little attentions such as masculine
gallantry delights to offer” and that, at other times, “her ways were
70 Lin Young
girlish; and there was always a languor about her, quite incompatible
with a masculine system in a state of health.”42 Here, Carmilla’s strange-
ness is applied to Laura’s assumptions about male ‘nature,’ as she tests
Carmilla’s behaviour against both ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories. In do-
ing so, Laura’s attempts to categorize Carmilla into easy, stable gender
categories—such as the museum gaze demands—are consistently incon-
clusive. Carmilla remains, throughout the text, socially, romantically
and sexually unexplainable.
Carmilla’s Queer, fuid sexuality provides an ideological model for
other forms of categorical transgression, as Carmilla’s ideological
Queerness—her fundamental capacity for destabilizing binary catego-
ries and embracing categorical fuidity—extends beyond her sexuality. It
also includes biological confusion between defnitions as broad as ‘dead’
and ‘alive’: Laura notes that Carmilla maintains the “appearance of a
healthy life”43 that makes her dead body physically indistinguishable
from living bodies. Her uncategorizeability also incorporates the ani-
mal: in one scene, Carmilla appears in Laura’s bedroom as “a sooty-
black animal that resembled a monstrous cat.”44 Though Laura attempts
to measure her according to scientifc practice—“about four or fve feet
long”—she ultimately states that she can “not accurately distinguish”
it.45 Laura describes her not as a cat, but as a thing which “resembled”
both an unidentifable monster and an identifable animal, leaving the
description to linger somewhere between certainty and uncertainty. Car-
milla’s resistance to this categorizing power is further observable when
the mountebank offers to de-animalize her tooth by shaving it down so
that it becomes “no longer the tooth of a fsh, but of a beautiful young
lady as she is.”46 It is notable that the mountebank suggests that any
hint of hybridity in Carmilla is itself both unappealing and unnatural
because it obscures what Carmilla “is” into something less consistent.
Carmilla responds to this suggestion by claiming that the man should be
whipped for his “insult.”47 Intriguingly, this reads as Carmilla’s defence
of potential Queer hybridic readings of her body.
Carmilla also uses her vampirism to overtly disrupt the seemingly
straightforward defnition of ‘nature.’ Discussing a recent rash of
vampire-related deaths, she proclaims that “this disease that invades the
country is natural. Nature. All things proceed from Nature—don’t they?
All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live
as Nature ordains?”48 In doing so, she subtly suggests that the vampire,
too, is a part of the ecosystem of the natural world; that the so-called
unnatural is, in fact, natural. In doing so, she opens herself to the pos-
sibility of being examined as a natural specimen, as a creature acting
according to knowable ordinances of nature itself. At the same time as
she suggests her knowability; however, she decries the power of science
and medical knowledge to manage the job, as she pointedly rejects the
wisdom embodied by the doctor by claiming that “Doctors never did me
any good.”49 Her contradictions extend to her dialogue, indicative of the
inherent categorical contradictions of the vampire itself. When wooing
Laura, she claims to want the pair of them “to die together, so that they
may live together.”50 Again, the categorical boundaries of ‘living’ and
‘dead’ are troubled and made meaningless by the vampiric state, and
Carmilla faunts this uncategorizeability as a seductive alternative to a
categorical life. In this way, Carmilla is a creature of contradictions not
only because of her vampiric state, but in the ways she suggests the vam-
pire as a ‘natural’ creature while simultaneously destabilizing scientifc
power to defne or understand that natural state. In this way, she asserts
herself as natural, but resists the heteronormative masculine mastery
that a categorization of that natural state would imply.
It is signifcant then that Carmilla’s vampirism also frustrates cat-
egorical boundaries beyond herself and in particular the boundaries
between the natural world and human social structures. While se-
ducing Laura, she invokes the natural world by claiming, “Girls are
caterpillars while they live in the world, to be fnally butterfies when
the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae…
each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.”51
Carmilla draws here on the popularity of butterfies amongst home
naturalists in her imagery. This simile is simultaneously one of cate-
gorization and resistance to categorization, as she suggests somewhat
paradoxically (from a scientifc standpoint) that the fnal form of life
for a caterpillar—the butterfy—can occur only after death, as in the
vampiric life. Again, Carmilla positions not only ‘unnatural’ life such
as the vampire’s, but ‘natural’ life as defned by transition between
states, wherein life states are constantly ‘dying’ and being reborn into
new forms. This comparison recognizes that states of being, be they
deemed natural or unnatural, are often in states of fux or change.
Carmilla highlights the processes of transition and reconfguration
in nature itself, much like her own name is constantly reconfgured.
The metaphor is also ambiguous in its own categorization: ‘larvae’
describes the immature form of an insect, applicable to either grubs
or caterpillars; however, grubs are the immature forms of beetles and
thus distinct from caterpillars. Here, Carmilla suggests that similar
appearances—grubs and caterpillar larvae—do not necessarily im-
ply predictable transitions. Further, she attributes this metaphor to
an unidentifed book of naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc: “So says
Monsieur Buffon, in his big book, in the next room.”52 Here, through
the application of a naturalist text to the evolution of young women,
we see a similar blurring of the worlds of nature and society in a way
that troubles clear boundaries between the two; however, it also estab-
lishes both Carmilla’s knowledge of proper categorization and her am-
biguous misuse of them, be they systems of etiquette or biology. These
comparisons ultimately work to recontextualize Carmilla’s vampirism
72 Lin Young
through a redefnition of what constitutes ‘natural’ life and produces
an inherently Queer dissolution of boundaries.
Despite these transgressions, Carmilla is eventually added to the Bar-
on’s collection of vampire case studies. These studies, however, have in-
triguing holes in them, burdened by insuffcient categorical conclusions.
The Baron’s fndings merely suggest “a system of principles that appear
to govern—some always, and others occasionally only—the condition
of the vampire.”53 This line suggests both a system of unimpeachable
categorical order and the admission that such a system is imperfect
and intermittently applicable to the shifting vampiric subject. Through
Laura, we observe his seemingly assured claims of verifed knowledge,
embodied by lines like “The amphibious existence of the vampire is
sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave”54 and “The vampire
is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the
passion of love, by particular persons.”55 These claims paint the vam-
pire as a knowable creature with repeatable patterns. However, as the
descriptions progress, we begin to see more uncertain, qualifying terms
sneak in: “in these cases,” Laura emphasizes twice, suggesting the ex-
istence of other, less conforming cases. 56 His claim that vampires who
“seem to yearn for something like sympathy” are to be understood in
contrast to “ordinary ones,” in which the vampire “goes direct to its
object, overpowers with violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a
single feast”57 suggests an underlying uncertainty in the consistent cat-
egorization of the vampire’s motivations. Further, it situates Carmilla
herself as unordinary, suggesting some defensive doubt as to whether
she actually conforms to his social and scientifc curation model. In the
end, this attempt to defnitively log Carmilla in the vampire fles only
results in increased doubt as to her categorical arrangement—she is de-
fnitively not an “ordinary” case, and we can read the Baron’s claim of
Carmilla’s apparent “yearn[ing] for sympathy” as an ambivalent worry
that the system of categorization has failed and that Carmilla’s moti-
vations were less sinister and more tragic than the “ordinary” vampire
case might imply.
The Baron’s report ends on a note of unsettling uncertainty, one that
suggests that the dominance and power of the museum gaze is far from
infallible. Further, it suggests that in this instance, although the vampire
has been vanished, the destabilizing threat it represents has not been
mastered through the strategies of the museum.
The Horror (and Beauty) of Carmilla

What makes Carmilla both intriguing and horrifc in the text has specif-
cally to do with her ability to demonstrate the permeability of categories,
both social and biological. Notably, she destabilizes not only her own
categories, but those of Victorian society at large. The most powerful
and complex example of Carmilla’s power to destabilize not only herself,
but those around her, can be seen in her infuence over Laura’s narration.
In contrast to the paternalistic museum-gazing of the men, Laura oper-
ates within the text as a more ambivalent curator, one simultaneously
eager and reluctant to impose narrative order over the ‘uncategorize-
able’ Carmilla and by extension, her own equally indefnable attraction
to her. Laura’s confict as narrator thus refects this tension between
her role as chronicler and curator and a more fuid eroticism articulated
through ephemeral imageries of dreams, time distortion, and phantas-
magorias. These spaces of dreams, memories, and shadow plays are all
inescapably Queered spaces wherein Laura, as a failed curator, laments
her inability to return to the seemingly solid, categorical, chronological
structures of Victorian society. However, this Queer dreamscape also
operates as an ambivalent resistance to the museum gaze that refects
Carmilla’s own powers of transgression, effectively extending and per-
petuating Carmilla’s Queer infuence throughout the text. In this way,
Laura’s mode of ephemeral recollection serves as an attempt to preserve
Carmilla without permanently categorizing her by employing Carmilla’s
own methods of Queer ambiguity.
As vampire chronicler, Laura is described as “a clever and careful…in-
formant.” Like the Baron, she initially catalogues Carmilla’s behaviours
and habits as eagerly as any natural scientist as she “gather[s]” informa-
tion from “chance hints” pertaining to Carmilla’s origins or her “her
native country.”58 She summarizes her fndings in a sequential fashion
that suggests all data must lead to knowledge:
First.—Her name was Carmilla.

Second.—Her family was very ancient and noble.
Third.—Her home lay in the direction of the west. 59
Notably, both Laura and the Baron describe their vampiric encounters
in the language of scientifc “hypothesis.”60 In this way, Laura is initially
positioned alongside the men as a fgure attempting to categorize, defne,
and illuminate the strange and uncategorizeable fgure of Carmilla.
However, Laura’s methods of curation grow increasingly unstable
as her relationship with Carmilla deepens, and throughout the text the
older Laura augments her younger self’s ambivalent cataloguing strat-
egies with narrative ones that privilege fuid, uncertain, and ambigu-
ous imagery. Jones describes “Laura’s admiring detailing of Carmilla’s
features.”61 Indeed, Laura recounts Carmilla’s “small and beautifully
formed” features, her “eyes large, dark, and lustrous” and hair “mag-
nifcently thick and long”62 in a series of descriptions that are both ad-
miring and cataloguing, confusing the boundaries between desire and
scientifc inquiry. During one erotic encounter, Laura laments her in-
ability to fully capture not only Carmilla, but her emotional response to
74 Lin Young
her. She reports feeling both adoration and revulsion, stating that “This
I know is paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the feel-
ing.”63 In this, however, Laura’s narrative strategy might be further illu-
minated. Knowing no better way to explain her relationship to Carmilla,
she admits that the most accurate form of preservation is this paradoxi-
cal, anti-categorical approach. In this way, her narrative embodies both
anxiety over Carmilla’s—and thus the vampire’s—lack of categorical
certainty and also Carmilla’s own ambivalent resistance to categories.
Like Carmilla herself, Laura’s narration is defned by ephemerality and
uncertainty. Almost immediately, Laura undermines her own memory as
a defnite source: “I forget all my life preceding that event, and for some
time after it is all obscure also, but the scenes I have just described stand
out vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by
darkness.”64 Here, she suggests that her memory only operates on events
concerning Carmilla and that her powers of recollection are foggy. She
compares the experiences she does recollect to a phantasmagoria. The
metaphor is appropriately insubstantial here: the phantasmagoria is fun-
damentally impermanent and mysterious in its spectacle, disappearing
as soon as the light show concludes and appearing only as the product
of light manipulation. The image of “isolated pictures…surrounded by
darkness” also emphasizes the vast expanse of unilluminated space sur-
rounding the images, harkening back to Laura’s emphatic uncertainty.
Jones positions Carmilla as the “spirit of phantasmagoria,” who “fick-
ers seductively between picture, corporeal presence, vaporous absence
and dream, and passes through those quick alternations repeatedly and
ambiguously, even as the letters in her name ripple and change.”65 As a
result, he argues that Laura’s misty narration implies that “Carmilla’s
intrusion has…forever conditioned, indeed phantasmagorised, Laura’s
mind. Her consciousness adopts…the format of [a shadow play] as she
conceptualises and envisages her memories.”66 This description suggests
that Laura’s narration has taken on several of Carmilla’s more unknow-
able, fuid qualities. However, Laura’s choice of metaphor gives her an
additional role to play: that of the observing (and reporting) audience.
As “eyewitness”67 to the shadow play, Laura positions herself as being
frmly “in the dark,” surrendering any claim to authoritative knowledge
of the images (an authorial agency readily claimed by the Baron). Laura
further describes these “isolated pictures” without actually offering the
reader any further details as to the specifcity of those images. Laura’s
employment of phantasmagoria places the reader in a similar position of
categorical uncertainty—what are we even looking at? Laura’s narrative
decisions here reconstruct Carmilla’s infuence over her, as she empha-
sizes (and preserves the possibility of) the vampire’s persistent unknow-
ability and by extension, her performative knowability. Similarly, she
depicts herself as an unknowable fgure, one simultaneously situated be-
tween illumination (knowledge) and darkness (ignorance) and between
interpretive control (as narrator) and a willing surrender of that control
(audience). Thus, Laura establishes the narrative as a careful dance be-
tween darkness and illumination.
The use of chronological distortion also surfaces in Laura’s narration
as she often drifts imperceptibly between past and present. One potent
example occurs here:
“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” [Carmilla] whis-
pered, “unless it should be with you.”
How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!68
Here, grammatically, there exists some ambiguity as to which Laura is

commenting on Carmilla’s beauty: is it the young Laura’s experience of
the moment or is it the older Laura recalling Carmilla’s beauty years
later? Such narrative strategies trouble the text’s representation of time
in such a way that chronology itself becomes inscrutable and meaning-
less. Again, Laura’s narration occasionally slips when recollecting Car-
milla’s erotic embraces. She writes: “she would press me more closely
in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon
my cheek.”69 The slippery use of the present tense ‘glow’ maintains the
same ambiguity: do Carmilla’s kisses still glow on her cheek? Admir-
ing Carmilla’s hair, Laura alternates tenses again by claiming that “her
hair was quite wonderful…I have often placed my hands under it, and
laughed.”70 Laura effectively confnes moments of desirable indefnabil-
ity to these convenient spaces of ambiguous time; in doing so, she simul-
taneously preserves them by invoking her past self and participating in
them as her current self.
Similarly, Laura depicts dreams as spaces of Queer possibility in which
she may experience the vampire’s ephemeral, fuid eroticism more fully.
Laura describes the nature of dreams as being fundamentally disassem-
bling, writing that “dreams come through stone walls, light up dark
rooms, or darken light ones.”71 Here, dreams possess the ability to pro-
vide both illumination and further darkness, recalling Laura’s similarly
inconclusive phantasmagoria imagery. Laura depicts dreams as spaces
of “vague[ness]” where her ability to curate or to “recollect their scen-
ery and persons” is frustrated.72 Carmilla similarly positions dreams
against paternalistic science, quipping that “I used to think that evil
spirits made dreams, but our doctor told me it is no such thing.”73 This
comparison—that she is the “evil spirit” disquieting Laura’s sleep—
lends a sheen of irony to the doctor’s dismissal of dreams. Laura recalls
that “[a]fter all these dreams there remained on waking a remembrance
of having been in a place very nearly dark,” wherein she experienced the
erotic energies of the vampire’s “kiss[es]” and “caress[es]” without nam-
ing them or recognizing their point of origin.74 The childhood ‘dream’
that Carmilla and Laura share, too, suggests that dreams are spaces
76 Lin Young
where Queer encounters can occur without rational explanation. Laura,
initially insistent that “I knew the visit of the strange woman was not a
dream,”75 later allows Carmilla’s explanation of the event to be recon-
textualized as a shared vision. Carmilla states, “Twelve years ago, I saw
your face in a dream”76; Laura replies, “in vision or reality, I certainly
saw you.”77 Here, Laura’s use of rational categories—either they met
in reality or in a dream—clashes against the unexplainable logic of the
vampire’s presence and subsequently her attraction to her. By the end
of the chapter, Laura has given up her insistence on the dream’s reality,
and refers to this frst meeting only as “my early dream,”78 seemingly as
a necessary consequence of confronting several “unaccountab[le]” and
“ambiguous” feelings for Carmilla’s “indescriba[ble]” charms.79 Laura
effectively relegates much of her history with Carmilla to this indistin-
guishable dream-space, where Carmilla’s Queer, vampiric contradic-
tions are allowable (and enjoyable) as a kind of dream-logic.
In essence, both the vampire and Laura’s depiction of the vampire
work to trouble the Victorian museum’s need for stable categories.
Further, Laura’s attempt to fuidly catalogue the vampire prompts a
consideration of her own fuidity. In The Catalogue of the Educational
Division of the South Kensington Museum, the curator describes one
utility of “system[s] of classifcation and arrangement” is “to bring to-
gether, as far as practicable, objects of a similar nature, and enable
those studying any particular subject to compare one example with an-
other.”80 In a similar way, Laura compares herself and her own desires
to Carmilla. She tells Carmilla, “I don’t know myself when you look so
and talk so,”81 fguring Carmilla’s infuence as one that destabilizes her
very sense of self. Carmilla’s repeated seductive claim that she “live[s]
in”82 Laura and that they are “one forever”83 furthers this process,
as their erotic attraction is characterized as a blending of bodies and
souls with no distinction between them. The suggestion here is that
by confronting Carmilla’s uncategorizeability, Laura too must recog-
nize a similar capacity for ambiguity in herself and the possibility that
she too might fnd meaning beyond the strict boundaries of Victorian
categories.
The vampire’s dissolution of categories, and the identity explora-
tion such dissolution allows for, ultimately suggests that a paternalis-
tic insistence on stable categories prevents the development not only of
self-knowledge, but of strange but meaningful intimacies between peo-
ple. In response, Laura’s persistently misty narration and her devotion to
fuid, changeable imagery operate to imagine a world in which Carmilla
is loved without being defned, categorized, or understood. We can ob-
serve this goal by returning to the fnal lines of the novella:
the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous

alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl;
sometimes the writhing fend…often from a reverie I have started,
fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door84
Here, Laura is again positioned with limited vision. She cannot see this
imagined Carmilla nor determine which of the aforementioned catego-
ries she embodies: girl or fend. Described again as emerging from a
“reverie,” this description allows Carmilla to exist simultaneously as
both girl and fend, present and not present, preserving her specifcally
through the use of the “ambiguous alternations” of dreams, time, and
memory. The text concludes Laura’s narrative experiment to preserve
Carmilla in a way authentic to the experience of knowing her, an ex-
perience that is indefnable, changeable, and unknowable. In this way,
Laura’s text is an ambivalent attempt to preserve a fuid, changeable,
binary-defying creature in the face of social strategies of categorization
as established by the Victorian museum.
Conclusion
The Victorian era oversaw the emergence of the museum not only as
a physical space, but also as an ideological force. The natural history
museum developed new strategies of consolidating knowledge through
its carefully arranged displays, which saw the organization and interpre-
tation of mass amounts of data into increasingly strict scientifc catego-
ries. Such categories perpetuated social ideas pertaining to patriarchal
and colonial systems of authority, which were themselves maintained
through strict social hierarchies and categorical defnitions.
Carmilla draws on Victorians’ complex social investment in the mu-
seum to evoke horror in the fundamentally uncategorizeable fgure of
the vampire. Employing the language and practices of the ‘museum
gaze,’ the novel is structured as a battleground between the mascu-
line fgures who embody these logics and attempt to defne the vampire
through scientifc inquiry and Laura, Carmilla’s would-be lover, who
experiments more ambivalently with recreating Carmilla’s more fuid
worldview in her own narration. Ultimately, Carmilla’s vampirism al-
lows her to resist all categories and maintain her ideological Queerness
in several ways, remaining undefnable to the very end. This suggests
that the chief horror of the novella is embodied by the vampire’s ability
to permanently destabilize or dissolve entirely all forms of epistemologi-
cal and social order. As such, we can read the vampire’s role in the novel
as an ambivalent one: the vampire produces horror in the men and to
some degree Laura, with respect to how permeable all forms of knowl-
edge and specifcally all defnitions of social and biological categories
really are. Intriguingly, however, Laura’s ambiguous narration reveals
a reluctant engagement with Carmilla’s Queered worldview, one that
suggests the seductive power of a less rigid world. Ultimately, le Fanu
78 Lin Young
allows for both horror and desire to mingle together throughout the
novel, suggesting that the subversive excitement of fuidity comes at the
cost of a stable sense of one’s identity and the world at large. In the end,
we are told Carmilla’s vampiric infuence leads to Laura’s demise—and
whether or not she is vampirically reborn into a new world of Queered
categories or simply destroyed by such disassembly is left to the reader’s
imagination.
Notes
1 Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, In A Glass Darkly (Peterborough: Broadview,
2018), 347.
2 MacCormack, “The Queer Ethics of Monstrosity,” in Speaking of Monsters:
A Teratological Anthology, eds. Caroline J. S. Picart and John E. Browning
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 256.
3 MacCormack, Queer, 257.
4 A Visit to the British Museum (London, Chapman and Hall, 1838), xii–xiii.
5 A Visit to the British Museum, xiii.
6 Carla Yanni, Nature’s Museums (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999),
15.
7 Yanni, Nature’s, 15.
8 Richard Owen, On the Extent and Aims of a National Museum of Natural
History (London, Saunders, Otley & Co., 1862), 232.
9 Jonah Siegel, The Emergence of the Modern Museum (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2009), 213–214.
10 Barbara Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and their Museums (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2000), 4.
11 Yanni, Nature’s, 5.
12 Cassell’s Household Guide (London: Cassell, Peter & Galpin, 1869), 17.
13 Cassell’s Household Guide, 63.
14 Black, On, 2.
15 Black, On, 9.
16 Edward Forbes, On the Educational Uses of Museums (London: Longman,
Brown Green, and Longmans, 1853), 9.
17 Gregory Swinney, in The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2011), 229–230.
18 William I. Bicknell, Illustrated London; or, a Series of Views in the British
Metropolis and Its Vicinity, Engraved by Albert Henry Payne (London: E.T.
Brain, 1847), 300.
20 Black, On, 9.
21 Owen, On, 126.
22 William S. W. Ruschenberger, A Notice of the Origin, Progress, and Present
Condition of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (Philadel-
phia, PA: T.K. and P.G. Collins, 1852), 13-14.
23 Forbes, On the Educational Uses of Museums, 3.
24 Gordon Fyfe and Max Ross, “Decoding the Visitor’s Gaze: Rethinking
Museum Visiting,” in Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Di-
versity in a Changing World, eds. Gordon Fyfe and Sharon Macdonald,
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 133.
25 Fyfe and Ross, Decoding, 133.
26 le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, 326.
32 le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, 402, 404.
36 le Fanu, In A Glass Darkly, 403.
37 Amy Leal, Unnameable Desires in le Fanu’s Carmilla (NAMES 55:1), 38.
38 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Mod-
ern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 30–31.
41 le Fanu, In A Glass Darkly, 347–348.
54 le Fanu, In A Glass Darkly, 402–403.
60 le Fanu, In A Glass Darkly, 348, 388.
61 David Jones, in Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern (New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2014), 153.
62 le Fanu, In A Glass Darkly, In, 345.
74 le Fanu, In A Glass Darkly, 365, 366, 366.
80 Lin Young
80 The Catalogue of the Educational Division of the South Kensington Mu-
seum (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1867), 3.
82 le Fanu, In A Glass Darkly, 357, 346.
5 The Addict as Vampire
Rebecca McLean
[V]ampire narratives perform the legerdemain of transforming the ter-

ror of the temperance narrative—namely, the protagonist’s loss of his
individuality, autonomy, and status—into a pleasurable seduction, they
perform the distinctively new thrill of imagining oneself to be a vampire
or addict.1
The fgure of the literary vampire has been closely associated with the
excesses of addiction from John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) to Brahm
Stokers Dracula (1897) and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vam-
pire (1897) and beyond. This chapter examines how fgures addicted to
opiates are depicted in vampiric terms. 2 The addict often functions as
the Gothic Other: that which the hero or reader is defned against. By
predating on the protagonists, this Gothic Other becomes a fgure both
of terror and, as Zieger highlights, vicariously pleasurable fear at the
imagined prospect of becoming Other.
The Scottish writer George MacDonald (1824–1905) attaches con-
cepts of punishment and redemption to those with vampiric addiction,
thereby encouraging the reader to be thrilled at the imagined prospect of
acting as Other and also to empathise with the suffering of the vampiric.
MacDonald presents two tales, “The Cruel Painter” (1864) and Donal
Grant (1883), describing addicts in terms associated with the vampiric.
The othering of his vampiric fgures not only depends on their addic-
tive behaviours but also their social status. This chapter explores both
representations of vampiric Others and then concludes with a discus-
sion of MacDonald’s fnal work of fantasy Lilith (1895) on punishment
and redemption of the addict fgure. Through comparison of all three
texts, we see how MacDonald’s equation of the vampiric with addiction
culminates in the fgure’s redemption through suffering. MacDonald’s
development of the vampire in these works demonstrates a Christianised
response to addiction framed in supernatural terms. I argue that such
an equation encourages readers to change or reconsider their responses
towards those in society who scare or shock them.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-6
82 Rebecca McLean
Redemption and Punishment in Non-Fiction and
“The Cruel Painter”
MacDonald does not offer a fully formed theology or approach in his
literary works; however, his non-fction works, Unspoken Sermons and
A Dish of Orts, describe how he uses literature, and fantasy in particu-
lar, to refect on social ills as personifed by the vampire-addict fgure. 3
MacDonald’s sermon “Justice” begins by addressing the divide between
mercy and justice: “Those who say justice means the punishing of sin,
and mercy the not punishing of sin, and attribute both to God, would
make a schism in the very idea of God.”4 This concept of merciful pun-
ishment thus informs his representation of sinners: “such is the mercy of
God that he will hold his children in the consuming fre of his distance
until they pay the uttermost farthing.”5 The main form of punishment
is distancing the sinner from God. However, this is not the only form of
divine justice: “no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy
of God to redeem his children.”6
MacDonald’s essay on “The Imagination” shows how he sees fction
as a means to gain insight into the world around us. The main function
of the imagination is, MacDonald explains, “to inquire into what God
has made.”7 Using our imaginations, a faculty provided by God, is the
closest we can get to (divine) creation. MacDonald goes on to argue that
no human thought is original. It has a divine source because “Man is but
a thought of God.”8 Human thoughts are formed by God’s imagination
during creation, and human imagination is therefore an echo of divine
thoughts. The imagination functions in a revelatory capacity, and by ac-
knowledging this, the imagination becomes childlike: “we dare to claim
for the true, childlike, humble imagination, such an inward oneness with
the laws of the universe that it possesses in itself an insight into the very
nature of things.”9
MacDonald’s frst representation of the vampire fgure appears in
“The Cruel Painter.” “The Cruel Painter” has been largely ignored or
dismissed by MacDonald scholars. Richard Reis claims the story is “en-
tirely without symbolic resonance,”10 while William Raeper argues that
the tale’s cruelty “reveal[s] an unexpected element of violence in Mac-
Donald’s imagination.”11 Karl, a painter’s apprentice is unknowingly
drugged by his master, Teufelsbürst, and painted while suffering halluci-
nations.12 However, Karl overdoses and Teufelsbürst assumes he is dead.
Upon recovering, Karl believes for a short while that he is a vampire
and goes on to play a series of supernatural pranks on his master with
the help of Lilith, Teufelsbürst’s daughter. MacDonald refers to Lilith
and Karl as “the generation of the vampire brood,”13 thus invoking the
Romantic literary tradition on this monstrous fgure.
David Punter notes that the fgure of the vampire is “an anomaly and
one which crops up repeatedly in the works of the Romantics.”14 The Ro-
mantic vampire appears in continental tales such as Goethe’s “The Bride
The Addict as Vampire 83
of Corinth” (1797), Tieck’s “Wake Not the Dead” (1823), and Gautier’s
“The Deathly Lover” (1843). English vampire tales published prior to
“The Cruel Painter” include Lord Byron’s fragment “The End of My
Journey” (1816), which later inspired the frst vampire novel written
in English, John Polidori’s The Vampyre.15 There are also a number
of poems from this period containing vampires, including Coleridge’s
1816 poem “Christabel” and Keats’s 1820 ballad “La Belle Dame sans
Merci.” The popularity of these tales suggests the appeal of a vampire
who is both monster and anti-hero. This is also the period when vam-
pires become “aristocratic hero-villains,” partly in response to the public
image of Lord Byron.16
MacDonald gestures towards the prevalence of such vampire
tales when he writes, “Lilith and Karl were quite familiar with the
popular ideas on the subject.”17 MacDonald interrupts his tale to
paraphrase “The Shoemaker of Breslau,” a sixteenth-century tale,18
in which a local suicide returns from the grave as a vampire to
plague the town.19 Having frst been exhumed and reburied under
the gallows, the vampire continues to haunt the town and so is once
again exhumed and burned. This is almost identical to MacDonald’s
shoemaker character, who begins the vampire plague in “The Cruel
Painter.”20 MacDonald’s decision to reproduce the sixteenth-century
tale is indicative of the centrality of oral and popular culture for
the development of his narrative. “The Cruel Painter” examines the
effect of such tales on the imagination. Karl and Lilith are capable
of moving beyond fear and discovering a deeper imaginative quality
to the vampire mythology. Contributing to Romantic-era literature
on vampires, “The Cruel Painter” provides a new revenant who is
human-like and who exerts power over others. More importantly,
MacDonald develops a vampire with the capacity for moral and
imaginative development and thus downplays the terror and blood
typical of such Gothic tales. 21 Scott McLaren discusses the Gothic
genre and its conventions present in “The Cruel Painter”:
MacDonald’s theological convictions prompted him to write stories

that violate what has come to be perceived as the fundamental and
persistent moral economy of the [gothic] genre when they fail to end
in unambiguous “hopeless desolation.”22
“The Cruel Painter” simultaneously invokes, only to reject, Gothic con-

ventions through the didacticism of MacDonald’s theologically laden
prose. The Gothic tradition becomes the central genre of MacDonald’s
metafctional techniques in his invocation of the Other. “The Cruel
Painter” alludes to earlier texts and literary traditions to facilitate the
reader’s imaginative development or awakening. Ultimately, MacDonald
encourages the reader to imagine the vampire’s suffering not just in his
own fction but within the wider canon of vampire literature.
84 Rebecca McLean
Readers of “The Cruel Painter” are encouraged to associate Mac-
Donald’s vampiric characters with those from other texts. For example,
Teufelsbürst’s casting of the unconscious Karl is a form of artistic cre-
ation, and like Frankenstein’s creation, it is revivifed by an electrical
charge. Victor Frankenstein speaks of collecting “the instruments of life
around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing at
my feet.”23 When the creature awakes, its animation is observed: “by
the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of
the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its
limbs.”24 MacDonald offers a similar depiction of Karl’s reawakening:
At midnight, while a peal of thunder was just dying away in the

distance, the crust of death few asunder, rending in all directions;
and, pale as his investiture, staring with ghastly eyes, the form of
Karl started up sitting on the couch… now the catalepsy had passed
away, possibly under the infuence of the electric condition of the at-
mosphere. Very likely the strength he now put forth was intensifed
by a convulsive reaction of all the powers of life. 25
Both passages focus on the eyes. This, coupled with MacDonald’s tenta-
tive suggestion that it is the electrical atmosphere which has awakened
Karl place Karl in the role of Frankenstein’s creature—and like the crea-
ture, Karl goes on to plague his creator. MacDonald’s later fction devel-
ops this intertextual narrative strategy through more detailed versions
of the vampire addict. His later stories focus more fully on the vampire
as a drug addict and, in so doing, seek to change readers’ reception of
this literary fgure.
The Addict—Donal Grant

In Donal Grant, MacDonald develops an upper-class vampire-addict in
the antagonist, Lord Morven, thereby adding a supernatural element to
his treatment and causes of his addiction. Morven is consumed by an
addiction to opiates, which fuels much of the intrigue of Donal Grant’s
sensational plot. Morven’s redemption has two aspects: frst, the pun-
ishment of a sinner until they are brought to repentance, and second,
the moral reformation of the addict. This plot differs from representa-
tions of opium addicts found in other Victorian texts. Realist writers of
the mid-Victorian period (after DeQuincy or Coleridge, for example),
including Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray,
equate addiction with poverty. 26 MacDonald instead places his addict
among the upper levels of society and equates addiction with immorality,
encouraging a new deconstruction of class biases against drug addicts.
MacDonald’s addict is in a social position of power over others, hiring
Donal, acting as ward to Arctura and father to Davie. 27 The vitality
imparted through this social power is made explicit in the frst meeting
of Donal and Morven when Donal claims to have no fear of challenging
his social betters: “The earl was silent; his grey face seemed to grow
grayer.”28 By associating social status with vitality in this way, Morven
is both consumed by addiction whilst consuming and controlling others.
The most prevalent form of addiction displayed in Victorian literature
is alcoholism, often directly associated with the lower classes and espe-
cially prevalent in accounts of “slumming.”29 There are very clear moral
implications implicit in such accounts, which often include child abuse
or villainous fgures.30 As a result, the majority of anti-poverty measures
targeted alcohol consumption, focusing particularly on gin.31 Such cam-
paigns conformed to class biases surrounding addiction (well up until
the end of the century). For example, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The
Adventure of the Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891), Watson visits a drug
den, described as a cave full of drug-addled addicts who are the dregs
of the docks.32 To his surprise, Watson discovers one of the inhabitants
is a patient, a man whom Sherlock Holmes refers to as “sottish” (a term
more commonly associated with drunken behaviour, but in this case is
thereby removed from the classed stigma of the drug den).33 This classed
distinction is cemented when Holmes’s own drug addictions are men-
tioned as “little weaknesses.”34 Conversely, for MacDonald, addiction to
either alcohol or drugs is associated with a defcit of morals, not poverty.
Morven has no control over his addiction, just as a vampire lacks con-
trol over its need for blood. The title of the chapter “A Soul Diseased”
recasts this problem of accountability (or control) as illness. In the chap-
ter, Morven even argues that humanity’s ability to exercise free will is
fallacious, a position which allows him to divest responsibility for his
actions.35 An explicit link between the demonic and addiction is made
when Morven quotes the Bible, “all a man hath he will give for life,”
to support his reluctance to suffer the effects of withdrawal. 36 Donal
responds that these words are spoken by the devil, highlighting the link
between addiction and moral degeneration. Morven’s unwitting adher-
ence to the devil’s words thus demonstrates the moral damage of addic-
tion. Morven considers reducing his opiate intake to discover his own
nature, but due to his “moral Poltonnery” or cowardice, he instead ends
the conversation by consuming opiates with a look of “Demonical hate”
directed at Donal.37 Such demonic visions and beliefs are actually part
of divine punishment.38 Morven is tortured by the devil losing control
over his addiction, turning into a vampiric or soulless body. 39
It is worth noting that Morven’s vampiric attributes develop well be-
fore Donal reaches the castle. He is described by servants as “aye up the
stair an, doon the stair the forepairt o’ the nicht an’ maist inveesible a’
day.”40 His invisibility during the day and nocturnal activity are also
indicative of his vampiric transformation. Over the narrative, Mor-
ven’s physical appearance disintegrates from “a tall, bowed man, with
86 Rebecca McLean
a large-featured white face, thin and worn and a deep-sunken eye that
gleamed with an unhealthy life”41 into something undead and “cadav-
erous: his eyes dull, but with a kind of glitter in them; his look that of
a house breaker.”42 Donal is therefore horrifed to encounter Morven at
night, detecting in the latter a complete lack of soul: “There is something
more terrible in a presence that is not a presence than in the vision of
the bodiless; that is a present ghost is not so terrible as an absent one, a
present but deserted body.”43 Morven is indeed vampiric as he wanders
the corridors, flling an “anomalous condition of neither ghost nor gen-
uine mortal.”44
Akin to the vampire’s pursuit of immortality, Morven believes that
opiates will extend his life.45 When Donal visits for dinner, Morven also
drugs his guest’s drink. The subsequent descriptions of Morven suggest
that he gains vitality from drugging others.46 Alcohol and opiates are
directly involved: “my uncle is in the habit of taking some horrible drug
for the sake of its effect on his brain[…] I have heard himself remark
[…] that opium was worse than wine.”47 This combination of drugs
with alcohol leads both Donal and Arctura to refuse the latter (drink),
overtly showing both these substances as dangerous. True, Morven does
not literally drink the blood of his victims, but he is still represented in
vampiric terms insofar as he vicariously feeds on and thus gains vitality
from their consumption of intoxicants. Presenting Morven as an addict,
MacDonald’s novel proposes a new template for how the vampire might
be treated and even reformed. A hidden chapel, the lair where Morven
earlier murdered his wife, is discovered and described as “the very nest
of his evil deeds.”48 In contemporary vampire narratives, such gravesites
are means to attaining physical power over the vampire. For example,
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1897) sees the grave of Countess Mir-
calla exhumed and her slumbering vampiric form destroyed after what
is termed a “pursuit to the lair of the beast.”49 Donal Grant subverts
this concept of power over vampires because the power Donal gains is
knowledge regarding the fate of Lady Morven, not a physical advantage.
There are three points where Morven is discovered in the chapel. First,
Donal hears him while exploring the chamber:
“Ah! Thought Donal… How easily I could punish him now, with a
lightning blast of terror!” It was but a thought; it did not amount to
temptation; Donal knew that he had no right. Vengeance belongs to
the Lord, for he alone knows how to use it.50
In rejecting the notion of punishment, MacDonald diverges from tra-

ditional vampire narratives in which destruction of the monster is the
ultimate goal. MacDonald instead adheres to a Christian moral frame-
work; the tale’s exploration of addiction poses a new solution wherein
vampirism is seen as an ailment in need of curing. During the second
encounter, Donal punches Morven while rescuing Arctura.51 This act
of aggression is meant to help rescue Arctura, not as retribution. By not
overtaking the vampire in his lair, Donal allows the vampiric and addic-
tive aspects to remain in tension, hoping the latter character(istic) might
eventually be treated.
In the third interaction, Morven is overcome by love and kindness.
The image of a vampire compelling its victim is inverted when Arctura
instead embraces her uncle, causing him to regret his previous cruel
actions:
Was she there to assure him that he might yet hope for the world
to come? He stretched out his arms to her. She turned away. He
thought she had vanished. The next moment she was in the chapel,
but he did not hear her, and stood gazing up. She threw her arms
around him... “Don’t be frightened, uncle,” said Arctura. “I am not
dead. The sepulchre is the only resurrection-house!”52
Arctura is depicted as saintly, standing above her uncle and moving

soundlessly around the chapel. Evil is thus confronted by Christian
goodness (embodied by Arctura). Through such images, the novel sig-
nals its rejection of human retribution in favour of divine punishment,
and any inclination towards repentance is met with kindness and for-
giveness. Moreover, this scene also conveys another key aspect of Mac-
Donald’s theology: Arctura’s forgiveness is not a purely divine act but
is also necessary for her own redemption because, as we are told, “The
saint may have to be saved from more than sin.”53
All of MacDonald’s characters move closer to redemption through
interaction with the vampire-addict. The reformation of the addict
becomes morally benefcial for all involved. Donal’s refusal to engage
in physical punishment of Morven demonstrates such spiritual devel-
opment by leaving punishment to God and instead enacting Christian
forgiveness. At the same time, Morven’s demonic addiction is fully ac-
knowledged: “It was those cursed drugs that wiled the soul out of me
and then the devil went in a took its place.”54 By viewing demons as part
of the divine will, Morven’s addiction is understood as a divine trial
intended to bring about repentance for past misdeeds. In Donal Grant,
rather than force a moral argument, MacDonald instead utilises the
Gothic monster to prove his point, allowing Morven to become Other as
a consequence of addiction. In this way, then, the text elides much of the
moral indignation traditionally attached to the addict without dismiss-
ing or affrming the addiction.
Observation of Morven’s moral condition also illuminates the surpris-
ingly positive effects of addiction upon friends and family. Donal, Arc-
tura, and Morven all morally improve through their association with
addiction. For MacDonald, then, the social ill of addiction serves as an
88 Rebecca McLean
opportunity to come closer to God. As the narrator of Donal Grant says:
“But to terrify a man at the possibilities of his neglected nature is to do
something towards the redemption of that nature.”55 MacDonald’s use
of the Gothic Other, in fact, allows the reader to closely examine all of
the characters’ morals.
The Vampire and Redemption: Lilith

In MacDonald’s novel Lilith, the vampiric fgure directly consumes
blood. Historically, Lilith is a sexually aggressive succubus who hates
children and feeds from their blood. She is also depicted as the mother of
leeches.56 Still, MacDonald believes that even such leech-like vampires
can be redeemed, including Lilith. The novel is thereby important to our
understanding of vampirism, because while the mythological Lilith is
damned, MacDonald’s vampire is recuperated. Her actions are framed
as a compulsion akin to addiction, which is later overcome. Lilith’s re-
demption has four stages: (1) resurrection, (2) judgement, (3) torture
and penetration, before (4) she moves closer to God entering a deathlike
sleep. These stages refect the idea that individuals will fnd their own
way to God and that life is a journey towards redemption.
The frst stage of Lilith’s journey is resurrection. Vane rescues Lilith for
self-centred reasons: “Without well considering my solitude, no one will
understand what seemed to lie for me in the redemption of the women
from death.”57 The language of redemption is misused by Vane; death
is a new beginning rather than an ending. Lilith feeds on both Vane’s
idealism and his blood to strengthen and return to life. Yet the life Lilith
returns to is unwanted, for as she tells Vane, “You have done me the two
worst of wrongs—compelled me to live, and put me to shame: neither of
them I can pardon.”58 Lilith’s shame is linked to Vane’s bathing her in a
hot river every morning. In Jungian theory, running water is symbolic of
the unconscious, with rivers representing death and rebirth or a transi-
tional phase in life.59 In Lilith, water is linked to the divine and to cre-
ation.60 Michael Düring discusses this spiritual signifcance MacDonald
frequently places upon water, suggesting that “Through the enterally
fowing water MacDonald believes he […] participating in eternal life
and in the eternal goodness of the Creator.”61 This creative goodness
embodied by the water at frst disgusts Lilith: “She gave a shudder of
disgust… with her gaze fxed on the hurrying water.”62 The frst stage of
Lilith’s redemption is, therefore, a forced rebirth akin to the frst stage
of divine creation. Creation is only used to preserve Lilith’s existence,
which she conceives as separate from divine infuence. Lilith accuses
Vane of wronging her after she looks into the river and realises that she
is part of such spiritual creation. Yet, her distinction between this new
life and her shame shows that Lilith still views herself as separate from
God and thus tainted by the water of life. Although she drinks blood like
a typical nineteenth-century vampire, Lilith’s main faw is her refusal to
accept her place within divine creation—a faw not found in contempo-
rary vampire literature.
In the second stage, Lilith follows Vane into his world disguised as
a Persian cat. She is then judged when Adam catches her and reads
passages from a book that records her life.63 This recital produces “a
prolonged yell of agony” from Lilith as she is forced to hear and face
herself.64 In this scene of denunciation, she is described in terms asso-
ciated with the mythological Lilith. She is the frst wife of Adam, who
demands power over others because she created new life in her daughter,
but when Adam refuses to worship her, Lilith leaves and becomes queen
of hell. She now wants to kill her child and therein to prove her power
over creation: “vilest of God’s creatures, she lives by the blood and lives
and souls of men. She consumes and slays, but is powerless to destroy as
to create.”65 Though described as “powerless” over these past actions,
Lilith is exhorted to repent by Adam: “The evil thou meditates […] thou
shalt never compass, Lilith, for Good and not Evil is the Universe […]
Repent, I beseech thee: repent, and be again an angel of God.”66 Lilith’s
refusal to accept that she is part of God’s order is her biggest sin, while
her inability to control destructive desires are part of her spiritual trial.
Per the latter trial, the vampire is ultimately exposed as having no cre-
ative power (she can only destroy). This is reinforced by Lilith’s insis-
tence on killing her child.
Lilith’s initial refusal to repent and accept her place in the creative
order becomes the underlying motivation for the vampire. At the same
time, during a visit to the library, Vane gains the knowledge he needs in
order to exercise power over her. The transitory nature of the house and
library, both full of doorways to the fantasy world, is symbolic of Lilith’s
changing position: she seeks to validate her perception of, and power
over, creation by destroying her child. The “demoness” inside her thus
overtakes Lilith.67 In this second stage, Lilith’s physical deterioration
leaves her weak and controlled by her vampiric nature as she begs for
blood. Hence, Lilith too, like Karl and Morven, manifests vampirism
as an addiction. In this story, too, the vampire’s desires must run their
course. Vane realises that although she is within his control, “I had no
power to make her repent! I had hardly a right to slay her—much less a
right to let her loose in the world!”68 Vane relinquishes his power over
Lilith, similar to Donal’s relinquishment of power over Morven.
Lilith’s judgement by Adam is repeated in the third stage of her re-
demption: torture. In this stage, Lilith is placed in a psychological fre,
a sort of redemptive turning point. Self-discovery brings Lilith to the
“Light of Life,” returning her to God and her correct place in creation.69
Her burning echoes MacDonald’s assertion that “Such is the mercy of
God that he will hold his children in the consuming fre […] until they
pay the uttermost farthing.”70 Lilith’s punishment thus brings her to
90 Rebecca McLean
God and his divine mercy. Her own faws and evil cause suffering in
the fre. And while this psychological punishment purifes Lilith, she
is also physically tortured by penetration. The latter invokes the tra-
ditional punishment for vampires in nineteenth-century narratives like
Dracula, particularly the scene where the Crew of Light “driv[es] a stake
through” the undead Lucy.71 In MacDonald’s novel, however, the stake
is described as a fery serpent:
I saw the worm-thing come creeping out [of the fre…] The shining
thing crawled on to a bare bony foot[…] very slowly, it crept along
her robe until it reached her bosom, where it disappeared among the
folds. […]Mara, Mother of Sorrow[…] drew aside the closed edges
of the robe: no serpent was there—no searing trail; the creature had
passed in by the centre of the black spot, and was piercing through
the joints and marrow[…she] gave one writhing, contorted shudder,
and I knew the worm was in her secret chamber.72
The description of the serpent crawling up Lilith’s body and under her
clothes builds an atmosphere of sexual tension. By separating the physi-
cal and psychological aspects of Lilith’s torture, MacDonald offers a dis-
tinctive approach to the vampire tradition. Still, the almost erotic quality
of the vampire’s physical defeat in Lilith has parallels with other works
of vampire fction. Only two years after Lilith’s publication, for exam-
ple, Dracula describes the aforementioned scene of vampiric destruction
with the death of Lucy, who appears orgasmic as she is penetrated: “The
body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions.”73
In the fourth and fnal stage, Lilith recovers from her vampiric addic-
tion, thus confrming MacDonald’s underlying theological message that
no one is beyond redemption, even the vampire.74 Lilith’s main fault
is not her vampirism but her refusal to accept her place within Divine
creation. This moral can be traced back to Romantic theology, with its
focus on the individual coming to God: by rejecting her place within cre-
ation, Lilith is rejecting God.75 And although Lilith is frst described as
evil, she is part of the created order and thus she will ultimately become
good. In other words, the unveiled good in Lilith suggests that her re-
demption is preordained: “Lilith’s hour has been long on the way, but it
is come! Everything comes. Thousands of years have I waited—and not
in vain!”76 Redemptive order is established over all subjects in this fan-
tasy world. MacDonald’s idea of universal redemption is demonstrated
by depicting an ancient evil’s journey through resurrection, judgement,
punishment, and penetration.
The central moral focus of the novel is not Lilith’s redemption, however,
but Vane’s moral renewal. Vane resurrects Lilith because he believes that
he is capable of both restoring life and redeeming the addict-vampire—
creative acts that MacDonald assigns to God alone. Vane’s vanity thus
mirrors Lilith’s arrogant belief that she can create as God does. Lilith’s
subsequent punishment thus implicitly calls attention to Vane’s similarly
fawed beliefs. She becomes a kind of demon in need of divine correc-
tion. By externalising the demonic Lilith from Vane, Lilith is a full re-
alisation of the vampiric-addictive punishment explored in earlier texts
like Donal Grant.
Vane is punished through his interactions with Lilith, but his misad-
venture allows for a greater good to develop than if he had simply obeyed
Adam. The greater good is shown just before Vane resurrects Lilith:
“In this world never trust a person who has once deceived you.
Above all, never do anything such a one may ask you to do.” “I will
try to remember,” I answered; “—but I may forget!” “Then some
evil that is good for you will follow.”77
When Vane does not take this advice, Lilith follows him into his world
and divine judgement follows with her. Lilith becomes the “evil that is
good” provoked by Vane’s own actions; her role is to assist Vane’s moral
development.
While Lilith is inspired by canonical vampires of the Victorian era, the
novel’s theological currents move beyond these more traditional tales.
In a unique twist, the vampire in MacDonald’s fction is both redeemed
and redemptive. In this regard, Lilith must be read as the culmination
of MacDonald’s theological approach to the vampire-addict. The epony-
mous vampire is a means through which the author explores such themes
as divine punishment and redemption. Ultimately, the tale is not about
Lilith; rather, her redemption is secondary to her function as mirror for
Vane’s faws. She is, in other words, a vampire who facilitates humans’
redemption, more generally.
Conclusion
In MacDonald’s fction, the vampire-addict shifts from a fgure of terror
and horror to one that evokes sympathy and is sometimes even physi-
cally and emotionally attractive. Both “The Cruel Painter” and Donal
Grant challenge readers’ expectations by transforming the vampire fg-
ure into an object of sympathy, and Lilith takes readers along the re-
demption ark of the demonic Lilith. The vampire who is both victim and
monster is more typically associated with twenty-frst-century vampires,
as in HBO’s True Blood series, for example, where Bill is the romantic
lead for Sookie and agonises over his desire for her blood. MacDonald’s
vampire, however, manages to straddle categories of monstrous and
sympathetic. Arguably, MacDonald’s nineteenth-century texts help to
pioneer the sympathetic Gothic Other that defnes much of our modern
vampire literature.
92 Rebecca McLean
It is undeniable that when tracing his literary output, MacDonald’s
religious approach plays an increasingly large part in his understanding
of vampiric addiction. In seeking to explore the ramifcations of addic-
tion, MacDonald links the fgure of the addict with the fantasy monster
of the vampire, and by merging real-life issues with literary modes he
thereby creates a space in his reader’s imagination to explore poten-
tial and idealised responses to addiction. In “The Cruel Painter,” Karl’s
imagination creates a vampire which plays on Teufelsbürst’s imagina-
tion to allow him to move away from addiction towards redemption.
Donal Grant allows the vampiric Morven to be overcome by appealing
to his imagined understanding of the afterlife awaiting him for his mis-
deeds. And fnally by setting Lilith in a fantastic landscape, MacDon-
ald has full scope to appeal to and play on the reader’s imagination in
showing the vampire-addict’s route to redemption. MacDonald’s fction
places the divine in all aspects of life, and any act of imagination be-
comes, to some extent, an aspect of this larger force of divine creation.
Thus by approaching a social ill through the lens of imagination, Mac-
Donald allows his readers to sympathize with, and ultimately forgive,
real-life addicts.
Notes
1 Susan Ziger, Inventing the Addict (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2008), 196–232, 197.
2 Ziger explores this theme in relation to Brahm Stokers Dracula (1897) and
Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897). See also Dennis Dunn,
“The Vampire as Addict,” Journal of Vampirism II, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 10–13.
Laura S. Croley, “The Rhetoric of Reform in Stoker’s Dracula: Depravity,
Decline, and the Fin-de-Siècle ‘Residuum’,” Criticism 37, no. 1 (Winter
1995): 85–108. Robert Mighall, “‘A Pestilence Which Walketh in Dark-
ness’: Diagnosing the Victorian Vampire,” in Spectral Readings: Towards
a Gothic Geography, eds. Glennis Byron and David Punter (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1999), 108–124.
3 See George MacDonald, “Justice,” in Unspoken Sermons. Third Series
(London: Longmans, 1889), 109–162; and George MacDonald, “The Imag-
ination: Its Functions and Its Culture,” in A Dish of Orts (London: Sampson
Low, 1895), 1–42.
4 MacDonald, “Justice,” 114.
7 MacDonald, “Imagination,” 4.
10 Richard Reis, George MacDonald (Twayne: New York, 1972), 85.
11 William Raeper, George MacDonald (London: Lion, 1987), 316.
12 George MacDonald, “The Cruel Painter,” in Adela Cathcart, Vol III (Lon-
don: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), 206.
13 MacDonald, “The Cruel Painter,” 208.
14 See David Punter’s The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions
from 1765 to the Present Day. Volume 1: The Gothic Tradition, 2nd ed.
(London: Longman, 1996), 100–112, especially page 102.
15 Polidori’s vampire became a cultural turning point in the representation of
vampires as addicts; see Conrad Aquilina, “The Deformed Transformed; or
From Bloodsucker to Byronic Hero—Polidori and the Literary Vampire,”
in Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Un-
dead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day, eds. Sam George and Bill
Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 24–38.
16 See Christopher Frayling, Vampires: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (Lon-
don: Faber and Faber, 1991), 6.
17 George MacDonald, “The Cruel Painter,” 208.
18 A translation of this tale from the original German can be found in Paul
Barber’s Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 10–13.
19 Nick Groom notes that Slavonic culture believed suicides would become
vampires. See Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2018), 15, 98–99.
20 MacDonald, “Cruel Painter,” 202–206.
21 The Romantic Vampire is epitomized by John Polidori’s vampire Lord Ruth-
ven, a caricature of Lord Byron.
22 Scott McLaren, “Saving the Monsters? Images of Redemption in the Gothic
Tales of George MacDonald,” Christianity and Literature 55, no. 2 (2006):
245–269 (p. 247). See also Susan Ang’s “George MacDonald and ‘Ethicized’
Gothic,” in George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs (Wayne: Zos-
sima Press, 2008).
23 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus [The 1818 Text],
ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 38. For an in-
depth discussion of the role of electricity in the creation scene, see Martin
Wills, “Frankenstein and the Soul,” Essays in Criticism 45, no. 1 (1995):
24–35.
24 Shelley, Frankenstein, 38–39.
25 MacDonald, “Cruel Painter,” 219.
26 See for example Dickens’s 1835 sketch, “Gin-.shops,” in Sketches by Boz,
ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 220.
27 George MacDonald, Donal Grant (London: Routledge and Sons, 1883),
46–48.
28 MacDonald, Donal Grant, 47.
29 I am using Seth Koven’s defnition of slumming as “a movement, fgured
as some sort of ‘descent,’ across urban spatial and class, gender and sexual
boundaries” (Slumming [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004],
9). An early example of such slumming is James Greenwood’s 1866 “Night
in a Workhouse.”
30 In addition, a signifcant number of Victorian novelists were themselves ha-
bitual users of opium, including Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Wal-
ter Scott. See Andrzej Diniejko, “Victorian Drug Use,” The Victorian Web:
Literature, History & Culture in the Age of Victoria. Accessed August 16,
2019. http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/science/addiction/addiction2.
html.
31 See William Hogarth’s 1751 pair of engravings “Gin Lane” and “Beer
Street” produced in support of the Gin Act.
32 Arthur C. Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London: George
Nwnes, 1892), 128–155.
94 Rebecca McLean
33 Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, 132.
34 Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, 133.
35 MacDonald, Donal Grant, 289–295.
36 MacDonald, Donal Grant, 293, 295.
38 It should be noted that MacDonald’s adherence to the concept of universal
salvation extends to all of creation, including demons.
46 MacDonald, Donal Grant, 142, 153.
49 J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2005), 107.
56 Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories
(London: Penguin Books, 2000), 33.
57 George MacDonald, Lilith: A Romance (London: Chatto & Windus, 1896),
135.
58 MacDonald, Lilith, 147.
59 See Wilfred L. Guren et al., A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Litera-
ture: Fifth Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 185.
60 For more on the spiritual signifcance of water in MacDonald’s writings,
see Michael Düring, “Waterwheels, Healing Springs, and Baptismal Water:
George MacDonald’s Gutta Percha Willie; The Working Genius,” North
Wind 19 (2000): 9–18.
61 Düring, “Waterwheels,” 10.
63 MacDonald, Lilith, 201–204.
71 Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1895), 119, 201, 213,
319.
72 MacDonald, Lilith, 279–280.
73 Stoker, Dracula, 185. For more discussion of this scene, see also Carol A.
Senf, “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror,” in Dracula: The Vampire
and the Critics, ed. Margaret L. Carter (Ann Arbor, MI and London: UMI
Research Press, 1988), 100. Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Drac-
ula and Its Media,” ELH 59, no. 2 (1992): 483; and John A. Stevenson “The
Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula,” PMLA 103, no. 2 (1988):
143.
74 Indeed, MacDonald even hints at Satan’s eventual redemption when a fgure
called “The great Shadow” briefy hovers over the house of the dead and
Adam says “Over him also is power given me,” suggesting that he too will
undergo divine punishment and come to a state of redemption. MacDonald,
Lilith, 298.
75 For more on Romantic theology, see Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler, Roman-
ticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006).
6 “What a vampire!”
Gender and the Modern
Sexual Contract in Braddon’s
“Good Lady Ducayne”
Brooke Cameron
What if a story’s vampire was not the monstrous bloodsucker but, in

fact, the romantic hero who was supposed to save the damsel in dis-
tress? This is the lingering horror of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good
Lady Ducayne” (1896). Braddon’s story concerns Bella Rolleston, a
young girl taken on as a paid companion by the eponymous “Good
Lady.” Lady Ducayne is later revealed to be vampiric predator who, in
the tradition of Elizabeth Báthory (the late sixteenth-century Hungar-
ian Countess famed for murdering hundreds of young women), drains
the blood of her female companions in order to prolong her life. Bella
is eventually saved from Lady Ducayne by marriage to Doctor Her-
bert Stafford, who immediately recognizes the suspicious needle marks
upon her arm as evidence of the “vampire” (339) or of nonconsensual
blood transfusions more specifcally. His early insistence that he does
not hold “any prejudices about rank” seems to align our romantic hero
with the new Victorian world of class, in which bloodline (or status) is
supplanted by mutual contract between individuals. However, Herbert
never discloses to his bride the real cause for her illness; instead, he
assumes the kind executive authority over the female body permitted to
men by Victorian gender roles. That his and Bella’s marriage is funded
by Lady Ducayne also signals something is awry with this marriage
plot. Indeed, the vampire persists in this story, from explicitly named
villain to shadow fgure working behind and exploiting the failure of
the modern sexual contract.
“Good Lady Ducayne” has gained some small attention from crit-
ics, with much of this scholarship trying to place the story within
nineteenth-century representations of vampirism (what type of vampire
does Braddon give us and what are the cultural fears exploited in this
tale?). This criticism tends to focus on the vampire’s use of blood trans-
fusions as thematizing Victorians’ fear of medicine at the end of the
century.1 Leah Larson, for example, argues that “Good Lady Ducayne”
is “important because it is the frst [story] to combine traditional vam-
pire superstitions with the Victorian interest in technology, especially
in transfusion.”2 Shannon Wooden’s “post-feminist” reading claims
that the story’s central preoccupation with science represents a power
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-7
“What a vampire!” 97
struggle over knowledge.3 Still other critics focus on the story’s invest-
ment in gender and economics, themes prominent in Braddon’s earlier
writings. Lauren Goodlad reads the story’s “anti-capitalism” as part of
a larger critique of the new professional.4 In her interpretation, Lady Du-
cyane’s physician, Parravicini, is the real monster, whereas Herbert Staf-
ford represents an older type of professional-gentleman who overthrows
the entrepreneurial capitalist. Janine Hatter combines earlier criticism
on the role of science, while also extending Goodlad’s work on vampir-
ism and the Victorian class system. Hatter’s discussion of the vampire as
a kind of “monstrous mother” in particular elucidates Victorians’ very
real (or “realistic”) fear of women and the power of matrilineal social
systems in a class-based society.5
I too am interested in the story’s use of gender and kinship systems as
a response to capitalism. Like earlier critics, I recognize the vampire’s
very modern reliance upon blood transfusions; however, I explain how
this glaring scientifc detail calls attention to the villain’s obsession with
blood(lines) per the old world of status. Unlike Hatter, I do not read
Bella’s loyalty to the family as representative of a feminist (matriarchal)
threat; instead, her bond to the mother—and Lady Ducayne as a substi-
tute mother—is symbolic of an older (pre-class) system blood descent.
Hence, the villain is not the professional doctor or the new class sys-
tem he represents; rather, the villain is still very much the vampire who,
in brokering the marriage plot, represents a return to the old world of
blood and therein undermines the kind of female agency promised by
capitalism’s modern contract. This chapter thus reads the vampire in
“Good Lady Ducayne” as a symptom of the failed modern sexual con-
tract. To make this point, I frame Braddon’s Gothic short story within
her wider writings—specifcally, her sustained interest in gender and
economic themes that defned her as a pioneer of sensation fction.
Typically associated with Gothic horror, the vampire in Braddon’s
short story shows how this fgure has the power to cross genres and con-
tribute to the lasting power—or afterlife—of sensation fction. Braddon
is best known for Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), a scandalous story of
female bigamy and domestic murder. Such plots played a pivotal role in
the rise of women’s sexual rights. On the heels of the 1857 Matrimonial
Causes Act, this fction capitalized on scandal, including men’s misuse
of legal authority over wives, in order to push for marriage reform and
women’s equal rights. Feminists’ subsequent fght for socioeconomic
equality thus helped to usher in what Victorian legal historians such as
Henry Sumer Maine describe as the historic shift from the old world of
status to modern sexual contract (Ancient Law, 1861). Published at the
end of the century after the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act, Brad-
don’s short story responds to assumptions that economic reform alone
guarantees sexual equality. Indeed, the plot’s denouement, in which
fancé supplants the vampire as the authoritative (and appropriative)
98 Brooke Cameron
guardian, suggests that there can be no equality without gender reform
and a mutual respect for women’s contractual consent.
Braddon and Sensation Fiction after 1857

Sensation fction’s popularity had much to do with the debates surround-
ing the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act. The Act was a landmark moment
in the fght for marriage reform, making divorce slightly more accessible
through the courts of law instead of a private Act of Parliament. While
still an expensive and time-consuming process, this legal route made di-
vorce possible for many middle- and upper-class individuals stuck in un-
happy marriages. Indeed, gossip papers were quick to capitalize on the
many scandals associated with the growing number of divorce cases.6
Feminists’ fght leading up to this reform sought to cast a wider net—
to undo the institution of “coverture” stipulating that a wife’s identity,
both legal and economic, were entirely absorbed by her husband’s.7 One
pioneer in this larger cause was Caroline Norton.8 The granddaughter of
the legendary playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Caroline was used
to a certain amount of notoriety, but her public profle exploded fol-
lowing her separation from George Chapple Norton. While separated,
Caroline discovered that, according to the law of coverture, her husband
still enjoyed complete authority over her income, money she was earn-
ing to support herself and children independently. These conditions thus
lead Caroline and fellow reformers to push for (among other things) the
separated wife’s right to possess her own earnings (clause 21 in the orig-
inal proposal), the wife’s right to inherit and bequeath property (clause
25), and the wife’s right to contract (clause 26). Though many of these
proposed reforms did not make it into the fnal 1857 Act, stories such as
Caroline’s highlighted women vulnerability under the current marriage
agreement.9 Sensation fction was a response to such stories, often lifting
content—if not entire plotlines—from some of the salacious accounts
cited by reformers.
Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) was, like many sensation nov-
els of the time, informed by the scandals surrounding the new 1857
Act. It tells the story of Lady Audley, who has adopted a new identity
and married Sir Michael after (as she claims) being abandoned by her
impoverished frst husband. As Elaine Showalter summarizes, “Brad-
don’s bigamous heroine deserts her child, pushes husband number one
down a well, thinks about poisoning husband number two and sets fre
to a hotel in which her other male acquaintances are residing.”10 The
Lady’s “secret” is eventually found out and she is committed to a mental
institution, while her husband, his new wife, and child move to North
America. Many of these incredible plot details were, in fact, inspired
by the real-life case of Constance Kent (1860),11 which involved child
murder and popular conspiracy tales of adultery. The bigamous wife
aside, Braddon’s novel also taps into contemporary marriage reform de-
bates, especially arguments raised by Norton regarding women’s access
to divorce after desertion (and destitution). Lady Audley’s Secret subse-
quently became one of the best-selling examples of the genre12 and went
on to inspire numerous adaptations and cultural references (indeed, it
has never gone out of print).
Sensation fction is assumed to have died out by the later decades of
the Victorian period. This is not to say that its central themes—marriage
reform and women’s sexual equality—did not continue to play a key role
throughout the latter half of the century. Scholars such as Lyn Pykett ar-
gue that the genre helped pave the way for the New Woman Novel. Both
genres, Pykett explains, shared a commitment to heroines who trans-
gressed Victorian gender roles:
Sensation heroines were (or were perceived to be) criminals, mad-

women and domestic fends, while the heroines of the New Woman
fction were invariably women who—either consciously and wit-
tingly, or through force of circumstances—transgressed, rebelled
against, or were deformed by restricting social pressures.13
Sensation fction’s bold representations of women who dared to defy

restrictive patriarchal marriage plots would then play a huge role in late
Victorian feminist literature and, with it, women’s continued fght for
bodily and economic autonomy (i.e. contractual rights).
During this later period, Braddon also continued to experiment with
representations of transgressive women and unconventional sexuality.
Her later fction on these topics is more accurately defned as Gothic fc-
tion. This is not to say that Braddon, who penned perhaps THE most fa-
mous work of Sensation Fiction, transitioned from one genre to another;
rather, she wrote Gothic fction throughout her career. Early examples
of her supernatural tales include Gerard, or the World, the Flesh and
the Devil (1891), “The Cold Embrace” (The Welcome Guest, September
29, 1860), “Eveline’s Visitant” (Belgravia, January 1867), and “At Ch-
righton Abbey” (Belgravia, May 1871). Braddon also continued to write
Gothic fction into the 1880s and 1890s: The Face in the Glass (1880),
The Ghost’s Name (1891), Island of Old Faces (1892), and “Herself”
(Sheffeld Telegraph, 1894). Recent scholars working on both Braddon’s
sensation fction and Gothic writings point out that the two genres share
a sustained interest in questions of gender and women’s oppression. Lau-
rence Talairach-Vielmas, for example, argues that Lady Audley’s Se-
cret incorporates “gothic sites and stereotypes to play upon fears related
to women’s corporeality.”14 The novel uses images of coffns and even
the dead body in order “to mediate” between the two genres and, as
Talairach-Vielmas continues, “prob[e] women’s concealed depths” (21).
And discussed in the next sections, this cross-pollination also went the
100 Brooke Cameron
other way, from sensation fction to Gothic, borrowing themes from the
former in order to stress through the latter a continued horror at oppres-
sive marital plots.
The Vampire and the Old World of Status

Though Braddon’s story does invoke modern science, “Good Lady
Ducayne” is nonetheless a scary tale of the undead or supernatural
nosferatu. In fact, it is Lady Ducayne’s own physician who admits that
the pair’s predation is vampiric; following his mistress’s orders, he has
been secretly bleeding Bella through transfusions meant to prolong Lady
Ducayne’s life, but when Bella shows Dr. Parravicini the small “mos-
quito” bite on her arm, the latter rather slyly responds, “Yes, that’s
rather more than a joke,” the mosquito “has caught you on the top of a
vein. What a vampire!” (339–340). The transfusions seem to work, for
the Lady is still alive despite being over 100 years of age. When Herbert
frst sets eyes on her “withered” face, he immediately recognizes an “in-
describable horror of death outlived” (348). Through these transfusions,
Lady Ducayne is transformed into an undead monster sustained by the
blood of her human victim.
Braddon’s story clearly draws upon a long tradition of literature
stretching all the way back to Countess Báthory, perhaps the frst in-
stance of a female vampire. There are, of course, other examples of
female vampires that precede “Good Lady Ducayne” (including Keats’s
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” [1819], Gautier’s “La Morte Amoureuse”
[1836], Tolstoy’s The Family of the Vourdalak [1839/1884], and Le
Fanu’s Carmilla [1872]). Yet, it is in the legend of Countess Báthory
where we fnd the prototype for the female vampire who preys upon
girls of a lower social status. Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed
(1560–1614) was a Hungarian noblewoman who is said to have impris-
oned and murdered hundreds of village girls so that she might bathe
in their blood. Báthory believed that this gruesome ritual would stave
off the ravages of age and even “enhance her beauty,” for “[w]hen the
blood drops were washed off her face, her skin appeared much more
beautiful—whiter and more transparent on the spots where the blood
had been.”15 Báthory is said to have been exceptionally cruel in her
treatment of the girls, taking them into service in her castle, only to
have them locked in a cellar and beaten. The actual extent of Báthory’s
crimes and number of her victims (if any) have been debated by histo-
rians, but still she became the stuff of legend and helped to set a new
precedent for female vampires. Indeed, her status as a noblewoman
even predates John William Polidori’s iconic story, The Vampyre (1819;
modeled after his notorious employer, Lord Byron), responsible for the
modern literary tradition of the vampire as tied somehow to the old-
world aristocracy.16
Braddon’s use of the vampire as a symbol for the aristocracy, espe-
cially in relationship to women, would have reminded Victorian readers
of contemporary debates around female contract.17 Indeed, Braddon’s
pioneer work of sensation fction, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), was pub-
lished just shortly after one of the key dissertations on the shift from
the old world of status (aristocracy) to the modern world of contract
(class): Henry Sumner Maine’s Ancient Law (1861). Maine’s text de-
scribes the shift of English society from its so-called “primitive” state
to its modern formation, using the concept of contract as a way to focus
this history.18 The ffth chapter on “Law in Primitive Society” looks at
the role of familial obligation versus the individual’s ability to engage in
self-possessed exchange:
… society in primitive times was not what it is assumed to be at pres-

ent, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in the view of the men
who composed it, it was an aggregation of families. The contrast
may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the unit of an ancient
society was the Family, of a modern society the Individual.19
According to this history, then the older world of status is marked by

the subordination of individuals to the family (or “corporation”). 20 This
is the world of blood(lines), wherein property is traced through pater-
nal descent.21 There is no such thing as the individual in this world of
status: “Men are,” Maine explains, “regarded and treated, not as indi-
viduals, but always as members of a particular group” (Ancient Law,
1861, 108). 22 Maine’s preference for the masculine subject is not simply
sexist but, rather, an accurate refection of the family’s patriarchal struc-
ture. As Ruth Perry explains, “Agnatio” or “kinship created through the
male, included the concept of civil kinship as well as biological kinship,
which was a function of being subject to patria potestas or the father’s
power”; conversely, “Women could only create cognatio, or natural kin-
ship, ‘devoid of the privileges attached to legal kinship.’”23 With the rise
of capitalism’s class system, however, the blood bond (Agnatio and Pa-
tria Potestas family) was eventually displaced by conjugal bonds or “con-
tracts” between individuals. “We may,” as Maine concludes his chapter,
“say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been
a movement from Status to Contract.”24 This historic shift thus freed
men from flial obligation (the Patria Potestas family) to engage in free
exchange as self-possessed individuals. However, at issue for Maine—
as well as Braddon—is the question of women’s similar freedom from
blood ties to or defnition through the family.
From the outset, Bella is shown as very much caught between the
worlds of status and contract. In regards to the latter, she aspires to the
role of self-possessed individual who pursues a career of her choosing.
In her initial conversation with the placement agent, for example, Bella
102 Brooke Cameron
shows her class ambition when she admits she wants more than work
as a “lowly” companion: “I am not at all accomplished,” she says, for
“[i]f I were I should want to be a governess—a companion seems the
lowest stage” (325). Bella also displays an appetite for commodity con-
sumption or the desire to purchase goods of her own: “There were so
many things that she longed for and would never be able to buy” (329).
Yet Bella thinks she can “never” enjoy such possessive individualism
because of her mother’s poverty. Bella even places her flial duty above
any prospective marriage plot; when the agent worries that Bella’s rush
to fnd work is due to some kind of “love affair,” the girl retorts, “with
faming cheeks,” “What utter nonsense. I want a situation because
mother is poor, and I hate being a burden to her. I want a salary that I
can share with her” (327). Yet the Rolleston family is matriarchal, for
Bella’s father left her mother destitute long ago. On the one hand, Bella’s
tie to the matriarch creates a perfect situation for Lady Ducayne to step
in as both substitute mother fgure and as a symbol of familial obligation
(status). In a letter to her mother, Bella even describes Lady Ducayne as
a “funny old grandmother, who has suddenly appeared in my life, very
rich, very kind” (333). On the other hand, the absence of a father fgure
creates the perfect power vacuum in which a romantic male might fll
and thereby assume his role as Patria Postas.
Lady Ducayne’s subsequent use of transfusions foregrounds this
Victorian fxation with—and more specifcally, anxiety around—
blood(lines). In fact, so much of the horror in “Good Lady Ducayne”
derives from the medical form of this predation, betraying Victorians’
discomfort with the scientifc practice. 25 By the end of the century, and
with the rise of the professional classes, fear of doctors reached new
levels, largely due to the commodifcation of medical treatment. Wil-
liam Hughes explains how doctors refect “a pervasive perception of
the greater profession,” and that “If there is a dominant focus … within
Victorian Gothic, then it would seem to be the overwhelmingly mate-
rialist … attitude to the patient.”26 This context is why, as Goodlad
argues, the real vampire in “Good lady Ducayne” is actually Doctor
Parravicini, for he is not only the one responsible for extracting literal
blood from Bella but he also, and more importantly, bleeds his employer
of her fnances. 27 Toward the end of the story, Lady Ducayne insists
that Parravicini “needn’t complain” for she has already “paid [him]
thousands to keep [her] alive” and “Every year of [her] life has swollen
[his] hoards” (350). While Goodlad is correct that the doctor taps into
Victorians’ fears of a new professional class, I would add that Lady
Ducayne wants to harness the power of medicine in order to preserve
an older social order of and through blood. In other words, transfusions
work on another level of class anxiety, apart from readers’ distrust of
medicine, by instead highlighting quite visibly the aristocrat’s appropri-
ation of the lower-class subject’s life force.
By using transfusions as the aristocratic vampire’s preferred mode
of predation, Braddon’s short story thus forces readers to contend with
the social meaning of blood and specifcally the persistent power of
the familial bond throughout the nineteenth century. In “Good Lady
Ducayne,” blood circulates not as a currency of capitalism or cross-class
appropriation of labor value; rather, it works to bind together donor and
recipient through a shared investment in kinship. The process of trans-
fusion seems to work by making clear this character or shared meaning
of blood. In his own history of transfusions, Nick Groom explains how
there was a longstanding assumption about the donor’s character or “es-
sence” being passed on to the recipient through blood. He cites the 1667
example of Coga, a 32-year-old Divinity graduate of Cambridge Univer-
sity, whose “freakish and extravagant” nature was effectively tempered
by the “cooling” characteristics of transfused lamb’s blood. 28 This same
assumption about blood’s character is why much time is spent early in
the story, during Lady Ducayne’s interview of Bella, questioning the lat-
ter on her “good health” and strength (330, 331). Báthory-like, Lady
Ducayne will later fll herself with the girl’s blood and presumably its
essence of youth. As the transfusions progress, however, we discover
that the girl’s blood means so much more than robust health; her blood
also symbolizes her ties to the mother or matriarchal family. Bella frst
credits her health (blood) to her mother: “I owe it to her care that I grew
up such a great, strong creature” (345), and later, as she grows weaker,
Bella worries about her ability to continue working and becomes home-
sick, longing for her mother (335–336; 344). In an ironic twist, then,
the life-preserving quality of the girl’s blood has as much to do with its
origin in familial bonds (exceeding the individual donor and recipient).
The Vampire and Modern Marriage Contract

At frst glance, Herbert Stafford would seem to represent a plot shift to
the modern marriage contract as solution to the vampire and/as the old
world of status. After all, Herbert cares little about what one’s family
signifes in social rank. When his sister Lotta warns him, “Bella is an
absolute pauper” whose “mother makes mantles for a West-end shop,”
Herbert defnitively replies, “I shouldn’t think any less of her if her
mother made match-boxes” (342). Herbert instead claims to believe in
companionate marriage between individuals, not bloodlines: “if ever I
love a woman well enough to think of marrying her, riches or rank will
count for nothing with me” (344–345). Herbert’s actions toward Bella,
however, are much different from his express political commitments;
instead of consulting with his new bride-to-be as an equal worthy of in-
formed consent, he withholds crucial information from her. Specifcally,
he does not tell her about Lady’s Ducayne’s predation, and as a result of
this omission, his proposal looks more like benevolent rescue than an act
104 Brooke Cameron
of mutual contract. In fact, it is Lotta, not Herbert, who informs Bella
of Herbert’s conversation with and Bella’s subsequent dismissal by Lady
Ducayne: “Herbert had a good talk with Lady Ducayne last night and
it was settled for you to leave this morning,” Lotta tells Bella, “[Lady
Ducayne] doesn’t like invalids, you see” (352). Not only is Bella absent
when Lady Ducayne confesses her guilt, but she also, as a result of this
absence, has no agency in her subsequent shift in narrative role from em-
ployee to wife. Herbert essentially exchanges roles with Lady Ducayne
as acting authority over Bella. 29
Herbert’s assumption of such patriarchal authority is doubly prob-
lematic, given the story’s cultural setting. “Good Lady Ducayne” was
published over a decade after the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act,
which was the culmination of much feminist lobbying after the short-
falls of the 1857 Act. In particular, the new 1882 Act did what the for-
mer couldn’t and fnally guaranteed married women the right to own
and bequeath property. Yet, as suggested by Herbert’s disregard for Bel-
la’s informed consent, there were still limits to women’s new rights. As
Catherine O. Frank explains:
the law persisted in viewing marital status as a determining factor of

[women’s] freedom of testation; women’s right to have constituted a
new way to be, but the law continued to discourage the association
of women’s property rights with the enhancement of women’s will.30
In other words, women enjoyed greater economic independence in mar-

riage, and yet the expression of private identity through testimony, the
very foundation of a contract, was still a problem even after 1882.
This history combined with Herbert’s assumption of authority over
Bella’s plot thus suggest that while property rights secured a certain de-
gree of autonomy for women, these rights did not guarantee sexual con-
tract. Rather, late Victorian women were still constricted by traditional
or, specifcally, patriarchal gender roles, especially since such gender
roles tacitly allowed men to disregard the very (female) voices needed to
express consent. It was this context that inspired many so-called New
Women writers, such as Oliver Schreiner (Story of an African Farm,
1883), Amy Levy (The Romance of a Shop, 1888), and George Egerton
(Keynotes, 1893) to pen stories questioning women’s social circum-
scription within marriage plots in the frst place. Like these late Vic-
torian feminists, Braddon takes aim at the marriage plot. Yet in place
of the New Woman’s radical rejection of such plots, Braddon instead
returns to her roots as a writer of sensation fction in order to expose
and therein critique the persistent problem of patriarchal gender roles,
even after 1882.
The problem of patriarchy is at the very heart of Maine’s analysis of
modern marriage. According to Maine, marriage cannot present itself
as a contract and thus move from status into modernity until it sheds
entirely all vestiges of the patriarchal traffc in women or what he terms
as “tutelage.” Maine explains the “tutelage of women” as that structure
of kinship building, wherein a wife is transferred from her father’s to her
husband’s family—otherwise known as exogamous exchange of women
meant to prevent confict among patriarchs. 31 In turn, the woman and
her offspring (bloodline) are defned—or their kinship is delineated—
through the husband/patriarch. Through this discussion of female tu-
telage, Maine thus codes patriarchy as a holdover of primitive society
or the family as “status” (the Patria Potestas). As Kathy Alexis Psomia-
des explains, “By redefning marriage as an ancient social arrangement
of status, like slavery, a holdover from a world without the beneft of
contract, Maine primitivizes patriarchy.”32 The advent of the modern
marriage contract therefore depends upon the demise of patriarchal
gender roles or any such structure that denies women the equal right
to self-possessed sexual exchange. Maine writes: “It is this patriarchal
aggregate—the modern family thus cut down on one side and extended
on the other—which meets us on the threshold of primitive jurispru-
dence.”33 Maine instead advocates the abolition of female tutelage from
the woman’s “coming of age to her marriage all the relations she may
form are relations of contract.”34
In “Good Lady Ducayne,” men are not the only ones who hold fast to
the old world of status and the blood bonds of the patriarchal family; the
eponymous villain thwarts our would-be heroine’s plot to self-employed
contract by tapping her blood without consent. Lady Ducayne’s vampir-
ism thus manifests as a unique mix of modern science used to preserve
life and the world of status she represents. This is why she is immediately
drawn to Herbert, for she recognizes the young doctor’s knowledge of
new medicine that might be harnessed to serve this nefarious purpose.
“Have you made any discovery that teaches you to prolong human life—
any elixir—any mode of treatment?” she asks him, and then explicitly
states, “I want my life prolonged, young man” (349–350). Parravacini’s
methods are already “too old,” Lady Ducayne complains, and though
“he studies all of the new theories,” “his brain-power is going—he is
bigoted—prejudiced—can’t receive new ideas—can’t grapple with new
systems” (349–350). Parravacini’s outmoded methods, of course, rely
on literal transfusion for bloodlines, a method that Ducayne herself sees
as too risky, if not criminal (as Herbert argues): it only takes “one air
bubble and I shall be gone” (351). Through Herbert, Lady Ducayne dis-
covers a new method to prolong the world of status she embodies: by
funding the marriage plot. Confronted with her crime, Lady Ducayne’s
solution is to broker a union between the girl and the authoritative hero,
for when she dismisses Bella from her service, she also gifts the girl “a
cheque for a thousand” (353). As a result, Bella need no longer work and
can instead shift her attention to romance. The vampire’s transfusions
106 Brooke Cameron
thus serve as catalyst from literal blood(lines) to the marriage plot and
the patriarchal family.
Conclusion
Bella’s salvation from the vampire thus comes in the form of the marriage
plot. Yet, Herbert’s proposal is a far cry from a modern contract; in-
stead, just as the transfusions emphasize the importance of blood(lines),
so too does Herbert’s proposal represent a return to the old world of
status. In this Gothic story, the terror hinges on the return to patriarchy.
Elizabeth Rose Gruner argues that Lady Ducayne’s (now certain) death
will provide some kind of closure to the horror story, 35 but I suggest here
that her legacy is actually extended through marriage between Bella and
Herbert. The story’s denouement thus emphasizes the vampire’s afterlife
by harnessing this seemingly new promise of the modern marriage plot
only, and ironically, in order to preserve Lady Ducayne’s “good” name
and the world of status she signifes.
By ending with Bella’s letter to her mother, Braddon’s story thus con-
frms Lady’s Ducayne’s legacy through the persistent familial bond. This
letter tells us that Bella is still very much preoccupied with blood ties; at
the same time, Bella’s letter confrms her ignorance of past victimhood
and instead celebrates Lady Ducayne’s benevolence in making possible
this marriage. “And I am sure you will adore him, mother, as much as I
do,” writes Bella, adding that “It is all good Lady Ducayne’s doing” and
that “I never could have married if I had not secured that little nest-egg
for you” (354). Indeed, Bella’s quick shift in focus from Herbert to Lady
Ducayne suggests that her emotions for the latter are connected to, if not
overshadowed by, the former. And this connection thus suggests that the
family—in this case, the substitute mother fgure—is still, according to
Bella, the driving force of her plotline. Herbert himself even seems to
recognize that his marriage is bound within these terms of flial loyalty,
for in taking Bella as a wife he also promises to take on responsibility
for her mother: “Herbert says we shall be able to add to it as the years go
by, and that wherever we live there shall be always a room in our house
for you,” Bella writes to her mother; “The word ‘mother-in-law’ has no
terrors for him.” (354). It would be wrong to read this last bit of infor-
mation as evidence of some kind of compassionate sacrifce on Herbert’s
part; rather, his acceptance of Bella’s mother (or his lack of “terror”) is
very much in keeping with his new role in what Maine refers to as the
“Patria Potestas.” Lady Ducayne’s money means the preservation of sta-
tus through this funded marriage, and Herbert only too happily seems
to step into his new role as the traditional patriarch.
“Good Lady Ducayne” is, in the end, a Gothic story that reads like
sensation fction, in that its central action and the underlying source
of horror highlight the persistent problem of outmoded or oppressive
gender roles. As in typical sensation fction, the story relies on thrills
and seemingly outrageous plots that, when probed a bit deeper, ex-
pose the facts of sexual inequality. And while both genres shared an
interest in sexual politics, “Good Lady Ducayne” embraces the Gothic
(particularly its fgure of the vampire) in order to stress the afterlife of
sensation fction and the enduring necessity of its investment in gender
critique. When it frst emerged in the 1860s, sensation fction capital-
ized on the fallout from the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Acts, exposing
how women, despite greater access to divorce, were incredibly vulner-
able to abuse under common law assumptions of masculine authority.
As Braddon’s story makes clear, even after the 1882 Married Women’s
Property Act guaranteed women new economic rights, sexual inequal-
ity was still far from solved in conjugal plots so long as traditional
gender roles, harkening back to the world of status, underwrote men’s
power to override female consent. “Good Lady Ducayne” exposes, in
other words, the continued need for—or afterlife of—sensation fction
writers of horrifying plots to expose the patriarchal family sucking the
life force—and, more specifcally, the agency—from women at the end
of the century.
Notes
1 See also Ingrid Pitt, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women
(London: Robinson, 2001), 381; and Saverio Tomaiuolo, “Reading be-
tween the (Blood)lines of Victorian Vampires: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s
‘Good Lady Ducayne’,” in From Wollstonecraft to Stoker: Essays on Gothic
and Victorian Sensation Fiction, ed. Marilyn Brock (London: McFarland,
2009), 114.
2 Leah Larson, “Braddon, Mary Elizabeth,” in The Facts on File Companion
to the British Short Story, ed. Andrew Maunder (New York: Facts on File,
2007), 170.
3 Shannon Wooden, “Mary Braddon’s ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ in Context(s):
Victorian Medicine, Literary Gothicism and 21st Century Feminist Peda-
gogy,” CEA Forum 36, no. 2 (2007): 5.
4 Lauren Goodlad, “‘Go and Marry Your Doctor’: Fetishism and ‘Redun-
dance’ at the Fin de Siècle and the Vampires of ‘Good Lady Ducayne’,”
in Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, eds. Marlene
Tromp et al. (New York: University of New York Press, 2000), 220.
5 Janine Hatter, “Writing the Vampire: M. E. Braddon’s ‘Good Lady Ducayne’
and Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Supernatural Studies 2, no. 2 (August 24,
2015): 38, 44.
6 See Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction and
the Invention of the News (Oxford University Press, 2009), 64–65.
7 See William Blackstone, “Chapter XV: Of Husband and Wife,” in Com-
mentaries on the Laws of England, Book the First (Oxford: Claredon Press,
1765), 421–433, for more on how English common law, with its guiding
principle of ‘coverture,’ defnes the wife and husband as a single entity over
whom the husband assumes absolute authority.
8 For more on this history, see Mary Poovey, “Covered but Not Bound: Caro-
line Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act,” Uneven Developments:
The Ideology Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, IL: The
University of Chicago Press, 1988), 51–88.
108 Brooke Cameron
9 See Catherine O. Frank, Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture
in England, 1837–1925 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 111.
10 Elain Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Authors from
Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 163.
11 See “Murder of Francis Savile Kent,” COVE. Accessed November 29, 2021.
https://editions.covecollective.org/blog/murder-francis-savile-kent
12 See John Sutherland, “Lady Audley’s Secret,” in The Stanford Companion
to Victorian Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1989), 360.
13 Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and
the New Women Writing (New York: Routledge, 1992), 9–10.
14 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, “Sensation Fiction and the Gothic,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Andrew Mangham (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 21.
15 Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves [1865], (Urbana, IL: Proj-
ect Gutenberg) Retrieved February 3, 2021.
16 Carol A. Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Bowl-
ing Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press,1988), 43, 58.
17 See Wooden, “‘Good Lady Ducayne’ in Context(s),” 5, for more on the class
dynamics of this predatory relationship.
18 Ancient Law was hailed by many Victorians as an instant “classic” on mod-
ern contract law (J. H. Morgan, “Introduction” [Ancient Law (New York:
Dent & Sons, 1917)], vii). Morgan added that “its epoch-making infuence
may not unftly be compared to that exercised by Darwin’s Origins of Spe-
cies” (“Introduction,” vii).
19 Henry S. Maine, Ancient Law (New York: Dent & Sons, 1917), 74.
20 Maine, Ancient Law, 108; see Frank, Law, Literature, 40, for more on the
patriarch and the corporate family.
21 See Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English
Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
117; Perry argues that the powerful legacy of this familial structure can
be found in the abundance of names for relations acquired through blood
bonds (niece, nephew, etc.); yet, there are few terms for relations acquired
through marriage (“in-laws”).
22 Maine, Ancient Law, 108.
23 Perry, Novel Relations, 111.
24 Maine, Ancient Law, 100; See also Kathy Psomiades, “The Marriage Plot in
Theory,” Novel 43, no. 1 (2010): 54.
25 See Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
26 William Hughes, “Victorian Medicine and the Gothic,” The Victorian
Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, eds. Andrew Smith and William
Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 197.
27 Goodlad, “Go and Marry Your Doctor,” 222–223; See also Hatter, “Writ-
ing the Vampire,” 10.
28 Groom, The Vampire, 19. These same assumptions persisted well into the
twentieth century, but in a racist form, whereby (up until the 1960s) insti-
tutions such as the American Red Cross insisted on separating Black and
White donor blood (Michael G. Kenny, “A Question of Blood, Race, and
Politics,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61, no. 4
[2006]: 456).
29 For more on this “anticlimactic” and “unsatisfyning” marriage plot, see
Heather Braune, “Idle Vampires and Decadent Maidens: Sensation, the
Supernatural, and Mary E. Braddon’s Disappointing Femme Fatales,” in
Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century
Women Writers, ed. Tamara S. Wagner (Amherst: Cambria, 2009), 242.
30 Frank, Law, Literature, 111.
32 Kathy A. Psomiades, “Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fic-
tions: The Eustace Diamonds and Victorian Anthropology,” Novel 33, no. 1
(1999): 101.
34 Maine, Ancient Law, 99–100.
35 Elisabeth R. Gruner, “Short Fiction by Women in the Victorian Litera-
ture Survey,” in Teaching British Women Writers 1750–1900, eds. Jeanne
Moskal and Shannon R. Wooden (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 106.
7 The Vampire’s Touch in
“Olalla” and The Blood of
the Vampire
Kimberly Cox
“One sign of the vampire is the power of the hand.”

—Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
Why include an analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Olalla” (1885) and

Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) in a collection on
the nineteenth-century vampire, a fgure commonly identifed by fangs
and bloodlust? There’s very little blood or traditional bloodsucking in
either story despite what the name of the latter promises. In Stevenson’s
story, Olalla’s mother, the Señora, bites the unnamed narrator when he
presents his bleeding hand to her, but there’s no clear mention of blood
drinking: “[…] the next moment my hand was at her mouth, and she had
bitten me to the bone.”1 The presentation of this moment lacks many of
the details readers may be familiar with from Sheridan Le Fanu’s and
Bram Stoker’s iterations of vampires. And in The Blood of the Vampire
(hereafter Blood), it’s Harriet Brandt’s mixed-race ancestry—English
and Barbadian—that the titular “blood” refers to rather than the form
of life force she consumes. It may seem that the answer to my opening
question should be, “You don’t!”
Yet scholars who have written about “Olalla” and Blood take these
characters’ vampire status as given. 2 In the absence of bloodsucking
though, what, one might ask, makes Olalla in the former or Harriet
Brandt in the latter vampires at all? Neither story suggests that the vam-
piric characters are undead and reliant on blood for survival. Harriet
is very much alive throughout the narrative—up until her suicide. And
while adjectives such as “unhumanly” (166) and “bestial” (208) are at-
tributed to characters in “Olalla,” the eponymous family’s capacity for
sexual rather than vampiric reproduction suggests that they are all con-
ventionally alive. Further, no characters have fangs, sleep in coffns, die
by wooden stakes, change form, require an invitation, fear crosses, or
transform others into the undead through the oral exchange of blood.
Ignoring bloodsucking altogether, much scholarship on these two sto-
ries focuses instead on the themes of inheritance, degeneracy, doubling,
and gender.3 David Melville’s short article on “Olalla” is the only one
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-8
The Vampire’s Touch 111
to overtly query whether “Olalla truly [is] a vampire in the making?”4
Melville comes to no certain conclusion about Olalla’s nature. Similarly,
those who have written about Marryat’s Blood, which reads almost like
a tract against interracial relationships, 5 have accepted Harriet’s vampir-
ism because that’s how the text refers to her. Sian Macfe, for example,
identifes Harriet as a “psychic vampire,” explaining that “vampirism
also came to be used metaphorically to refer to a social phenomenon, the
‘psychic sponge.’ […] a woman who was perceived to be a drain on the
energy, and emotional and intellectual resources of her companions.”6
But, as with “Olalla,” critics have not yet explored what makes Harriet
a vampire rather than a succubus, given that Harriet drains vital energy
through physical contact—often affectionate or amorous—rather than
bloodsucking. It’s this contact on which I’d like to focus and which, I
suggest, is the key to understanding both what makes Olalla and Har-
riet vampires, despite their differences from more canonized examples,
and how those differences allow readers to better understand the fears
and compunctions that lurk in the shadows cast on Victorian readers by
literary vampires.
Both Olalla and Harriet are coded by their respective narratives as
vampires because of what happens when they touch others. In fact,
rather than bloodlust, it’s the literal strength and intense eroticism of
their touches that establish them as vampiric or, at least, more than hu-
man. After the Señora in “Olalla” bites the narrator, he describes what
he remembers of his rescue: “I felt Olalla clasp me in her arms, her hair
falling on my face, and, with the strength of a man, raise and half-drag,
half-carry me upstairs to my own room, where she cast me down upon
the bed” (207). In Blood, the narrator notes that Harriet’s hands possess
a similar type of unfeminine strength when, during an amorous embrace
with Ralph Pullen, “Her hand, very slight and lissom, clung to his with
a force of which he had not thought it capable and he felt it trembling
in his clasp” (74). Yet, the narrator in the frst instance and Ralph in the
second are fascinated and aroused by the strength of these touches rather
than frightened.
While much vampire criticism focuses on fanged penetration as sym-
bolic of vampires’ social and sexual “deviancy,”7 I emphasize tactility
for two reasons. First, Olalla and Harriet are portrayed as vampires
in their respective narratives through detailed descriptions of how their
hands’ strength and erotic power belie their traditionally feminine ap-
pearance and behavior. Their family legacies—their literal blood—curse
them with such vampiric touch. Second, the pleasure male characters
experience when they touch or are touched by Olalla and Harriet sit-
uates non-White, non-English female sexuality as a direct threat to
conventional White English masculinity, imperial reproductive futur-
ism, and the nation-building to which such men’s “seed” is supposed to
contribute. In this chapter, I explore how “tactile erotics”8 characterize
112 Kimberly Cox
Olalla and Harriet as vampires and their respective tales as vampire
stories despite the distinct absence of bloodsucking and other standard
vampire mythology. In doing so, I assert that vampires’ touches reveal
something that their bites do not. Their touches highlight how fn de
siècle Victorian xenophobia and gender normativity served to demonize
erotic contact that threatened to “rob” England and its empire of the re-
sources from which it would draw future soldiers, statesmen, and moth-
ers. Victorians’ anxious insistence on sexual normativity was not only
about conformity, but rather the preservation of imperial reproductive
futurism. Through representations of touch, these vampire stories pres-
ent phantasmagorically strengthened and crucially non-British female
tactile erotics as terrifying, at least in part, because they threatened the
“proper” deployment of masculine sexual potency.
Tactility, Female Sexuality, and Monstrosity

The fn de siècle in England saw mass anxiety over the nation’s reproduc-
tive future in light of the declining national birthrate, which was linked
in the national imaginary to imperialist expansion and the rise of the
New Woman.9 Such widespread concerns were associated in literature
and culture with monstrosity, which was, in turn, often the product of
modernity and resulted in social decline.10 As Franco Moretti argues,
“one of the institutions most threatened by the monsters is the family.”11
I extend his observation, suggesting that in “Olalla” and Blood, it’s
not just “the family” as a singular idea that these female vampires and
their touches threaten. It’s the reproductive family—or the potential for
certain characters to establish a reproductive, White, family—to which
Olalla and Harriet pose a danger. That threat becomes of particular
concern toward the end of the century since, as Alexandra Warwick
shows, not all monsters are visually identifable; the post-Darwinian
monster “is the invisible one, the man whose apparently normal exterior
hides psychological deformity.”12
Neither Olalla nor Harriet look like monsters; however, as I’ll de-
scribe in detail in subsequent sections, their touches are superhuman and
thus convey monstrosity. Olalla and her family are Spanish and come
from an aristocratic lineage with an ancient bloodline that “had been
impoverished” (181). The narrator contrasts this degeneracy, which he
initially associates with a lack of intelligence, with numerous descrip-
tions of Olalla’s, her mother’s, and her brother’s beauty. In fact, it’s that
beauty that prevents him from taking seriously Olalla’s design to end
her family’s curse—the bloodlust revealed in her mother—by refusing
to reproduce. While these characters don’t look wicked, the narrator’s
description of how Olalla’s beauty transfxes him betrays an underlying
danger: “her eyes took hold upon mine and clung there, and bound us
together like the joining of hands” (194). Similarly, Harriet was born in
Jamaica, and unbeknownst to her, possesses a “terrible parentage.”13
Doctor Phillips, the novel’s medical authority, explains how Harriet was
orphaned at a young age and “bred of sensuality, cruelty, and heartless-
ness” (85). He identifes her as the bastard child of a sadistic English
vivisectionist and a “fat, fabby half caste” “fend” with an insatiable
bloodlust (83). Harriet’s father, Henry Brandt, settled in Jamaica after
his expulsion from a Swiss hospital for the extreme “barbarity” of his
experiments. Her mother was born of “Judge Carey of Barbadoes by
one of his slave girls,” and this enslaved woman, Harriet’s grandmother,
was bitten by a vampire bat while pregnant (82). That violent heritage is
not readily apparent on Harriet’s attractive exterior, however. Harriet’s
“colourless but clear” skin, her “long-shaped, dark, and narrow” eyes,
her “straight and small” nose, her “soft, dull, blue-black hair,” and her
“large” mouth “with lips of a deep blood color” render her “a remark-
able looking girl” (4) frequently called “beautiful” (47) and “handsome”
(48). But, as with Olalla, her loveliness itself is dangerous because it
enthralls. The features that distinguish Harriet’s appearance from that
of the White Englishwomen around her are what make her desirable to
men in particular, “men [who] welcomed and eagerly responded to” (45)
her lust for life apparent in her dark eyes and red lips. In their study of
monstrosity, Abigail Lee Six and Hannah Thompson suggest that nine-
teenth-century literature “present[s] the monster as an impediment to
national, social, political, and scientifc progress.”14 When female char-
acters show no outward signs of monstrosity other than beauty char-
acterized as slightly foreign (i.e., not English), touch becomes a way to
signal these anxieties in vampire fction, particularly when a vampire’s
touch threatens to disrupt the sexually reproductive and thus national
order.
In the Victorian imaginary, touch was closely linked with sexuality as
anatomical science came to be a basis for pseudosciences like hand phre-
nology and for designating appropriate social behaviors like handshake
etiquette. Richard Beamish’s The Psychonomy of the Hand (1843), pop-
ular enough to be republished in 1865, notes a difference between “the
nerves of feeling, which […] are common to the whole surface of the
body, [and] the nerves of touch,” which appear in the hands, feet, and
“also on the red edges of the lips, and on the point of the tongue.”15 The
popular etiquette book The Habits of Good Society makes a similar as-
sociation between hands and lips: “Next to those of the lips, the nerves
of touch are most highly developed in the fngers.”16 Since hands and lips
experience physical stimuli in the same way through the same nerves (ac-
cording to Victorian anatomical science, pseudoscience, and etiquette),
the association of hands with sex organs and touch with eroticism be-
came a common feature of literary narratives, including monster stories,
as Aviva Briefel and Katherine Rowe show in their respective analyses of
mummies’ hands and “beast[s] with fve fngers.”17
114 Kimberly Cox
Both Olalla and Harriet touch in ways that contradict the rules of
tactile erotics associated with traditional White, English femininity. In
her study of gloves, Ariel Beaujot notes supple White skin unmarked by
sun and dainty palms with long thin fngers and rounded, plump fnger-
tips as demonstrative of “proper”—meaning White and middle-class—
femininity during the nineteenth century.18 The Habits of Good Society
details how such “ladies” should and shouldn’t touch:
A young lady gives her hand, but does not shake a gentleman’s un-
less she is his friend. A lady should always rise to give her hand; […]
On introduction in a room, a married lady generally offers her hand,
a young lady not; in a ball-room, […] you never shake hands; and
as a general rule, an introduction is not followed by shaking hands,
only by a bow.19
Thus, an unmarried “lady,” which here means a White middle- or

upper-class English woman of marriageable age, demonstrates her social
status and respectability by not touching men’s hands unless she already
knows him as an intimate acquaintance. An article in All the Year Round
goes so far as to explain the reason for such cautions: “Ladies […] can-
not be expected to show persons of the other sex a warmth of greeting,
which might be misinterpreted.”20 Though the narrator merely bows to
Olalla the frst few times they meet, the frst time she comes and speaks
to him, he explains, “she leaped to me and clung to me” (203). Similarly,
Harriet frequently and freely touches the men around her, including the
already engaged Ralph Pullen mere hours after they meet:
She was dancing about the shallow water, […] and clinging hold
of the Baron’s hand, […] [until] Captain [Ralph] Pullen evidently
trying to induce Miss [Harriet] Brandt to venture further into the
water, holding out both hands for her protection,—[resulted in] her
yield[ing] to his persuasion, and leaving go of her hold on the Herr
Baron, trust[ing] herself entirely to the stranger’s care.
(64–65)
Not only do Olalla and Harriet possess uncharacteristically masculine

grips, they touch in ways that demonstrate open affection and passion.
Such expressions of desire code both women as more sexual and less
“ladylike” than their English counterparts, suggesting an inner mon-
strosity, a dangerous beauty by which good, young Englishmen might
be led astray.
In both stories, then, the vampire’s touch rather than her fangs re-
veals the tension between desire and repulsion characteristic of vampire
fction. In her study of monstrosity, Rosi Braidotti asserts that the mon-
strous body “is something which evokes both horror and fascination
[…] It is simultaneously holy and hellish” and that this “simultaneity
of opposite effects is the trademark of the monstrous body.”21 The
power—strong yet sensual—that lies in Olalla’s and Harriet’s hands
render the monstrosity of such opposition visible to readers of vampire
fction. Their hands’ shape and surface often belie physical strength, just
as the feel of their touch stimulates erotic longing that’s simultaneously
pleasurable and repellent for non-vampiric characters, particularly male
characters. For instance, as the narrator of “Olalla” lays recovering after
being bitten by the Señora, he describes the passion he experiences when
Olalla “plucked my hand towards her, herself at the same time leaning
somewhat forward, and laid it on the beating of her heart” (210). Olalla
intends to use this gesture of intimacy to explain her cursed lineage, but
it only arouses the narrator’s passion and leaves him frustrated, unable
to pursue her when she leaves due to his own physical weakness. Ralph
similarly experiences the oxymoronic effect of Harriet’s touch:
her full red lips met his own, in a long-drawn kiss, that seemed to
sap his vitality. As he raised his head again, he felt faint and sick, but
quickly recovering himself, he gave her a second kiss more passion-
ate, if possible, than the frst.
(75)
These touches, which deviate from those established rules of etiquette,

are encoded by both texts as sexual in nature, and such sexuality thereby
renders Olalla’s and Harriet’s femininity monstrous in its ability to
tempt young, White Englishmen to forsake familial duty for feeting
individual pleasure. In contrast to traditional vampire narratives like
Dracula (1897), which depicts vampiric reproduction as dangerous but
still reproductive, “Olalla” and Blood highlight tactile erotics to convey
Olalla’s and Harriet’s vampiric heritage as dangerous because it directs
male sexual energy away from Englishwomen and the reproductive fam-
ily such conventional coupling would promote.
Olalla’s Embrace
Each member of Olalla’s family—including her mother, the Señora, and
her brother, Felipe—touch in ways that deviate from accepted English
etiquette and thus characterize them as Other. I begin my discussion
of “Olalla” with the Señora’s and Felipe’s touches, since they appear
frst in the narrative and establish a clear pattern that Olalla’s touch
follows. The narrator has an erotic tactile experience at each of their
hands. Shortly after meeting the “very rustic, very cunning, very loutish,
and […] innocent” (164) Felipe, the narrator, confesses to allowing an
uncomfortable level of social intimacy, exemplifed by Felipe’s “some-
times drawing his hand over my clothes with an affectionate manner of
116 Kimberly Cox
caressing that never failed to cause in me an embarrassment of which
I was ashamed” (172). The shame that the narrator feels suggests that
Felipe’s caresses inspire in him undesired physical arousal. Felipe’s touch
redirects the narrator’s desire away from “proper” heteronormative ob-
jects. This short scene is the frst of several in “Olalla” in which the
narrator describes touches that he fnds threatening because they are
alluring, though they detract from heteronormative plots.
In his interactions with Olalla’s mother, the narrator experiences a
touch that’s similarly jarring because it’s arousing. The narrator de-
scribes his shame following his excitement at the Señora’s handshake:
[…] but I was made conscious of her pleasure by some more inti-
mate communication than the sight. […] she suddenly shot forth
one of her hands and patted mine. The thing was done, and she
was back in her accustomed attitude, before my mind had received
intelligence of the caress; and when I turned to look her in the face
I could perceive no answerable sentiment. It was plain she attached
no moment to the act, and I blamed myself for my own more uneasy
consciousness.
(181)
The narrator’s use of the word “blame” suggests that he again feels
ashamed of his response to unorthodox touch and of his awareness of
his pleasure in such physicality. He contemplates sexual pleasure with-
out concern for reproductive duty, a pleasure that he sublimates with
Felipe and the Señora but that he would knowingly act upon with Olalla,
if she did not reject his advances.
The manual strength of both the Señora’s and Felipe’s touch em-
phasizes how tactile eroticism and force work collectively to identify
vampires’ hands. When the Señora bites the narrator’s bleeding hand,
exposing her true nature, the narrator explains that “Her strength was
like that of madness; mine was rapidly ebbing with the loss of blood”
(207). Here, the narrator associates her exertion of strength with the
loss of his own. During this sequence, the narrator also notes Felipe’s
strength, given that he “pinned down his mother” (207), his hands over-
coming the force of her violent exertions. As with the previous erotic
caresses, the Señora’s brutal and vicious grasp has the effect of overpow-
ering him. Her hand’s grasp makes the narrator feel his own frailty and
vulnerability. 22 According to Victorian gender roles, this grasp renders
him effeminate while the Señora assumes an aggressive, masculine po-
sition. Olalla uses her might in a different way. Rather than dominating
the narrator’s body through force, Olalla carries the narrator to safety.
The parallel between the power of Olalla’s grip and that of her moth-
er’s and brother’s suggests that Olalla could inherit the same bloodlust,
making the erotic appeal of her touch all the more threatening.
Olalla shares her family’s ability to both overpower and sexually over-
whelm through touch. Where she differs is in her beauty, intelligence,
modesty, and morality. Captivated by her physical beauty, the narrator
explains, “in Olalla all that I desired and had not dared to imagine was
united” (196). When the narrator frst meets Olalla, she tells him to
leave the residencia if he loves her. He, however, ignores Olalla’s wishes.
Instead, shortly after their initial meeting, he explains:
I stretched out my arms and called upon her name; and she leaped
to me and clung to me. The hills rocked about us, the earth quaked;
a shock as of a blow went through me and left me blind and dizzy.
And the next moment she had thrust me back, broken rudely from
my arms, and fed [...]
(203)
He describes his response to Olalla’s embrace using language similar to

that of orgasmic pleasure, which neither resists. For this narrator, her
touch overwhelms his better judgment as he embraces his arousal, will-
ing to give up friends, family, and country to remain with Olalla: “Her
touch had quickened, and renewed, and strung me up to the old pitch of
concert with the rugged earth, to a swelling of the soul that men learn to
forget in their polite assemblies” (204). Olalla’s embrace excites him so
much that rather than being embarrassed, his desire to experience sexual
release in Olalla’s arms directs his reproductive energy away from the
empire. Given his military background, the narrator’s shift highlights
the danger—the monstrous nature—of Olalla’s touch that is capable of
enticing a British subject who literally fought for his country to forsake it
for personal pleasure. The dramatic tension of the tale, as Hilary Beattie
has noted, comes from the fact that the narrator “would gladly forswear
[his] country, [his] language, and [his] his friends to live forever by her
[Olalla’s] side.”23 The narrator knows that he should listen to Olalla and
leave after the Señora’s violent attack, but he struggles with that knowl-
edge because, he explains, “the touch of her [Olalla’s] smooth hand lin-
gered in mine and talked with me” (209). He imagines it tells him of her
singular love and devotion: “‘Your hand clings to mine, your heart leaps
at my touch’” (212), he tells her. Thus, while Olalla’s embrace arouses
his feeling of virility, it also threatens to result in the degeneration of the
British nation. 24
Luckily for the narrator, Olalla is instead committed to ending the
curse of her bloodline. Despite the narrator’s desires, Olalla won’t allow
him to make that choice. She may touch out of turn and her touch may
be dangerously erotic, but Stevenson’s tale imagines her as a beautiful
monster who won’t allow the narrator, or England by proxy, to par-
take of her fate. It’s this tension between desire and duty that recurs in
these vampire stories and it’s this tension that tactility draws to the fore.
118 Kimberly Cox
Both Olalla’s and Harriet’s touch emphasizes that which made the vam-
pire terrifying to Victorians: its promise of increased genetic diversity—
understood as the dilution of White, imperial purity. Harriet doesn’t
know about her parentage and thus doesn’t recognize the monstrous
nature of her touch early in the narrative. Once she learns about it, she
doesn’t initially choose to end her family curse as Olalla does. Her at-
tempts to live as human and marry a British man are punished, as those
she loves most literally die from her embrace.
Harriet’s Caress
Harriet Brandt’s strong grip and erotic caress reveal her inherited mon-
strosity as vampiric. Like Olalla, Harriet’s vampirism and non-White,
non-English heritage render her sexually desirous. Yet, unlike Olalla
who rejects the reproduction of her bloodline, Harriet’s touch character-
izes her as distinctly infertile. Despite her desire for meaningful and re-
ciprocal physical contact with those nearest her, Harriet’s touch poisons
those it embraces by siphoning their life force. The danger her caress
poses is not the risk of interracial reproduction—the text does not offer
her that choice—but rather the prevention of reproductive futurism.
Interestingly, the male characters are more than willing to indulge
their desires by accepting Harriet’s embrace. In fact, it’s only the fe-
male characters who recognize any danger in her touch. The text uses
Harriet’s caress, as well as her appetite and appearance, to distinguish
her from her English female acquaintances who demonstrate “proper
and ladylike reserve” (28). 25 Yet, Marryat’s novel attaches race to that
distinction by noting how Harriet’s blood renders her touch cursed and
gives her such a strong appetite for pleasure. Further, it links her curse
with her interracial parentage by describing both of her parents as im-
moral monsters. Harriet’s curse, in other words, is being not White and
not English, a difference that manifests in her touch.
Unlike Olalla, Harriet is not initially aware of the violence inherent
in her affection, which she demonstrates by embracing those she cares
for with an openness that female characters such as Margaret Pullen, an
English acquaintance, fnd disorienting. One evening, while Harriet and
Margaret are out together, Margaret fnds herself in Harriet’s clasp and
is discomfted by their physical intimacy. While there’s no mention of
“embarrassment” or “shame” (as seen in “Olalla”), Margaret’s dislike
of the embrace suggests an anxiety about how it makes her feel, both
literally and socially: Harriet “had crept closer and closer to [Margaret]
as she spoke, and now encircled her waist with her arm, and leaned her
head upon her shoulder. It was not a position that Margaret liked” (19).
Harriet’s sensual embrace proves directly dangerous to Margaret, who:
become[s] fainter and fainter, […] She felt as if something or some

one [sic.], were drawing all her life away. She tried to disengage
herself from the girl’s clasp, but Harriet Brandt seemed to come after
her, like a coiling snake [...]
(21)
Margaret’s inability to extricate herself from Harriet’s clasp suggests the

literal power of Harriet’s hands and Margaret’s dislike of the intimate
contact implies an underlying eroticism inherent in the gesture. 26 As the
Biblical imagery of a “coiling snake” indicates, Margaret perceives Har-
riet’s touch as immoral and a distinct threat to her very being.
Margaret’s brother-in-law Ralph Pullen, however, perceives his expe-
rience in Harriet’s arms quite differently. Though engaged to Margaret’s
friend Elinor Leyton, Ralph ignores his betrothal to actively pursue Har-
riet and later explicitly notes the struggle between duty and desire that
Harriet’s touch excites:
That was the most remarkable thing about her [Harriet]—the ease
with which she seemed to attract, looking so innocent all the while,
and the deadly strength with which she resisted one’s efforts to get
free again. […] I don’t believe I could trust myself [if I met her again],
only speaking of her seems to have revived the old sensation of being
drawn against my will […] to be near her, to touch her, to embrace
her, until all power of resistance is gone.
(175; emphasis mine)
Harriet appears harmless or “innocent,” but her looks belie the “deadly
strength” of infuence that Ralph believes her to wield. As he character-
izes it, Harriet’s vampiric touch has the capacity to draw people against
their will but as if they were willing. Translated, his desire to touch
and be touched by Harriet conficts with his knowledge of socially ac-
ceptable behavior, and he doesn’t trust himself to choose duty over at-
traction. Instead, Harriet’s power comes from her tactile allure, a direct
threat to his and Elinor’s betrothal.
Ralph is not the only male character stirred by Harriet’s touches; in fact,
it is her relationship with Margaret’s cousin Anthony “Tony” Pennell that
clarifes the novel’s racist commentary on interracial marriage. The narra-
tor describes Tony as a charitable, liberal-minded Socialist who “waged
perpetual warfare against the tyranny of men over women; the ill-treatment
of children; and the barbarities practised upon dumb animals and all living
things. […] with a heart large enough and tender enough to belong to a
woman” (176). He gives his heart to Harriet, loving her caresses:
Her [Harriet’s] love […] had poured itself, by means of looks and
sighs and little timid, tender touches upon Anthony Pennell like
a mountain torrent that had burst its bounds, and he had been
responsive—he had opened his arms to receive the food [...]
(180)
120 Kimberly Cox
Harriet’s “timid, tender touches” hold more power than her “pretty lit-
tle hands” (155) would suggest. They rouse Tony’s passions, which he
knowingly embraces. The narrator of “Olalla” describes the stimulation
of his desire in similar environmental terms. Though Tony falters under
the strength of erotic contact and the passions it excites, he ultimately
does not shy away from Harriet—as Margaret and eventually Ralph
both do.
Blood ends with Tony’s death at Harriet’s hands, emphasizing that
while it may be Harriet’s cursed blood that renders her vampiric, it’s the
strength of her hands and the erotic power of her touch that elucidate
her vampire status—and the danger she poses—to characters and read-
ers alike. After Harriet learns of her cursed lineage, she responds with
a clear imperative: “‘Don’t touch me, Tony!’” (198). She even links the
dangers of her touch with his reproductive duty to his nation: “I will
live my life without you, […] but I can never, never consent to sap your
manhood and your brains, which do not belong to me but to the world”
(201). In such moments, the novel doesn’t present Harriet as monstrous
in nature, just in touch and blood. In fact, the novel even allows Harriet
the opportunity to query her curse:
“Why am I to suffer? […] I have youth and health and good looks,
and money—everything, the world would say, calculated to make
my life a pleasant one, and yet, I am tortured by this awful thought—
that I must keep aloof from everybody, that I am a social leper, full
of contagion and death!”
(214)
Harriet recognizes that her touch carries literal danger, but her question
also implies that the reason she must suffer is because she is not a White
Englishwoman. The only difference between her and other women with
“health and good looks, and money” is her interracial heritage. The Bar-
oness, whose son Harriet accidently kills, informs Tony of Harriet’s in-
herited monstrosity: “Her father and her mother were murderers […] left
their curse upon this girl—the curse of black blood and of the vampire’s
blood which kills everything which it caresses” (188). While Tony makes
clear that he doesn’t believe in her curse and, if it were true, would rather
die “suffocated in [her] dear embrace” (215), the novel invalidates his
gesture and asserts interracial marriage as dangerous to Britain’s repro-
ductive future and national progress through it by having Tony die em-
bracing Harriet in their marriage bed. As they fall asleep, “She [Harriet]
kissed the big hand too that lay upon her pillow and composed herself to
sleep while it still encircled her” (223). On awaking, Harriet notes “How
strangely heavy and cold it [his arm] felt. […] [she] placed her hand upon
his heart. The body was cold—cold and still all over!” (224). Tony chose
desire over duty, which ultimately culminates in his death. Harriet, like
vampires before and after her, is most dangerous when most affection-
ate. Harriet comes to a conclusion similar to that reached by Olalla:
“My parents have made me unft to live. Let me go to a world where the
curse of heredity which they laid upon me may be mercifully wiped out”
(227). However, unlike Olalla, who sequesters herself, Harriet instead
chooses suicide as the fnal solution.
Embracing the Vampire

In both “Olalla” and Blood, vampirism is a concept associated not only
with blood but with the appropriation through touch of other vital re-
sources from “proper” Victorian channels of race and empire. Olalla’s
and Harriet’s hands and tactility convey their cursed lineage to other
characters and readers alike. Olalla’s hand betrays her vampiric lineage
in its power to control, bewitch, and seduce. Readers didn’t, and still
don’t, need to see the “foreigner” Olalla bite the narrator in order to
recognize the danger of her caresses. Similarly, Harriet’s hands—dainty,
feminine, despite her “unfortunate” blood—possess a powerful grip and
erotic touch capable of sapping the vitality of anyone they caress. While
Olalla and Harriet may not display the hallmarks of vampire mythology,
the power of their touch to overwhelm male characters’ better instincts
and to distract from proper reproductive channels makes both women
vampiric. While vampires may be easy to recognize when they bite, the
strength and seductive power of their clasp in literature has also been
a consistent menace. The vampire’s true danger lies in the capacity of
tactility to overwhelm and master resistance, enticing those touched to
choose the vampire’s embrace over “God, Queen, and country.”27
Notes
1 Robert L. Stevenson, “Olalla,” in The Merry Men and Other Tales and
Fables (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1887), 161–223 (p. 207). Future
references will appear in text. I would like to thank Ann C. Colley for intro-
ducing me to this story.
2 See Hilary Beattie, “Dreaming, Doubling and Gender in the Work of Rob-
ert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of ‘Olalla,’” Journal of Stevenson
Studies 2 (2005): 10–32; Ed Block, Jr., “James Sully, Evolutionist Psy-
chology, and Late Victorian Gothic Fiction,” Victorian Studies 25, no. 4
(1982): 443–467; Octavia Davis, “Morbid Mothers: Gothic Heredity in
Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire,” in Horrifying Sex: Essays
on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature, ed. Ruth B. Anolik (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland & Co., 2007), 40–54; Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic
and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003); Robert T. Eldridge, “The Other Vampire Novel of 1897:
The Blood of the Vampire by Florence Marryat,” The New York Review
of Science Fiction 10, no. 6 (1998): 10–12; Katherine Linehan, “Revaluing
Women and Marriage in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Short Fiction,” ELT 40,
no. 1 (1997): 34–59; Sian Macfe, “‘They Suck Us Dry’: A Study of Late
122 Kimberly Cox
Nineteenth-Century Projections of Vampiric Women,” in Subjectivity and
Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day, eds. Philip Shaw and
Peter Stockwell (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), 58–67; Howard L. Mal-
chow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1996); Irving Massey, “The Third Self: Dracula,
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Mérimée’s ‘Lokis,’” Bulle-
tin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 6, no. 2 (1973): 57–67;
David Melville, “Tempting the Angels—‘Olalla’ as Gothic Vampire Narra-
tive,” The Bottle Imp 12 (2010): 1–2; Ellen Rees, “Holy Witch and Wanton
Saint: Gothic Precursors for Isak Dinesen’s ‘The Dreamers,’” Scandina-
vian Studies 78, no. 3 (2006): 333–348; Sara Wasson, “Olalla’s Legacy:
Twentieth-Century Vampire Fiction and Genetic Previvorship,” Journal of
Stevenson Studies 7 (2010): 55–81; and Sarah Willburn, “The Savage Mag-
net: Racialization of the Occult Body in Late Victorian Fiction,” Women’s
Writing 15, no. 3 (2008): 436–453.
3 For more on degeneration in Olalla’s lineage, see Block, “James Sulley”; and
Dryden, Modern Gothic. For readings of monstrosity and doubling, see Be-
attie, “Dreaming”; and Massey, “Third Self.” Wasson argues that the sto-
ry’s “genetic vampirism” (“Olalla’s Legacy,” 60) has had profound infuence
on contemporary vampire narratives. For a discussion of gender, see Rees,
“Holy Witch”; Beattie, “Dreaming”; and Linehan, “Revaluing Women.”
4 Melville, “Tempting the Angels,” 1.
5 For analyses of how the novel racially codes vampirism, see Davis, “Mor-
bid Mothers”; Willburn, “Savage Magnet”; and Malchow, Gothic Images,
whose works draw a connection between Harriet’s vampirism and Victorian
anxieties emanating from majority White culture about consensual interra-
cial relationships and the progeny that may result from them. I use the term
“consensual” here because of the frequency with which women of color were
raped by their enslavers and colonizers. For a discussion of rape narratives
as a byproduct of empire, see Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj: Gen-
der, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947 (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999). Eldridge overtly links Mar-
ryat’s novel with vampire fction generally, reading it “as a witty domestica-
tion of Stoker’s extravagant horrors” that “stress[es] the primacy of heredity
over environment” (“Other Vampire Novel,” 12).
6 Macfe, “‘They Suck Us Dry,’” 60.
7 See Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of
Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies 33, no. 4 (1990): 621–645; Cristo-
pher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula,” Representations 8 (1984): 107–133; and Talia Schaffer,
“‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula,” ELH 61,
no. 2 (1994): 381–425.
8 See my forthcoming book, Touch, Sexuality, and Hands in British Liter-
ature, 1740–1901 (New York: Routledge, 2021), especially Chapter 5, for
further development of this concept.
9 Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Elaine Showalter, Sexual An-
archy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Little, Brown
Book Group Limited, 1992).
10 See Block, “James Sulley”; Davis, “Morbid Mothers”; Malchow, Gothic Im-
ages; Wasson, “Olalla’s Legacy”; and Wilburn, “Savage Magnet,” for dis-
cussions of degeneration and monstrosity in “Olalla” and Blood.
11 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary
Forms, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2005), 83–108 (p. 78).
12 Alexandra Warwick, “Ghosts, Monsters and Spirits, 1840–1900,” in The
Gothic World, eds. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (Hoboken, NJ:
Taylor and Francis, 2013), 366–375 (p. 369). Abigail Lee Six and Hannah
Thompson also explain this trend as one “whereby monstrosity, disturb-
ingly, has become invisible and potentially ubiquitous, for it lurks within
seemingly normal, respectable people and is grounded in anxieties con-
cerning sexuality” (“From Hideous to Hedonist: The Changing Face of
the Nineteenth-century Monster,” in The Ashgate Research Companion
to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman [Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2012], 238).
13 Florence Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, introduction by Brenda Ham-
mack (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books, 2009), 81. Future references
will appear in text.
14 Lee Six and Thompson, “From Hideous,” 250.
15 Richard Beamish, The Psychonomy of the Hand; or, The Hand an Index of
Mental Development, According to Mm. D’Arpentigny and Desbarrolles,
2nd ed. (London: N.p., 1865), 2.
16 The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook of Etiquette for Ladies and Gen-
tlemen (London: James Hogg & Sons, 1859), 324.
17 See Aviva Briefel, The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination. Cam-
bridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 102 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), introduction and Chapter 3; and
Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), Chapter 4. See also Peter J.
Capuano, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfguration
of the Victorian Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015);
William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Sex Scandal: The Private
Parts of Victorian Fiction, Series Q (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1996); Pamela Gilbert, Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2019); and Aaron Ritzenberg, The Sentimental
Touch: The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2012).
18 Ariel Beaujot, Victorian Fashion Accessories (London: Berg, 2012), 31–62.
19 Habits, 327.
20 “Hand-Shaking,” All the Year Round (April 16, 1870), 466–469 (p. 467).
21 Rosi Braidotti, “Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and
Embodied Differences,” in Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs:
Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace, eds. Nina
Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (Zed Books, 1996), 136.
22 See Beattie, “Dreaming”; and Kathleen Spencer, “Purity and Danger: Drac-
ula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis,” ELH 59,
no. 1 (1992): 197–225, for analyses of the sexual nature of these scenes.
23 Beattie, “Dreaming,” 203.
24 See Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, “Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and
Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’” Frontiers: A Jour-
nal of Women Studies 2, no. 3 (1977): 104–113, for a discussion of Victo-
rian understanding of “sexual perversity” (108) as hereditary.
25 For a reading of Marryat’s internalization of sex-based oppression, see Da-
vis, “Morbid Mothers,” 42; Malchow, Gothic Images, 170. See also Brenda
124 Kimberly Cox
M. Hammack, “Florence Marryat’s Female Vampire and the Scientizing of
Hybridity,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 48, no. 4 (2008):
885–896, for more on Marryat’s biographical infuences.
26 See Wilburn, “Savage Magnet,” 440, who reads lesbianism as a social threat
in this scene.
27 Royal Family GB, “Royal Family GB.” Accessed July 5, 2021. https://
royalfamilygb.com/.
8 “Keep[ing] Time at
Arm’s-Length”
Vampire and Veterans
in Varney
Rebecca Nesvet
When Charles Dickens composed his quasi-vampire tale Our Mutual

Friend (1862), Daniel P. Scoggin speculates, that he would have known
James Malcolm Rymer’s “penny dreadful” Varney the Vampyre (1845–
1847).1 In Nick Groom’s estimation (2017), the “most popular vampire”
tale of the nineteenth century, Varney is the missing link between John
William Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897) and introduces, as Nina Auerbach (1999) claims, “the frst vam-
pire who can transform victims into his kind,” a feature now considered
obligatory. 2 Today, criticism shows that Varney and other 1840s “penny
bloods” were far from escapist. Scoggin observes that in Varney, Rymer
“employ[s] the monster as a social metaphor,” representing “money and
status” as “a new form of ‘life-blood.’”3 Troy Boone (2005) argues that
Varney promotes Moral Force Chartism.4 Most recently, Groom’s mag-
isterial study of the vampire briefy acknowledges Varney as “an early
example of popular vampirism, in which the fgure of the vampire is
introduced into […] social situations” to open them up to critique. 5
Extending Groom’s passing reevaluation, I reveal Varney’s commen-
tary on a social situation of interest to many of the working-class Victo-
rian families for whom Rymer wrote his penny fction: the plight of the
Naval veterans of the “Long War” against France. In Varney, a vampire
terrorizes a provincial bourgeois family but meets his match in septua-
genarian Long War Admiral Bell and his midshipman companion. These
men function as the vampire’s double, since, like him, they have outlived
their era and struggled to fnd a new place and purpose. By positing
these veterans as the doubles and hunters of the vampire, Rymer calls
attention to Victorian Britain’s often self-contradictory treatment of the
aging survivors of its most inspiring and haunting maritime war.
The Great Slump

“The Victorian Navy relied on the reputation left to it by Nelson,” ob-
serves C.I. Hamilton.6 Britain lionized the heroes of Trafalgar and the
Nile in a plethora of nautical melodramas featuring affable and patri-
otic “Jack Tars” as heroes. In 1813, the newly appointed Poet Laureate
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-9
126 Rebecca Nesvet
Robert Southey published a hagiographic Life of Nelson. A very popular
1830s novelist, Captain (Frederick) Marryat had joined the Royal Navy
at 14 and seen out the Long War before writing “nauticals.” According
to Patrick Brantlinger (1998), Captain Frederick Marryat’s novels:
look back nostalgically to an age of youthful adventure when he-

roic action was almost routine. They imply that the peace and na-
tional prestige enjoyed by their frst readers in the 1830s and 1840s
are founded upon valiant deeds that comprise the glory of British
history.7
In the 1850s, “Marryat’s reputation was wide and seemed secure,” ob-
served John T. Flanagan (1937).8 In the same decade, Charing Cross saw
the commencement of construction of the new Trafalgar Square and its
column commemorating Nelson.9
The heroes’ reality, however, was different. Between Waterloo and
the 1850s, the Royal Navy experienced “the Great Slump.” This was, as
Michael Lewis (1965) argues, “the greatest employment crisis in all [the]
long history” of Britain’s armed forces.10 “Once the war was over,” the
Admiralty “had no idea how to get rid of the ‘war-surplus’ of men.”11 In
1813–1817 alone, the Royal Navy let 124,000 men out of active service.12
Commissioned offcers received “half-pay” or a release from active duty
and demotion to half their salaries as a guarantor of their availability
in future conficts.13 In this era, half-pay was unsustainable as a subsis-
tence salary. In the 1825 engraving “A Mid on Half-Pay,” a midshipman
peddles shoe-shining in the street.14 After Waterloo, “[s]eamen became
ever more prominent amid the destitute, especially in London, leading
to the formation of an association for their relief in 1818, the forerun-
ner of the Seamen’s Hospital Society.”15 Furthermore, they experienced
psychological confict that long outlasted the war. As Lewis explains,
nineteenth-century Navy men did not understand themselves to have a
professional identity during peacetime. There was no such individual as
“any Admiral,” only the admiral of a certain ship during war. Conse-
quently, “[i]f our offcer is not ‘of’” a particular ship, “he is nothing at
all: he is not an offcer at all.”16 Martin Wilcox (2014) delves further. For
those men who entered the Navy late in the 22-year-long war, “the ‘great
block’ remained a personal disappointment.”17 Their “promising careers
ground to a halt in 1815,” leaving them “a sometimes-resented expense
for an increasingly laissez-faire minded state, until death thinned out
the ranks of the unemployed in the middle of the nineteenth century.”18
An antiquated, nepotistic system of preferment made it impossible for
talented young seamen to be promoted before their elders. By 1845, the
year when Varney the Vampyre began publication, the frst 300 captains
on the Navy List were, on average, sexagenarians.19 An indicative case
history of the early nineteenth-century Navy leadership’s greying and
Vampire and Veterans in Varney 127
stultifcation is that of the “notorious land-admiral, Edward Ratsey”
who spent the years 1818–1842 “on shore, yet rising slowly […] as those
on the rungs above him died off” (78). According to C.J. Bartlett, in the
1840s and 1850s, Sir Robert Stopford served as commander in chief at
age 70, Sir Charles Napier served in the Crimean War at 68 and Sir John
Ommanney remained an active offcer at the age of 81. One veteran of
Trafalgar, Sir John Franklin, fatally set out for his third Arctic expedi-
tion, out of shape and looking exhausted, at 59. 20
Still, Victorian Britain needed sailors. In the 1840s, fears of French
invasion returned. 21 In 1845, Britain passed legislation authorizing the
Navy to capture any Brazilian slave ships. 22 Additionally, the Admiralty
manufactured an urgent need for the Royal Navy by pursuing the quest
for the Northwest Passage. According to Pierre Berton:
By 1817 […] 90 percent of all naval offcers were unemployed […]

and yearning for an opportunity—any opportunity—that would re-
store them to service and bring them promotion […] What matter if
the ships were too big and cumbersome and the crews too large for
effective Arctic service? What matter if the Passage was commer-
cially impractical? England was about to embark upon a new age of
discovery in which it was the exploit itself that counted. 23
Spearheading this project was Sir John Barrow (1764–1848), Second

Secretary of the Admiralty. In Arthur S. Herman’s recent popular his-
tory of the Royal Navy, Barrow appears a vampiric lingerer from the era
of Napoleon, controlling Arctic policy long enough to send Franklin to
his doom:
Tall and thin with dark, imposing eyes, Barrow was the living link
between the age of Cook and the age of Charles Darwin […] the
last Admiralty offcial to meet with Nelson before he boarded the
Victory, Barrow would go on to found the Royal Geographic Soci-
ety in 1830 and remain in offce until almost the eve of the Crimean
War, when he was eighty-one […] selfess and hard-working […]
It was Barrow who frst suggested that Napoleon be exiled to St.
Helena. 24
Other historians have proven less kind. Berton assigns Barrow “the tena-
cious temperament of a bull terrier” and textbook bureaucrat, remark-
ing that “he hadn’t even seen an iceberg”—ever, but in his 1790s youth
had “fallen in love with the idea of the Arctic” and emulated Nelson. 25
“The frustrations and failures of the Elizabeth and Jacobean explor-
ers” Barrow “forgot […] or minimized,” because “[h]ad not Nelson tri-
umphed over the French navy?”26 His fxation with Nelson reveals that
the ideology underpinning the Great Slump informs the Arctic quest.
128 Rebecca Nesvet
Barrow’s Arctic project functioned, as Groom writes of the Victorian
vampire, as “a perpetual reminder that the past cannot be laid to rest,
but will forever haunt the present.”27 Kim Wheatley’s rhetorical anal-
ysis of Barrow’s anonymous Arctic-themed periodical articles reveals
that his motivations included personal fame, a need to vindicate Frank-
lin, and a decades-long vendetta against Arctic explorer Sir John Ross,
whom he accused of scheming to suppress evidence of the Passage’s
existence. 28 Barrow’s persecution of Ross reached its apogee midway
through Varney’s run in 1846, when Barrow published under his own
name the screed Voyages of Discovery and Research Within the Arctic
Regions, from the Year 1818 to the Present Time, which savaged Ross.
The latter responded with Observations on a Work, entitled, “Voyages
of Discovery and Research Within the Arctic Regions,” by Sir John Bar-
row, Bart., Aetat. [age] 82, Being a Refutation of the Numerous Mis-
representations Contained in that Volume.29 Ross further antagonized
Barrow by becoming the frst naval fgure to publicly express alarm at
Franklin’s 1846 disappearance in the Arctic with two ships and nearly
130 men, none of whom would ever return. Sadly, Ross’s plea went un-
heard until it was too late to save the men, in part because of Franklin’s
image as a Great Slump veteran. According to Ellen Boucher, “[m]uch of
the popular conviction” that the third Franklin expedition “would one
day return” of its own accord “rested on Franklin’s proven reputation
as a survivor” of both the Arctic and Trafalgar, as well as his wife Lady
Jane Franklin’s persistent campaigning for him to be found and increas-
ingly implausible belief that he was alive.30 Allegedly detected by spirit
mediums whom Lady Jane chose to fnd credible, Franklin seemed to
have bypassed death, crossing over instead from the realm of the living
to that of the undead.
The Ghost of the Past

Rymer would long have been acutely aware of the nautical past’s haunt-
ing of the present in the form of the Great Slump. Nelson-themed penny
bloods and dreadfuls include Henry Downes Miles’s Tales of the Wars,
or, Naval and Military (1836) chronicle, a component tale of William
Mark Clark’s Chronicles of the Sea (1838–1840) and A Voice from the
Tomb! A Dialogue between Nelson and Wellington (c. 1859, author
unknown).31 Edward Lloyd, publisher of Varney and many of Rymer’s
other 1840s penny sensations, printed Lady Hamilton; or, Nelson’s Leg-
acy. A Romance of Real Life (Lloyd, 1849, author unknown) as well as
several nauticals by his regular writer Thomas Peckett Prest: Gallant
Tom, or the Perils of a Sailor Ashore and Afoat (1840), set, as an 1849
manuscript of a stage play version says, in “the Last Days of Nelson,”32
Black-Eyed Susan, or The Sailor’s Bride (1840), Poor Little Jack (1840),
The Death Ship; or, The Pirate’s Bride and the Maniac of the Deep
(1846), The Ocean Child; or The Lost Vessel (1846), Jack Junk; or, The
Tar for all Weathers (1849), Richard Parker; or, The Mutiny at the Nore
(1850), and Ben Bolt; or The Perils of a Sailor (ca. 1850). 33 Rymer wrote
the nauticals Vanderdecken; or, The Flying Dutchman (1850), The Life
Raft: a Tale of the Sea (1858), The Wreckers: a Tale of the Sea (1858),
True Blue; or, Sharks upon the Shore (1859), The Young Shipwright
(1860), Sea Drift; or, The Smugglers of the Channel (1863), and Secret
Service, a Tale of the Sea (1863).34 He sometimes utilized a pseudonym
that implied frsthand experience of naval life: “Captain Malcolm S.
Merry, USN.” “Merry” is an anagram of “Rymer,” as is his more com-
mon pseudonym, “Malcolm J. Errym,” and appears to have served in
the American Navy.
Other Rymer serials prominently feature Royal Navy men. A notable
example is “Lieutenant” Charles Thornhill, a minor but dramatically
signifcant character in Rymer’s masterpiece The String of Pearls, A Ro-
mance (1846–1847), later expanded as The String of Pearls, or, the Sail-
or’s Gift (circa 1849–1850), and then reissued under the title The String
of Pearls, or, the Barber of Fleet Street (1850). While the sailor Mark
Ingestrie is a civilian fortune-seeker, he passes the pearls to Thornhill,
who tries to give them to Ingestrie’s fancée. Described by Colonel John
Jeffery of the East India Company army as “a braver man never stepped,
nor a better offcer,” Thornhill is only nominally a lieutenant, for, “when
quite a young man,” he “was cashiered for fghting a duel with his supe-
rior offcer.”35 Rymer suggests the superior was in the wrong, because
Thornhill’s list of virtuous exploits is long. Thornhill saves Jeffery from
murder during an ill-advised stopover in Madagascar. In recompense,
Jeffery investigates Thornhill’s disappearance in London. Thornhill’s
virtue also shows in his willingness to give the priceless string of pearls
to Mark’s fancée instead of profting from it himself, even though he be-
lieves Mark to be dead; and by his kind treatment of his Newfoundland
dog. In short, Thornhill shares key characteristics with the Great Slump
veterans: his naval past is distinguished by heroic potential, but his tal-
ent squandered, he is fatally ignored by an unknowing public, a public
that literally consumes his fesh and blood just as victorious Regency
society fourished on the blood of Nelson’s Navy.
Veterans and Varney

Like The String of Pearls, Varney the Vampyre features naval veterans
as the most heroic characters. The tale begins with the vampiric perse-
cution of heroine Flora Bannerworth by her family’s neighbor, Sir Fran-
cis Varney, whose ultimate aim is to acquire Bannerworth Hall and a
lost treasure hidden in it. To do so, Varney must alienate Flora from
her fancé, painter Charles Holland. When this plan fails, Varney and
a mysterious accomplice kidnap Holland and make it appear to Flora
130 Rebecca Nesvet
that he has abandoned her because he does not want a vampyre bride.
The accomplice, who turns out to be Flora’s common law stepfather
Mr. Marchdale, articulates this threat to her in language that suggests
the social stigmatization of the veteran. Marchdale makes Flora fear to
become “one of the dreadful tribe of beings who cling to existence by
feeding, in the most dreadful manner, upon the life blood of others.”36
This euphemism describes not only vampires, but warriors: members of
an organized, intergenerational group with a unique culture (“tribe”)
that pursues a bloody means of subsistence. The vanished Holland has
a benevolent and resourceful protector with time on his hands: his uncle
Admiral Bell, a Long War veteran subsisting on half-pay and accompa-
nied since the war’s end by a faithful tar, Jack Pringle. Auerbach calls
Bell “a comic, choric stock fgure,” but there is more to him than comic
relief.37 Rymer pointedly introduces him and Pringle as anachronisms of
the Long War. In the 15th chapter, a post chaise rolls up to a High Street
pub called the Nelson’s Arms, an establishment that attests to the Long
War’s persistence in public memory. From the post chaise emerge “two
persons,” the frst of whom is “a man who seemed fast verging on sev-
enty years of age,” but with a “still ruddy and embrowned complexion
and stentorian voice” that makes it “quite evident he intended to keep
time at arm’s-length for many years to come.”38 This was true of many
of the Great Slump’s half-pay admirals.
Rymer’s introduction of Bell likens him to a vampire by emphasiz-
ing that he has outlived his era and purpose and furthermore, just as a
vampire simulates human life but does not live it, is a mere simulation
of what he once was. Bell’s street dress announces him as a proud Royal
Navy veteran, and perhaps a sufferer of the existential quandary of the
half-pay admiral:
He was attired in ample and expensive clothing, but every article

had a naval animus about it, if we may be allowed such an expres-
sion with regard to clothing. On his buttons was an anchor, and the
general assortment and colour of his clothing as nearly simulated
as possible to the undress naval uniform of an offcer of high rank
some ffty or sixty years ago.39
He wears his “naval animus” or spirit on the outside, but Rymer’s use
of the word “animus” suggests that this naval spirit is something of a
problematic demon which has possessed a living body and is unwilling
to give it up. No longer either on active duty or young, this admiral is
almost as close to the walking dead as the possessed corpses that steer
the Ancient Mariner’s ship home. His costume is pointedly not a Royal
Navy uniform: it only “simulate[s]” one. The individual Rymer depicts
is a simulacrum of a Long War era offcer, as winding back time “ffty
years” from 1845 brings us to 1785–1795, a period when many of the
senior veterans of the Long War would have been in service, though not
yet against Napoleon.40 For instance, Admiral Nelson, born in 1758,
served from 1771 until his death in 1805. Bell and Pringle are veterans of
at least one 1790s engagement with Napoleon’s forces. “You didn’t call
me no seaman in the Bay of Corfu, when the buttlers were scuttling our
nobs,” Pringle claims,41 apparently referring to the French occupation of
the Greek island of Corfu in 1796–1799, the most notable event of which
was the Battle of Corfu fought between the British and French navies on
August 18, 1798.
Pringle clings to his heroic past as tightly as does Bell: “a genuine
sailor,” Pringle “wore the shore costume of one.”42 He and Bell converse
as if still at sea, and they correct the popular history of the Long War as
represented or so they think by the inn’s naming:
“A-hoy!”
“Well, you lubber, what now?” cried the other [Pringle].
“They call this the Nelson’s Arms; and, you know, shiver me that for
the best half of his life he had but one.”43
The naïveté of this joke betrays his very real concern for the right repre-
sentation of the war by generations that, unlike him, did not personally
experience it. Pringle’s banter also reveals ontological insecurity. “I ain’t
been your walley de cham [valet de chambre] without larning [sic] a
little about land reckonings,” he protests to Bell;. “Nobody would take
me for a sailor now.”44 He is even more disconsolate a bit later. “Don’t
tell me I’m no seaman,” he begs Bell. “Call me a wagabone [vagabond]
if you like but don’t hurt my feelins [sic].”45 He cannot accept that he is
perhaps no longer a sailor.
Bell and Pringle habitually interpret present-day experience in the
terminology of their nautical past. Asking Pringle for a letter from his
pocket, Bell demands the “sailing instructions,” and Bell produces
them from “the locker.”46 They recall the days of battle in wooden sail-
ing ships, not steamers. “You shall take a glass with me,” Bell tells his
attorney, Josiah Crinkles, whom he meets at the Nelson’s Arms, “to the
honour of the wooden walls of Old England, d—me, if you was twenty
lawyers”47; “Shiver my timbers, if I knows what a wampigher is,” Prin-
gle declares, “unless he’s some distant relation to Davy Jones!”48 (1:70).
And yet, they see the same tendency to anachronism in Varney. “No-
body fghts with swords, now-a-days,” Bell chides him. “That’s all ex-
ploded.”49 “I cling to the customs and fashions of my youth,” Varney
responds. “I have been, years ago, accustomed to wear a sword, and
to be without one now vexes me.”50 He is disoriented by his travels
across the banks and shoals of time. Bell and Pringle surely understand.
“I look upon this old nautical ruffan as something between a fool or
a madman,” Marchdale says of Bell. 51 “If he were a younger man, I
132 Rebecca Nesvet
would chastise him upon the spot; but as it is I live in hopes of getting
him into some comfortable lunatic asylum.”52 Throughout Victorian
Gothic literature, the lunatic asylum is the fnal prison of the outcast.
In Rymer’s The String of Pearls, the lunatic asylum is where the bour-
geoisie sends its opponents and supernumeraries to die. In response to
Marchdale’s threat, Bell declares an affnity with vampires: “I’d rather
sail round the world with a shipload of vampyres than with such a hum-
bugging son of a gun as you are.”53 This affnity is reinforced by Bell’s
unwillingness to admit that his killings constitute murder due to their
apparent necessity. Pringle teases this conviction out of him during a
spirited argument:
“Them Frenchmen that you murdered on board the Big Thunderer,

as you called it.”
“I murder them, you rascal?”
“Yes, there was about fve hundred of them killed.”
“They were only shot.”
“They were killed, only your conscience tells you it’s
uncomfortable.”
“You rascal—you villain! You ought to be keel-hauled and well
payed [sic].”
“Ay; you’re payed, and paid off as an old hulk.”54
Like Bell, Varney lives by killing. He is only readier to admit that he

does.
For Varney, vampire existence consists of serving in humanity’s ranks
longer than he fnds good, as did the Great Slump’s half-pay offcers. We
have seen that the Victorian Admiralty created an existential crisis in
their veterans. Varney explains his struggle as a vampire in terms that
refect the veterans’ crisis. “Why am I here?” he [Varney] said; “Here,
without fxed design or stability of purpose.”55 In depicting Varney this
way, Rymer draws upon the British Romantic vampire tradition, par-
ticularly as developed in John William Polidori’s tale “The Vampyre,”
which Rymer acknowledges by naming a minor character “Count Pol-
lidori” [sic]. 56 As Erik Butler explains, Polidori and Byron crafted “the
vampyre” as “a fgure of moral bankruptcy and spiritual destitution” and
therefore “an emblem of anguished consciousness, representing psycho-
logical interiority as a kind of bottomless pit of imperfectly disavowed
culpability” that “refect[s] the bourgeoisie’s ascendancy” and complic-
ity in the violence of modern life.57 Like the Romantic vampires, Varney
locates himself outside “the great muster-roll of humanity.”58 Bell and
Pringle might do the same, but they fnd new purpose by hunting the
vampire and searching for Bell’s nephew. By hunting Varney, they try to
vanquish Time itself, as his self-depiction suggests. “I am one who has
witnessed time’s mutations on man and on his works, and I have pitied
neither,” Varney tells Flora. “I have seen the fall of empires, and sighed
not that high reaching ambition was toppled to the dust.”59 However,
Bell and Pringle’s accomplishment of their mission proves the usefulness
of the half-pay offcer and his attendant former midshipman. They hunt
the vampire in a reasoned, orderly manner, and when they come face to
face with Varney, they tend to treat him with respect, having breakfast
at his home by invitation, speaking courteously to him, and observing
rules such as the regulations that govern dueling. In this, they are the
antithesis of the rural mob, a clichéd group, replete with pitchforks and
entropically gossiping wives, which burns down Varneys’s house and
threatens to kill both him and some neighbors whom said mob suspects
of vampirism—including one who is already dead and buried. The mil-
itary (the army) is called in, and also does a terrible job of restoring
order. The soldiers arrive too late to save Varney’s house and later fee
the scene. In reaction to such chaos, Bell remains a fgure of honorable
order-keeping. When Charles expresses dismay at the behavior of “the
desultory and ill-appointed multitude,” Bell responds:
I don’t like to see anybody run down. A fair fght’s another thing.
Yard arm and yard arm—stink pots and pipkins—broadside to
broadside—and throw in your bodies if you like, on the lee quarter,
but don’t do anything shabby.60
With this monologue, Bell vindicates the Royal Navy as a relic of honor
and order in an age of chaos and hypocrisy.
Reprising the Navy’s past heroism, Bell and Pringle chase Varney
round the world, just as the Long War veterans chased Napoleon. They
track him across continental Europe to Italy, the scene of several of the
major naval battles of the Napoleonic Wars. They also behave like the
Navy veterans whom Barrow sent on expeditions to the Arctic, such
as Franklin. “I’m going on a voyage of discovery for my nephew,” Bell
explains.61 All these plot points recall the Admiralty’s attempts to fnd
new quests and purposes for its lingering Long War offcers, none of
which proved as satisfactory as a vampire hunt. Having successfully
routed Varney several times, Bell acquires newfound pride in himself.
“I’m old Admiral Bell; very well known for having beaten the French,
and the terror of all vampyres,” he introduces himself to the mother of
an English girl whom he has saved from marrying Varney.62 After a
while, Bell’s repeated victories against Varney become a cliché that even
he himself recognizes. “Shiver my timbers, and they begin to creak a bit
now—d—n the gout!—but that’s Varney, the vampyre!” Bell announces
at yet another interrupted wedding. “Who’d a thought he’d always be
turning up in this way, like an old mop as nobody can use?”63 The mop
metaphor associates Varney with Bell, as both have been judged inconve-
nient lingerers without a purpose; but now, society has a use for Bell as a
134 Rebecca Nesvet
vampire hunter and Bell has a use for Varney as a conveniently perpetual
Questing Beast.
At the novel’s resolution, Varney troublingly articulates the struggles
of veterans of the Long War and many other wars. Varney eludes his
nautical pursuers. In the fnal 200 pages (667–876), Bell and Pringle
no longer appear nor are they mentioned, but they successfully drive
Varney out of England and into Italy. There, Varney commits suicide by
self-immolation in the crater of Mount Vesuvius, making sure to leave
behind a witness and a written life story. The geography is signifcant,
as Nelson arrived in Naples in 1793, there met Lady Emma Hamilton,
and contemplated Mt. Vesuvius. Varney’s suicidal ideation echoes that
of many actual veterans throughout the modern era. As a 2014 trauma-
tology study shows, suicidal ideation in combat veterans results in part
from actual or perceived complicity in killings and other wartime “acts
that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and experiences.”64 Varney’s
depiction of this phenomenon suggests that the text should have a prom-
inent place in the curriculum.
Conclusion
Varney might belong to a brief literary tradition in which vampire im-
agery facilitates empathetic consideration of veteran trauma. This idea
might have been suggested even before Byron and Polidori composed
the earliest widely circulated English vampire stories. In The Rime of
the Ancyent Marinere (1798), Samuel Taylor Coleridge represents his
traumatized nautical hero as a very much undead being. The Ancient
Mariner’s “skinny hand” (line 13) makes him seem almost skeletal and
terrifes the Wedding Guest. The Mariner might be a civilian sailor and is
frequently and credibly identifed as a member of a slave ship’s crew, like
one of his possible inspirations, the Reverend John Newton of “Amazing
Grace” fame.65 However, Coleridge withholds the exact purpose of the
voyage, making it legible through several different sociopolitical lenses
at once, and the shooting of the albatross—an authorized killing for
which the crew suffers—likens the unexplained mission to naval war-
fare. Meanwhile, like a vampire, the Mariner carries a contagious in-
fection: the desire to tell his story, which once assuaged, transforms the
listener into one like himself. At the ballad’s end, the Wedding Guest,
having heard the story, fnds himself similarly excluded from human life
as represented by the wedding party. The morning after his encounter
with the vampiric Mariner, the Wedding Guest fnds that the transmis-
sion has irrevocably changed him.
An even clearer example of the empathetic representation of veteran
experience as vampirism postdates Varney, belonging, in fact, to our
own era. Like Varney, the BBC television drama Being Human (2008–
2013) enlists the vampire as a motif to explain veteran experience. In the
frst episode, Captain John Mitchell (Aidan Turner), an Irishman born
in 1893, serves in the First World War. Like the protagonist of Yeats’s
poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” Mitchell has no ideologi-
cal commitment to any side of this confict, but willingly sacrifces him-
self for the men he commands. To save them from vampires disguised as
high-ranking offcers—an obvious metaphor for the notorious misman-
agement of the First World War—Mitchell reluctantly becomes a vam-
pire himself. However, this transformation is less horrifc than the war
itself. In series creator Toby Whithouse’s shooting script, the battlefeld
where Mitchell dies and is reborn is “like a painting by Hieronymous
Bosch. Blood, mud, and body upon body upon body. Mitchell among
them. Dead, pale and cold.”66 He is indicative: “[j]ust another soldier,
just another death.”67 After waking violently into undeath, a seamless
temporal transition shows him contemplating a war memorial. He care-
fully reads the inscribed names. Then, he turns away to face a Britain
that, in Whithouse’s narration, “has moved away from that Flanders
feld” and is now crowded with “People. Cars. Neon. Life.”68 Like Bell
and Varney, Mitchell endures ontological confusion. Post-Flanders and
post-life, what is his identity, community, or purpose? Mitchell persists,
undead, until 2013, making him the last survivor of the trenches.69 In
his fnal episode, he protests vampirism in language that articulates the
trauma of the universal soldier of our age of unending war. “God, I can
see their faces!” he tells his best friend, the naïve werewolf George:
Not just the people I’ve killed but the people I’m going to kill. I’m
so scared. I want to tear my eyes out… It’s all so inevitable … You
need to stop me, George. And if you can’t do it for me you have to
do it for them.70
As the media historian Jason Rhode writes, while “[s]oldiers have al-
ways brought war home,” they do not always fnd others “willing … to
discuss” it, “to listen, and to learn.”71 In Varney the Vampyre, Rymer
listens in this way to the last living veterans of the Long War.
Notes
1 Daniel P. Scoggin, “A Speculative Resurrection: Death, Money, and the Vam-
piric Economy of Our Mutual Friend,” Victorian Literature and Culture
30, no. 1 (2002): 101. Scoggin identifes a vampiric quality to Harmon’s
“living-deadness” (101) that alerts the reader to the vampiric nature of the
London economy. As part of Scoggin’s demonstration that these vampirism
metaphors are intentional on Dickens’s part, he documents Dickens’s expo-
sure to the notion of the vampire in literature, including Polidori’s “The Vam-
pire,” 1820s–1830s stage adaptations of that tale, and Varney (102–103).
2 Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2017), 211; Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 29.
136 Rebecca Nesvet
3 Scoggin, “A Speculative Resurrection,” 102.
4 Troy Boone, Youth of Darkest England: Working-class Children at the
Heart of Victorian Empire (London: Routledge, 2005), 5–9, 52.
6 C. I. Hamilton, “The Victorian Navy,” The Historical Journal 25, no. 3
(1982): 471.
7 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,
1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 48.
8 John T. Flanagan, “Captain Marryat at Old St. Peter’s,” Minnesota History
18, no. 2 (1937): 152.
9 Nautical melodrama from 1820 to 1840 is briefy surveyed by Matthew
Kaiser in his account of Victorian leisure, The World in Play: Portraits of
a Victorian Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 61.
Nautical melodrama also is the subject of a forthcoming anthology of stage
plays edited by Arnold Schmidt, British Nautical Melodramas, 1820–1850
(London: Routledge, 2019). Schmidt’s anthology reveals that the cultural
memory of the Long War dominated nautical melodrama (the most pop-
ular subgenre), with many plays set during and just after the confict with
Napoleon.
10 Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864: A Social History (Lon-
don: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 59, 48.
11 Lewis, The Navy, 48.
12 Martin Wilcox, “‘These Peaceable Times Are the Devil’: Royal Navy Off-
cers in the Post-War Slump, 1815–1825,” International Journal of Maritime
History 26, no. 3 (2014): 471–488, 472.
15 Wilcox, “‘These Peaceable Times’,” 474.
16 Lewis, The Navy, 55–56.
17 Wilcox, “‘These Peaceable Times,” 488.
18 Wilcox, “‘These Peaceable Times,” 488.
19 Lewis, The Navy, 61; C.J. Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power, 1815–53
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 45.
20 Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power, 315.
23 Pierre Berton, Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and the
North Pole, 1818–1909 (New York: Lyons, 2000), 18–19.
24 Arthur Herman, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the
Modern World (New York: Harper, 2005), 431.
25 Berton, Arctic Grail, 19–20.
26 Berton, Arctic Grail, 21.
28 Kim Wheatley, Romantic Feuds: Transcending the ‘Age of Personality’
(London: Routledge, 2016), 162.
29 Wheatley, Romantic Feuds, 164.
30 Ellen Boucher, “Arctic Mysteries,” The Journal of Modern History 90, no.
1 (March 1, 2018), 51.
31 Catalogued in Léger-St-Jean, Marie. Price One Penny: A Database of
Cheap Literature, 1837–1860. [July 12, 2018]. Faculty of English, Cam-
bridge [March 23, 2019] (http://priceonepenny.info).
32 Allardyce Nicoll, “Reviewed Works on Herman Melville,” Modern Lan-
guage Quarterly 60, no. 2 (1965): 263.
33 Helen R. Smith, New Light on Sweeney Todd, James Malcolm Rymer, Thomas
Peckett Prest, and Elizabeth Caroline Grey (London: Jarndyce, 2002), 16–17.
For a late-Victorian recollection of Prest’s nautical bloods, see also Arthur E.
Waite, “By-Ways of Periodical Literature,” Walford’s Antiquarian Magazine
and Bibliographical Review 11 (1887): 181–186. Google Books.
34 Smith, New Light on Sweeney Todd, 18–21.
35 James M. Rymer, The String of Pearls, a Romance, ed. Richard Mack (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21.
36 James M. Rymer, Varney the Vampyre, or the Feast of Blood, 2 vols, ed. Ev-
erett F. Bleiler (London: Dover, 1970–1972), 1:55. All subsequent citations
denote this edition.
37 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 32.
38 Rymer, Varney, 1:66.
40 Groom claims that Varney the Vampyre takes place during the 1730s (165),
probably because a prefatory letter interpolated just after the title page in the
1847 second printing suggests this. The letter may have been added by Lloyd
or another of his employees besides Rymer, as it shows little familiarity with
the primary text it introduces.
49 Rymer, Varney, 1:107
51 Rymer, Varney, 1:164
57 Erik Butler, Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cul-
tural Transformations in Europe, 1732–1933 (London: Boydell and Brewer,
2010), 85, quoted in Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 100–101.
64 AnnaBelle Bryan et al., “Moral Injury, Suicidal Ideation, and Suicide At-
tempts in a Military Sample,” Traumatology 20 (2014): 1–7, 1–2.
65 See, for instance, Debbie Lee, “Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade: Coleridge’s
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’” English Literary History 65, no. 3
(1998): 675–700.
66 Toby Whithouse, Being Human: Season 1, Episode 1: Shooting Script (De-
cember 17, 2008), 1–2. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/
being_human_s1e1.pdf
138 Rebecca Nesvet
67 Whithouse, Being Human, 2.
68 Whithouse, Being Human, 3.
69 The historical last living veteran of 1914–1918 trench warfare, Harry
Patch, passed away in 2009. In the chronology of Being Human, Mitchell is
“killed” in 1916 and exists as a vampire from that point until 2011.
70 Being Human: S3 (DVD). Created by Toby Whithouse. With Aidan Turner,
Russell Tovey, and Lenora Crichlow. BBC Home Entertainment, 2011.
71 Jason Rhode, “The Passion and Honesty of Walter Sobchak: Vietnam and
American Memory,” in The Vietnam War in Popular Culture: The Infuence
of America’s Most Controversial War on Everyday Life, ed. Ron Milam
(Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017), 104–140, 139.
9 “A Financial Vampire”
The Aesthetics of Repetition
in Eric Stenbock’s Studies
of Death
Lara Karpenko, Lauren Brandmeier,
Alexa Larson, Lora Leach, Murphy McCoy,
Gabriel Mundo, and Natasha Pellegrini
According to various newspaper reports, vampires had invaded Britain

and America during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The
vampires, warns The Montrose Review, “entrap the unwary” not by
beguiling or hypnotizing their victims but by circulating “advertise-
ments… and stamps.” These curiously prosaic creatures were “fnancial
vampires” or, as the report reveals, money lenders.1 The Weekly Free-
man and Irish Agriculturist also warns against “fnancial vampires,”
those “unprincipled speculators” who operate from “their centers in
Lombard St.” in order to take advantage of the Irish people, while Karl
Marx invokes the specter of the fnancial vampire as he suggests that the
“capitalist” has an all-consuming “vampire thirst for the living blood
of labour.”2 And in a scathing obituary, the populist newspaper The
People charges that American railway baron Jay Gould “was not a pro-
ducer. He was not a builder. He was not an employer of labour. He was
a fnancial vampire, a wrecker, and highwayman.”3 As these examples
show, for writers in the late nineteenth-century political and popular
press, vampirism came to function as a widely understood shorthand
to signify economic exploitation. But despite its ubiquity in newspapers
and political tracts, the phrase “fnancial vampire” seldom made its way
into fction. The perverse, seductive vampire of the stage and page rarely
connected with unfeeling capitalists of the periodical press.
This essay, however, examines an exception to that general trend: the
critically overlooked Studies of Death (1894).4 Written by the eccentric
Count Eric Stenbock (1860–1895), a British-Estonian author, aristocrat,
and “aesthete through and through,”5 and published a year before his
untimely death, Studies of Death features Stenbock’s best known work
“The True Story of a Vampire.”6 Stenbock opens this story, the sixth in
the collection, with a curious reference to fnancial vampirism as Car-
mela, the story’s narrator, describes the titular vampire, Vardalek:
You must think I am joking, or perhaps that by the word ‘Vampire’

I mean a fnancial vampire. No, I am quite serious. The Vampire of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-10
140 Lara Karpenko et al.
whom I am speaking, who laid waste our hearth and home, was a
real vampire.7
Even as Carmela insists that her tale does not portray fnancial vam-
pirism, her declaration tacitly suggests such exploitation was com-
monly discussed, if not experienced. Coming at the very beginning of
the story, her denial functions apophasically, not only throwing into
sharp relief the capitalist structures that underpin “True Story” it-
self, but also prompting a revaluation of the stories that occur before
and after.
In forcing this sort of nonlinear reading style, Stenbock subtly refer-
ences the changing temporal structures that underpinned the emerging
capitalist system—temporal structures that responded to and grew from
industrial rhythms, or what Trish Ferguson refers to as “time disci-
pline.”8 Seeming, as Elizabeth Freeman suggests, most “natural to those
[it] privilege[d],” time discipline supported a normative system that un-
dergirded middle-class heteropatriarchy; simultaneously though, time
also became a sort of rarifed commodity, one that was always in dan-
ger of slipping away.9 Indeed, from Alice’s white rabbit, comically yet
poignantly anxious that he “shall be late,” to etiquette manuals that
stipulate a “gentleman” must always “carr[y] a watch,” to the various
advertisements for watches and clocks that peppered the newspapers,
it seems safe to say that time haunted the Victorian imagination.10 The
Victorian interest in the vampire then, a creature inherently able to re-
sist the demands of time discipline, partially arises from and responds
to this new temporal reality. While, as Carol Senf notes, folkloric ac-
counts of vampires from previous eras emphasized the creature’s “physi-
cal urges,”11 Victorian vampires seem more interested in exploiting time
than draining blood. For instance, in Dion Boucicault’s melodrama The
Vampire (1851), Alan Raby, the play’s villainous vampire, goes to great
lengths to ensure that he can torture the Peveril family and its descen-
dants at the same hour on the same day every 100 years while Sheridan
Lefanu (1872) emphasizes the vampire’s terrifying ability to manipulate
time as the ever-youthful villainess appears in various anagrammed in-
stantiations (Mircalla, Millarca, Carmilla) throughout the centuries.12
By emphasizing Vardalek’s ability to exploit time (signifed perhaps most
perversely by the fact that he selects a child victim), Stenbock thus ex-
plores a well-worn tradition, not only tapping into the Victorian obses-
sion with time discipline but also exposing its cruelties.
Partly because “True Story of a Vampire” has been excerpted and read
in isolation from the entire collection with some frequency, Stenbock’s
emphasis on capitalist cruelty has been elided in critical discussions of
the text. If Stenbock’s work is discussed at all, it is most typically cate-
gorized by critics like James Machin as “weird fction” or brushed off, in
Brian Stableford’s words, as “intensely lurid.”13 To be sure, all seven of
“A Financial Vampire” 141
the tales in Studies of Death have a supernatural element, ranging from
Vardalek the vampire to a selfsh young man maimed by magic to a little
girl who can communicate with birds. But such emphases on the text’s
“weirdness,” though perhaps actively encouraged by Stenbock, also miss
the stark realism of the tales. Even Vardalek is surprisingly domestic as
he “arrive[s] by commonplace means of the railway, and in the after-
noon.”14 And Vardalek’s dependence on human means of mobility is
hardly unique: throughout Studies of Death, Stenbock supplants super-
natural forces to human desires, concerns, and limits. The supernatural
neither drives the evils inherent to the stories nor does it provide a con-
venient deus ex machina escape. Instead, the supernatural invades the
stories, highlighting the very mundanity of the cruelty that Stenbock ex-
poses. Though Mathew Bradley acknowledges that the “overall frame…
of economic vampirism” “persists as an awful reality” throughout “True
Story,” he also suggests that Stenbock’s critique remains “unwitting,” a
sort of serendipitous moment of clarity in a work that otherwise can be
described as “‘bad’ literature.”15 But because Bradley does not consider
the entirety of Studies of Death, his analysis remains truncated, missing
just how deliberately Stenbock constructed his text in order to highlight
this “economic vampirism.” Less lurid tales of the supernatural than
unfinching recounts of cruelty, Studies of Death, as the ominous title
suggests, studies the social and economic conditions that cause time to
be cut short.
Connecting a “real vampire” to a “fnancial vampire,” “True Story”
functions as a sort of pivot point in Studies of Death, rendering explicit
the patterns of victimization that bind the text. Focusing on the story’s
relationship to the collection, we argue that in Studies of Death, Sten-
bock critiques Victorian capitalist exploitation by deploying, what we
term, an aesthetics of repetition. By insistently, almost hypnotically, re-
peating themes, plots, and character names, Stenbock establishes a clear
pattern to and between the stories in Studies of Death, blurring the
generic boundary between short story collection and novel. While rep-
etition buttressed Victorian time discipline in order to establish know-
ability and predictability, Stenbock inverts this trend, using repetition
to introduce an uncanny sense of cyclicality. Stenbock’s aesthetics of
repetition allows him to disrupt the linear sense of time that character-
izes much of Victorian storytelling, highlighting the temporal exploita-
tion that underpins the capitalist enterprise. In this sense, Stenbock
adopts what Elizabeth Freeman describes as a “queer” temporality, an
understanding of time that resists the chrononormative and hints at the
possibility of an alternate model of community. But in Studies of Death,
these alternate, queered community bonds almost never endure and in-
stead disintegrate as the text repeatedly emphasizes isolation, destruc-
tion, and loss, suggesting the inescapability of the vampiric demands of
time discipline.
Time Discipline and the Aesthetics of Repetition
While observing the rapid technological and industrial developments
that characterized the nineteenth century, a reporter for the Westmin-
ster Review proclaimed that “England… triumph[ed] over time and
space.” Embedded in the bravado of this statement is the tacit under-
standing that a temporal revolution had accompanied the industrial one.
With this in mind, we begin our analysis of Studies of Death with a brief
discussion of Victorian time discipline; this section will suggest this new
temporal reality depended on a logic of repetition, infuencing Victorian
understandings of both labor and fction. In his Dictionary of Manu-
factures, Mining Machinery, and the Industrial Arts, George Dodd, the
popular journalist and science writer, lauds repetition as he suggests that
the machine “is made to perform a certain work, to repeat it identically
as long as it is required, and with that beauty of form and fnish which is
the prevailing feature of modern mechanical industry.”16 In another dic-
tionary dedicated to science and technology, chemist William Thomas
Brande defnes the laborer as one who “perform[s] the same endless rou-
tine of precisely similar operations.”17 While Brande does hint at some
sympathy for the constricted laborer, he, like Dodd, suggests that indus-
try remains inseparable from mechanical repetition. Indeed, the fact that
both Dodd and Brande’s observations occur in dictionaries suggests that
in many ways, repetition literally defned industry.
As repetition established predictable patterns of work and (limited)
rest, the work week proceeded according to a linear rather than a cycli-
cal logic. Exemplifying this point, American poet and essayist Edward
Rowland Sill comments that “[l]ife, to most people, is work; and the
week begins when the work begins.”18 Embedded in Sills’s commentary
is not only the suggestion that work structures the daily temporal ex-
perience but that time largely begins with the arbitrary designation of
“Monday.”19 Perhaps nothing concretizes the Victorian emphasis on lin-
ear, synchronized time so much as the erection of Big Ben in 1859. As
Ferguson suggests, Big Ben became “the focal point of an increasingly
disciplinary industrial world of factories, the mail system and transport
schedules, all of which was facilitated by the strict observance of the
newly developed concept of public time kept by the town clock.”20 Ulti-
mately, the prominence of Big Ben helped coordinate railway time, fac-
tory time, and commercial time in order to ensure a sort of citywide and
nationwide experience of repetition and simultaneity. Big Ben ensured
that each day replicated the day previous and that each week replicated
the week previous, naturalizing and cementing the temporal structures
of the work week and disciplining the public to operate within those
structures.
Responding to this new temporal reality, Victorian fction became in-
creasingly reliant on an aesthetics of repetition. While Victorian plots
certainly could be surprising and characters could be unique, the very
generic form of the Victorian novel, like all forms, depended upon what
Caroline Levine terms “patterns of repetition and difference.”21 In other
words, readers knew that they were reading a novel because formal and
repetitive patterns emerged: novels were divided by chapters; they relied
on a core set of named characters, they were typically written in the past
tense, and so forth. And it is perhaps the linear plot structure that be-
came one of the most repeated generic features of the nineteenth-century
novel. From the marriage plot to the sensation mystery to the bildungs-
roman, “liner narratives,” as Nancy Armstrong points out, “organiz[ed]
mainstream Victorian fction.”22 Stenbock, however, intervenes in these
formal constraints so that he can produce a work of fction that seems at
once familiar and eerily unclassifable, a work that, as we suggest above,
blurs the generic boundaries between novel and short story collection. 23
Anticipating the fractured approach to storytelling that characterizes
modernist works like James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Stenbock exploits
the conventions of repetition so that it fractures instead of coheres; in-
stead of predictability, his aesthetic offers confusion; instead of linearity,
cyclicality; instead of resolution, dissolution. What remains is a haunt-
ing indictment of the vampiric demands of the capitalist enterprise.
Vampirism in Studies of Death

Famously described by William Butler Yeats as a “scholar, connoisseur,
drunkard, poet, pervert, [and] most charming of men,” Stenbock was
widely known during his lifetime for his excesses: his wealth, his addic-
tions, his strange habits. 24 In a typical account, his niece Erika describes
the “snake whom he often place[d] around his neck” and his extrava-
gant room “which was flled with plants,… beautifully-smelling resins…
[and] furs covering the foor.”25 But despite his famboyance, Stenbock
had connections to prominent Fabians, such as John Costelloe and Sid-
ney Webb, and almost certainly joined them in “talking economics” un-
til late in the evening. 26 Never marrying, Stenbock also forged a variety
of nonnormative queer bonds, ranging from the surprising (accounts de-
scribe his devoted attachment to a child-sized wooden doll that he would
refer to as his son) to the whimsical (he founded the “Idiot’s Club” which
encouraged its members, mostly children, to act in outlandish ways),
to the intimate (he was a patron and probable lover of Simeon Solo-
mon). 27 Studies of Death, Stenbock’s fnal published work, arises out
of this juncture between the aesthetic, the ethical, and the queer as his
use of repetition intervenes politically and formally with standard Vic-
torian narratives. Stenbock establishes his aesthetics of repetition partly
through thematic and narrative resonances. All seven stories unfold in
nearly identical ways: they feature otherworldly innocents who attempt
to exist outside the demands of time discipline before they meet untimely
and tragic ends.
But it is not until “True Story”, the sixth in the collection, that Sten-
bock offers a vocabulary and a framework, that of fnancial vampirism,
for understanding this pattern of exploitation. At basis, “True Story”
focuses on Vardalek, the collection’s only “real vampire,”28 and Gabriel,
“the strange and superhuman” boy upon whom he preys. 29 A solitary
fgure, Gabriel frequently “dart[s] away” to the forest where he keeps
company “with all manner of woodland creatures,”30 rejecting nor-
mative bonds and identifying with nature. Gabriel even rejects interior
structures, preferring to reach “his little room at the top of turret” by
“means of a very tall chestnut-tree, through the window” instead of the
staircase, indicating his discomfort with the industrialized world alto-
gether.31 And at frst, Vardalek seems to offer Gabriel the possibility of a
pleasurable bond that exists outside systems of exchange:
…[Vardalek] sat down at the piano. Then he played a Hungarian

csardas-wild, rhapsodic, wonderful. That is the music which makes
men mad. He went on in the same strain. Gabriel stood stock still
by the piano, his eyes dilated and fxed, his form quivering. At last
he said very slowly… ‘Yes, I think I could play that.’ Then he quickly
fetched his fddle and self-made xylophone, and did. 32
Defying the confnes of the sheet or the metronome, Vardalek’s “wild,

rhasodic” music promises to evade time discipline; and as Gabriel in-
stantly replays music that should take weeks or months to learn, it seems
that the two create a queer temporal moment, one which, to paraphrase
Freeman, seems twisted and elongated. 33 Extending this queer moment,
Gabriel and Vardalek later enjoy a pleasurable physicality as Gabriel
kisses Vardalek “on the mouth” exciting a “shiver” from the vampire34
and the two walk “hand in hand” through the forest, removed from
the demands of labor, heteronormative productivity, or any societal
norms.35 But even as music and physical pleasure provide a respite from
time discipline, they also become the means by which Vardalek victim-
izes Gabriel, emphasizing that, for Stenbock, queer time and the nonnor-
mative bonding it facilitates evaporates under the demands of fnancial
vampirism.
Recalling the fnancial vampires described in the periodical press,
Vardalek slowly and deliberately drains the life force out of Gabriel,
who falls “utterly under [his] domination.”36 As Gabriel slowly loses
“his general health and vitality” while Vardalek conversely “begins to
look quite young,” it becomes clear that Gabriel’s slow death is due to
Vardalek’s insistent and repeated feedings.37 While the entire volume of
Studies of Death depends on an aesthetics of repetition as an organizing
principal (a point we will return to later), “True Story of a Vampire”
plays out this aesthetic in miniature, linking repetition and parasitic be-
havior. In the story’s climax, Carmela (Gabriel’s sister) listens as Var-
dalek plays “one of Chopin’s nocturnes, very beautifully.”38 Suddenly,
to her horror and astonishment, Gabriel also appears transfxed by this
music as Vardalek speaks to him in a ft of seeming anguish:
“My darling, I fain would spare thee: but thy life is my life, and I
must live, I who would rather die. Will God not have any mercy on
me? Oh! Oh! Life; oh, the torture of life!’” Here he struck one ago-
nized and strange chord, then continued playing softly, “O, Gabriel,
my beloved! my life, yes life- oh, why life? I am sure this is but a little
that I demand of thee. Surely thy superabundance of life can spare
a little to one who is already dead. No, stay,’ he said now almost
harshly, ‘what must be, must be!’39
In one sense, Vardalek seems to express grief as he slowly kills Gabriel,

but in another sense, Vardalek’s guilt-ridden monologue reveals his com-
plicity in the pain he causes. After all, though he sadly declares that he
“must live” at Gabriel’s expense, it never becomes clear why this is so.
Despite his protestations to the contrary, it seems that self-interest drives
Vardalek’s predation.
Gabriel’s death precipitates a cycle of tragedy: once he dies, Gabriel
and Carmela’s “father die[s] very soon afterwards, suddenly aged and
bent down with grief” and Carmela, alone and now “an old woman…
keep[s], in memory of Gabriel, an asylum for stray animals.”40 Vardalek
however, “utterly disappears,” and presumably escapes to repeat his cy-
cle of predation with an endless series of nonnormative victims. Though
Vardalek does not seem to gain economically from his predation, Car-
mela’s opening mention of fnancial vampirism frames the story, forc-
ing a connection between Vardalek’s depletion of Gabriel and capitalist
depletion of people. By confating fnancial vampirism with Vardalek’s
more literal vampirism, Stenbock draws attention to the pattern of suf-
fering that accompanies the repetitive chrono structures endemic to time
discipline.
It is this pattern of vampiric victimization—what Bradley refers to as
the “I-gain-you-lose frame”—that repeats again and again throughout
Studies of Death.41 To show these narrative similarities, we will cover in
detail one more story from the collection, “The Egg of the Albatross.”
Occurring immediately before “True Story,” Stenbock emphasizes f-
nancial vampirism in this tragic tale, though he does not yet use the
phrase. Set in a fctional island in the West Indies (removed from but
clearly colonized by European power), “The Egg of the Albatross” ee-
rily anticipates the tragedy of Gabriel. This story focuses on Marina,
a young girl, who, like Gabriel, seems strange and disconnected from
her community. Existing at the margins, Marina lives at the “top of a
disused lighthouse, surrounded by the sea.”42 And like Gabriel, there
is an otherworldly aspect to Marina who some “superstitious people…
[thought] a water-sprite.”43 Heightening this otherworldliness, Marina
seems disconnected from the modern moment, with little interest in or
understanding of commodities:
[Her] furniture was very simple indeed: the only table was utilized
to support a large aquarium… that she had arranged with a kind of
fairy garden, with seaweeds for trees, and all manner of beautiful
sea anemones for fowers. The rest of the furniture consisted of two
large boxes… There was no chair; for if she sat down at all, she sat
on the foor; also no freplace… The windows were always open,
and the wild sea-birds would fy out and in; she used to buy food
for them in the town, which cost her much more than her own food
ever did.44
Living in a prelapsarian-type state, Marina almost entirely rejects the de-

mands of time discipline; instead, natural cycles defne her daily rhythms
as her “chief source of income were the eggs of the gulls, guillemots,
sea-swallows, penguins, and the like.”45 And even in her pursuit of this
modest income, she remains connected to nature as the birds “actually
allowed her to take their eggs from their nest. She never took more than
one from each nest.”46 Far from preying on the natural environment,
Marina exists in a sort of natural symbiosis; she draws support from
and, in turn, supports the creatures that surround her.
Largely because she exists outside capitalist demands, Marina remains
disconnected from the people of her town and though she is “rather a
pet” with them, they “thought it just as well that she should live a little
way off.”47 But, again like Gabriel, Marina fnds a way to forge authentic
bonds that exist outside heteronormative productivity. For Marina, “her
chief friend was an albatross, whom she called Almotana,… [and] an-
other bigger albatross, who she called Wandafra.”48 Further highlight-
ing the queerness of these relationships, Marina resists the predictable
norms of grammar, vocabulary, and syntax and communicates with the
birds in a “strange jargon”49 that “conformed to no known language.”50
Marina even forges an alternate, queer family structure that refuses the
logic of heterosexual productivity when she, to help Almotana, “sit[s] on
the nest and keep[s] the egg warm herself,”51 contentedly erasing the line
between the human and the nonhuman.
But in keeping with the repetitive tragedies that occur throughout
Studies of Death, Marina becomes a victim of fnancial vampirism when
a European steamer ship lands on her island. Most destructively for Ma-
rina, the steamer brings a German Professor who has a “mania” for
collecting.52 After arriving on the island and convincing Marina to al-
low him to see the albatross egg, he abruptly takes it, paying her money
she does not need nor want while she “cri[es] bitterly.”53 Eventually, the
loss of the egg causes a rapid and tragic series of events, anticipating
the domino-like effect of tragedy that occurs in “True Story.” When
Almotana returns to fnd her egg gone, she emits a “loud wail” and
fies from Marina as the young girl implores her to return and, in the
process, “overbalance[s] herself, and [falls] straight into the water,” dy-
ing instantly54; soon after, Almotana stands vigil over Marina’s washed
up body when a hunter (who arrives on the same ship as the Professor)
shoots her. A few lines later, the narrator recounts:
There was Marina lying dead; and on her bosom the dead albatross,
shot through the heart. And circling round, in circles sometimes
wide and sometimes narrow, a male albatross, bewailing the death
of his mate.55
Forming a tragic version of the holy trinity, this tableau closes the tale,
a lingering reminder of the capitalist (and imperialist) forces at fault for
the deaths of Marina and her nonhuman friends. Taken individually,
then every story in Studies of Death is about fnancial vampirism, a
system that victimizes, drains, and discards; in isolation, the stories all
indict contemporary economic greed and exploitation. From the young
boy who gives his skin to support his family in “Viol D’Amour” to the
young brothers who freeze to death due to their stepfather’s cruelty in
the “Worm of Luck,” the collection unrelentingly, almost unbearably,
recounts stories of exploitation. Taken together though, these narrative
repetitions emphasize the pervasiveness and the inescapability of capi-
talist structures.
Stenbock’s aesthetics of repetition extend beyond narrative resonances
as he also inserts the same characters into his stories: the victim and
the vampire. The victims have almost identical physical descriptions
(youthful, delicate bodies, large eyes, uncanny beauty), live outside the
demands of time discipline (immersed in nature, playing “wild” music),
and attempt to forge queer bonds (homoerotic, transhuman, asexual).
The vampires, claiming necessity, compulsion, duty, or even, as is the
case with Vardalek, love, deplete these innocents, generally killing them,
as these brief stories unfold. Strikingly, Stenbock also repeats character
names throughout the slim volume. The clearest example of this is the
narrator in the story “Hylas” who is named “Gabriel,” exactly like the
hero-victim of “True Story,” and although the name “Gabriel” is the
only one which fully repeats, almost every story includes at least one
character whose name begins with the letter “G”: Gore-Vere, Guido,
Giovanni, Gisela, George, and Gyula. By repeating character names and
descriptions, Stenbock builds the impression that there is one central
character who repeatedly succumbs to the same predatory forces, hy-
bridizing the text into an amalgam of short story collection and novel.
In a tragic reimagination of a bildungsroman, the text’s central char-
acter never progresses or reaches closure, and instead remains trapped
in a Sisyphean cycle of vampiric victimization and death. As characters
already dead seem to haunt subsequent stories and vampiric predators
surface and resurface, it becomes clear that Stenbock’s aesthetics of
repetition depends on building meaning between the stories as well as
within the stories.
While repetition, whether in the form of the work week or in the pat-
tern building form of the novel, generally helps to establish linear nar-
ratives, Stenbock uses repetition to delinearize his text and the reading
experience more largely. The page that closes “The Egg of the Alba-
tross” (quoted above) is followed immediately by the opening of “True
Story” with its apophasic declaration of “fnancial vampirism.” This
declaration startlingly clarifes the economic exploitation that effectively
murders Marina just the page before. So, this story about an “actual
vampire” suddenly makes apparent that all the previous stories featured
vampires of some sort. As “True Story” opens then, Stenbock forces re-
interpretations, if not actual rereads, of the previous stories. By the fnal
tale, “The Worm of Luck”, which immediately follows “True Story,” the
cyclical rhythms become glaringly apparent. The fnal line of the story
describes a “gypsy” mother as she mourns the death of her two sons:
“‘I will go back to my own people,’ she said, and went forth into the
woods.”56 This sentence (which stands as its own paragraph) concludes
not only the story but the entire collection, forcing a visual and syntactic
pause. By ending the collection with the phrase “go back,” we suggest
that Stenbock subtly encourages the reader to “go back” to the collec-
tion’s origin—the frst page of the frst story. This ultimately returns the
reader to “Hylas,” which again features a main character named Ga-
briel, throwing into sharp relief the repetition of character names, traits,
and narrative storylines.
By encouraging such a reading style, Stenbock reinvents the generic
parameters of textual engagement. Disrupting the linearity that domi-
nates the form of the novel, Stenbock transforms the text into something
bewilderingly cyclical, thus rendering the act of reading as disruptive
to the chrononormative. Though Stenbock portrays fnancial vampirism
as nearly inescapable, he subtly seems to hint at the possibility of resis-
tance through creating what might be called a “queer reading praxis.”
Inspired by Freeman’s suggestion that “queer temporalities” necessarily
resist the chrononormative and instead create alternative “possibilities
for living in relation to… [the] past, present, and future,” we suggest
that Stenbock’s queer reading praxis creates sutures in the readerly tem-
poral experience.57 No longer is the text something the reader begins
on the frst page, linearly and orderly progressing until the last; instead,
the readerly experience becomes one of fipping and reading back and
forth across stories and pages, resisting the very possibility of linearity.
Anticipating James Joyce’s notion of an “ideal reader” who endlessly
reads a text on a loop, Stenbock’s queer reading praxis expands and
extends the moment of textual encounter, connecting the repetition that
lay at the heart of fnancial vampirism not to labor or exploitation but to
reading pleasure and an elasticized, fexible sense of time. 58 Four years
before publishing Studies of Death, Stenbock fguratively represented
what we suggest is a pictorial and abstracted depiction of this queer
reading praxis. Entitled “Pre-Adamite Elephant Adoring a Sunfower”
and drawn as a contribution to the guest book of his close family friends,
the sketch features a cartoonish, doe-eyed elephant gazing up at an im-
possibly tall sunfower, while the sun, moon, and various stars all appear
overhead and a small mouse looks on placidly in the corner. Though no
books or scenes of reading appear in this depiction, the elephant, in his
focused contemplation (or “worship”) of the sunfower, seems be en-
gaged in the same interpretive praxis that Stenbock so subtly encourages
in Studies of Death (Figure 9.1).
It is an image of harmony as supposedly conficting animals, plants,
and astral bodies all easily coexist in a surreal plain. It is also an image
of temporal disjunction as night and day crash into each other and the
antediluvian elephant adores one of the symbols of Stenbock’s aesthetic
Figure 9.1 Eric Stenbock, “Pre-adamite elephant adoring a sunfower.” Permis-

sion provided by David Tibet, personal collection.
present. As the elephant engages in this endless moment of pleasurable
contemplation, time discipline, capital, and vampirism have all evapo-
rated, providing one of Stenbock’s only depictions of a purely harmo-
nious, ethical existence. But even as Stenbock subtly carves out spaces
for resisting the repetitive demands of capitalist time, it bears repeating
that he provides no such respite for his queer hero-victims and Studies of
Death remains unrelentingly bleak, an uncomfortable testament to the
rapacious power of vampires.
Studies of Death depends on an aesthetics of repetition, a repetition
that recalls, mimics, disrupts, and inverts the generic logic of time dis-
cipline, a logic propelled and embedded in the capitalist enterprise. It
seems that for Stenbock, this project was intensely personal and he, in
his own idiosyncratic and queer way, constantly sought to evade disci-
plinary structures. We will close this essay with a brief account from
Stenbock’s colorful life. When Stenbock was still living in Estonia, he
went on an outing with his young nieces and nephews and chanced upon
a balloon vender. Stenbock, with his usual extravagance, purchased all
the multicolored balloons that were available and, along with the chil-
dren, attached one of his own poems to each balloon. They then released
the balloons into the air so that they could be found by someone else in a
different place, at a different time.59 Stenbock felt no obligation to proft
from this work, but instead willingly released it out into the public. As
Stenbock refuses to subjugate himself to time discipline, he also refuses
to subjugate others to it. To some extent, Stenbock’s rejection of fame,
conventionality, and proft perhaps doomed his literary corpus to obscu-
rity. Despite this obscurity or perhaps even because of it, we suggest that
his work holds relevance and can help us understand the mechanisms
that underpin the systemic cruelties of the Victorian era as well as of our
own late capitalist moment.
Coda
I wanted to close this piece by briefy discussing the somewhat unusual
methodology that gave rise to this article, as it was cowritten between
myself, a tenured faculty member, and a team of six undergraduate stu-
dents (all of whom have since graduated). We composed the earlier drafts
of this work during a semester-long elective course dedicated solely to
this project and I revised during the following summer (Summer 2019).
While professional collaborations between faculty and undergraduates
are common in the sciences and social sciences, they remain fairly rare
in the Humanities. But for many faculty and staff involved in higher ed-
ucation, especially contingent faculty or faculty who (like myself) work
at small, teaching-intensive institutions, undergraduates are frequently
the campus members with whom we have the most interaction. Work-
ing with undergraduates then makes practical sense. But it is more than
the practical benefts that motivated this current project: collaborating
with undergraduates can help bridge the divide that, as George Levine
points out, all too often exists between “our work as teachers [and] our
work as scholars.”60 Such collaborations also help turn the Humanities
classroom into a lab of sorts as undergraduates help to create the daily
classroom experience and participate in the exciting process of knowl-
edge-making in the Humanities. Overall, we want to emphasize that
student-faculty collaborations can provide stimulating, memorable, and
professionalizing experiences for undergraduates as well as pedagogical
and research opportunities for faculty. We include this coda to encour-
age faculty and students in Humanities-based felds to be courageous
and creative in locating and participating in such projects.
Notes
1 “The Money Lender,” The Montrose Review, January 18, 1889, 5.
2 “Are the Irish Improvident?,” The Weekly Freeman and Irish Agriculturist,
September 25, 1875, 3; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist
Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels
(London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, & Co., 1887.) Note: we elected to go
with this translation because it would have been most familiar to Stenbock
and a late Victorian audience.
3 “The Gould Millions,” The People, supplement, January 26, 1895, 1. As this
example and Stenbock’s own work suggests, the term also sometimes had
anti-Semitic undertones.
4 Eric Stenbock, Studies of Death: Romantic Tales (Snuggly Books, 2018), 74.
5 David Tibet, Of Kings and Things: Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock (Lon-
don: Strange Attractor Press, 2018), xv. Tibet cites Stenbock’s niece, The-
ophile von Bodisco.
6 “True Story of a Vampire” is frequently anthologized. For just two exam-
ples, see Michael Simms, ed., Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection
of Victorian Vampire Stories (New York: Walker Books, 2010), and Otto
Penzler, The Vampire Archives: The Most Complete Volume of Vampire
Tales Ever Published (New York: Vintage Books, 2009).
7 Stenbock, Studies of Death, 74.
8 Trish Ferguson, ed., “Introduction,” Victorian Time: Technologies, Stan-
dardizations, Catastrophes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 1.
9 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010), 3.
10 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and through the Look-
ing-Glass, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 9; How to Dress or
Etiquette of the Toilette (London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1876), 10.
11 Stenbock, Studies in Death, 19.
12 Dion Boucicault, The Phantom (New York: Samuel French, 1852). (Note:
the Phantom a is revision of the Vampire. The Vampire only exists in ho-
lograph form.); Joseph Le Fanu, Carmilla, ed. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan
(New York: Syracuse University Press, 2013).
13 James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880 –1939, (New York, Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2018), 93; Brian Stableford, Glorious Perversity: The
Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence (Cabin John, MD: Wildside
Press, 2008), 119.
15 Matthew Bradley, “Living Parody: Eric, Count Stenbock, and Economies
of Perversity,” in Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle, eds.
Jane Ford, Kim E. Keates, and Patricia Pulham (New York: Routledge Press,
2016), 149, 151, 158.
16 George Dodd, Dictionary of Manufactures, Mining, Machinery, and the
Industrial Arts (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1869), 215.
17 William T. (W.T.) Brande, A Dictionary of Science, Literature, and Art,
Comprising the History, Description, and Scientifc Principles of Every
Branch of Human Knowledge; with the Derivation and Defnition of All the
Terms in General Use (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans,
1862), 435.
18 Edward R. Sill, “Physiognomy of the Days,” The Atlantic Monthly 59
(1887): 54.
19 For more on the nineteenth-century formalization of the work week, please
see David Henkin, “Tick, Tock, Tuesday: Serial Timekeeping and the History
of the Modern Week,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 40, no. 5 (509–524).
20 Ferguson, Victorian Time, 1.
21 Caroline Levine, Forms Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2015), 3.
22 Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think the Limits of Individualism from
1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 110.
23 James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).
24 William B. Yeats, ed., “Introduction” The Oxford Book of Modern Verse
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), x.
25 Tibet, Of Kings and Things, xix, xx. Tibet cites Stenbock’s niece, Erika von
Bodisco.
26 John Adlard, Stenbock, Yeats, and the Nineties (London: Cecil and Amerlia
Woold, 1969), 69.
27 Tibet, Of Kings and Things, xxxiv; Adlard, Stenbock, Yeats, and the Nine-
ties, 39.
30 Stenbock, Studies in Death, 78–79.
33 Freeman, Time Binds, x.
39 Stenbock, Studies in Death, 86; emphasis in original.
41 Bradley, “Living Parody,” 151.
57 Freeman, Time Binds, xxii.
58 For more on Joyce’s notion of the “ideal reader,” please see James M. Cahalan,
“‘Dear Reader’ and ‘Drear Writer’: Joyce’s Direct Address to His Readers in
Finnegan’s Wake,” Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 3 (1995): 306–318.
59 Tibet, Of Kings and Things, xix. Tibet once again draws from Stenbock’s
niece, Theophile von Bodisco.
60 George Levine, “The Two Nations,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to
Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 1, no. 1 (2001):
17. This is not the frst time that I have discussed “bridging the divide” be-
tween teaching and research. For more on this as well as for a discussion of
an undergraduate editing class, please see Lara Karpenko and Lauri Dietz
(eds. and introduction), “Bridging the Divide: Teaching Nineteenth-Cen-
tury Literature and Gender in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom,” Nine-
teenth-Century Gender Studies (special issue) 11, no. 4 (2016).
10 The Vampire as Byron
Polidori’s Story Adapted to
the French and British Stage
Matthew Gibson
It perhaps is odd that the development of Byromania in France should

have derived from the translation, sequeling and then adaptation to
the stage of a text which Byron himself did not write: Polidori’s “The
Vampyre,” originally published in 1819 and translated into French
that year by “Faber” to great public interest. It was honoured with an
Italy-based sequel by Cyprien Bérard in February 1820, and then adapted
into a huge dramatic success in June by Bérard’s publisher, the novelist
Charles Nodier, together with two collaborators, Achille de Jouffroy
and Pierre Carmouche. This was, in turn, translated and adapted into
a musical by James Robinson Planché at the Lyceum English Opera
House in London in August of the same year. Back in France, it took
several years before a translation of Byron’s extant works became avail-
able by Amédée Pichot in 1824, and even then this constituted simply
prose translations of the verse. The reputation of Lord Byron amongst
the monoglot, play-going and general reading public of the bourgeoisie
thus rested mainly upon the huge success of Bérard’s book (February
1820) as a sequel to “The Vampyre,” the play by Nodier, Jouffroy and
Carmouche (June 13, 1820), and the host of imitators who crowded the
Paris theatre the same year and just after with versions of the play.1
The Byronic hero was therefore represented through the vampire, who
tended to encompass the demonic and the supernatural, while the
moral complexities of the poet’s characterisations were missed by most.
A more nuanced understanding of the Byronic hero could only develop
from the mid-1820s onward once a more rounded appraisal of Byron
had emerged.
Critics have examined the varying cultural values of these texts. Katie
Harse, largely ignoring the French play, has centred on how Planché’s ad-
aptation “domesticates” the subversiveness of Polidori’s vampire by mak-
ing the heroic fgures more masculine and rendering both the lower- and
upper-class victims equally resistant to the vampire, while Polidori’s had
been more subversive in making the aristocratic woman less resistant. 2
Fred Burwick has examined the major differences between Nodier, Jouf-
froy and Carmouche’s play and that by Planché in relation to the con-
ventions of comedy and the pragmatics of theatre production in France
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-11
The Vampire as Byron 155
and England at that time, arguing that the portrayal of the vampire in
both was an elaboration and publicizing of the “Byronic hero” and that
“[t]he new vampire combined the wickedness and charm of Byron him-
self, an aristocrat at ease in high society, oblivious to moral constraints,
and readily seducing women to feed an insatiable lust.”3 He sees the con-
nection to Byron as being made even more frmly in these two plays than
in Polidori’s tales by moving the action to Scotland, Byron’s childhood
home.4 Erik Butler has further interpreted both the original Polidori
short story and the French and English plays as being a development of
the vampire to represent the new bourgeois fgure, who is rootless and
preys upon peasant and aristocrat alike. He argues that the importance
of Ruthven as a character lies not in his presumed similarity to Byron
but in his difference: “that Ruthven also bears traits that separate him
from Byron and the aristocracy in general, and these features make him
a representative of an indeterminate—and therefore threatening—class
of new men,”5 this new class being “the bourgeoisie.”6 Such a fgure fur-
ther “embodies movement and change; he goes from metropolitan salon
to rural hovel, destroying the wellborn and poor alike.”7
This chapter argues that in all three cases, the adaptations serve as
proof against seeing Ruthven as bourgeois capitalist rather than as aris-
tocrat in post-Polidori developments of the initial short story; various
features provided by all versions add details to the original tale that
confound Butler’s interpretation, confrming the opinion of Burwick
that Rutwen and Ruthven are indeed frmly associated with Byron and
are transformations of the Byronic hero. This chapter will examine the
development of the vampire as Ruthwen in France through Cyprien Bé-
rard’s novel and Nodier’s play, citing available information about By-
ron’s reception in France at that time (as opposed to England), and then
will compare the portrayal of Ruthven in the English translation/adap-
tation by J. R. Planché and expose the different cultural understandings
of the Ruthwen character as a Byronic fgure in both countries. Centring
on seminal changes to scenes made by the English playwright, I argue
that the vampire is afforded much greater psychological complexity in
Planché’s play due to the more nuanced understanding of the Byronic
hero in Great Britain, in turn thanks to a greater receptivity to “Roman-
tic” sensibility than in the still classically minded France.
Byron in France 1813–1820: the Importance of

Charles Nodier
The most important history of Byron’s reception in France remains Ed-
mond Estève’s Byron et le Romantisme Français (1907), which delin-
eates concisely the translations and reviews of the poet’s work in French
language periodicals and editions, and exhaustively so up until at least
1820. Estève notes that there is a review of Cantos 1 and 2 of Childe
156 Matthew Gibson
Harold’s Pilgrimage in Mercure étranger (II 1813 no. 2) (edited by the
classically minded Amaury Duval) and another of The Corsair in the
same journal (III 1814 no. 15), which admires the imagination exhibited
therein, but dislikes the morally “defective” ending8; another of Lara in
Le Mercure by the editor R-J Durdant in 1816 (IV 1816 no. 20), deni-
grating the poem on account of its denouement, which, unlike Radcliffe’s
work, does not provide the “key to the mysteries.”9 A very negative re-
view in Panorama d’Angleterre attacks Byron on account of his too viva-
cious language, but above all because of his dislike of the French people,
which the reviewer declares “sont les voeux charitables qu’il forme pour
son anéantissement, pour sa honte éternelle” (the charitable vows which
he is forming for his spiritual annihilation, for his eternal shame) (30
April 1816).10 With the exception of one review by Malte-Brun in 1814
in Le Spectateur littéraire (1814 II), which chides French critics for their
arrogance in relation to foreign literature,11 it would seem that the few
reviewers who concerned themselves with Byron’s work in the early days
of his exposure in France did little to encourage translators to translate
him or readers to read him.
This attitude seems to reverse on both fronts later in 1816 with the
frst full translation of a work by Byron, one of the Turkish tales Zuleika
et Selim by Léon Thiessé, an anti-Romantic, who nevertheless admired
Byron’s work and praised the poem fulsomely in the preface.12 Other
translated extracts from The Giaour, The Corsair and Lara followed
in the Geneva-based Bibliothèque Universelle in 1817 (VI) before the
publication of the “Complete Works” of Byron in English in 1818 by
Galignani, which gave educated French readers the chance to read the
originals in their entirety.13
Likewise the scandals of his private life began to be presented by the
French Press as well as the English, amplifed by the translation of Lady
Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon in 1819, its portrayal of Byron as the vicious
and seductive Ruthven, leading to the book being quickly reprinted.14
The translation of Polidori’s The Vampyre in 1819 by “Faber” was a
huge success and effectively led to an increased interest among monoglot
readers. It was at this point that Charles Nodier, author of the recent
“roman noir” Jean Sbogar (1818) and librarian at L’Arsenal, published
in February 1820 the frst sequel to Byron/Polidori’s short story Lord
Ruthwen, ou Les Vampires by Cyprien Bérard, a writer whose name
and identity had never appeared anywhere else (nor indeed ever did af-
terwards), leading contemporary reviewers to assume Nodier himself to
have been the writer: a claim which he fatly denied, despite having writ-
ten the “Observations Préliminaires” or preface.15
Nodier’s preface contains an explication promulgating the “roman”
(novel) as a genre belonging to the “romantique”16 due to its ability to
break classical unities. However, in describing the novel’s particular vir-
tues, he admits that the superstitions of primitive people are too based
on terror for this genre and must be treated with a “timide sobriété” by
today’s readers, meaning that they should be seen sceptically. That said,
he vouches for the vampire as a more literary form which has adorned
many works, including the “contes arabes,”17 and which has been dig-
nifed by no less a genius than Lord Byron, making it suitable for the
present volume, which Nodier labels an example of “notre moyenne lit-
térature,”18 a term which appears to designate a popular literature that
nevertheless holds artistic merit.
Certainly this novel, with its long and fast-paced passages of dialogue
and relatively limited and repetitive vocabulary, provides none of the
stylistic obscurities and complex sentences which one fnds in Nodier’s
own later “contes fantastiques,” leading one to assume that Nodier was
not the author or at least not the sole author of the work. The tale retains
little of the original plot elements of The Vampyre by Polidori, except a
scene in the ruins of Athens with the Arab warrior Nadour-Héli and the
beautiful Greek woman Cymédore.19 The binding oath which Ruthwen
makes Aubrey swear is alluded to as occurring before the novel’s main
events and as being no longer of importance to the vengeful young hero,
while Ruthwen’s seducing and demonic nature is preserved throughout.
However, the novel is ambivalent in its attitude to vampirism. It in-
cludes both genuine examples and comic hoaxes, with Ruthwen himself
acting as a spokesman advocating its reality in an early cautionary ac-
count of his adventures in Poland, 20 and unreality in the story of a false
vampire of Baghdad later in the work when he scotches the superstition
to a group of courtesans in Modena, 21 which latter example Ruthwen
uses to interpret the vampire as being simply allegorical of other, more
mundane troubles. Through Ruthwen’s second story, the vampire is re-
lated to the Voltairean allegory of political and fnancial abuse from Dic-
tionnaire philosophique, 22 demonstrating that even in this “acceptable,”
Byron-inspired portrayal of the superstition, the writer maintained the
“timide sobriété” which Nodier suggested readers should bring to earlier
superstitions. 23 The macabre aspects of vampirism are absent, except in
Bettina’s later description of how she managed to escape her curse and
tomb through divine intervention 24 and in the description of Ruthwen
in his sepulchre as an “odieux cadavre” lit by a “hideuse paleur,”25 with
most of the other descriptions of vampirism being limited to their effects
in leaving bodies behind them.
While Ruthwen’s stories and actions serve to depict him as a demonic
and deceitful fgure, he is afforded little character complexity, except in
his capacity for deceit. Nevertheless, the connection with Byron also ap-
pears to have been an important point in promoting and advertising the
work, and thus we may understand Ruthwen as being a somewhat lim-
ited depiction of the Byronic hero identifed by Burwick in early theatri-
cal vampires, 26 a point reinforced partly by the vampire’s connection to
Scotland and “l’armée d’ Ecosse.”27 On the other hand the possibility of
158 Matthew Gibson
seeing the vampire as bourgeois and not aristocratic, argued by Butler, is
complicated by the historic setting of the novel. Although the historical
distancing is not as developed as in the work of early realists like Scott,
the novel is still obviously set in the Renaissance period with no guns
in warfare and an India that has no European presence. Ruthwen takes
up his fctional position as frst Minister of Modena against the real
historical background of the contention between the papacy and César,
the new Duke of Modena, who assumed his title in 1597 to papal objec-
tion, thus preventing the possibility of the vampire being understood as
bourgeois.
Le Vampire (13 June 1820), the stage play which Nodier wrote with
Achille de Jouffroy and Pierre Carmouche, is not a sequel but an adap-
tation of the Polidori short story, which includes original features of that
tale and also charges the vampire myth with new potentials. The main
elements consist of the return of Rutwen to Scotland to marry Aubray’s
sister Malvina while originally pretending to be his own brother, Lord
Marsden; his “death” at the hands of the young Edgar after he tries to
seduce Edgar’s fancée; Rutwen’s extraction of an oath of silence on this
from Aubray; and the vampire’s fnal destruction by an exterminating
angel before he can ravage Malvina.
The adaptation borrows the death in Greece, the oath to silence and
some of the names from the short story, not to mention the importance
of moonlight for reanimating corpses. It also stages a new “death” in
Scotland, probably motivated by interest in Ossian and Scott, but also
by Byron’s own connections with the country. Thus the central twist in
the original plot of the binding obligation is maintained. The play also,
like the novel Lord Ruthwen, maintains the vampire as an entirely di-
abolical creature, with no saving graces or sense of remorse expressed
in the dialogue, therefore making the character unlike the Byronic hero,
but certainly similar to Polidori’s character. The association of the story,
both with Byron and with the type of literature which Nodier saw him
as promoting, means that the work has to have been popularly associ-
ated with Byron’s name and image, especially given the French press
gossip and the popularity in France of Lamb’s Glenarvon. Furthermore,
like in the novel, there is the Byronic connection with Scotland (Byron
had, of course, grown up in Aberdeen before inheriting an estate in
Nottinghamshire). 28
A major change from Polidori’s text, however, is the development of
the vampire’s progeny and general features. At the beginning of the play,
Oscar, the spirit of marriage, explains to the spirit Ituriel the process by
which vampires survive:
Une puissance dont il ne nous est pas permis de scruter les arrêts
irrévocables, a permis que certaines âmes funestes, dévouées à des
tourmens que leurs crimes se sont attirés sur la terre, jouissent de ce
droit épouvantable qu’elles exercent de préférence sur la couche vir-
ginale et sur le berceau. Tantôt elles y descendent, formidables, avec
la fgure hideuse que la mort leur a donnée. Tantôt, plus privilégiées,
parce que leur carrière est plus courte et leur avenir plus effrayant,
elles obtiennent de revêtir des formes perdues dans la tombe, et de
reparaître à la lumière des vivans sous l’aspect du corps qu’elles ont
animé. 29
[A power whose irrevocable decisions we are not allowed to scru-
tinize, has permitted that certain diabolical souls, given over to tor-
ments to which their crimes have drawn them while on earth, rejoice
in this unshakeable right of preference which they exercise on the
virginal bed and the cradle. On the one hand they descend to earth,
formidable, with the hideous face that death has given them. On the
other hand, more privileged than others, because their careers are
shorter and their futures more terrifying, they succeed in reclothing
themselves with forms lost in the tomb, and to reappear by the light
of the living in the form of a body they have animated.]
In a further exchange, he explains how vampires avoid “le néant” by

preying on young maidens, which means being consigned not to Hell
but to an atheist’s nothingness. They are able to perform acts of palin-
genesis, since they specifcally come to the graves of the dead in order to
take new forms and can further change their forms whenever they like.30
This adds a form of unresolved causation to the play, since although
Oscar tells Ituriel that by marrying the Earl of Marsden, Malvina will
“fall from the arms of love into the arms of death” (“tomber des bras
de l’amour dans les bras de la mort”), 31 he does not name the vampire
as Marsden explicitly or call the covered vampire by his name. Thus it
would appear that the ghost concealed by a “linceul” (shroud) at the
beginning, may in fact not be Rutwen if he is entering as yet unvisaged,
but instead a demonic spirit readying himself to steal Rutwen’s form.
However, this is later belied or complicated by the fact that Malvina can
already recognize Rutwen when he appears in Act One from the night
before (in the prologue, he is repelled by Oscar and Ituriel without reveal-
ing his face); that Petterson, Rutwen’s housekeeper, had heard nothing
of his master for nine years, but recognizes him immediately (meaning
that he surely cannot be the long dead corpse buried in the crypt in the
cave)32; and that the story of the disappearing body in Greece has all the
uncanny marks of the vampire already existing. This may be a source
of confusion or at least of creating hesitation as to Rutwen’s true na-
ture, which is surely dispelled for even the most sceptical audience when
Oscar returns later to Edgar’s wedding night party in disguise (which
the audience is meant to see through but which Rutwen does not, even
though having supposedly met the spirit of marriage the night before)
and targets his anger at Rutwen.
160 Matthew Gibson
Despite this somewhat confused development of the vampire as a
form of succubus, the portrayal of Rutwen is certainly in keeping with
the vampire of Polidori in being a demonic character with no saving
graces. However, as in Bérard’s novel, the play of 1820 foments greater
association with Byron as real-life character than Polidori does, and in
doing so makes him appear more aristocratic. For one thing, Ruthwen
and Rutwen are both aristocrats, even if in the play there is the faint
and unconvincing possibility at the beginning that the spirit may have
purloined an originary Rutwen’s identity through reanimating a dead
Rutwen’s corpse.
In both Lord Ruthwen and Le Vampire, the vampire is much more
feasibly connected with the feudal past and is also certainly more noble
than the Ruthven portrayed in Polidori’s text. Indeed, even if we did
see the vampire as a new creation stealing Lord Rutwen’s form, which
is one of the arguments used by Butler for both this play and Planché’s
to see him as an “interloper” between two fxed classes as well as an
“Impostor,”33 he is still most defnitely aristocratic in behaviour, since
Oscar’s description of the vampire as a creature that is “more privileged”
than others due to their special conditions on earth and as having the
“unshakeable right of preference” over young maidens is itself a fea-
ture shared by the aristocracy, like the law of jus prima. 34 Furthermore,
this particular spirit is clearly of historical standing and born into the
aristocracy, having suborned an heiress as bridegroom some 100 years
before, according to the servant Scop, as “un jeune et riche Seigneur” (“a
young and rich Lord”)35 long before the rise of the bourgeoisie. Whether
the form was that of the present Rutwen or another lord perhaps matters
little: it was always in the form of an aristocrat that the predatory actions
were performed. Thus, in both texts the vampire is developed from Po-
lidori’s “The Vampyre” into a creature that is entirely demonic, associ-
ated with Scotland through Byron’s personal history and most defnitely
aristocratic rather than bourgeois in terms of progeny and behaviour.
However, there are certain features of the continued Byronic asso-
ciation that no critic has so far suffciently addressed. In neither text
does the vampire take on any of the complexities of the Byronic hero,
as expressed in works like Childe Harold and The Corsair. The latter of
these poems Nodier had clearly read, since his novel of 1818 Jean Sbogar
about a philosopher-brigand in Dalmatia is very obviously modelled on
it, as noticed by one contemporary reviewer in La Rénommée (17 Oc-
tober 1819).36 The parallels with the embittered and nihilistic pirate of
Byron’s The Corsair, Conrad, were clearly not missed by French critics
before 1819, and thus it might be surprising that Nodier, together with
Cyprien Bérard, Carmouche and Achille de Jouffroy, did not explore
this complexity in the development of their own Byronic anti-heroes
when including so much more of Byron’s own biography in the vampire.
Instead, Nodier, together with his co-writers, maintained the view of
Byron in their presentation of the vampire as promoter of the roman noir
and of supernatural literature and of literature that had a thoroughly
immoral edge. The reasons for this are best understood by examining
the critical episteme of the time.
The Reception of Byron in France and Britain

Both Bérard’s sequel and the play by Nodier, Jouffroy and Carmouche
develop the vampire—a theme on which Nodier observes Byron as having
bestowed distinction37—in keeping with the way in which most critics in
France, still heavily under the infuence of Voltairean classicism, under-
stood all of Byron’s work. In the Bibliothèque Universelle in 1817 (V 72
passim), an anonymous reviewer had complained of Byron that he is:
Un poète qui s’identife ainsi avec le caractère d’un héros séduisant et

odieux, qu’il reproduit sans cesse sous divers noms, peut à bon droit
être accusé de sacrifer le morale à l’effet, de faire un usage funeste
de ses talents, et de se rendre l’apôtre d’une misanthropie sombre
et fère, d’une fausse et dangereuse doctrine sur les devoirs, sur la
destination de l’homme.38
[A poet who further identifes with the character of a seducing and
hateful hero, which he endlessly reproduces under various names,
can with good reason be accused of sacrifcing the moral to the ef-
fect, of making a baleful use of his talents, and of making himself
the apostle of a gloomy and arrogant misanthropy, of a false and
dangerous doctrine of duties, over the destiny of man.]
The assessment of both Byron the poet and of the Byronic hero with
whom the poet identifes is as an entirely negative character that has no
morality, is misanthropic and promotes irresponsibility in relation to
“duties.” The Horatian-based classicism of the previous century was still
very much evident in most of both Napoleonic or Restoration France,
and the attitude towards Byron as a writer whose imagination was
“sombre” and “funeste” was a description relating to both himself and
his Byronic heroes throughout most of the criticism in that country, with
only a few writers like Nodier himself appearing to have recognized
their complexities.
Compared with the attitude presented by French critics, for all the
scandal afforded by Byron’s life and romances, critics in Scotland and
England nevertheless present a far more nuanced understanding, which
unravels the complexities of the Byronic hero and also the fascination
of the moral darkness and misanthropy with which the works are suf-
fused. In a review of Cantos 1 and 2 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage for
the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey displayed this appreciation of the
complexity therein:
162 Matthew Gibson
Like Milton’s fend, however, he sees ‘undelighted all delight,’ and
passes on through the great wilderness of the world with a heart
shut to all human sympathy—sullenly despising the stir both of its
business and its pleasures—but hating and despising himself most of
all, for beholding it with so little emotion. 39
The comparison with Milton’s Lucifer is tempered by the fact that By-
ron’s hero registers his own self-hatred while seeing the world misan-
thropically and with “so little emotion.” The work, however, is clearly
not itself without emotional effect on the reader in Jeffrey’s opinion, as
he later understands the hero’s “misanthropy and universal scorn” as
having the potential to “excite a kind of curiosity” in presenting familiar
objects through “so dark a medium.”40 In this interpretation, we can
discern the possibility of the sublime as a form of taste, in Jeffrey’s un-
derstanding of the “curiosity” and “piquant” feeling that this creates in
the reader,41 somewhat similar to Burke’s understanding of how causes
of terror become forms of pleasure or rather “delight” when dissociated
from danger and thus from pain.42
In a later review of Byron for the Edinburgh Review, principally of
The Giaour and The Corsair, Jeffrey attests to the strengths of attraction
in Byron’s work, stating that:
it is to his pictures of the stronger passions, that he is indebted for

the fulness of his fame. He has delineated, with unequalled force
and fdelity, the workings of those deep and powerful emotions
which alternately enchant and agonize the minds that are exposed
to their inroads.43
The ambivalent nature of Byron’s presentations of the “stronger pas-

sions,” which are clearly capable of causing the reader both pleasure
and pain, leads the critic further to declare that there is a kind of “nat-
ural magic” in Byron’s “moral sublimity,” which is comprised of “the
terrors and attractions of those overpowering feelings, the depths and
the heights of which he seems to have so successfully explored.”44 The
declaration that the sublime caused by these feelings is moral rather than
aesthetic suggests that Byron has successfully moved the cause of sub-
limity to characterization rather than the response to nature of a poet
like Wordsworth. It is diffcult to gauge whether Jeffrey had become
aware of Kant’s description of the sublime of magnitude, which involves
the subject fnding pleasure from failing to reconcile the shape and size
of what they perceive into the concept of the beautiful because of its
irregularity of form,45 although as editor of the Edinburgh Review, he
had already presided over two long articles on Kant by Thomas Brown
(1803) and James Mackintosh (1813).46 Assuming that Jeffrey had, then
Byron it would seem, shifted that very irregularity in nature to character
itself, whose emotions and reactions combine extremes which the reader
cannot harmonize and which stretch the boundaries of experience, thus
alternately “enchant[ing]” and “agoniz[ing],” and furthermore making
the pleasure “moral” rather than simply “aesthetic.” Jeffrey sees this
presentation of “moral sublimity,” perhaps in keeping with Hume’s eth-
ical theory, as being related to emotion (as opposed to the Kantian insis-
tence that reason is the basis of the moral), and in doing so maintains the
Wordsworthian insistence in the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads (1800)
that a poem is distinguished by the intensity of its feeling rather than by
“action and situation.”47
Jeffrey, as critic, brings a plethora of mixed assumptions to reading
Byron that have been schooled by immersion in the new literature of
sentimentalism, Wordsworth, Schiller and even perhaps earlier Humian
scepticism. These are all part of traditions unavailable to or else ignored
by the classically minded French critics, whose models were Horace and
Voltaire and whose moral guides were pessimistic Catholic thinkers like
Pascal. To such critics, feeling and the exploration of emotion were less
important than the grandeur of theme; exhibition of imagination be-
yond the laws of nature was superfuous and indulgent; and morality
was key to the value of a work. Thus the demonic element of Byron’s
writing was for them absolute, and the Byronic hero’s complexities were
entirely ignored. Likewise, the irrationalism of some of his more super-
naturally based works like Lara was considered unnatural.48
This classically driven condemnation of Byron’s writing must have
fascinated the public, as Bérard, Jouffroy, Nodier and Carmouche were
only too happy to exploit the Byron connection to vampirism for popu-
lar consumption, embellishing the vampire’s nature with more macabre
detail than in Polidori’s original, but also making him more similar to
the real-life Byron through progeny and status: amplifcations that are in
keeping with the original short story, but certainly not with the vampire
in Byron’s The Giaour. This is perhaps to be expected in a nation becom-
ing acquainted gradually with Byron and reacting primarily to a short
story whose provenance these authors thought was that writer. Thus, in
both Bérard’s sequel to Polidori’s tale and the adaptation by Nodier and
his friends, there is a greater affrmation of the vampire as an aristocrat
and a greater affnity with Byron himself, while the complexities of the
Byronic hero, so often linked to Byron’s own personality, are lost. As we
shall see, the English translation/adaptation of the play the same year
gives much greater moral complexity to the vampire.
J.R. Planché’s The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles

The 24-year-old Planché replicated the success of Le Vampire: mélo-
drame en trois actes in his own translation and adaptation of the play
for a musical performed at the Lyceum theatre in 1820. The play has far
164 Matthew Gibson
more comedy and singing than the original as well as more violence, and
it has been suggested by at least one critic that the Scottish setting was
conditioned by an abundance of Scottish costumes from previous dra-
mas.49 The plot of the play is somewhat different from the French play,
while as linguistic adaptation it veers between close translation of the
original and wholly different renditions of speeches as well as completely
added scenes and dialogue.
The basic plot is far more certain in presenting Marsden/Ruthven as
the vampire, while affrming that he is really Cromal, a demon soul who
has taken another’s form. 50 McSwill, Lord Ronald’s servant, is played
for many more laughs by a low comedian than the character Scop, Lord
Aubray’s servant in the French play. The scene with prenuptial festivities
and assault on Effe is much shorter than the plot twist in the French ver-
sion without the return of either of the spirits from the beginning of the
tale, while Effe’s young bridegroom Robert has a far more developed
role than his French counterpart Edgar, fghting frst with Lord Ronald
and then with Ruthven at the end of the play. This inclusion may have
been infuenced by the need to introduce a young heroic fgure to the
melodrama, particularly since Planché had dispensed with Margaret’s
brother and given Aubrey’s role to the father fgure, Lord Ronald. Other
changes may have been prompted not only by the musical nature of the
work and the expectations of melodrama, but also by Shakespearean
traditions, with, for example, McSwill as the low comedian fulflling
a role similar to the porter in Macbeth. Lord Ronald’s casting of Ruth-
wen’s ring into the sea after his frst death is pulled not from Polidori
or Nodier, but, as Roxana Stuart has shown, from Byron’s original
“Fragment.”51
While these changes have been observed by Burwick and others,
one especially important and under-discussed difference concerns the
vampire’s moral nature. Planché’s version uses soliloquies and asides in
which the vampire expresses guilt and remorse, as, for example, in Act I,
when Ruthven relates his true feelings to the audience:
Rut. [Walking about agitated] Demon as I am, that walks the earth
to slaughter and devour! The little that remains of heart within this
wizard frame, sustained alone by human blood, shrinks from the
appalling act of planting misery in the bosom of this veteran chief-
tain. Still must the fearful sacrifce be made, and suddenly, for the
approaching night will fnd my wretched frame exhausted—and
darkness—worse than death—annihilation is my lot! Margaret!
Unhappy maid! Thou art my destined prey! Thy blood must feed a
Vampire’s life, and prove the food of his disgusting banquet!52
This soliloquy expands the concept that life among vampires consists
of consciousness but no redeemable soul, and that they are in need of
marriage to a virgin victim to continue living their undead life, even
if using the form of another body. However, above all, it presents the
vampire as suffering from remorse and self-loathing, giving the demon
a moral complexity entirely missing in the original play or Polidori’s
short story. While Roxana Stuart sees this inclusion of self-disgust by
Planché as a mistake since it compromises Ruthwen’s vampiric nature, 53
there are good reasons why it was included. For one thing, Planché may
have been careful to inject saving graces into a fgure who is certainly a
member of the British aristocracy in a way that the three French authors
did not care to do, the Anglophobia of “Le Vampire” being, in Burwick’s
opinion, one of its major features. 54
This development of a conscience presents a further peculiar inversion
in the relation between the seen and the unseen in the vampire’s per-
sonality. Margaret unwittingly portrays this dual nature of the vampire
when describing her dream to Bridget:
On a sudden, a sepulchre opened, and a phantom approached me; I

trembled; but an invisible hand seemed to prevent my fight. I could
not even turn mine eyes from the apparition. To my surprise the
countenance was that of a young and handsome man, but it was pale
and wo-worn. His eyes, fxed upon mine with the most touching ex-
pression, seemed to implore my pity. He uttered my name, and had
nearly reached me, when a beautiful being stood between us, and
checked his progress. Then, oh, horror! The features of the spectre
grew frightfully distorted; its whole form assumed the most terrifc
appearance; and it sunk into the tomb from which it had issued,
with a shriek that froze me.55
This passage is mainly a faithful if slightly curtailed translation of the

original two speeches in Nodier et al.’s play, and like the original the
passage shows the distinction between the handsome, pitiable young
man and the vampire’s genuine interior, which is then exteriorized. This
can be compared to spiritualist ideas, such as Swedenborg’s belief in the
“interior man” that is revealed when the exterior body dies56; to the por-
trayal of the witch Alcina in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, who tricks Rug-
giero with her external beauty before he sees her inner form57; or Duessa
in Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, who similarly fooled the unfortunate
Fradubio before he saw her as an ugly hag while bathing. 58 Here it is a
masculine fgure who is trying to seduce a woman through trickery, like
the legendary Don Juan. However, in Planché’s play, the confessional so-
liloquy by Ruthven complicates the melodramatic polarities of this divi-
sion and casts a different perspective on Margaret’s “dream.” Unlike in
the version by Nodier et al., the initial external form does, in fact, show
one aspect of the vampire’s true character: remorse and self-loathing.
This suggests that the pitiable young countenance may also represent an
166 Matthew Gibson
exteriorization of the vampire’s remorseful interior, which must eventu-
ally be overcome by the lust and mischief incarnated by the vampire’s
second, uglier exterior.
However, a further reason for this injection of guilt and self-loathing
for the vampire in Planché’s version is probably Ruthven’s association
with Byron himself and a better understanding of the Byronic hero (less
available in France): a type of hero whom Francis Jeffrey understood
as presenting “moral sublimity” through “the terrors and attractions
of those overpowering feelings, the depths and the heights of which he
seems to have so successfully explored.”59 It is perhaps for this reason
that Planché also imbues the vampire with contradictory extremes, par-
ticularly those of lust and remorse.
Ruthven’s remorse takes a subtler turn later, illuminating his particu-
lar guilt at harming a “veteran chieftain.”60 It is through following the
extent of the vampire’s continued expression of remorse that we can fur-
ther understand how the interpretation of Ruthven as bourgeois rather
than aristocrat applies even less here than in the original French adap-
tation. In an aside to the audience, at the beginning of Act II, Ruthven
gives his motives for seducing and killing the peasant girl Effe (this pas-
sage is not in the French text):
RUT: Fear Nothing. [Aside] Yet, she has cause to fear. Should I surprise
her heart, as by my gifted spell I may, the tribute that prolongs ex-
istence may be paid and Margaret may (at least awhile) be spared.
[To Effe] How delightful ‘tis to gaze upon thee thus! An atmosphere
of joy is round about thee, which whosoever breathes, becomes thy
slave.61
Here, Ruthven admits that murdering and suborning the peasant Ef-
fe is to save the worthier Margaret at least for some period of delay.
Talking of Effe’s irresistible “atmosphere of joy,” which makes another
her “slave” (a word not used in the French seduction scene) after he has
just confessed what he deems to be his own “gifted spell,” simply consti-
tutes a projection of what he presumes to be his own power to make her
his vassal. The passage in Planché’s version exhibits a hierarchical un-
derstanding of reality that, in Butler’s description of the bourgeois vam-
pire, is not there, since the bourgeois vampire preys upon the aristocracy
and the peasantry with equal disdain.62 Ruthven’s remorse and fear at
having to kill the beautiful Margaret and to upset this “veteran chief-
tain”63 may seem illogical (could he not seduce and kill 100 more Effes
and leave Margaret alone?). However, it demonstrates that even if the
vampire is the much older dispossessed soul of Cromal (whose progeny
we do not know) within Ruthven’s body, his attitudes maintain a feudal
sense of peoples’ relative values (if not, as Harse has argued, a sense of
“droit de seigneur”),64 valuing more those with aristocratic background.
Thus the most signifcant change in Planché’s adaptation of Le Vam-
pire (1820)—apart from the obvious plot changes involving the space for
a young male hero, the curtailing of the role of the supernatural char-
acters and the introduction of a comic low comedian—would seem to
be the inclusion of remorse and self-loathing on the part of the vampire.
Such a change gives the fgure a greater association with the Byronic
hero (in a story presumed to have been instigated by Byron) and also
cements the nature of the vampire far more frmly with the aristocratic
class than may be the case in Polidori’s original short story—a change
partly caused by a need to temper criticism of the aristocracy itself, but
also by a closer acquaintance in Britain with the complexities of the
Byronic hero.
Conclusion
All-in-all, Cyprien Bérard’s Lord Ruthwen, the stage play Le Vampire
by Nodier and others and Planché’s The Vampire, or The Bride of the
Isles all augment the aristocratic nature of the vampire, connect him
specifcally with Scotland and in doing so increase the relationship with
Lord Byron. Whereas the two French texts present the Byronic hero as
unsubtly demonic, in keeping with both the Polidori original and with
the French critical opinion of Byron’s work, the English play embellishes
the vampire’s character with contradictory and extreme emotions as
well as feudal attitudes, facilitating a closer connection with the com-
plex moral nature and emotional extremes of the Byronic hero. All three
works augment Ruthven’s status as aristocrat, not bourgeois.
Notes
1 Fred Burwick, Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2010), 234.
2 Katie Harse, “The Melodrama hath Charms: J.R. Planché’s Theatrical Do-
mestication of Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre,’” Journal of Dracula Studies, 3
(2001): 1–7 (online), 4.
3 Burwick, Romantic Drama, 230–231.
4 Burwick, Romantic Drama, 235.
5 Erik Butler, Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural
Transformations in Europe, 1732–1933 (New York: Camden House, 2010),
89.
6 Butler, Metamorphoses, 87.
8 Edmond Estève, Byron et le Romantisme Français: Essai sur la Fortune et
l’Infuence de l’œuvre de Byron de 1812 à 1850 (Paris : Librairie Hachette,
1907), 48.
9 Estève, Byron et le Romantisme Français, 49.
12 Estève, Byron et le Romantisme Français, 50–51.
168 Matthew Gibson
13 Estève, Byron et le Romantisme Français, 53n, 59.
14 Estève, Byron et le Romantisme Français, 73–74.
15 Estève, Byron et le Romantisme Français, 76n–77n.
16 Cyprien Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, ou les Vampires, 2 vols (Paris : L’Advocat,
1820), I i.
17 Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, I iii.
19 Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, II 52, 56–70.
20 Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, I 43–44.
21 Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, II 97–98; 127–131.
22 Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (London: Garnier, 1878), 548.
24 Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, II 27
25 I Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, II 174.
27 Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, I 64.
29 Charles Nodier, Pierre Carmouche, and Achille de Jouffroy, Le Vampire:
mélodrame en trois actes (Paris: J-N Barba Librairie, 1820), 5.
30 Nodier et al., Le Vampire, 6.
34 Harse also notes Ruthven’s sense of “droit de seigneur,” although chiefy in
relation to Planché’s play, and Ruthven’s attitude toward Effe (Harse, “The
Melodrama hath Charms,” 4).
35 Ibid. 12.
36 Maixner, Rudolph, Charles Nodier et L’Illyrie (Paris: Didier, 1960), 48.
37 Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, iii.
38 Qtd in Estève, Byron et le Romantisme Français, 53.
39 Francis Jeffrey, “From His Unsigned Review,” Edinburgh Review, February
1812, xix, 466–477,” in Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Ruther-
ford (London and New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 39.
40 Jeffrey, “From His Unsigned Review,” 40.
41 Jeffrey, “From His Unsigned Review,” 40.
42 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014),
252–253.
43 Francis Jeffrey, “From His Unsigned Review of The Corsair and The Bride
of Abydos,” Edinburgh Review, dated April 1814, issued July 1814, XXIII,
198–229, Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London,
New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 52–64, at 53.
44 Jeffrey 1814, “Review of The Corsair and The Bride of Abydos,” 54.
45 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. James
C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 80–91.
46 J. H. Burns, “Scottish Kantians: An Exploration,” Journal of Scottish Phi-
losophy 7, no. 2 (2009): 115–131, at 118–119.
47 William Wordsworth, 1770–1850; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834,
eds. Raymond L. Brett and Alun R. Jones (Abingdon, New York: Routledge,
2005), 293.
50 James R. Planché, The Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles: A Romantic Melo
Drama in Two Acts (London and New York: Samuel French, 1820), 15.
51 Roxana Stuart, Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th-Century Stage (Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994), 76.
52 Planché, The Vampire, 26–27.
53 Stuart, Stage Blood, 80.
55 Planché, The Vampire, 21–22.
56 Emanuel Swedenborg, The Delights of Wisdom Relating to Conjugal Love,
trans. Arthur H. Searle (London: Swedenborg Society, 1891) 36, n. 36.
57 Lodovico Ariosto, Roland Furieux: Poème Héroique, trans. A-J du Pays
(Paris : Hachette, 1879), 111–112, Chapter 10, st. 64–69.
58 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London: Printed for William Ponson-
bie, 1596) [ecopy] 30, Bk 1, Canto 2.
59 Jeffrey 1814, “Review of The Corsair and The Bride of Abydos,” 40.
60 Planché, The Vampire, 26.
64 Harse, “The Melodrama Hath Charms,” 4.
11 America’s First Vampire
Novel and the Supernatural
as Artifce
Gary D. Rhodes and
John Edgar Browning
Histories of vampire literature traditionally concentrate on four key texts

published in Great Britain in the nineteenth century: John Polidori’s nov-
elette The Vampyre, A Tale (1819); James Malcolm Rymer’s (or Thomas
Peckett Prest’s) penny dreadful Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of
Blood (1845–1847); J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1872); and
Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (Constable, 1897). In them are important
evolutions and consolidations of the vampire we see in fction today.
Fans of the subject seek out these texts, reading and rereading them, or
at the very least—in the case of Varney—memorizing the cover image
of the 1853 edition while scanning the voluminous word count (totaling
some 666,000 and then some).
Scholarly interest in the subject has led to emphasis on other
nineteenth-century works, including stage adaptations of Polidori’s tale,
among them James Robinson Planché’s The Vampire; or the Bride of
the Isles (1820). Roxana Stuart’s Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th-
Century Stage (1994), for example, recovers much information on
vampire characters in European theater.1 Nevertheless, further literary
excavations are still necessary. Much remains to be rediscovered, partic-
ularly in terms of the US.
However much attention American scholars have rightly paid to Varney
and Carmilla in the late twentieth and early twenty-frst centuries, those
two texts made little-to-no impact in nineteenth-century America (though
a recent discovery by John Edgar Browning shows that Carmilla did at
least see serial publication).2 And while Dracula became an immediately
popular success,3 it was not published in the US until 1899, by which time
it had already been translated into Hungarian in 1898 and serialized in
a Budapest newspaper, then in English in a Chicago newspaper a year
before the American book release (Doubleday & McClure Co., 1899).4
By contrast, American newspapers wrote at length about the publica-
tion of The Vampyre in 1819. The vampire (or, more ornately, “vampyre”)
started to appear in American newspapers as early as the eighteenth
century, often pejoratively to refer to businessmen, corporations, banks,
bankers, landlords, and politicians. Medicinal treatment advertisements
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-12
America’s First Vampire Novel 171
also employed the vampire to describe a range of illnesses, like scrofula
(a form of tuberculosis). Even science turned to the vampire to identify
various species of bat and squid. Newspapers were seemingly all too
eager to cash in on the vampire’s rising popularity with the publica-
tion of The Vampyre. Despite some negative reviews, the story seems
to have been an immediate hit with American readers. Uriah Derick
D’Arcy quickly published a “burlesque” entitled The Black Vampyre in
New York, the stated aim being to “ridicule” the story. 5 And in what
was likely the frst performance of a vampire play in the US, the Pavillion
Theatre in New York staged The Vampyre, an apparently unauthorized
and loose adaptation of the story in July 1819.6
The following year, The Vampire; or the Bride of the Isles made its
New York debut. Versions continued to be staged in America often
during the years that followed. As an article in the New York Literary
Journal noted in 1821, “Since the appearance of the story of the Vam-
pire, the conversation of private parties has frequently turned to the sub-
ject, and the discussion has been prolonged and invigorated by the pieces
brought at the theatres….”7
The next major appearance of the vampire in America came thanks
to Dion Boucicault’s two-act play The Phantom. Originally staged in
England as The Vampire in 1852, The Phantom opened in New York in
1856. Unfortunately, The Phantom remains conspicuously absent from
many modern vampire histories. While The Phantom never became as
successful as Boucicault’s Irish-themed plays, theatres did stage it oc-
casionally after its New York premiere. As late as 1870, a version of it
appeared in Galveston, Texas.8
All of this history—as well as popular attention paid to Philip Burne-
Jones painting The Vampire (1897) and Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the
same name and year—represents a particularized lineage, meaning that
some but not all fctional vampires from Europe arrived on US soil and
had varying degrees of success with readers and theatergoers. It is a de-
cidedly American tale, though, one of foreign invasion by vampires. But
however much it needs to be investigated, it is only part of the story of
American vampires in the nineteenth century.
The key missing link in previous histories is America’s frst vampire
novel. Published in 1885, The Vampire; or, Detective Brand’s Greatest
Case has languished in obscurity, cited only briefy in a few recent texts.9
And yet it may have been the most widely read vampire novel in America
prior to the publication of Stoker’s Dracula.
Written anonymously, The Vampire; or, Detective Brand’s Greatest
Case was published as a “dime novel.” Dime novels, which were really
novellas or “novelettes,” featured tales of Native Americans, western
heroes and outlaws, the American Civil War, detectives, and/or horror.
During the late nineteenth century, the term “dime novel” had become
172 Gary D. Rhodes and John Edgar Browning
used generically to describe much paperback fction, regardless of the
cover price. J. Randolph Cox writes:
In the beginning, the term ‘dime novel’ was a brand name. Beadle’s
Dime Novels (1860–1874) was a series of paper-covered booklets,
published at regular intervals and numbered in sequence. For 14
years, a new title was issued by the publishers, Beadle and Adams,
every two weeks or so, 321 in all.
… Imitation being a good way to make money, as well as the sin-
cerest form of fattery, it wasn’t long before other publishers issued
their own variations on the Beadle dime novel theme. In 1863, a for-
mer employee of Erastus Beadle, George P. Munro, became his chief
competitor by issuing a series called Munro’s Ten Cent Novels.10
Munro’s brother, Norman L. Munro, ran his own dime novel company,
which published The Vampire; or, Detective Brand’s Greatest Case on
September 14, 1885, as part of the “Old Cap Collier Library.”
Gary Hoppenstand writes that “there has always existed a Bermuda
Triangle in detective fction, a vacuum, if you will, that has absorbed an
entire archetype for over a hundred years.”11 Reasons range from the
limited availability of dime novels for study as well as prejudice against
the form. Indeed, Kevin Dodd describes The Vampire; or, Detective
Brand’s Greatest Case as an “adolescent” novel, which is true insofar
as dime novels largely targeted young men (even though the reading de-
mographic for them may well have been larger).12 However, the word
“adolescent” is misleading insofar as indicating the type of language
and prose style it utilizes. Here is not a book solely for children, in other
words, not by any means.
Hoppenstand and others have attributed The Vampire; or, Detective
Brand’s Greatest Case to Hawley Smart, but only recently has compel-
ling evidence confrmed Smart as the actual author. More important
than the writer’s name though is what he or she wrote, as the dime novel
is quite different than its predecessors in vampire fction. The book’s
key revelation—that the “supernatural” vampire is merely an insane,
bloodthirsty villain making puncture marks on his victims’ throats—
places it at the forefront of an entirely new type of vampire fction, one
that would later thrive in such flms as London after Midnight (Tod
Browning, 1927), Mark of the Vampire (Tod Browning, 1935), and—
most especially—Martin (George Romero, 1978).
American Horror before 1885

The Vampire; or, Detective Brand’s Greatest Case represented an en-
tirely new kind of vampire fction when it was published. But it was also
part of a larger continuum, one in which horror themes in American
literature were treated in two particular respects. Of these, one particu-
lar focus was on real-life horrors. As Daniel A. Cohen has noted, Amer-
ican publications on murder and capital punishment date to the frst
half of the eighteenth century when “gallows broadsides” published the
dying words of the condemned as well as details of their crimes. Later,
in the early decades of the nineteenth century, murder trial reports in
newspapers became popular, as did biographies of criminals.13
As Karen Halttunen indicates in Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the
American Imagination (1998), the subject of murder in popular fction
and nonfction literature grew dramatically after the 1820s, the result of
many causes, among them an escalation in literacy rates.14 Reading became
common, with murder helping to lead the charge. Halttunen observes:
This literature did not simply report ‘intense excitement’; it actively

sought to stimulate it, intentionally sending a ‘thrill of horror’ to
readers’ hearts…. Most important, murder literature after 1800 fo-
cused overwhelmingly on images of the body in pain and death. The
primary technique of sensationalism was body-horror, the effort to
arouse the readers’ repugnance (and excitement) in the face of the
physiological realities of violent death.15
Halttunnen explains further that “Reading horror literature thus helped

reinforce the rising levels of repression demanded by the growing hu-
manitarian sanctions against violent impulses and actions.”16
The other main trajectory of American horror was to invoke the super-
natural only to rationalize it. Most commonly, American writers chose
to expose the “supernatural” as being the product of all-too-human
trickery. The Enlightenment won over Old World superstitions. And
then there was the human mind, capable of playing tricks on oneself or
others. America’s frst novelist Charles Brockden Brown explored these
possibilities in Wieland, or The Transformation (1798). In this novel,
Brown describes a family living in a mansion near Philadelphia. The
character Theodore Wieland slaughters his relatives because he believes
God has told him to do so. However, the voice he hears is apparently
that of the all-too-human Carwin, a “biloquist”. Then, in William Aus-
tin’s The Man with the Cloaks: A Vermont Legend (1836), the narrator
announces, “There was nothing supernatural in this; the body is often
the plaything of the mind.” The mental state of frst-person narrators
also became a particularly successful mechanism for writing about the
supernatural while still explaining it. The rational largely triumphed
during the nineteenth century, so much so that in 1913, a critic made
the following plea:
Wanted—a ghost story: a romance in which the spectre is a real

one…. The advertiser thus requests because she is weary of the ghost
that ultimately proves to be an escaped maniac, a wandering ba-
boon, or a six-year-old masquerading in her aunt’s dress.17
Is there a headless horseman in Sleepy Hollow or is it merely Brom

Bones playing a joke on poor Ichabod Crane? Had the title character of
Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown (1835) fallen asleep and merely
dreamed of witches? Be it so, if you will. Are there ghosts in Henry
James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) or is the problem a deluded mind
of the type Poe so regularly examined?
To be sure, there are exceptions to these two approaches to American
horror, but the numbers do not lie. To detail murder, and to broach the
supernatural without verifying it, or dismiss it outright: here is where
most American texts situated themselves prior to 1885. The Vampire;
or, Detective Brand’s Greatest Case drew upon these traditions, both of
which converge within its pages.
Detective Brand’s Greatest Case

The story begins on a spring day. It is early evening and the weather
mild, when a policeman walking the city streets discovers a murder vic-
tim and something else, afar in the distance, which “froze him with
horror”: the fgure of a man “framed against the moon,” resembling in
that frightful moment “a huge bird … attired entirely in black.” Prior to
the incident, dead bodies had been appearing on the streets of New York
with puncture wounds on their necks. “Gotham was puzzled,” and:
The best detectives were at a loss, and candidly confessed their

confusion. A [series] of mysterious deaths and disappearances had
called forth the best talent of the metropolitan detective force, but as
yet no substantial clew to the perpetrator of the awful murders, and
mysterious disappearances, both believed to be the work of the same
inhuman fend, had been obtained. Murders were common enough
in New York, but there was an unusual factor in these of which we
write, and it was something so ghoulish, so horrible, so unnatural,
that even the tried offces of the force spoke of the matter with whis-
pering voices, and sometimes with a shudder of superstitious horror
that could not be repressed.18
During the frst chapters, a clever detective named Brace chases the cul-
prit, his disguises capable of fooling men assigned to work with him,
men who were “all his own brothers.” But Brace is still not up to the
task. In Chapter XI, his corpse is discovered. An “examination revealed
that he had perished from a stab wound piercing the heart, and on the
neck, under the left ear, were the two mysterious marks which had also
appeared on the bodies of the other victims.”19 And so the arrival of the
“keen” Detective Carlton Brand becomes necessary. He works for him-
self, not the police. He is a:
… man possessed of wonderful physical power, undaunted courage,

and a face so mobile it was capable of the most astonishing changes,
coupled with the instinct of a bloodhound, a more terrible man-
catcher never got upon a rascal’s track. 20
Upon learning of Brace’s death and the details of the case, Brand ex-
plains to the police chief:
The money is welcome enough, of course, although I am tolerably well

provided, but I would undertake the work all the same if there wasn’t
a dollar up, for this mysterious assassin is no common stabber, and it
is these superhuman villains that I delight to track. I believe I ought
to have been born a bloodhound, for I take a ferce delight when I can
get upon the track of such a magnifcent rascal. There is no pleasure
hunting down your common vulgar scoundrel; that is, not for a man
like myself. If I cannot chase a big game, I prefer to remain idle.21
In some respects, Brand exemplifes what Gary Hoppenstand calls the

“archetypal Avenger Detective” of dime novels. He works “outside tra-
ditional law-enforcement agencies,” he “is a man of great wealth,” he “is
a master of disguise,” and he “possesses great strength, superb training
and determination, coupled with courage.”22
Brand is himself a master of disguise, not only of his face, but also of
his voice, affecting different accents as needed. But initially he couldn’t
work on this case. He has been out of America for some time and “the hot
sun of the tropics had bronzed his complexion.” He grows his moustache
longer and also sports a “small chin-piece, after the foreign fashion.”
Brand is also an “old opium-eater.” He explains, “Years ago, when trou-
ble nearly drove me crazy, I found relief in that lethe-producing drug, and
[became] so used to it that I could take, without harm, a quantity large
enough to almost kill a dozen men….” In so many respects, then Brand
is prescient of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who would not appear in
print for another two years. And, although loosely hinted at in Holmes’s
inaugural appearance in A Study in Scarlet (1887), his drug use did not
become apparent until Doyle’s second novel The Sign of the Four (1890).23
An Irish policeman is the frst in the narrative to witness the vampire,
“a fgure strange enough to startle almost anyone, as it appeared, framed
against the moon.” “Holy Moses! Is it a man or a divil,” he cries in lan-
guage that attempts to mimic his brogue.24 The novel then explains:
It is no wonder that he asked the question, for at a distance the

fgure, though evidently that of a man, bore a striking resemblance
to a huge bird, being attired entirely in black, wearing a long, old-
fashioned circular cloak, and just as the offcer caught sight of the
man, he raised and stretched out his arms, and the cloak being thus
extended, looked exactly like a pair of huge wings, and as the man
wore, too, a small, soft hat, pulled in chapeau fashion down over his
eyes, so that it came to a point in front, it gave his head the appear-
ance of a bird of prey.25
His black cloak inspires “credulous souls with terror.” Could the author
have known of the serialized penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1845–
1847), whose title character wore a black cloak? Not likely, since it had not
yet been published in the US. Perhaps, if the author was indeed American,
he was aware of the “black plume and cloak” worn by the title character
in Boucicault’s The Vampire (1852), which was staged with much success
in America beginning in 1856 under the title The Phantom. More likely
still, it was an offshoot of the ever-growing confation between the su-
pernatural vampire and the (relatively harmless) vampire bat. Indeed, the
fgure of the “winged vampire” played a prominent role in politicized pe-
riodical illustrations or as the occasional American literary trope (see, for
example, “Haidoni and the Vampyres” in A.E.P. Searling’s The Land of
Rip Van Winkle, 1884). Aided by Polidori’s The Vampyre and the Ameri-
can press, this confation helped to fan the modern conception of the vam-
pire as sporting fangs. (Indeed, the vampire or “revenant” of European
folklore, on which the vampire of fction is based, lacked fangs entirely, so
whereas the European vampire lent the vampire bat its name, the vampire
bat, in turn, almost assuredly lent the vampire of fction its fangs.)
As for the murderer, he drives a dagger into the heart of his victims.
But he also leaves two puncture marks on their necks, a sign of the vam-
pire. An “old seaman” provides insight for the uninitiated:
I heered tell on a vampire once down in the Isle of Java …. It was

nigh onto twenty years ago, and his hyar thing used for to light
onto a sleeping man, w’ot was foolish enough fur to camp out in the
woods, fan him with his wings so as fur to keep him from waking,
and suck his blood at the same time. I never see’d any of the things,
tho’ I’ve heered plenty of yarns ‘bout them, but I allers reckoned it
was a kind of bird. 26
Another character explains: “suppose there was a girl of twenty years

old, and whose natural term of life would be forty, that is if the vampire
did not cut it short.” He continues, “By killing her and drinking her
blood the vampire added the twenty years of her life to his own….”27
In an effort to dig into the underworld and uncover the vampire, De-
tective Brand initially plays the role of a wealthy foreigner who has come
to New York for “amusement.”28 Then he moves further into the “nether
world” of Gotham, disguising himself to see all those sights “found after
dark”: “The Bon Ton Club the place was called, and those who were
not in the secret supposed it to be a clubhouse pure and simple, while in
reality it was nothing but a regular gambling hell.”29 During his search,
Brand encounters a woman who slips a drug into his drink:
The woman was quick to discover that though the drug had worked
to a charm upon the hotel offcial, rendering him completely insen-
sible to all that was passing around, yet Brand, although deprived of
muscular power, was yet conscious of what was going on.
The woman, who had also sunk back into an easy-chair after
drinking, now rose to her feet, with the look of a demon on her
face.30
Surprised at Brand’s resilience, this woman nevertheless knows who he

is and announces that even if he has been close to death “a hundred
times,” he has never been nearer his fate. She confesses to being the vam-
pire and removes a diamond cross from her “lustrous, jet-black hair.”
Its pin is a dagger, “only a little larger round than an ordinary knitting-
needle.”31 Her eyes then “glow with an unnatural light” as she bran-
dishes the weapon in front of Brand:
It is a toy, and yet it has drunk the heart’s blood of many a strong
man, and hurled him before his time into the cold, damp gravel …
And now, Carlton Brand, it is your turn, and after you, this miser-
able fool [the hotel offcial], although he is barely worth the killing,
but I crave blood—I cannot have too much of it; if I cannot get plun-
der, I can, at least, slake my thirst for gore!32
But Brand has only pretended to suffer the effects of the drug. He cap-
tures the “infernal vixen,” only for her to escape. No matter; she was
“nothing but a plant,” or so he believes, to throw the great detective “off
the scent” of the real culprit.33
The vampire is indeed male, here disguised as a woman. He is tall and
slender, and his name is “Mr. Lee.” He purports to have been the best
swordsman in his class at Heidelberg; and, he also claims to be “French
Italian.”34 He affects different accents and is seen with both short and
long hair. He is a “creature of the lost soul who reigns in the realm of
darkness,” possessing the “eyes of a fend,” and is variously referred to
as a “devil” and a “demon.”35 He also has a “demoniac laugh.”
And he develops an abiding fascination for the “reserved” and
“lady-like” Helena Porrus. When the two frst meet on a boat, he briefy
tries to charm her before throwing his arms around her and applying a
sponge to her nose. After having drugged her, he plans to glut himself on
her blood, as he makes evident:
[The vampire] is not a fable; such things do exist as you will fnd to
your cost before this night is over; the old life-current ebbs freely
in the veins, and a new supply is needed—fresh, young blood. You
should live thirty—forty years yet, but you will die to-night, and the
years of your life will go to enrich another!36
But the two become separated. Efforts to save her converge with a storm
at sea:
The stranger, who had been hurled head fore-most into the water,
soon rose to the surface, and despite the fact that he was sadly en-
cumbered by the heavy cloak which he wore, struck out with lusty
strokes for the overturned boat. A vivid fash of lightning just at this
moment lit up the vast expanse of the water, and the girl, who had
risen to the surface about the same time, caught sight of her perpe-
trator, and, as she did not lose her presence of mind in this dread
extremity, Helena understood that he was trying to reach the boat,
but as she was totally ignorant of the swimmer’s art, she could not
hope to follow his example.
In her desperation she struck out wildly with her hands to keep
from sinking beneath the surface of the wave. She was in the rear of
the swimmer so that he did not perceive her.
… The lightning had died away and utter darkness reigned. 37
Following her prayer, Helena survives not only the treacherous waters,
but also a suspicious couple who try to “help” her.
In language that anticipates Stoker’s word “lizard” to describe Drac-
ula’s movements, the author compares Helena’s fear of the vampire to
an encounter with “slimy serpent” or “reptile.” And the two meet once
more. “Again you are in my power,” the vampire declares, “and this time
I fancy you will not escape until my purpose is accomplished.” He means
for Helena to become his wife, explaining:
It is necessary for certain purposes that we become man and wife.

There isn’t anything romantic about the affair. I am not at all in love
with you, and I don’t expect you to profess any affection for me, but
you must be my wife, and I haven’t any doubt that we will get along
just as well as the majority of married folks. 38
He is convinced that she will eventually submit, even if it requires him to

“enfeeble her mind” with drugs.
But that is not to be. Detective Brand and the vampire meet once
again, having weeks earlier fought a sword duel at the exact spot where
“Alexander Hamilton fell by the hand of Aaron Burr.” By this point, the
author has created intriguing parallels between hero and villain. Both
men rely on disguises and travel incognito. And the vampire has referred
to Brand, ironically, as “blood-thirsty” and as a “demon.” Once cap-
tured, Lee, the “vampire,” admits the truth, explaining to Brand:
My particular craze, when the ft came on, was to believe I was a

vampire, one of those fabulous creatures who live on human blood. I
slew my victims, and then I pricked them in the neck with the dagger
point, just as if the vampire’s teeth had bitten there. 39
His madness stems from the fact he returned from Europe to fnd his in-
heritance taken from him (due, he learns, to his being the adopted child
of a quadroon or one-quarter Black slave). Now a “penniless beggar”
of apparently tainted blood, the “blow” drives him mad. And so he was
sentenced to an asylum, treated there in the “most cruel manner,” he
explains. Once released, he “preyed upon [his] fellow men as mercilessly
as any wild beast.”40
Lee is nothing if not consistent. The so-called vampire’s madness has
surfaced in the story even prior to his admission that he is no supernat-
ural creature:
All I am afraid of is myself. I am half mad at times; I know it; I am

quite conscious when the spell comes on, and then I am a perfect
wild beast, hungry for blood and slaughter. But will not the time
come at last when the mind will give way and the madness become
permanent? That will be an interesting study. Many men are crazy,
more or less, but few of them are aware of it, and fewer still capable
of calmly waiting and watching its development.41
However insane he is at times, though, the “vampire” has prepared for

his own demise. He wears a ring of the Borgias, using it to inject poison
into himself. “I feel [the poison] sapping the life within my veins,” he
declares. Continuing, “No scaffold-beam, no hangman’s rope for me!
Brand, accursed man hunter, my blood is on your head—in death I defy
thee!” he utters before his death.42
Conclusion
“There was nothing supernatural in this. The body is often the plaything
of the mind.”—William Austin, “The Man with the Cloaks: A Vermont
Legend” (1836).43
Rationalizing the supernatural as human artifce, of which Austin
speaks above, helped to bridge the transition from the American Gothic
of the nineteenth century to American Realism. In doing so, it kept hor-
ror literature vibrant and varied through employing a myriad of genres,
characters, and settings, generally relying “not on the supernatural, but
instead on such subjects as pseudo-science, otherness, and—perhaps
most popular of all—murder.”44 Likewise, racial (and even to some ex-
tent “gendered”) otherness augmented the murder plot in The Vampire;
or, Detective Brand’s Greatest Case.
The popularity of dime novels continued right through the early
twentieth century, and while some would occasionally invoke the un-
explained supernatural, most relied upon the horror vérité of mur-
der, mystery, and human butchery. By World War I, the rational had
frmly supplanted the supernatural. With the advent of talkies, prefer-
ence for human monsters over the supernatural would come to domi-
nate the cinema as well. Even though supernatural fends like Dracula
and the Mummy helped jumpstart Classical Hollywood horror in the
1930s, the majority of genre productions in the 1930s and the 1940s
privileged the mad scientist, just as the 1970s and the 1980s would
herald the all-too-human murderer of the Slasher subgenre. In the
end, although no more Detective Brand novels would see publication,
the realism and plot devices of The Vampire; or, Detective Brand’s
Greatest Case anticipate several evolutionary milestones in horror
cinema, and that’s worth a supernatural monster or two any day.
Notes
1 Roxana Stuart, Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th-Century Stage (Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994).
2 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) appeared in serial form in The
Sunny South (Atlanta, GA), beginning in vol. 3, no. 134 (January 12, 1878):
1–2.
3 John E. Browning, Dracula—An Anthology: Critical Reviews and Reac-
tions, 1897–1920 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
4 See Simone Berni, Dracula by Bram Stoker: The Mystery of the Early Edi-
tions (Macerata: Biblohaus, 2016).
5 Untitled, The Village Record (West Chester, PA), September 18, 1819, np.
6 The adaptation seems to have been loose given the play’s three main char-
acters as Lord Ruthven, Aubrey, and Pedro, the latter being a character that
does not exist (at least by that name) in Polidori’s tale.
7 “On Vampires and Vampirism,” New Monthly Magazine and Universal
Register (London) 14 (1820): 548–552.
8 Untitled, Flake’s Bulletin, January 22, 1870, np.
9 The Vampire; or, Detective Brand’s Greatest Case is mentioned in Gary D.
Rhodes, “The First Vampire Films in America,” Palgrave Communications
3, article no. 51 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0043-y; Gary
D. Rhodes, The Birth of the American Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2018), 31; and Kevin Dodd, “‘Blood Suckers Most Cruel’:
The Vampire and the Bat in and before Dracula,” Athens Journal of Hu-
manities and Arts 6, no. 2 (2019): 107–132.
10 J. Randolph Cox, The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), xii–xiv.
11 Gary Hoppenstand, “Introduction: The Missing Detective,” in The Dime
Novel Detective, ed. Gary Hoppenstand (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green University Popular Press, 1982), 3.
12 Dodd, “‘Blood Suckers Most Cruel’,” 119.
13 Daniel A. Cohen, “Blood Will Out: Sensationalism, Horror, and the Roots
of American Crime Literature,” in Mortal Remains: Death in Early Amer-
ica, eds. Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 54.
14 Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 36, 69.
15 Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 73.
16 Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 82.
17 M. H. Menaugh, “Bookish Chats, No. IX–The Ghost in Fiction,” Colman’s
Rural World, January 16, 1913, 10.
18 Anon, The Vampire; or, Detective Brand’s Greatest Case (Old Cap Collier
Library Series) (New York: Norman L. Munro, Publisher) 2, no. 161 (Sep-
tember 15, 1885): 1.
19 Anon, The Vampire, 15.
22 Hoppenstand, “Introduction,” 4. Hoppenstand notes that the “Avenger
Detective” frst appeared in the early 1880s and continued into the 1920s.
Detective Brand does not exemplify four of the eight qualities that Hop-
penstand attributes to the archetype, perhaps because of his appearance so
early in its formation. For example, Brand does use “iconic weaponry (most
always a gun),” but he does not “combat crime with a dedicated group of
assistants,” he does not “maintain a sanctum sanctorum for his personal
use,” and he is not “strongly nationalistic.”
23 For further commentary, see, for example, D. N. Pearce, “Sherlock
Holmes, Conan Doyle and Cocaine,” Journal of the History of the Neu-
rosciences 3, no. 4 (1994): 227–232; or Kevin R. Loughlin, “It’s Ele-
mentary: The Addictions of Sherlock Holmes,” Hektoen International
Journal (Summer 2019), https://hekint.org/2019/09/05/its-elementary-
the-addictions-of-sherlock-holmes/.
31 Anon, The Vampire, 24
33 Anon, The Vampire, 28
34 Anon, The Vampire, 3–4, 41.
35 Anon, The Vampire, 7–8, 14.
43 William Austin, “The Man with the Cloaks: A Vermont Legend,” The
American Monthly Magazine 6, no. 5 (January 1836): 332.
44 Rhodes, The Birth of the American Horror Film, 21–22.
12 Queerly (Re)Vamped
Women, Men, and
Neo-Victorian Dracula(s)
Sarah E. Maier
Truly there is no such thing as finality. Not a week since I said “Fi-
nis,” and yet here I am starting fresh again, or rather going on with the
record.1
Count Dracula must feel he lacks finality, the final curtain to his im-
pressive performance in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). While he was
never the first vampire, he is certainly the one with whom we are most
intimately acquainted and it is he who we encounter from the nineteenth
through twentieth centuries. Dracula, in multiple transformations and
many media, is constantly being put on the record for our consideration
because he too is “up-to-date with a vengeance” with “powers of [his]
own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”2 New versions—transmedia
adaptations in particular—send us back to contemplate the Urtext, the
fin de siècle narrative named for Dracula to see what it has to say about
our own neo-Victorian desire to understand it.
The folkloric image of the vampire has undergone transforma-
tions over time; from nosferatu to Kindred, the Victorian revamping
of the vampire into a civilized gentleman continues to develop in the
t wenty-first adaptations. Historical, political, libidinal, and sensational
elements make neo-Victorian vampires particularly fascinating. These
monstrous individuals, here represented by Count Dracula, are uniquely
poised as the undead, to provide a consistent means of investigating the
f(r)iction between the past and/to the present context to see how the
Victorian—as another kind of revenant—seeks to articulate its impor-
tance to the postmodern present. The focus of this piece is the recon-
sideration of Stoker’s characters—particularly Mina, Lucy, and Sister
Agatha—in one neo-Victorian transmedia adaptation, the three-part
BBC Dracula (2020) written by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffatt, 3 and
how that particular adaptation encourages a rereading of the queerness
of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).
A consideration of the neo-Victorian series invites a look in the
rearview mirror4 at Stoker’s nineteenth-century source text. Any neo-
Victorian narrative necessarily considers what relevance the book has
DOI: 10.4324/9781003173083-13
184 Sarah E. Maier
to our current moment in history; in this case, the BBC Dracula fore-
grounds two central characters, and one marginal one, into an occult
history scholar faith-doubting nun, a female philanthropist, an oncology
visionary, and a club kid. The queerness of these individuals is created
not only by nonnormative sexualities but also their mastery of historical,
intellectual, and professional interests.
Neo-Women and Their Draculean Men

One important definition of the neo-Victorian project asserts that nos-
talgia can be lessened or perhaps avoided altogether with self-conscious
engagement. The “‘neo-Victorian’ is more than historical fiction set
in the nineteenth century” because it “must in some respect be self-
consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and
(re)vision concerning the Victorians” while keeping in mind the ethical,
metafictional and metacritical parameters in “acts of (readerly/writerly)
appropriation”5 in the metafictional mode.
Such revisionist texts must consider “the metahistoric and metacul-
tural ramifications of such historical engagement.”6 There is a “new
consciousness about the possibilities of re-visioning nineteenth-century
cultural Ur—texts” to begin “articulating perspectives that were textu-
ally marginalized and yet imaginatively central to the original text.”7
Foundational issues in the Urtext of Stoker’s Dracula reappear in written
narratives such as Elizabeth Kostova’s revision The Historian (2005)8 or
in neo-Victorian novels like Dacre Stoker’s prequel Dracula: The Un-
Dead (2009; with Ian Holt)9 as well as in the biofiction of Stoker, Dracul
(2018; with J. D. Barker).10 Vampires abound in pop culture but trans-
media adaptations like Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s series and Cole
Haddon and Daniel Knauff’s single season NBC series Dracula (2013)
explore the significant gaps of Stoker’s novel or extend the narrative to
include the subtexts to Dracula’s story, including potentialities for recon-
structed characters, alternative sexualities, technological advances, and
vampiric adaptation.
The current interest in the omnipresence of the gothic mode may read
as a result of postmodern anxiety, general instability, or cultural decline,
but, as pointed out by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, it has
“permanently emerged from the crepuscular cultural unconscious into
the brightly lit mainstream,”11 even seeing them invited into homes with
a plethora of Vampire diaries, Kindred covens, nosferatu slayers, Grimm
realities, and Draculean undead, a trend that began at the end of the
twentieth century and has continued in the new millennium. Neo-Gothic
and neo-Victorian adaptations are haunted by a “cyclical revenance”
which “continues to remain—unburiable”12 to be spectral, disruptive,
transgressive, even cannibalistic. Jennifer E. Dunn rightly claims that “re-
writing is never as straightforward as one text countering and disrupting
Queerly (Re)Vamped 185
a predecessor: disruption goes both ways”13 and “rewriting is, like the
Gothic, always a double gesture.”14 Tammy Lai-Ming Ho takes the posi-
tion that neo-Victorian narratives often cannibalize earlier, original and
derivative, versions of each other,15 while Rosario Arias reminds us there
is haunting and spectrality throughout neo-Victorian fiction.16
To revisit the silences of the past, the gothic can “open horizons be-
yond social patterns, rational decisions, and institutionally approved
emotions” in a liberation of feeling.17 The gothic enacts “a double ges-
ture” in modern rewrites, and I would argue transmedia adaptations,
“since they return to these moments in the literary past both repeating
and transforming them,” sometimes “bringing the Gothic uncomfort-
ably close to home.”18 To do so, these narratives—like the BBC version
of Dracula considered here—propose connections between the past and
the present, even leaving any sense of resolution to the future rather
than the confirmed containment of Stoker’s novel. This is not to say that
Gatiss and Moffatt’s series is intended to be haunting; rather, it suggests
that “the bygone is never bygone and that the whole point of postmod-
ernist art is to problematize the pastness of the past and the deadness
of the dead.”19 The BBC Dracula creates a fascinating tension between
past and present understandings of Stoker’s text and its potential to be
read queerly for what may motivate the nonnormative female characters
and, of course, the Count.
The Urtext, Dracula, is “deeply conflicted and confused when it comes
to gender.”20 The new transmedia adaptations seek to move beyond
Stoker’s suggestiveness of gender emancipation to translate effectively
sexuality and gender roles, even fluidity and queerness, for a new cen-
tury with no nostalgia for such a restrictive past. Like the neo-Victorian
impulse to investigate the silenced voices, repressive politics, and strictly
gendered perspectives of the Victorian age, a transgression takes place
not the nostalgia one might have expected. The narrative is “decisively
active, as it transforms the past, turning it upside down, [to] foreground
its background, corrupting its order” and a “double performativity”21 to
create a conversation between the past narratives and the present repre-
sentation of them. The transmedia adaptation, in a dialogic relationship
with the novel, retains its originality while extending some of its ideas
and rebutting others. Neil Gaiman admires how the original:
Dracula is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of sci-

ence, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders,
blood transfusions, shorthand, and trepanning. It features a cast of
stout heroes and beautiful, doomed women. And it is told entirely
in letters, telegrams, press cuttings, and the like. None of the people
who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is actually
going on. This means that Dracula is a book that forces the reader to
fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. 22
186 Sarah E. Maier
Gatiss and Moffatt’s work in the screenplay seeks to do just that—reread
the original novel through to its potential endgame with Dracula moving
through time. By his very nature, he has never been confined to Victo-
ria’s age but moving back and beyond that touchstone. The series re-
vivifies the legend of Dracula to follow a narrative from not only the
vampire’s perspective but through Sister Agnes and her descendants.
Any new version, argues Nick Groom, will “swiftly become more so-
phisticated, more cultured and more refined” as well as “immeasurably
more monstrous,”23 but such a statement begs the question as to how
those persons, particularly women, will appear in the present.
Adapting Wom/Men’s Pursuits

The BBC series follows the Count from Transylvania in 1897; he is
suave, debonair, and the embodiment of both Stoker’s Count and takes
cues from film adaptations of the past. 24 Aristocratic manners provide
a mask of civility barely restraining the ferocity so close to the surface
of Gatiss and Moffat’s version of the character. It is Dracula’s fascina-
tion with a Catholic nun which is the focal point of its overall narrative
arc. Sister Agatha, who writes a letter to Mina, who then describes her
in an intimate letter to Lucy in the novel, becomes an active, highly
involved character, not only as a nun at the convent where Jonathan
Harker ends up with his “brain fever” but as the person seeking to
verify the handwritten documentation of his time in Castle Dracula;
too much has been left out—he writes only and she wants to identify
the “contagion” that afflicts him to the point where he will “lose the
divine ability to die.”25
Harker, in this narrative, has become nosferatu. Sister Agatha leaves
her sequestration—not in prayer but in study—to conduct an investiga-
tion; she directly asks Harker if he “had sexual intercourse with Count
Dracula.”26 The scene is strongly suggestive that he did with a visual im-
age of Harker’s sexual fantasy of Mina that ends with him seeing Drac-
ula rise above his lower body dripping blood. 27 There is an argument to
be made that in terms of physical sexual interest and companionship,
Dracula has always had a homoerotic, if not homosexual, obsession
with Harker, not the women; intellectually, he is fascinated by women
who, too, outpace their time and context like Mina and Agnes.
The real interest of the series is Sister Agatha. A nun not by calling but
by choice, the viewer learns she is a nun only because it allowed her to
avoid a loveless, heteronormative marriage. She has a quick wit demon-
strated in her retort to Harker’s “This is a house of God,” to which she
responds, “we could do with a man about the place,”28 displacing God
from his house while placing man as only “of use,” a position usually
occupied by a Victorian woman. Harker is surprised by her candor; he
continues, “the way you talk is unusual for one of your calling,” which
she denies, contending “my calling was a very long time ago”29 because
faith is a “sleeping draught for children and simpletons.”30
Sister Agatha has an overt interest—as scholar historian—and is
“known to have some expertise in the realm of witchcraft and the oc-
cult,” but when challenged that it is inappropriate for a nun, she retorts,
“We can discuss my imperfectly suppressed fascination with everything
dark and evil another time.”31 Her transgressive knowledge outside of
the Church teaching is what leads her to set a trap for the vampire that
invokes the “Rules of the Beast” even while she doubts their efficacy.
Agatha is aware that:
None of the vampire legends make sense, and yet somehow they are
proving to be true. He can’t enter a home without being invited. Why
not? The light of the day would burn him to death. Why? He’s ter-
rified of the cross, and yet he’s no believer. Somehow, these facts are
all the same fact. There’s one thing that Dracula fears above all.32
Dracula’s dislike of the cross is too transgressive to the legend and proves
there is more than one explanation for it. He does not explain in terms
of a fear of God or the Church; rather, he explains:
Of course I do. Everyone does, that’s the problem. It’s not a symbol
of virtue and kindness, it’s a mark of horror and oppression. Your
idiot Church has terrorised the peasant population for centuries,
and I have been imbibing the blood of those same peasants for so
long I have absorbed their fear of the cross. My God … I cannot wait
to eat some atheists.33
Both Agatha and Dracula exist within a society that conforms to faith,
yet they both challenge religious dogma and the Church’s authority over
the individual. Like the original gothic and the neo-gothic reincarna-
tions of the twenty-first century, the anti-Catholicism of the modern
series matches Stoker’s narrative. When Dracula arrives, Sister Agatha
mocks him while he writhes in animalistic rage at the gate. Fearless,
Sister Agatha approaches the transmogrified Count (wolf to man), slices
open her hand with a dagger to drop blood on the ground for him. She
learns that for this iteration of Dracula, “blood is lives”—in fact, when
he feeds, he learns all of the history of the person upon whom he has fed.
At this point, it is revealed that she is Sister Agatha Van Helsing, Dracu-
la’s “every nightmare all at once—an educated woman in a crucifix.”34
The weakness here is not the women; the sexually transgressed Har-
ker is full of shame, mixed in his horror at and desire for the Count; to
that end, it is Harker who invites him in to the convent. The Count is
left to feed on Harker and on the virginal women of the convent, except
for Sister Agatha and Mina who hide behind a line of sacramental bread.
188 Sarah E. Maier
When Mina questions its effectiveness, the Sister admits her doubt as to
its power, challenging God’s power by casting it in the same breath as a
legend35 with a string of questioning. Ultimately, Dracula comes to them
masked in Harker’s skin; once they out him for his misuse of the young
man, a deal is struck between the Sister and the Count: her blood/life for
Mina’s freedom. An ultimatum is issued to Dracula; he must take Mina
“or take [Agatha’s blood] and learn something,” and in this protection
of the child-like Mina, she entices him with “come boy, suckle”36 in an
astonishing act of courageous matriarchy.
The second episode begins in an incongruously self-referential man-
ner, with the hunter reading a book admitting that he “can’t bear a bad
book”37 that breaks the contract with the reader, leaving Agatha to ask,
“why are we always talking about stories?”38 This metatextual mus-
ing by fictional characters outside of their novel discussing the contract
between book/author and reader is confronted with the neo-Victorian
project and whether the contract between author and reader is broken if
there is self-referentiality to previous fictionality. The intellectualism of
the series is paralleled in the game the two characters play: chess, where
a knight is menacing a queen. The easy but competitive rapport between
the two infers this game is ongoing but also that Dracula now sees Ag-
atha (without her wimple) as an equal. Agatha comes to realize that she
too has been created nosferatu, suggesting that Dracula desires Agatha
as a companion who understands him, not just as a victim.
The adaptation shifts to his passage on a ship, the Demeter, and to
many new characters who are not in the original novel; Mina, Lucy,
Harker, Quincy Morris, and Sir Arthur Holmwood are absent. This ep-
isode fills in the time at sea left ambiguous in the novel, only described
as a Russian schooner “knocking about in the queerest way. She doesn’t
know her mind a bit” as she tries to survive one of the “greatest and sud-
denest storms on record.”39 The narrative tells us that after the storm, the
coastguard boards the ship to find a man “simply fastened by his hands,
tied one over the other, to a spoke of the wheel. Between the inner hand
and the wood was a crucifix, the set of beads on which it was fastened
being around both writes and wheel, and all kept fast by the binding
cords” which “had cut the flesh to the bone.”40 The captain’s log and its
addendum in a bottle attest to the thick fog as well as strange behavior
by the first mate, “wild-eyed and haggard,” who says, “It is here. I know
it now. On the watch last night I saw It, like a man, tall and thin, and
ghastly pale,”41 who, believing the sea will save him, commits suicide
as he threw himself into it. Gatiss and Moffat invite the viewer to share
their possible interpolation of what might have been. Amongst the rich
passengers, we see the ease of seductiveness of the aristocratic manner
of the Count and the affects he has on an elderly, wistful Grand Duchess
Valeria with whom he had danced on her 18th birthday42; a young wife
in white named Lady Ruthven; Dorabella, who is married to the effete,
gay, vampire-intrigued Lord Ruthven43 whose African-French skepti-
cal lover, Adisa, travels with them in jealous proximity.44 They create
a queer throuple outside of heteronormative masculinity. Even though
Ruthven had hoped he would be chosen as Dracula’s sexual partner, he
and his family are ripped apart by the vampire. Unlike Dorabella in her
patriarchally imposed naīveté, there is one female who outsmarts him:
Dr. Sharma’s deaf, mute young daughter, Yamini, who takes her own life
with an overdose of “a last resort” poison rather than be taken.45
There is one more passenger on the ship: Sister Agatha. Isolated in
room nine, said to be unwell with an unknown condition, Agatha leaves
her bed to once again invoke reason, not religion, to fight for the people
who remain; she relieves Captain Sokolov of his duty and tells others
the evil that is at work. When confronted with the belief that all she
advocates as protection is superstition and fairy tale—considered to be
traditional realms of women and, for the unfaithful, the narrative of the
Catholic Church—the crew turn upon her to hang her as the source of
death. Dracula seeks to tempt her to “step outside the circle [of Bible
pages] and dance with me”46 in a kind of danse macabre. They toss
his boxes of Transylvanian earth overboard, then immolate the vam-
pire. Encouraging the three remaining crew to take the lifeboat, Agatha
with the Captain’s assistance sinks the ship in a queered heroic gesture,
ungendered in mutual sacrifice—it is not only the Captain who will go
down with the ship. The men express distress over her strength of pur-
pose but know that “God will take care of sister Agatha if God knows
what is good for him.”47
Dracula escapes only to awaken 123 years later to walk out of the
sea at Whitby where he finds electrical spotlights, helicopters, cars, and
advanced weaponry trained on him. He laughs, delighted to “see you [hu-
mans] are accelerating” in inventiveness48; however, he is shocked when
confronted by a twenty-first century not Agatha but her great-great-
paternal niece, Dr. Zoë Helsing.49 He addresses her with seductive recog-
nition, “Not her are you, but it’s the same blood line. Unmistakable,”50
which she later formally clarifies, “I’m a scientist. […] I’m not Sister Ag-
atha. I’m Dr. Helsing, and I’m the woman in charge of this foundation.”51
The continuity in the narrative is not only provided by Dracula’s
presence but by Sister Agatha’s sense of scientific inquiry and her de-
sire for women’s rights, 52 which have travelled forward in time to her
female descendent. Zoë Helsing, who is both doctor and patient, is a
woman who seeks to use the undead’s blood to cure the sick and uses
herself as a test subject. Zoë follows her predecessor’s reliance on ac-
quired knowledge—in this case, science—to understand how dis/ease
continues through time in the form of the vampiric, be it Dracula or
cancer. In a dream sequence, when Dracula feeds upon her but vomits
because her blood is diseased, Dracula recognizes that she holds herself
apart due to a “shadow” on her heart. 53 Were he to continue to feed on
190 Sarah E. Maier
her, his finest “vintage,” he knows he will die. The neo-Victorian revi-
sion makes clear that, following Stoker, harm comes to humans, be it
vampire contagion or human cancer, through the blood. While “blood
is lives,” it is also death.
Zoë’s confrontation with Dracula is final. She hypothesizes that his
motivation is fear; Dracula is afraid to die. It takes courage to die, cour-
age she has but he does not. Zoë Van Helsing proposes to keep Drac-
ula in captivity for scientific study at the Harker Institute54 established
by the never-married Mina Murray who inherited her father’s money
to become a prominent philanthropist. Mina established the Institute
with the help of Sister Agatha’s family55 in an act of female cooperation
funded by patriarchal money and she has mercenaries on the payroll.
When he threatens her, Zoë reminds him, “I can break you with a sun-
beam.”56 Zoë drinks a laboratory sample of the Count’s blood and mo-
mentarily in a vision she sees Agatha at her moment of sacrifice; Agatha’s
knowledge passes to Zoë and she understands that “Only in blood do
we find the truth.”57
Dracula, here, is much more intellectual than horrific beast; refined
rather than horrific, he seeks enlightenment and knowledge. He tells
Zoë:
In the matter of blood, I’m a connoisseur. Blood is lives. Blood is

testimony. The testimony of everyone I have ever destroyed flows in
my veins. I will choose with care who joins them now. Ripeness is
the first moment of decay. Sweetness is the promise of corruption.
I shall look for the perfect food of this world. And I will find it.58
Zoë studies the vampire; ultimately, she knows her cancer is the means
of deliverance which metastasizes into death for the hunted and the
hunter. A scientific, conscientious woman is the downfall of the blood-
thirsty warlord.
(Neo)Victorian Return to Stoker

Dracula is in the modern century of the third episode undone by the
neo-Victorian present’s unwillingness to accept the silence of the Victo-
rian vampire’s victims without fighting back; indeed, Agatha/Zoë em-
body the challenge on behalf of the preyed-upon women who fell before
Stoker’s misogynist vampire. While none of the new adaptation are pre-
cisely Stoker’s women, not even his Dracula, perhaps the motifs of the
Victorian and neo-Victorian vampire(s) will continue on because “in the
twenty-first century any encounter with vampire literature or vampire
tales is like hearing a million variations on a musical theme.”59 But it is
the original text against which the adaptation is measured, not for faith-
fulness or accuracy but for a means to reapproach the Urtext. In this
case, the new innovations beg a return to Stoker’s novel to reconsider if
the possibilities were always there.
The end of the third episode leads us back to the beginning, back to
the past and to rethinking the novel. In their final moments, Agatha
evaluates the man “who cannot bear to look in a mirror”:
ZOË: “Dracula who won’t stand revealed in the sunlight, who cannot en-
ter a home without invitation. These aren’t curses. They are merely
habits that become fetishes that become legends that even you be-
lieve. The rules of the beast as we discussed so very long ago. But
why? What are you afraid of? You are a warrior from a long line of
warriors. Your grandfather died in battle. Your father, your broth-
ers, your sons, their sons. All of them fell as heroes on the battlefield.
But not you. Not Count Dracula, the warlord who skulks in the
shadows and steals the lives of others. Unwelcome everywhere. Who
sleeps in a box of dirt yet dreams of a warrior’s grave. […] The cour-
age it takes to die. I call you ashamed. Count Dracula is ashamed.
I don’t need this anymore. I’m dying. I am doing the one thing that
you can never do, Dracula.”
DRACULA: “You’re in pain.”
ZOË: “I am equal to it. You seek to conquer death, but you cannot, until
you face it without fear. Goodbye, Count Dracula. Shuffle back to
your box of dirt. The game is over. You lose. You will live forever…
in shame.”60
After this confrontation, they both move toward mortality and human-
ity. Zoë’s knowledge allows Dracula to step into the sunlight, shadowed
by the cross he has avoided; he says, “look at her Agatha. She is beauti-
ful,”61 leaving the viewer unsure whether he speaks of the sun, a female
God, or Agatha—he has gone back to the woman he loves in his mind.
In a dream vision given to her by the Count, she sees herself in his arms;
Dracula is content to die so he can protect her from pain, saying “After
all this time, did you think I would let it hurt?”62
Asked to feel a certain degree of compassion for the adaptive vampire,
the viewer might wonder if there is a reason to reconsider Stoker’s other
men. Clearly, with a new character, Gatiss and Moffatt refer to Lord
Ruthven from Dr. John Polidori’s nineteenth-century text The Vampyre:
A Tale (1819), but more interesting is returning to the character of Pro-
fessor Abraham Van Helsing. In the novel, as philosopher, metaphysi-
cian, and “one of the most advanced scientists of his day,” he “knows
as much about obscure diseases as anyone in the world.”63 Dr. Seward
describes Van Helsing with “iron nerve, a temper of the ice-brook, an
indomitable resolution, self-command, and toleration exalted from vir-
tues to blessings, and the kindliest and truest heart that beats” while he
pursues his “work.”64 Sister Agatha writes with news of Harker’s illness;
192 Sarah E. Maier
Mina describes Agatha, from the letter and once she meets her, to Lucy
as “a good creature and a born nurse” with a “good, sweet soul”65 who
tries to reassure Mina that Harker’s illness has nothing to do with his
love for her. From the contents of Sister Agatha’s letter, it is clear she
understands more of Harker’s condition, with ravings of wolves and
blood, warning her “the traces of such an illness as his do not lightly die
away,”66 suggesting Sister Agatha has more occult knowledge than one
would expect from a nun.
The composite of these two characters—the compassion and occult
knowledge of Sister Agatha, combined with the nerve and steadfastness
of Van Helsing—are combined into one. The modern series transforms
Van Helsing into feminine, compassionate, scientific rationality—two
women—a gender switch that prompts a reader/viewer to question why
Gatiss and Moffatt thought it would be a productive and/or progressive
change. Not merely a “we’ve come a long way baby” moment, it is more
substantially a recognition that for a cure to be found for Lucy, only
two men—Dr. Seward and Professor Van Helsing—were available in
the nineteenth century because systems of science historically excluded
women, a misjudgment rectified for the twenty-first century when Sister
Agatha/Dr. Zoë Van Helsing become their own savior.
Other characters appear; there is an additional storyline featuring the
lovelorn Dr. Jack Seward, a junior doctor who wants to specialize in
mental health; Quincey, a rich American, wannabe James Dean; and
Lucy W., a sexually liberated, self-obsessed British club kid. Lucy—the
raison d’être in some ways of the original novel—in this version is also
erotically fascinated with the seductiveness of the Count; however, in
the modern narrative, separated by centuries, Lucy W. does not coexist
with Mina. This lack of understanding of the centrality of the romantic
friendship of the two women is the biggest flaw in the adaptation. The
relationship between Mina and Lucy is at the core of Stoker’s novel, a
point easily understood if one carefully reads the source text; why in
an age of sexual fluidity where the relationship might be explored it is
removed is unknown.
Mina’s liminality in the new adaptation is surprising; it is her New
Woman character in Stoker’s Dracula who advocates for women to be
more than fodder for a vampire or a man. In the original narrative,
Miss Mina Murray is the progressive girl of the future who is equal to
Henrik Ibsen’s questioning heroines and the ambitious, socially progres-
sive young female characters of New Women writers like Ella D’Arcy or
“George Egerton.” The young woman’s typewriting skills allow for her
diary’s contemporaneous records and constructs the events of the adven-
ture and her thoughts on how “shocked the ‘New Woman’” would be
with her “appetites.”67 Mina muses upon how in the future, “those same
New Women will some day start an idea that men and women should
be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But
I suppose the ‘New Woman’ won’t condescend in future to accept; she
will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too!”68
Transgressive to a point in her independence, Mina is disciplined for
articulating her unconventional desires in a “punitive patriarchy con-
taining the wayward desire of middle-class women.”69
Lucy is seemingly both Mina’s conventional friend but also her binary
opposite. Mina is a quiet assistant schoolmistress without aristocratic
means who must earn a living. She hones her skills at shorthand, stenog-
raphy, and typewriting in the manner of “lady journalists […] interview-
ing and writing descriptions and trying to remember conversations.”70
The aristocratically rich Lucy, absolutely uninterested in supporting
herself, spends her time pitting suitor against suitor to the point where
the aristocrat Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming), the American
Quincy Morris, and the Alienist Dr. John Seward all vie for her hand
in marriage. They act as perfect gentlemen, acting only out of altruistic
desire to see Lucy well. The twenty-first-century Dracula points to the
falsity of such a well-crafted pose:
AGATHA: “Ah, the beast revealed, ravenous for blood and stinking of
grave dirt. The sophisticated gentleman nothing more than a veneer.”
DRACULA: “The sophistication of a gentleman, Agatha, is always a
veneer.”71
The posse of men’s flirtatiousness with Lucy results in three proposals

in one day.
Given the BBC Dracula’s comment of the veneer of the gentleman—of
which he is the paradigmatic image—the neo-Victorian reader realizes
that Lucy too acts from behind a mask of assumed Victorian female
virtue and innocence, a mask she drops when ill and in private. Her
desire for all three men, for different reasons, is obvious. While clear
in her choice of Holmwood for his manner and title, Lucy laments,
“Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her,
and save all this trouble? But this is heresy, and I must not say it.”72
Lucy W. calls out what she refers to as “slut shaming,”73 referring to her
homosexual friend as “Queen Victoria,”74 both an ironic reference to
nineteenth-century anti-female sentiment as well as to the Queen who
reigned during the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) and The Contagious
Diseases Acts (in the 1860s), all of which wielded misogynist power over
women’s sexuality, and to her friend as a “Queen,” a derogatory modern
term for homosexual men.
The new adaptation leaves out the focal point of the original novel: the
friendship between Mina and Lucy. The two women have a very strong
bond; Lucy describes her understanding of their friendship to Mina as
one wherein “we have told all our secrets to each other since we were
children; we have slept together and eaten together, and laughed and
194 Sarah E. Maier
cried together; and now, though I have spoken, I would like to speak
more. Oh, Mina, couldn’t you guess?” with the admonishment, “I need
not tell you this is a secret.”75 When somnambulism or the call of the
vampire takes Lucy outside in the night, it is Mina who finds her. Mina
sees Lucy’s “lips were parted, and she was breathing […] As I came close,
she put up her hand in her sleep and pulled the collar of her nightdress
close around her throat, whilst she did so there came a little shudder
through her,” as Mina worries that she had accidentally pricked her with
a safety pin.76 The queerness of this scene is further complicated when
we consider that Mina has previously watched Lucy “asleep and breath-
ing softly. She has more colour in her cheeks than usual, and looks, oh,
so sweet.”77
In a private letter to Lucy, although she does not open it, Mina ex-
presses her feelings openly with “so, as you love me, and he loves me,
and I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb, I send you
simply his ‘love’ instead.”78 A lifelong physical and emotional closeness
exemplifies the intensity of their bond which may or may not be a lesbian
one. The erotic language Mina uses to describe the physical arousal of
Lucy is also suggestive of desire. That said, it is not clear that Stoker
intended to queer the text, at least not for the women; rather, the subtext
of the romantic friendship supports Mina’s choice of Harker, for he too
understands her. In some ways, it is due to her unconventional desires
that the “punitive patriarchy” seeks to contain such “wayward desire of
middle-class women” that Mina loses Lucy to Dracula.79
From this point on, Lucy seems to degenerate into what is perceived as
pathological female behavior by the Victorian establishment. According
to Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero:
Nymphomania transforms the most timid girl into a shameless bac-

chante. She tried to attract every man she sees, displaying some-
times violence, and sometimes the most refined coquetry. She often
suffers from intense thirst, a dry mouth, a fetid breath, and a ten-
dency to bite everybody she meets […] and feels as if she were being
strangled.80
To settle her—to bring Lucy back into conventional womanhood—she is

infused with the blood of four men alongside “morphia” given “swiftly
and deftly” so Van Helsing might “carry out his intent” of corrective
recuperation which includes reminding her that she “must obey, and si-
lence is part of obedience; and obedience is to bring you strong and
well into loving arms that wait for you”81 in the person of Holmwood.
Complacent for a time, Lucy’s seductiveness threatens to overwhelm him
when, alongside the “angelic beauty of her eyes,” she begs him in “a
soft, voluptuous voice”82 to kiss her as she dies, making “a very beau-
tiful corpse”83 in a chapelle ardent until Van Helsing and Holmwood
must give her true death by decapitation and a stake through the heart,
reminding us she is undead, a “bloofer lady”84 not a femme fatale who
endangers the men’s virtue.
Van Helsing is aware of the irony here when he laughs at the thought
of Lucy being exclusively Holmwood’s bride, given if all that is required
is blood, then “this so sweet maid is a polyandrist.”85 Both Mina and
Lucy, with a bare mention of Sister Agatha, are the backdrop in many
ways to the homoeroticism of the text and the band of brothers who
ultimately take on Dracula to protect Victorian virtuous womanhood.
Tying the potentialities for queerness to the new adaptation revises the
way the viewer/reader may come to interpret the female characters and
the men who stand beside them in Stoker’s Dracula.
The Re(ar)view Mirror

Original reviews of Stoker’s novel provide the map for what follows here;
in the first instance, the book critic for the Hampshire Advertiser finds:
two things which are remarkable I the novel—the first is the con-
fident reliance on superstition as furnishing the groundwork of a
modern story; and the second, more significant still, is the bold ad-
aptation of the legend to such ordinary spheres of latter-day exis-
tence [sic].86
The Athenaeum seeks to place Dracula as:
Stories and novels appear just now in plenty stamped with a more
or less genuine air of belief in the visibility of supernatural agency.
The strengthening of a bygone faith in the fantastic and magical
view of things in lieu of the purely material is a feature of the hour, a
reaction—artificial, perhaps, rather than natural—against late ten-
dencies in thought.87
Juxtaposed against the lauding of Stoker’s informed use of folklore is

his overreaching into the present day—nineteenth century that is—for
his setting; the more interesting question is the absence of commentary
on the female characters, except as a kind of titillation of “the most
charming young women, having been infected with the vampire poison
in life, take to flitting about and gorging themselves upon the blood of
children at Hampstead Heath”88 and of “three beautiful females who
have the misfortune to be vampires” with “intentions, which can hardly
be described as honourable, are to suck his blood, in order to sustain
their own vitality.”89
For Gatiss and Moffatt, the women are the thread holding the nar-
rative together so that the viewer might come to understand the Count,
196 Sarah E. Maier
the man they said would be a hero. Few direct references are made in
the original reviews, whether read as conventional or queer, to Miss
Mina Murray or Miss Lucy Westenra. There is, however, in several con-
temporary reviews, mention of how Stoker describes the highly sexual-
ized “Thing in the coffin [as it] writhed, and a hideous blood curdling
screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook, and quivered,
and twisted in wild contortions.”90 Such a choice to change woman to
a sexually ambiguous thing is clearly intended to capture the reader’s
base, instinctual attention if the critical analysis did not. Perhaps “the
grisly details of two beautiful and virtuous women having the veins in
their throats sucked by the gleaming white teeth” or more horrible still,
the scene when Jonathan Harker’s “brave wife is actually forced by the
Vampire to quaff his own nauseating blood”91 will entice a person to
read the novel even as it seeks to warn them off.
If not, then to entice a rereading after watching the series. In a recent
interview, Mark Gatiss promises both himself and Steven Moffatt “have
love and respect for the novel” but that the series is intended to be “ex-
tremely faithful and entirely faithless all at the same time” as they expand
the novel to make, they hope, “Dracula the hero of his own story.”92
Markman Ellis makes this point that such fictions “indulge a kind of cre-
ative anachronism, proposing untoward, perverse connections between
the deep past and contemporary life and politics.”93 At the very least, the
series encourages a chance to reconsider the novel’s women and to ap-
proach what was in its day a socially transformative use of the vampire.
Notes
1 Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (Peterborough: Broadview Press,
1997), 227.
3 Dracula, directed by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffatt (2020–; BBC One and
Netflix).
4 Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens: Ohio Univer-
sity Press, 2007).
5 Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in
the Twenty First Century, 1999–2009 (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 4; em-
phasis in original.
6 Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, 6.
7 Heilmann and Llewellyn, “On the Neo-Victorian, Now and Then,”
498–499.
8 Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian (New York: Little, Brown and Company,
2005).
9 Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt, Dracula the Un-Dead (London: HarperCollins,
2009).
10 Dacre Stoker and Jonathan D. Barker, Dracul (New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 2018).
11 Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, “The (Mis)Shapes of
Neo-Victorian Gothic: Continuations, Adaptations, Transformations,” in
Neo-Victorian Gothic, eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 1.
12 Julian Wolfreys, “Preface: ‘I Could a Tale Unfold’ or, The Promise of
Gothic,” in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the
Nineteenth Century, eds. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2000), xv.
13 Jennifer E. Dunn, “Gothic’s Double Gesture: Nostalgia, Perversion, and
Repetition in Gothic Rewritings,” in Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Re-
writing from the Eighteenth Century Until the Present Day, ed. Isabella van
Elferen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15.
14 Dunn, “Gothic’s Double Gesture,” 23.
15 Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Neo-Victorian Cannibalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2019), 2.
16 Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-
Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), xi.
17 Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (Abing-
don: Routledge, 1986), 3.
18 Dunn, “Gothic’s Double Gesture,” 12, 14.
19 Kohlke and Gutleben, “The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic,” 38. Of
course, Gatiss and Moffatt are the creators of the updated Sherlock series for
the BBC (2010–2017), which also has neo-Victorian implications.
20 Carol Senf, “Dracula and Women,” in Cambridge Companion to Dracula,
ed. Roger Luckhurst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 115.
21 Isabella van Elferen, Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the
Eighteenth Century Until the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars
Press, 2007), 5.
22 Neil Gaiman, “Introduction,” in The New Annotated Dracula, ed. Leslie S.
Klinger (New York: W. W. W. Norton, 2008), xvi.
23 Nick Groom, “Dracula’s Pre-History: The Advent of the Vampire,” in Cam-
bridge Companion to Dracula, ed. Robert Luckhurst (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2018), 24. The idea that one could spot a criminally
insane person or a person with monstrous intent, aside from being flush with
racial profiling, fell apart with the factual reality that “Jack the Ripper”
evaded the police. Stoker was incensed enough that his sole comment about
the police in his novel is when they rescue two children from the vampiric
Lucy (Stoker, Dracula, 237), although Dacre Stoker claims that his ancestry
had planned to include a “Detective Cotford” who would have caught the
killer (“Bram Stoker removed the Met Police from Dracula after failing to
catch Jack the Ripper,” in The Daily Mail [July 12, 2015], https://www.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3158633/Bram-Stoker-sacked-Met-Dracula-
failings-trying-catch-Jack-Ripper.html).
24 There are several traditional features to the Count; formal attire, black hair,
sharp fangs, long nails but also updates, perhaps referencing Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1992) directed by Francis Ford Coppola, like the steampunk sun-
glasses that he wears but he is not pushed so far as to be allowed into the
sunlight. The film references also include Nosferatu (1922), Legosi’s Dracula
(1931), Christopher Lee’s Dracula (1958), and Coppola’s film.
25 Dracula, BBC, 1.33:50; All timestamps will refer to the beginning of the
quotation; in addition, they read (episode.hour: minute:seconds) as required.
26 Dracula, BBC, 1.4:22.
198 Sarah E. Maier
32 Dracula, BBC, 1:24:41.
33 Dracula, BBC, 2.1:21:36.
34 Dracula, BBC, 1.1:15:41.
39 Stoker, Dracula, 208, 109.
41 Stoker, Dracula, 118–119.
4 4 Clearly, Gatiss and Moffatt are slyly referencing that some literary historians
argue that Ruthven is based on the non-heteronormative, bisexual George
Gordon, Lord Byron.
52 Dracula, BBC, 3:32:00.
59 Gaiman, “Introduction,” xvi.
60 Dracula, BBC, 3.1:24:34.
61 Dracula, BBC, 3.1:28:15.
62 Dracula, BBC, 3.1:29:14.
69 Senf, “Dracula and Women,” 115.
71 Dracula, BBC, 2.42.57.
72 Stoker, Dracula, 91
79 Senf, “Dracula and Women,” 115.
80 Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, The Female Offender (London:
Fisher Unwin Ltd, 1895), 295.
86 “Hampshire Advertiser, June 5, 1897,” The Bela Lugosi Blog. https://beladra
culalugosi.wordpress.com/contemporary-reviews-of-bram-stokers-dracula/
87 “Athenaeum, June 26, 1897,” The Bela Lugosi Blog. https://beladraculalugosi.
wordpress.com/contemporary-reviews-of-bram-stokers-dracula/
88 “Books of the Day, Country Life, June 19, 1897,” The Bela Lugosi Blog.
https://beladraculalugosi.wordpress.com/contemporary-reviews-of-bram-
stokers-dracula/
89 “Recent Novels, The Times, August 23, 1897,” The Bela Lugosi Blog.
https:// beladraculalugosi.wordpress.com /contemporary-reviews-of-
bram-stokers-dracula/
91 “Dracula, The Stage, June 17, 1897,” The Bela Lugosi Blog. https://
beladraculalugosi.wordpress.com /contemporar y-reviews- of-bram-
stokers-dracula/
92 Dracula, BBC, 00:17.
93 Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-
Index
Note: Italic page numbers refer to fgures.
Abrahams, Roger 14, 15 Bartlett, C.J. 127

addiction and vampirism 7, 81, Báthory de Ecsed, Countess Elizabeth
82–92, 93n15 96, 100
“Adventure of the Man with the Battle of Corfu, the 131
Twisted Lip, The” (story) 85 Beadle, Erastus 172
advice manuals for women 37 Beadle’s Dime Novels (booklets) 172
African oral tradition and vampirism Beal, Timothy 5
14–15 Beamish, Richard 113
African women and bloodlust 12–13, Beard, George 27–8
14 Beattie, Hilary 117
After Africa: Extracts from British Beaujot, Ariel 114
Travel Accounts and Journals “Beautiful Vampire, The” (short story)
(book) 14 6, 28–9, 34–6, 40–1
alcoholism in Victorian literature 85 Being Human (TV drama) 134–5
Amarawat, Vikram S. 48, 49, 52–3, Bell, Sir Hesketh 12
55, 59–60 Bérard, Cyprien 2, 154, 155, 156, 160,
American Journal of Obstetrics and 163
Diseases of Women and Children, Bernap, Rev. George W. 37
The 16 Berton, Pierre 127
Anatol, Giselle Liza 4, 6, 9n17 Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s
Ancient Law (book) 101, 108n18 Fiction and its Cultural Context
Andersen, Hans Christian 27 (book) 23
Arabian Nights (The Book of a Bibliothèque Universelle 161
Thousand Nights), The 47, 48, 50 Bicknell, W.I. 66
Arias, Rosario 185 Big Ben, London 142
aristocrat, as vampire see Byron, Lord Black, Barbara 65, 66
Armstrong, Nancy 143 Black Vampyre: A Legend of St.
Ashanti exhibition in Vienna (1896) Domingo, The (book) 4, 171
16 Blood of the Vampire (novel) 17–22,
Athenaeum, The (magazine) 195 23, 81, 110, 111; and the Black
Auerbach, Nina 3, 125, 130 female fgure 6, 11; and psychic
Austen, Jane 30 vampirism 31, 111; and touch
Austin, William 173 112–13, 114, 118–21
blood transfusions 102–3, 105–6,
Baartman, Sarah (the Venus 108n28
Hottentot) 16 bloodlines: and aristocratic status 96,
Banerjee, Sikita 53 101, 102–3, 112; and mixed race
Barker, J.D. 184 20, 24, 31
Barrow, Sir John 127–8 bloodlust in the Caribbean 11–13
Index 201
Boone, Troy 125 categorizations of the vampire 63–4;
Bosch, Hieronymous 135 see also Carmilla (novella)
Boucher, Ellen 128 Charcot, Jean-Paul 39
Boucicault, Dion 1, 140, 171 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 7, 96–107 Mercure Étranger (poem) 155–6,
Bradley, Matthew 141, 145 160, 161–2
Braidotti, Rosi 114 “Christabel” (poem) 83
Brande, William Thomas 142 Chronicles of the Sea (book) 128
Brantlinger, Patrick 126 Clark, William Mark 128
“Bride of Corinth, The” (poem) Cogan, Frances B. 41
82–3 Cohen, Daniel A. 173
Briefel, Aviva 113 Cohen, Jeffrey 5–6
British misunderstandings of Indian Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 83, 134
culture 48–9, 51–2, 60n7 Collins, Wilkie 93n30
Brown, Charles Brockden 173 Conan Doyle, Arthur 29, 85, 175
Brown, Thomas 162 Condé, Maryse 14
Browning, John Edgar 8, 170 consumption (“the white plague”) 32,
Burne-Jones, Philip 171 33, 34
Burton, Capt. Sir Richard Francis 7, Contagious Diseases Acts, the 193
47, 49–50, 51–60, 61n17 Corsair, The (poem) 156, 160, 162
Burton, Isabel 51 Costelloe, John 143
Burwick, Fred 154, 155, 165 Cox, J. Randolph 172
Butler, Erik 3, 132, 155, 158, 160 Cox, Kimberly 7
Bynum, Helen 34 Cruel Painter, The (novella) 81, 82–4,
Byrne, Katherine 32–3 91, 92
Byron, Lord 2, 83, 100, 132, 134, cultural appropriation 7
154–61; portrayal of in Le Vampire “Cultural Imperialism and Travel
(play) 8, 156–60, 163, 165, 167; Writing: Glimpses of Richard
portrayal of in Lord Ruthwen, ou Burton’s Travelogue” (essay) 48
les Vampires 156–7, 160; portrayal
of in The Vampire; or the Bride of Dance, Rev. Charles 14
the Isles (play) 163–7 D’Arcy, Ella 192
Byron et le Romantisme Français D’Arcy, Uriah Derek 4, 171
(book) 155–6 “Deathly Lover, The” (short story) 83
demonization of female illness, the 33
Calmet, Augustin 1 deviant African body, the 13–14
Cameron, Brooke 7 Dickens, Charles 84, 93n30, 125
capitalism and the Victorian vampire Dictionary of Manufactures, Mining
see Studies of Death (book) Machinery, and the Industrial Arts
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton 142
(book) 47 Dictionnaire Philosophique 157
Caribbean women and vampirism, the Dijkstra, Bram 29
11–12, 16–18 dime novels 171–2, 180; see also
Carmilla (novella) 63, 64, 67–78, 86, or, Detective Brand’s Greatest
100, 170 Case, The (novel); penny dreadful
Carmouche, Pierre-Francois-Adolphe magazines and books; Vampire
154, 158, 160, 161, 163 Dish of Orts, A (book) 82
Carter, Julian B. 27 Dix, Dorothy 41
Carter, Robert Brudenell 39 Dixon, Edward H. 30
Cassell’s Household Guide 65 Dodd, George 142
Castle, Terry 69 Dodd, Kevin 172
Catalogue of the Educational Division Doerksen, Teri Ann 16, 22
of the South Kensington Museum, Donal Grant (novel) 81, 84–8, 91, 92
The 76 Dracul (novel) 184
202 Index
Dracula (BBC series) 8, 183, 184, 185, Flanagan, John T. 126
186–90, 191–5, 196 Forbes, Edward 66, 67
Dracula (NBC series) 184 Forbes, James 48–9
Dracula (novel) 1, 11, 17, 22–4, 81, Frank, Catherine O. 104
115, 125, 170, 184, 191, 195; and Frankenstein (novel) 2
gender narratives 185, 192–4; and Franklin, Lady Jane 128
queerness 8, 183, 185–6, 194 Franklin, Sir John 127, 128
Dracula: The Un-Dead (novel) 184 Frawley, Maria 30
Dubliners (novel) 143 Frayling, Christopher 1–2
Dumas, Alexandre 2 Freeman, Elizabeth 140, 141
Dunn, Jennifer E. 184–5 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins 29, 36–8,
Durdant, R-J. 156 39–40, 41
Duval, Amaury 156 Froude, James Anthony 12
Fyfe, Gordon 67
early European vampire stories 15
East India Company, the 48, 59, 61n7 Gaiman, Neil 185
Edinburgh Review (magazine) 161–2 Gaskell, Elizabeth 84
Edwards, Bryan 11–12, 13 Gatiss, Mark 8, 183, 184, 186, 195,
Egerton, George 104 196
“Egg of the Albatross, The” (short Gautier, Théophile 83, 100
story) 145–7, 148 gender equality and vampiric
Ehrenreich, Barbara 29 embodiment 7, 96–7, 99–101,
Elizabeth I, Queen 59 103–7; see also Western notions of
Ellis, Markman 196 gender
“End of My Journey, The” (poem) 83 George, Sam 4
English, Deidre 29 Ghose, Indira 53, 61n17
English Gentleman’s House, The Giaour, The (poem) 156, 162, 163
(book) 65–6 Gibson, Matthew 8
Esquirol, Jean Étienne 35–6 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 31
Estève, Edmond 155–6 Gilman, Sander 13
Girl of the Period, and Other Social
Fabians, the 143 Essays, The (book) 38–9
Fairie Queene, The (poem) 165 glans clitoridis, the 16
Family of the Vourdalak, The (novella) Glenarvon (novel) 156, 158
100 Gogl, Nikolai 2
Fashionable Sufferer, A (play) 29 “Good Lady Ducayne” (short story) 7,
Fat and Blood: An Essay on the 96–8, 100, 103–4, 105–7
Treatment of Certain Forms of Goodlad, Lauren 97, 102
Neurasthenia and Hysteria (essay) Gothic fiction 99, 185
40 Gould, Jay 139
female parasite as vampire, the 29–31, Great Slump and Naval veterans’
33–9 unemployment, the 126, 127, 128,
Feminism and Sex Extinction (book) 129, 130
35 Groom, Nick 1, 103, 125, 128, 186,
feminists’ campaign for equal rights 197n24
97 Gruner, Elizabeth Rose 106
Ferguson, Trish 140, 142 Gutleben, Christian 184
Ferrero, William 194
Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in Habits of Good Society, The (book)
American Culture since 1870 113, 114
(book) 33 Haddon, Cole 184
financial vampirism 139–40, 141, Haefele-Thomas, Ardele 7
144–9 Haitian Revolution, the 4
First World War, the 135 Halttunen, Karen 173
Index 203
Hamilton, C.I. 125 Joyce, James 143, 149
Hamilton, Lady Emma 134 “Justice” (sermon) 82
Hammack, Brenda Mann 6–7, 19
Hampshire Advertiser (newspaper) Kama Sutra of Vatsayana, The (book)
195 47, 48
Harse, Katie 154 Kant, Immanuel 162
Hatter, Janine 97 Karpenko, Lara 8
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 174 Keats, John 83, 100
Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality Kenealy, Arabella 6, 28–9, 32, 34–6,
and Race in America, The (book) 27 40–1
Heigel, Cäsar Max 2 Kent, Constance 98
Herman, Arthur S. 127 Kerr, Richard 65–6
hermaphrodites as a third gender 49 Khubhandani, Lachman M. 52
Herndl, Diane 29–30 Kipling, Rudyard 171
Herskovits, Melville 15 Knauff, Daniel 184
Hijras, the 49, 61n10 Kohlke, Marie-Louise 184
Historian, The (book) 184 Kostova, Elizabeth 184
History, Civil and Commercial, of the
British Colonies in the West Indies, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (poem)
The (book) 12 83, 100
Ho, Tammy Lai-Ming 185 Lady Audley’s Secret (novel) 97, 98–9,
Holmes, Oliver Wendell 39 101–3
Holt, Ian 184 Lady Hamilton; or, Nelson’s Legacy. A
Hoppenstand, Gary 172, 175, 181n22 Romance of Real Life (book) 128
Hoppin, Augustus 29 Lamb, Lady Caroline 156, 158
Horace 163 Lancet, The (journal) 33
Hughes, William 23, 102 Land of Rip Van Winkle, The (novel)
human thought and divinity 82 176
Hume, David 163 Lara (poem) 156, 163
“Hylas” (short story) 147, 148 Larson, Leah 96
Le Fanu, Sheridan 29, 63, 67–78, 86,
“Imagination, The” (essay) 82 100, 110, 140
imperial vampirism see Vikram and Leal, Amy 69
the Vampire (stories) Leclerc, Georges-Louis 71
In Sugar-Cane Land (book) 14 Lectures on the Sphere and Duties of
Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Women (book) 37
Illness in American Fiction and Lee Six, Abigail 113, 123n12
Culture, 1810–1940 (book) 29–30 Levine, Caroline 6, 143
Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth- Levine, George 151
Century Britain (book) 30 Levy, Amy 104
invalids as vampires 29–41 Lewis, Michael 126
Irish Agriculturist (magazine) 139 libidinal desire 7
Lilith (novel) 81, 88–91, 92
Jamaican riots of 1865, the 12 Lindpainter, Peter Josef von 2
James, Henry 174 Linton, Eliza Lynn 38–9
Jane Eyre (novel) 6 Lloyd, Edward 128
Jean Sbogar (novel) 156, 160 Lombroso, Cesare 194
Jeffrey, Francis 161–3, 166 London after Midnight (flm) 172
Jenkins, Jerry Rafki 14–15 London Times (newspaper) 12
Jones, W.A. 33, 38 Long, Edward 13
Jouffroy, Achille de 154, 158, 160, Lord Ruthwen, ou Les Vampires
163 (short story) 2, 156–7, 160, 167
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, The Lovell, Mary S. 47
30–1 Ludgate, The (book) 28
204 Index
“Luella Miller” (short story) 36–40 monomania 35–6
Lyrical Ballads (poems) 163 monster theory and defning the
vampire 4–6
MacCormack, Patricia 63–4, 66, 69 monstrosity and national progress 113
MacDonald, George 81–2, 83, 91–2, monstrous body, the 114–15, 123n12
95n74; see also “Cruel Painter, The” Montrose Review, The (journal) 139
(novella); Donal Grant (novel); Moral Force Chartism 125
Lilith (novel) Moretti, Franco 112
Macfe, Sian 111 Morris, Robert T. 16
Machin, James 140 Munro, George P. 172
Mackintosh, James 162 Munro, Norman L. 172
Maier, Sarah 8 Munro’s Ten Cent Novels (book
Maine, Henry Sumner 97, 101, 104–5 series) 172
Malchow, Howard L. 16 Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the
Malte-Brun, Conrad 156 American Imagination (book) 173
Man with the Cloaks: A Vermont
Legend, The (novel) 173–4 Napier, Sir Charles 127
Mark of the Vampire (flm) 172 Napoleonic Wars, the 125, 126,
marriage reform 98, 99; see also 130–1, 133, 134
Married Women’s Property Act national anxiety and mythologization
(1882), the; Matrimonial Causes of black female vampires 15–16
Act (1857), the nautical melodramas 126, 136n9
Married Women’s Property Act Nelson, Lord Horatio 134
(1882), the 97, 104, 107 neo-Gothic pop culture 184
Marryat, Captain (Frederick) 126 neo-Victorian vampire narratives 183,
Marryat, Florence 7, 11, 17, 31, 81 184–96
Marschner, Heinrich 2 Nervous Ills; Their Cause and Cure
Martin (flm) 172 (book) 31
Marx, Karl 139 Nesvet, Rebecca 8
maternal inheritance and partus neurasthenia 27–8, 33
sequitur ventrem see Blood of the New Women writers 104, 192–3
Vampire (novel) New York Literary Journal 171
Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), the Newton, Rev. John 134
97, 98, 107, 193 Nightingale, Florence 30
McLean, Rebecca 7 Nodier, Charles 2, 8, 154, 156–7, 158,
McLaren, Scott 83 160–1, 163
Melville, David 110–11 Northwest Passage, the 127, 128
“Menopausal Vampire: Arabella Norton, Caroline 98, 99
Kenealy and the Boundaries of True Norton, George Chapple 98
Womanhood, The” (book) 32 nursing and caring for invalid
Metamorphosis of the Vampire in vampires 36–7
Literature and Film (book) 3
Miles, Henry Downes 128 Obeah: Witchcraft in the West Indies
Milton, John 162 (book) 12
miscegenation and Dracula 23 “Olalla” (short story) 110–12, 113,
Mitchell, S. Weir 40 114–18, 120, 121
Mittman, Asa 5 Ommanney, Sir John 127
modern literary vampire, the 2–4 On the Educational Uses of Museums
modern sexual and marriage contract, (book) 66
the 97–8, 103–5, 107; see also On the Pathology and Treatment of
“Good Lady Ducayne” (short story) Hysteria (book) 39
modern world of contract, the 101 opium addiction among novelists
Moffat, Steven 8, 183, 184, 186, 195, 93n30
196 Oppenheim, Janet 28
Index 205
Oriental Memoirs (book) 49 race and the vampire 6–7
origins of the vampire lore 3–4 race as a literary metaphor for
Orlando Furioso (poem) 165 separation 23–4
othering of vampiric fgures, the 81, racism as a sexual threat 16
87 Radcliffe, Ann 156
Ott, Katherine 33 Raeper, William 82
Our Mutual Friend (novel) 125 Rage to Live: A Biography of
Owen, Richard 65, 66, 67 Richard and Isabel Burton, A
(book) 47
Palumbo-DeSimone, Christine 36–7, Ratsey, Edward 127
38 redemption of vampires, the 88–91
Panorama d’Angleterre (magazine) Reis, Richard 82
156 Religion and Its Monsters (book) 5
Paole, Arnold 1 religious dogma and vampires’ dislike
partus sequitur ventrem 17; see also of the cross 187
Blood of the Vampire (novel) repetition and Victorian time
Pascal, Blaise 163 discipline 142, 147–8, 150
patriarchal authority and the modern replication as reproduction 8
marriage contract 103–5 reproduction and the British imperial
penny dreadful magazines and future 111, 112, 120
books 3, 125, 128; see also or the Rhode, Jason 135
Feast of Blood (serial); Varney the Rhodes, Gary D. 8
Vampire Rice, Edward 47
People, The (newspaper) 139 Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, The
performative illness as racial (poem) 134
superiority 27, 28–9 Rise of the Vampire, The (book) 3
Perry, Ruth 101 Robinson, William J. 33
Phantom, The (play) 171 Robinson Planché, James 2, 154
Phillpotts, Eden 14 Romantic vampire, the 82–3,
physical contact by touch from 93n21
vampires 111–12, 113–21 Rosenman, Ellen 3
Pichot, Amédée 154 Ross, Max 67
Planché, James Robinson 2, 8, 155, Ross, Sir John 128
160, 163–7 Rowe, Katherine 113
Polidori, John William 1, 2, 81, 83, Royal Navy, and unemployment after
93n15, 100, 125, 132 the Napoleonic Wars 126–7, 128,
Pope, Catherine 17 129
Port of Spain Gazette (newspaper) 13 Ruschenberger, W.S.W. 66, 67
“Pre-Adamite Elephant Adoring a Rymer, James Malcolm 3, 128, 129,
Sunfower” (drawing) 149, 130, 132
149–50
Prest, Thomas Peckett 128–9 Sanskrit language, the 47, 51, 52,
Princess and the Pea, The (story) 27 53–4, 60
Psomiades, Kathy Alexis 105 Schreiner, Olive 31, 104
Psychonomy of the Hand, The (book) Scoggin, Daniel P. 125, 135n1
113 Scott, Walter 93n30
Punter, David 82 Searling, A.E.P. 176
Pykett, Lyn 99 sensation fction 98–9, 104, 106–7
Sexual Neurasthenia (book) 27–8
Queerness and categorizing the Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients,
vampire 63–4; see also Carmilla and Depression in Victorian
(novella) England (book) 28
queerness and homoeroticism in Shelley, Mary 2
Dracula (BBC series) 194–5 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 98
206 Index
“Shoemaker of Breslau, The” (story) Tales of the Wars, or, Naval and
83 Military (book) 128
Showalter, Elaine 98 Thackeray, William 84
“Sicker Ever After: Diagnosing the Thaler, Ingrid 11
Whiteness of the Female Vampire” Thiessé, Léon 156
(essay) 6 Thompson, Hannah 113, 123n12
Sidis, Boris 30–1 Tieck, Johann Ludwig 83
Siegel, Jonah 65 time and Victorian vampires 140, 141,
Sign of the Four, The (novel) 175 142–3, 147–8, 150
Sill, Edward Rowland 142 Tolstoy, Aleksey 2, 100
slave trade, the 4, 20 Trinidad carnival, the 13
“slumming” 85, 93n29 True Blood (TV series) 91
Smart, Hawley 172 “True Story of a Vampire, The” (short
Solomon, Simeon 143 story) 139–40, 144–5, 148
soucouyant, the 12–13, 14 Tuberculosis and the Victorian
Southey, Robert 126 Literary Imagination (book) 32
Spectateur Littéraire, Le (journal) Tukulör people, the 14
156 Turn of the Screw, The (novella) 174
Spillers, Hortense 20
Spitting Blood: The History of Uhle, Charles P. 39
Tuberculosis (book) 34 Unspoken Sermons (book) 82
Springhall, John 3 Urtext, the 3, 183, 184, 185, 190
Stableford, Brian 140
stage adaptations of The Vampyre, Vampire, Le (play) 2, 8, 158–60, 163,
A Tale see Vampire, Le (play); 165, 167
Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles, Vampire; or, Detective Brand’s
The (play) Greatest Case, The (novel) 8,
Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th 171–3, 174–80, 181n22
Century Stage (book) 170 Vampire, The (painting) 171
Steiger, Janet 28 Vampire, The (play) 1, 140
Stenbock, Count Eric 8, 139–40, 141, Vampire, The (play - US version: The
143–9, 149 Phantom) 171, 176
Stetson, Erlene 17 Vampire, The (poem) 171
Stevenson, John Allen 23–4 Vampire, The; or the Bride of the Isles
Stevenson, Robert Louis 7, 110 (play) 2, 8, 163–7, 171
Stoker, Bram 1, 8, 11, 29, 81, 110, vampire novels and serializations in
178, 195–6 America 8, 170–80
Stoker, Dacre 184, 197n24 vampiric miscegenation 6
Stopford, Sir Robert 127 Vampyre; a Tale, The (novella) 1, 81,
String of Pearls, A Romance, The 125, 132, 154, 156, 157, 170, 171,
(novel) 129, 132 191; adaptations of 2, 8; and ties
Stuart, Roxana 170 to aristocracy 83, 100, 160, 163;
Studies of Death (book) 8, 139–42, see also Lord Ruthwen, ou Les
143–50 Vampires (short story); Vampire, Le
Study in Scarlet, A (novel) 175 (play); Vampire, or The Bride of the
Swedenborg, Emanuel 165 Isles, The (play)
Swenson, Kristine 32 Vampyre, The (play) 154
Swinney, Gregory 66 Varney the Vampire; or the Feast
Szwed, John 14, 15 of Blood (serial) 3, 8, 125, 126,
129–34, 170, 176
Tacky’s Rebellion 12 Verbrugge, Martha H. 41
“tactile erotics” 111–12, 115 Victoria, Queen 1, 50, 59,
Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence 99 61n7, 193
Index 207
Victorian natural history museum and Wilcox, Martin 126
categorization, the 63, 64–7, 77; see Wilkins Freeman, Mary E. 6
also Carmilla (novella) Williamson, Milly 11
Vikram and the Vampire (stories) 7, Wohlbrüch, W.A. 2
47, 48, 50–1, 53–60 Woman and Her Diseases: From the
“Viol D’Amour” (short story) 147 Cradle to the Grave (book) 30
Voltaire 163 Women and Economics (book) 31
Women and Labour (book) 31
Wake Not the Dead (novel) 83 Wooden, Shannon 96–7
war veterans as heroic vampires Woolson, Abba Goold 29
125–6, 129–35 Wordsworth, William 162
Warner-Lewis, Maureen 14 working-class readers 3
Warwick, Alexandra 112 World of Fashion, The (book) 27
Webb, Sidney 143 “Worm of Luck” (short story) 147,
Webber, Charles Wilkins 29 148
Weekly Freeman, The (magazine) 139
Western notions of gender 53, 61n10; Yanni, Carla 65
see also gender equality and Yeats, W.B. 135, 143
vampiric embodiment Young, Lin 7
Westminster Review (journal) 142 Young Goodman Brown (novel)
Wheatley, Kim 128 174
Whithouse, Toby 135
Wieland, or The Transformation Ziger, Susan 92n1, 92n2
(novel) 173 Zuleika et Selim (story) 156

(Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature) Brooke Cameron, Lara Karpenko - The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature - A Feast of Blood-Routledge (2022)

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The Vampire in

Brooke Cameron, PhD in English, University of Notre Dame, is Associate

Lara Karpenko, PhD in English, University of Notre Dame, is Associate

Victorian Pets and Poetry

The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and

Doctrine and Difference

The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott

Touch, Sexuality, and Hands in British Literature, 1740–1901

Nineteenth-Century Visions of Race

The Forgotten Alcott

The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

ISBN: 978-1-032-00177-7 (hbk)

List of Figures vii

1 Black Female Vampires in Nineteenth-Century Writing

2 Sicker Ever after: The Invalid as Vampire in Fiction by

3 “The Dropping of Blood from the Clouds”: Imperial

4 Curating the Vampire: Queer (Un)Natural

5 The Addict as Vampire 81

6 “What a vampire!”: Gender and the Modern Sexual

8 “Keep[ing] Time at Arm’s-Length”: Vampire and

9 “A Financial Vampire”: The Aesthetics of Repetition in

10 The Vampire as Byron: Polidori’s Story Adapted to the

11 America’s First Vampire Novel and the

12 Queerly (Re)Vamped: Women, Men, and Neo-Victorian

9.1 Eric Stenbock, “Pre-adamite elephant adoring a

Giselle Liza Anatol is Professor of English at the University of Kansas.

Kimberly Cox is Associate Professor of English at Chadron State College

Matthew Gibson is Associate Professor of English Literature at the

Ardele Haefele-Thomas is the Chair of LGBT Studies at City College of

In 1852, Queen Victoria saw Dion Boucicault’s The Vampire at the

To try (and inevitably fail) to capture the monster through defnition or

Early Stories of Caribbean Bloodlust

Haiti’s 1804 independence from France—viewed by many Europeans

Numerous other documents referred to the “vice” evidenced by African

Vampires in African Oral Traditions

Ethiopian [sic] monster, akin to the vampire or werewolf, [called]

The work of twentieth-century researchers indicates that tales about

Black Female Vampires Travel to Europe

Vampire texts, which became increasingly popular as the images of

In his work on images of race in nineteenth-century British gothic fc-

The Maternal Inheritance in The Blood of the Vampire

Either way, Marryat’s references to the Caribbean and her creation of a

Miss Carey is portrayed as more animal than human—much like the

White Women’s Bodies and Miscegenation:

Some suffering has long been accepted as obligatory among women

Invalids as Parasites, as Living Vampires

a disparate range of conditions that exhausted and drained the body

Kenealy’s reference to “consumption” (rather than phthisis or tuberculo-

Dangerous Sympathy: Babying the Invalid Vampire

the writings of Richard Francis Burton were considered as [the] most

Among the followers of an oriental camp, at least of the Mahratta

In his description, Forbes employs the Western term “hermaphrodite”

the outside worlds encountered by European travellers were inter-

Burton would certainly have been familiar with Forbes’s writings on

The following translation is rendered peculiarly valuable and inter-

Although Vikram is not a travelogue, Burton’s omission of stories and

confation of manhood and national progress was an integral part

Introducing Raja Vikram, Gothic Landscapes, and a

I am about to perform spells, incantations and magical rites on the

Vikram is not beyond fattery and bribery, so although he is not com-

clad in the ochre-coloured loin-wrap of his class…his face was

Amarawat notes that “Burton tried to present cultural superiority over