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ARIEL BARROSO DE SANT’ANNA

The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction:

The Various Faces of the Other

Rio de Janeiro

2005

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UNIVERSIDADE DO ESTADO DO RIO DE JANEIRO

The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction:

The Various Faces of the Other

Ariel Barroso de Sant’Anna

Dissertação apresentada ao Curso de Pós-

Graduação Stricto Sensu em Letras da

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro,

como requisito para a obtenção do grau de

Mestre em Letras. Área de concentração:

Literaturas de Língua Inglesa.

Orientadora: Profa. Dra. Maria Conceição Monteiro

Rio de Janeiro

2005

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ARIEL BARROSO DE SANT’ANNA

The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction:

The Various Faces of the Other

Esta dissertação foi julgada e aprovada, em sua forma final, pelo Programa de

Pós-Graduação Stricto Sensu em Letras, área de concentração Mestrado em

Literaturas de Língua Inglesa, para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Letras, pela

seguinte Banca Examinadora:

Profa. Dra. Maria Conceição Monteiro (Orientadora – UERJ)

Profa. Dra. Magda Velloso Fernandes de Tolentino (Titular – UFSJ)

Profa. Dra. Eliane Borges Berutti (Titular – UERJ)

Profa. Dra. Shirley de Souza Gomes Carreira (Suplente – UNIGRANRIO)

Prof. Dr. Leonardo Mendes (Suplente – UERJ/ São Gonçalo)

This work is dedicated to

Osvaldo S. Rosa and Vilma Vaz Orestes,

sources of inspiration in my school years.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks...

...to Maria Conceição Monteiro, for her dedicated and competent supervising in all

phases of this dissertation;

...to all my professors at UERJ, who greatly contributed to my intellectual and

personal development;

...to Daisy Porto Gomes, for her patience in lending me her ears, in spite of her

initial distate for the subject;

…to CAPES –– Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior ––

for granting me their scholarship, which allowed me time to dedicate myself to this

research.

RESUMO

O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar as várias identidades que a figura do vampiro

adquiriu no curso de sua existência, a sua evolução de uma figura folclórica a um

personagem literário, e as transformações que sofreu à medida que o século dezenove

avançou e diferentes histórias vampirescas surgiram. Conforme constatamos, a figura

marginal e transgressora do morto-vivo torna-o um “Outro” ameaçador em diversos níveis:

social, cultural, político e mesmo pessoal. Nesse estudo objetivamos também apontar que

medos e preconceitos, que pairavam sobre a Inglaterra no século dezenove, foram

encarnados na figura do vampiro, bem como examinar os mecanismos psicossociais

envolvidos na construção desses preconceitos e temores. Como base para a discussão dos

temas escolhidos, utilizo-me de duas das mais importantes obras produzidas no período, a

saber, “The Vampyre” (1819) de John Polidori, o primeiro conto sobre vampiros a mostrar

o morto-vivo como um homem de estirpe nobre, e Drácula (1897) de Bram Stoker, a

última e mais importante obra vampírica do século.

Palavras-chave: literatura gótica; vampiro; alteridade

ABSTRACT

This dissertation aims at analysing the various identities the vampire acquired in the

course of its existence, its evolution from a folkloric figure to a literary character, and the

transformations it underwent as nineteenth century progressed and different vampiric tales

appeared. The marginal and transgressive figure of the vampire renders it a threatening

“Other” in several levels: social, cultural, political, and even personal. In this study I also

aim at pinpointing what fears and anxieties, prevalent in nineteenth-century England, were

embodied in the figure of the vampire, as well as examining the psycho-social mechanisms

involved in the construction of these prejudices and fears. As a basis for discussing these

issues, I used two of the most significant works produced in the period, namely, John

Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), the first vampire tale to depict the undead as a man of

noble rank, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the last and most important vampiric work

of the century.

Key words: Gothic literature; vampire; otherness

CONTENTS

Introduction.................................................................................................................8

Chapter 1 – The origin of the vampire myth

1. The vampire in folklore.........................................................................................10

2. Enlightenment concerns and the Gothic................................................................19

Chapter 2 – From folklore to fiction

1. The ascent of the vampire from obscurity: Romantic appropriation...................26

2. Polidori’s “The Vampyre”: the origin of the modern myth ................................30

3. The rise of a new Gothic villain...........................................................................34

Chapter 3 – The vampire as a cultural body

1. The vampire and its multiple alterities................................................................40

2. The construction of identity and difference.........................................................41

3. The Doppelgänger motif.....................................................................................43

4. The abject body of the Other...............................................................................50

Chapter 4 – Victorian society in the mirror

1. Fears and anxieties in nineteenth-century England............................................56

1.1. The liberated “New Woman”........................................................................61

1.2. The vampire and sexual deviance.................................................................70

Conclusion...............................................................................................................78

Bibliography............................................................................................................81

Introduction

Since the publication of John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” in 1819, the figure of the

vampire has aroused a strong fascination. This may be witnessed not only through the large

number of best-selling novels and short stories published along the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, but also through the various successful films produced for the big

screen and television alike. The success of the vampire myth, to my mind, is largely due to

its capacity for transformation, its ability to adapt to changing social and environmental

conditions. Unlike other fearful fantastic characters in Gothic literature, who are relatively

changeless, the vampire exibits different faces, moulded, since its inception in folklore, by

the society and age in which it is produced. As a monstrous, marginal body, the vampire

has been used to embody the “Other”, the outcast, what society repels in order to preserve

its hegemonic values. As a cultural body, the undead incarnate a cultural moment ––– its

fears, desires, anxieties and fantasies. In each vampire tale, the revenant, as the vampire is

also designated, returns, in different garments, to reflect contemporary socio-cultural

concerns. In fact, the vampire’s monstrous body has been used to represent all sorts of

otherness: sexual, social, cultural, political, among others.

As the title of my dissertation indicates, my aim is to analyse these different faces,

the various identities the vampire acquired in the course of its existence, how it evolved and

changed from a folklore figure to the status of a literary character and the transformations it

experienced as nineteenth century progressed and different vampiric tales appeared. I will

also try to pinpoint what fears and prejudices, hovering over nineteenth-century England,

are embodied in the figure of the vampire, as well as examine the psycho-social

mechanisms involved in the construction of these prejudices and fears. I will be using,

as a basis for discussion, two of the most significant works produced in the period, namely,

John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), the first vampire tale to depict the undead as a man

of noble rank, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the last and most important vampiric

work of the century.

This dissertation is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, I focus on the

vampire lore and relate two of the most notorious and best documented cases of vampirism

occurred in Serbia in the eighteenth century, associated with the names of Peter

Plogojowitz and Arnold Paul, which were the source of debates in German universities,

generated the first academic treatises on the theme, and inspired some Romantic German

poets to use the vampire as a literary motif. I also identify and analyse in this chapter

allusions to vampirism in some works in the English classic Gothic.

In the second chapter, I analyse the appropriation of the vampire by the English

Romantic poets and the transformations undergone by the myth as the nineteenth century

advances and new vampiric narratives appear. The rise of the undead as a new Gothic

villain is analysed in Polidori’s “The Vampyre” in a special section in this chapter, since

the vampire as we know it owes a lot to Polidori’s characterisation. Polidori’s motivations

and contributions to the changing of the history and mythology of the vampire are also

dealt with. A comparison and contrast is also established between Lord Ruthven and Count

Dracula.

In the third chapter, I focus on the vampire as a cultural body. I defend the notion

that the vampire is not only the embodiment of socio-cultural and political fears and

anxieties, but also of psychological features inherent in human beings. In order to

understand how the representation of the vampire as monstrous evil and “other” is

constructed, I examine the psycho-social mechanisms that make us see the other, the

stranger, as a threat to our identity. To achieve this end, I discuss some issues related to the

construction of identity and difference, the double, and the abject body, as conceptualised

by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva’s concept of abjection is essential in that it explains the human

being’s contradictory attitudes towards the vampire, since it provokes not only repulsion

but also fascination.

In the last chapter, I establish the historical contexts in which the literary vampiric

works under discussion were produced and the possible fears and anxieties generated from

these contexts. I am mainly concerned, however, with the Victorian age, when Stoker’s

Dracula was written. I discuss the theory of degeneration, which was prevalent in the last

decades of the nineteenth century, and I try to pinpoint the fears and anxieties emanated

from such a notion, which highly influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Chapter 1 - The origin of the vampire myth

The vampire lore proves to be in large part an elaborate folk-hypothesis designed to account for

seemingly inexplicable events associated with death and decomposition.

Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death

... the vampire myth is rarely used twice for the same purpose.

Twitchell, The Living Dead

1. The vampire in folklore

Scholars who have studied the vampire myth conclude that the superstition of these

blood-sucking creatures exists almost everywhere in the world: creatures who, having an

untimely death, do not remain in their graves but return to torment their family and friends.

These revenants, or undead, as the vampires are also called, are referred to within their

cultures by different names altogether. Called Vrykolakas in Greece, Vurdulak in Russia,

and Vampyr or Upir, or some other etymological equivalent of the word, in Eastern Europe,

these creatures can also be found in Asian, Arabian and African folklore. Not only do their

names vary from culture to culture but there are also cultural distinctions among them.

Carol Senf cites Anthony Masters, author of The Natural History of the Vampire, who

catalogues the belief in vampires according to country of origin. He describes, for instance,

the Romanian strigöi as:

a reanimated corpse, made live again by the return of the soul. The Polish and

Russian vampires emerge from their coffins only between midday and midnight; in

addition, their coffins are filled with blood, and they have such enormous hunger

that they eat their winding sheets as a matter of course. The Malaysian Langsuir is a

flying female demon who sucks the blood of children [...] The Scottish baobham

sith takes the form of groups of beautiful girls to drain victims of blood while the

Danish Mara takes human form during the day and destroys those who fall in love

with her (Senf, 1988: 18).

This worldwide occurrence of the vampire can be justified by fear of corpses: the dead are

blamed for sickness and death in most cultures. As Paul Barber observes, in his Vampires,

Burial, and Death:

Lacking a proper grounding in physiology, pathology, and immunology, how are

people to account for disease and death? The common course [...] is to blame death

on the dead, who are apt to be observed closely for clues as to how they accomplish

their mischief (Barber, 1988: 3).

A person may become a vampire simply by being the first person to die of an epidemic, and

the epidemic is interpreted as the effect of his depredations. James Twitchell, in The Living

Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature, associates the plague with

vampirism:

From the twelfth to the seventeenth century millions of people in great human

waves were consumed by a silent and invisible death. Whole cities of people would

be coughing blood one week, gasping on the streets the next, and dying during the

third or fourth. In the first great plague of 1347-50, twenty–five million Europeans

died, and although in the scourges to follow the total numbers never reached such

magnitude, specific locations suffered more. As late as 1665-66 a plague swept

through London, killing almost seventy thousand, and the seventeenth-century

Englishman was as baffled about how it had occurred as his fourteenth-century

counterpart had been. The cause was simply unknown then, and although we now

know that the plague was carried to humans from rats via fleas, it was certainly

more ‘logical’ to use the time-tested explanation that had satisfied previous

generations: the city was a victim of a vampire attack. For only the vampire, with

his geometric population burst, could explain deaths of this magnitude (Twitchell,

1997: 19).

Besides the plague and other contagious diseases, other factors were thought to

bring revenants into existence. A common event that allegedly led to the creation of a

vampire was to allow an animal, such as a cat, to jump over a body before burial. A body

could also become a revenant merely by not being buried deep enough or as a result of an

absence of funerary or burial rites. Scholars usually agree that the figure of the vampire in

folklore also appears as an answer to the insoluble problems of a culture. The vampire is

seen as the cause of certain inexplicable evils, is held responsible for some extraordinary

occurrences in society and is frequently cited as the result of immoral behaviour. The oldest

vampires seem to have come into existence as an explanation for problems related to

childbirth. For example, the langsuyr, the most important of the vampires in Malaysia, was

a beautiful woman who had given birth to a stillborn baby. When she learned about the

condition of her child, she flew to a tree nearby and became a nocturnal evil spirit who

attacked children and sucked their blood. It was believed that, if a woman died in labour,

she would be doomed to become a langsuyr. Besides being inspired by problems in

childbirth, the vampire legends also originated from strange circumstances occurred during

birth. Children who were different at birth, usually by some abnormality or a defect, could

be considered potential vampires. For example, according to Barber, among the Poles of

Upper Silesia and among the Kashubes, a child born with teeth would tend to become a

vampire. In Romania, similarly suspicious were children born with an extra nipple or with

features that were viewed as bestial. Apart from physical defects, the lists of potential

revenants would also tend to include people who were morally different from the people

who made the lists. Barber quotes Burkhart as mentioning the following categories of

revenants:

the godless (people of a different faith are included here, too!), evildoers, suicides,

in addition sorcerers, witches, and werewolves; among the Bulgarians the group is

expanded by robbers, highwaymen, arsonists, prostitutes, deceitful and treacherous

barmaids and other dishonorable people (Barber, 1988: 30).

As can be seen from the list above, the vampire served as a tool of social control for

the community leaders. People who crossed the moral and religious boundaries established

by the community, not only put their souls at risk, but could become vampires. Christianity

added to the lore of the revenant, expanding the supply of practices that led to vampirism.

According to Barber, “In Romania, for example, it is reported that Christians who convert

to Islam become revenants, as do priests who say Mass in a state of mortal sin and children

whose godparents stumbled while reciting the Apostles’ Creed at their baptism” (Barber,

1988: 37). Dying unbaptised, being unruly during Lent, being buried in unconsecrated

ground were also a guarantee of vampiric possession. In some other Christian countries,

notably Russia and Greece, heresy could also lead to vampirism. The heretic was someone

who died in a state of excommunication. The Church threatened with excommunication a

series of unforgivable sins resulting from actions that ranged from a direct attack on the

Church to more common immoralities such as adultery and murder. In some cultures,

heresy was also associated with witchcraft, defined as connivance with the devil and the

development of malevolent antisocial magic. The witches who practised their magic art

could become vampires after death. Twitchell observes that:

If one did not commit suicide, was publicly religious and physically conforming,

there was still the possibility that the vampire might possess the body after death.

This would occur in the rare case when the vampire actually attacked and

successfully transformed the victim into another vampire (Twitchell, 1997: 10).

In literary adaptations of the myth, people become vampires by being bitten on the

neck. Barber claims, however, that vampires in folklore bite their victims somewhere on the

thorax: the area of the left breast (among the Kashubes), in the area of the heart (Russians),

or even on the nipple (in Danzig, now Gdansk). Both in folklore and fiction, however, the

vampire’s bite tends to cause the victim to become a vampire.

The medieval identification of vampires with witches and Satan redefined

vampirism as a real evil that could be combated with the arsenal of weapons of the Church.

The vampires were the opposite of the sacred and could be affected by all icons of the

Church ––– the cross, holy water, the rosary, and the Bible. The vampire destroyer was

naturally the priest, as he had both the knowledge of how evil operates and access to the

arsenal of Christian icons. Apart from sacred symbols, a number of practices evolved to

ward off a corpse that has transformed into a vampire. Garlic, put in the grave or hung

around one’s neck, and a few other herbs, was able to keep vampires at a distance. This was

an instance of protection used both in fiction and folklore. Barber mentions other strong-

smelling substances like green nutshells and cow dung found on a hawthorn bush as also

effective against the undead.

If these means of warding off vampires are unsuccessful, then one must find the

creature and kill it. Or rather, destroy it, since the body of the vampire is already dead.

When the presence of a vampire is reported in a village and his identity is determined, the

body is dug up, examined as to signs of vampiric activity (uncorrupted body, blood at the

mouth, for instance) and a method is then chosen to destroy him. The classic method of

killing a vampire is to drive a stake through his heart. In some cultures, according to

Barber, the stake is driven through the mouth or the stomach, instead of the heart. Barber

identifies a magical aspect in staking when he claims that, in some regions, only certain

kinds of wood should be used. In Russia, for instance, the appropriate wood for the purpose

is ash. In Silesia, oak is used and in Serbia the stake is to be made of hawthorn. But the

killing of the vampire has also a purely mechanical aspect. A revenant may have a nail

driven into his head, or a sharp knife could be as efficient as a thorn stick for killing a

vampire, in certain cultures. Besides staking, decapitation is common. In some cultures, the

decapitated head is placed at the feet of the corpse. If the mutilation of the body through

staking and beheading is not successful, then cremation of the body is used as a last resort.

The vampire from folklore does not fit exactly the romantic character that was

developed from the nineteenth century onwards. The fictional vampire is usually tall and

thin, with a pale, usually narrow face and with a pair of long canine teeth which protrudes

from his lips. Mostly in the films, he wears a long black cloak which gives him the

appearance of a big bat when he stretches his arms. In folklore, the vampire is very

different from his counterpart in fiction. The old descriptions of the appearance of the

undead vary greatly from culture to culture. There are, in fact, many kinds of vampires. The

typical Eastern European vampire, the one who influenced fictional vampiric tales, does not

wear a cloak or any sort of elegant clothing. We have to have in mind that the undead are

supposedly the dead who rise from their graves. They look, therefore, like many corpses

removed from their tombs. When people in the past reported seeing a vampire, they would

describe him as wearing what he had been buried with ––– a linen shroud. The vampire of

folklore is never pale, as one would expect of a corpse: his face or body is usually described

as ruddy or dark-blue in colour, and this may be attributed to his habit of drinking blood.

This made sense to the investigators of the time, because when they drove a stake into the

heart of the suspected vampire, a great deal of blood would spurt from the orifice, as if the

body were saturated with it. This takes us to another characteristic of the folkloric vampire:

unlike the emaciated vampire of fiction, his counterpart in folklore is usually described as

having a swollen body. To the contemporary vampire hunters, this would seem perfecly

normal. They believed that his swollen appearance was due to the fact that he was bloated

with blood. Other characteristics of folkloric vampire are shared by various fiction writers.

They include sharp teeth, although in folklore the teeth are not especially prominent, and

long hair and nails, as they have grown since death. Also, both in folklore and fiction, the

vampires let out a scream when a stake is driven into them, and blood may flow from their

mouths as they die. It is worth noting that most of the characteristics mentioned above were

observed in vampires lying in their coffins. Unlike the vampires of folklore, who usually lie

face downwards, the vampires in fiction are described as lying on their backs.

In the eighteenth century, western scholars considered, for the first time, the

existence of the vampire as something more than just an element of the vast rural folkloric

culture of the supernatural. Experts point out that the controversy was triggered by a series

of incidents of vampire hysteria in remote villages of Serbia, Hungary, and Silesia, in the

early part of the eighteenth century. Two of the most notable and best documented cases of

vampirism are the ones associated with the names of Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paul (or

Arnod Paole). One of the incidents started when Peter Plogojowitz, who had died in the

village of Kisilova, in Serbia, was seen by his family some days after his death. Soon after

that, he appeared before some people in their dreams. Within a week, nine people died after

suffering a twenty-four-hour illness. The people of the village decided to open the grave to

check whether the body had any of the characteristics usually found in a vampire. The body

was then exhumed in the presence of Austrian authorities and it was found, to their

astonishment, that the body had no unpleasant odour, but was completely fresh; the hair,

beard and nails had grown; new skin had formed under the old, which was peeling off; his

mouth was stained with fresh blood. It was concluded that he was a vampire. Plogojowitz’s

body was pierced with a stake and burned. When the staking took place, it was reported that

he bled profusely through his mouth and ears.

Even more notorious than Plogojowitz’s incident is Arnold Paul’s case. He lived in

the village of Medvegia, also in Serbia. Paul told his neighbours that when he was in the

Turkish army he had been bitten by a vampire. One week later he died. He broke his neck

in a fall from a hay wagon. Several weeks after his death, some people complained that

they had been bothered by Arnold Paul, and four of these people died. In order to end this

evil, Paul was exhumed forty days after his death. His body was found quite complete and

undecayed and, according to Barber’s description, “[...] the shirt, the covering, and the

coffin were completely bloody; [...] the old nails on his hand and feet, along with the skin,

had fallen off, and new ones had grown [...]” (Barber, 1988: 16). As he was considered a

true vampire, they drove a stake through his heart, which made him groan and bleed

copiously, and his body was burned. The other four people Paul had allegedly

“vampirised”, were also disinterred, staked and cremated. Arnold Paul’s case should have

been over after his cremation. However, in 1731, seventeen people in the village died, with

no previous illness, in a period of three months. Vampirism was suggested as a possible

cause. After further investigations, it was found out that Paul, five years before, had

attacked not only the people but also the cattle, and sucked out all their blood. Those who

ate the flesh of the cattle were infected and also became vampires. In the presence of

Austrian authorities, the bodies in the suspicious graves were exhumed, beheaded and

burned, and the ashes were thrown into the river Morava. Flückinger, the Austrian official

in charge of the case, returned to Vienna and presented a complete report to the emperor.

During 1732, the report itself and several newspaper versions of the story circulated

throughout all Europe. The stories of Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paul became the centre

of attention and the source of long and heated debates in German universities and many

works on the subject were produced at the time. Senf quotes Frayling as saying:

If the fashionable journals made much of the Arnold Paul story [one of the best

documented cases of vampirism] for a season or two, the interest aroused in

intellectual circles by this prototypical example of ‘peasant superstition’ lasted

much longer. The report of 1732 directly stimulated at least fourteen treatises and

four dissertations; at one time or another the debate involved such leading figures of

the Enlightenment as the Marquis d’Agens, Voltaire, Rousseau, Van Lwieten

(Empress Maria Thereza’s personal physician and adviser) and the Chevalier De

Jaucourt ( a prolific contributor to the great Encyclopedia) (Senf, 1988: 21).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was around this time, in 1734, that

the word “vampire” was coined in English, although other sources mention 1732 as the

year the word appeared for the first time in an issue published by the London Gentleman’s

Magazine (Senf, 1988; Davenport-Hine, 1999). Several accounts of the same nature were

object of investigation and official reports were written about them, evincing the

superstitions not only of the peasants but also of the many religious authorities, military

personnel, and medical officers who conducted the proceedings and recognised the

existence of vampires in attested documents.

During this time, scholars and religious leaders tried to find an explanation for the

phenomenon. Some simply discarded the reports as primitive superstitions. Many,

however, began to propose alternative explanations to justify what people had seen,

especially the phenomena related in Arnold Paul’s case. Authentic accounts of vampirism,

contrary to general folklore about the vampires, usually begin with people dying of

persistent diseases. After some of these sick people died, their neighbours exhumed the

corpses and observed a series of abnormal conditions, all evidence of postmortem activity:

the bodies had not decomposed; the skin was pinkish in colour and the hair and nails had

grown; new skin had formed under the old; there was fresh blood at the lips and their

bodies spurted out fresh blood when cut or pierced; when a stake was driven through the

body, it reacted as if it were in pain. The most popular explanation was by far premature

burial, which would explain the existence of corpses that rolled over in their graves, and of

those who had bloodied themselves in their attempt to escape. Twitchel points out that:

Premature burial was much commoner than we imagine, primarily because death

was so difficult to confirm. People were buried in comas, in catatonic fits, and in

shock, especially during plague years when the hasty disposal of the body was of

primary importance. Hence death would finally be caused by suffocation in the

casket and the visible evidence of this last gasp of life-strength would be seen by the

vampire hunters as they opened the casket. For them the contorted body was proof

enough of a life beyond death; the corpse would be burned and staked (Twitchell,

1997: 19).

As the debates about the reasons of vampirism continued, other explanations were

offered. Some theories suggested that some sort of disease was responsible for the

symptoms of vampirism. On the top of this list stood the plague. An epidemic of plague

occurred simultaneously with the irruption of vampirism in Eastern Prussia in 1710. The

proliferation of the germs of the plague could justify the dissemination of the symptoms of

vampirism. Other diseases encompass tuberculosis, where the early symptoms are weight

loss and the later coughing of blood; cholera, in which whole populations are slowly

decimated; and, porphiria, a rare blood disease that disfigures its victims. The most

satisfactory explanation to this date, however, seems to come from the cultural historian

Paul Barber, who conducted an extensive research on the original reports and offered the

first scientific explanation for the origins of the vampire legends. He contends that what

was observed by the informants of the vampire exhumations was, in fact, a natural

phenomenon of decomposition. According to him, the body undergoes remarkable changes

in both size and colour after death, a fact that was unknown to the eighteenth-century

observers. To them, if the body continued to change in colour, move, bleed, and so on, then

it continued to live. As a result of a natural process of decomposition, the swollen body and

its ruddiness, along with the blood in the corpse’s lips could be justified.

Morrison and Baldick claim in their introduction to The Vampyre and Other Tales

of the Macabre that following these series of vampire scares, Dom Augustin Calmet, a

French Benedictine abbot and biblical scholar, published in Paris in 1746 the first

anthology of several of these vampire sightings and exhumations, entitled Dissertations sur

les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de

Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie et de Silésie, in which he discussed the nature of these

phenomena. Calmet’s work was translated into and published in German (1752) and

English (1759; the English publication was entitled The Phantom World), disseminating the

image of Eastern Europe as the place of origin of the vampires and constituting a source of

inspiration for vampiric works throughout the following centuries.

Although the belief in vampires is almost ubiquitous, the United Kingdom seems to

have been practically exempt from this legend. Senf, however, mentions two twelfth-

century historical accounts of this belief in England: one by William of Newburg and

another by William of Malmesbury, and an article written in 1855 which refers to an

Anglo-Saxon poem on the “Vampyre of the Fens” , but as she herself recognises: “such

references are too remote to influence nineteenth-century writers” (Senf, 1988: 19). The

English interest in the vampire seems to have come straight from Germany, the centre of

debates about the vampire epidemics. The publication of monographs and treatises on

vampires inspired various German writers to use these bloodsucking creatures as literary

motif. The German poet Heinrich August Ossenfelder published Der Vampir in 1748;

Gottfried August Burger wrote his ballad Lenore in 1773; and Johann Wolfgang von

Goethe wrote The Bride of Corinth in 1797. The translations of these works, which soon

followed, reached England and also served as a source of information about the vampire.

2. Enlightenment concerns and the Gothic

By the time the vampire was being discussed and appropriated in the German

literature, England was living the development of a period known as Gothic. When dealing

with a genre of novels designated as “Gothic”, it seems appropriate to first try and define

the meaning of that word. It is usually agreed that the term “Gothic” originates from one of

several Germanic tribes, the Goths, who ransacked southern Europe in the fourth century

and brought about the downfall of the Roman Empire and its classical culture. Because the

Goths left no literature or art of their own, and were the destroyers of the great Roman

civilisation, they were associated with things that were barbaric, primitive and rude. During

the eighteenth century, however, the term expanded to include all the Germanic tribes,

including those who invaded Britain in the fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons. In order to

construct their national identity, the British idealised their past, based on ancient records

that seemed to point at the Goths as the ones who introduced the values of British liberty

and democracy. In this way, “Gothic” gradually lost its negative connotation and was used

to refer to an ancient past, often in a nostalgic way. This positive connotation later extended

to include aesthetic matters. As Fred Botting points out in his book entitled Gothic:

Manifestations of the Gothic past ––– buildings, ruins, songs and romances –––

were treated as products of uncultivated if not childish minds. But characteristics

like extravagance, superstition, fancy and wildness which were initially considered

in negative terms became associated, in the course of the eighteenth century, with a

more expansive and imaginative potential for aesthetic production (Botting, 2003:

22).

Horace Walpole, who is usually considered the father of the Gothic novel, did not

use the term “Gothic” himself when he introduced his novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764.

The first edition of this novel was subtitled simply A Story. It was only when Walpole

published a second edition in 1765 that the word “Gothic” was added to the title: The

Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. The Gothic fiction was not a revolutionary creation.

Rather, it evolved from various tendencies and ideologies of the eighteenth century. This

new genre already had a predecessor in the so-called Graveyard Poetry, a literary

movement popular in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Graveyard poets chose

graveyard and bleak places as the setting for their poetry, which already showed traces of

the Gothic concepts to be developed later, especially the shadows. Dark and melancholy

atmosphere pervades their poetry derived from such motifs as night, death, ruins, and

ghosts. For dealing with everything that was deemed irrational, the Graveyard poetry was

an important inspiration for the Gothic tradition. In the second half of the eighteenth

century, the interest in the beauty of “dark” places led to a discussion about the beautiful

and the sublime, which should also pave the way to the Gothic. Edmund Burke, in his

notion of “the sublime”, connected the most intense feelings to such regions as the

wilderness, mountains and ruins. To Burke, the sublime emotions would be spawned by

objects that were vast, magnificent, and obscure. Gothic also draws on sentimentalism, an

ideology popular in the eighteenth century, which stressed the refinement of feelings. David

Punter, referring to the relationship between the Gothic and sentimentalism, in his The

Literature of Terror, points out that: “The Gothic could not have come into being without a

style of this kind, for it is in this style that we begin to glimpse the possibility of the balance

and reason of the Enlightenment being crushed beneath the weight of feeling and passion”

(Punter, 1996: 26).

It is not by chance, then, that Gothic is viewed as a distinct reaction to the

rationalism of the Enlightenment, a literary and philosophical movement in Europe which

emphasised a profound faith in the powers of human reason and a devotion to clarity of

thought, to harmony, proportion, and balance. The eighteenth century was an “Age of

Reason” concerned with classical principles and scientific progress. The moral application

of this classical revival or neoclassicism proclaimed cultivation, education and civilisation,

the latter depending on virtue and reason. This movement believed that human reason could

be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world. Their

principal targets were religion (embodied in the Catholic Church) and the domination of

society by a hereditary aristocracy. They also disregarded the past in order to reconstruct

society according to the principles of reason and nature. Enlightenment historians would

refer to the European past, especially the Medieval times as “The Dark Age” or “The

Gothic Age”, which, Botting claims, constitutes “a general and derogatory term for the

Middle Ages which conjured up ideas of barbarous customs and practices, of superstition,

ignorance, extravagant fancies and natural wildness” (Botting, 2003: 22). The novel, a

young genre at the time, was predominantly realistic and didactic, and evolved in reaction

to the romance tradition that had been in vogue up to the late seventeenth century.

According to Peter Gay in his The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, to the neoclassicist,

art was “scientific, moral, orderly, and refined, capable of developing objective standards,

and improving, as it entertained, its public” (Gay, 1969: 219). This “New novel” was, then,

expected to reflect the new enlightened society and thus be educational. In contrast with

these notions, the Gothic, appearing near the end of the eighteenth century, was associated

with wildness and superstition, drawing as it did on the conventions of the medieval

romances in which knights battled with magic and monsters. Horace Walpole’s The Castle

of Otranto (1764) started the fashion for the Gothic and the horror novel was born. The

story is set in medieval times, with castles and ghosts, appearances and disappearances, and

a whole range of frightening effects. Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford, and

Matthew Lewis were to follow to consolidate the Gothic fiction. Many classicists were

concerned with the existence of such unrealistic stories, and also feared that the

monstrosities of nature were shown in too positive a light, and that the fascination for

dragons, for instance, would corrupt the civilised reader. Botting sums up the attacks on

Gothic fiction as follows:

Gothic excesses transgressed the proper limits of aesthetics as well as social order in

the overflow of emotions that undermined boundaries of life and fiction, fantasy and

reality. [ ... ] encouraging excessive emotions and invigorating unlicensed passions,

Gothic texts were also seen to be subverting the mores and manners on which good

social behaviour rested. [ ... ] Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence,

giving free rein to selfish ambitions and sexual desires beyond the prescriptions of

law or familial duty. [ ... ] Illegitimate power and violence is not only put on display

but threatens to consume the world of civilised and domestic values. In the

skeletons that leap from family closets and the erotic and often incestuous

tendencies of Gothic villains there emerges the awful spectre of complete social

disintegration in which virtue cedes to vice, reason to desire, law to tyranny

(Botting, 2003: 4,5).

Gothic novels, however, did not so much oppose classicist virtues. Rather, they

tested their limits, justifying and questioning them at the same time: authors spell out

accounts of passionate encounters, but those are often punished; they tell the reader about

supernatural encounters, but try to convey a feeling of authenticity and fact (in, for

instance, introductions relating how the narrator came across a certain manuscript); in

general, Gothic novels do not portray clear boundaries of good and evil, but focus on the

region between the two. As Botting contends:

These contradictions undermine the project of attaining and fixing secure

boundaries and leave Gothic texts open to a play of ambivalence, a dynamic of limit

and transgression that both restores and contests boundaries. This play of terms, of

oppositions, indeed, characterises the ambivalence of Gothic fiction: good depends

on evil, light on dark, reason on irrationality, in order to define limits (Botting,

2003: 9).

By dismantling imposed authority, religion, and the past, Enlightenment rationalism

tears apart the bonds of an ordered social world, generating fears and anxieties. Moreover,

other forces in operation also contribute to the uncertainties prevalent in the period of time

that favoured the appearance of the Gothic. As Punter explains:

[...] forces of industrialisation were producing vast changes in the ways people

lived and worked. Rural patterns of life were being broken up by enclosure of land

and by the labour demands of urban-centred industry. The stability of an, at least

theoretically, long-accepted social structure was being dissolved amid the pressure

of new types of work and new social roles. Even the sense of time acquired by

living and working according to the seasons was being replaced by a different sense

of time, the time of the machine and the time of the employer (Punter, 1996: 193).

All those social, economic and political as well as cultural changes caused

bewilderment and disorientation and generated disturbing ambivalence in various levels

(moral, political, sexual, and literary, for instance), which both threatened and reinforced

the eighteenth century system of values. According to Botting, it is through characters and

settings that Gothic fiction “provides the principal embodiments and evocations of cultural

anxieties” (Botting, 2003: 2). Although the setting and atmosphere of the Gothic

constituted an ideal environment to welcome the vampire, this new villain, strangely

enough, is absent from the novels of the period. After all, the ambiguity inherent in Gothic

fiction would have been highlighted by the figure of the vampire, since its fluid identity (it

can mould itself into different shapes: bat, wolf, even mist or dust, apart from its peculiar

condition of living-dead) already presupposes a difficult categorisation: human or animal?

animate or inanimate? dead or alive? Moreover, examining the characters who populate

Gothic landscapes as described by Botting, we might ask why on earth the vampire was not

included on the list: “Spectres, monsters, demons, corpses, skeletons, evil aristocrats,

monks and nuns, fainting heroines and bandits [...]” (Botting, 2003: 2). Senf is vague about

the reasons for this phenomenon. She believes that the vampire may not have served the

needs of the writers’ imaginations and that “something ––– or a combination of things –––

occurred later to make it a suitable literary subject” ( Senf, 1988: 22). David Punter claims

in his The Literature of Terror that “only in the early nineteenth century was vampirism

brought into alignement with more modern anxieties” (Punter, 1996: 203). Scholars point

out that it was in fact in the Romantic period that the vampire myth flourished. As Morrison

and Baldick put it in the introduction to “The Vampyre” And Other Tales of the Macabre,

Romanticism was engaged “in the imaginative exploitation of folk beliefs, rescuing them

from the degraded category of ‘vulgar superstition’ and finding in them depths of moral

and psychological significance that lay beyond the grasp of conventional rationality”

(Morrison and Baldick, 1998: xi). The vampire, especially after his unreality was

established by the science of Enlightenment, became an ideal vehicle for writers to express

their own complex feelings and to illustrate their horrifying personal experiences. Besides,

the Romantics were fascinated with death and rebelliousness (Satan and Prometheus, for

instance, were rebels exploited by Romanticism). All this probably contributed to the

appropriation of the vampire, a creature associated with the outcast since its very beginning

in folklore, as we shall see later on in chapter 3.

In fact, some traces of vampirism could already be spotted in the Gothic period, for

example, in William Beckford’s Vathek (1786). In order to allow Vathek into the Palace of

Subterranean Fire and take possession of its treasures, the Indian required “the blood of

fifty children” (Beckford, 1986: 170). With his “teeth gnashing” and “mouth watering”

(Beckford, 1986: 172), the Indian did not stop asking for more until the last child was

pushed into the chasm.

At another moment in the story, Carathis, during a journey, stops at a cemetery to

get directions from the ghouls, as she had killed her guides:

There were at least two thousand [sepulchres] on the declivity of a hill. [Carathis]

said to herself, ‘So beautiful a cemetery must be haunted by Ghoules! They never

want for intelligence: having heedlessly suffered my stupid guides to expire, I will

apply for directions to them; and, as an inducement, will invite them to regale on

these fresh corpses! ..., a hollow noise was made in the earth; the surface hove up

into heaps; and the Ghoules, on all sides, protruded their noses to inhale the effluvia

which the carcases of the woodmen began to emit. They assembled before a

sarcophagus of white marble, where Carathis was seated between the bodies of her

miserable guides. The princess received her visitants with distinguished politeness;

and, supper being ended, they talked of business. Carathis soon learned from them

every thing she wanted to discover; and, without loss of time, prepared to set

forward on her journey (Beckford, 1986: 230).

A ghoul is defined in the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture as “a spirit

which, in the stories told in some Eastern countries, takes bodies from graves to eat them”.

The ghoules are, in fact, part of the Arabian folklore. Unlike vampires, they feed on human

flesh, not blood. The fact, however, that they are living dead and inhabit cemeteries makes

them akin to the folkloric vampire.

In Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, a Gothic novel published in 1796, the vampire is

evoked through the figure of a bat, an association which would be much exploited in later

vampiric works and whose link had already been established in the political world in

articles published in eighteenth-century England antedating the publication of The Monk.

John Paul Riquelme claims in his appendix to Stoker’s Dracula that:

The image of the vampire in antagonistic expressions of political difference has a

long history in England that begins in the eighteenth century with articles such as

“Political Vampyres” (1732), in which ministers of state are compared to blood-

sucking bats (Riquelme, 2002: 370-1; my emphasis).

While Ambrosio is waiting for Matilda to return from the cavern into which she had

descended to invoke the devil, Lewis tells us that: “ Profound darkness again surrounded

him [Ambrosio], and the silence of night was only broken by the whirring Bat, as She

flitted slowly by him” (Lewis, 1995: 233). Two facts strike us in this description. Firstly,

the use of the definite article before “bat”, and secondly, the use of the pronoun “she” to

refer to the creature. Associating Matilda with a blood-sucking bat is not a hard task. To

start with, she literally sucks the blood of Ambrosio’s wound when he is bitten by a

poisonous insect and is about to die. As she herself tells him later on: “You slept; I

loosened the bandage from your hand; I kissed the wound, and drew out the poison with my

lips” (Lewis, 1995: 88). Moreover, she is identified throughout the novel as a creature of

the night, whose encounters with the devil in dark caverns and with Ambrosio in his cell

always occur at night. Matilda’s aggressive behaviour and sexuality can be compared to the

vampirised Lucy’s, and the three women vampires’ in Stoker’s Dracula. She openly

confesses her passion and lust for a still hesitating Ambrosio: “I lust for the enjoyment of

your person. The Woman reigns in my bosom, and I am become a prey to the wildest of

passion. [ ... ] Tremble then, Ambrosio, tremble to succeed in your prayers” (Lewis, 1995:

89). Ambrosio is surprised at Matilda’s reaction against his interference to save Agnes from

being punished at the hands of the Prioress of Saint Clare. He criticises her behaviour as

manly, a bold gender boundary-crossing:

He [Ambrosio] grieved, that Matilda preferred the virtues of his sex to those of her

own; and when He thought of her expressions respecting the devoted Nun, He could

not help blaming them as cruel and unfeminine. Pity is a sentiment so natural, so

appropriate to the female character, that it is scarcely a merit for a woman to possess

it, but to be without it is a grievous crime (Lewis, 1995: 232).

This and other “grievous” crimes were also a threat to be combated in the late nineteenth

century with the emergence of the “New Women”, whose “manly” behaviour was

considered to be a threat to gender roles and was also used to characterise them as

vampires.

Chapter 2 – From folklore to fiction

But first, on earth as Vampire sent,

Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent;

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race,

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life.

Byron, “The Giaour”

...the perverse union of passion and death ... is the essence of the vampire.

Punter, “Gothic and Romanticism”

1. The ascent of the vampire from obscurity: Romantic appropriation

As shown in the previous chapter, only allusions to the figure of the vampire had

been made in the classic Gothic. The first appearances of more recognisable vampires in

English literature occur in Romantic poetry. Robert Southey’s “Thalaba the Destroyer”

(1801), Byron’s “The Giaour” (1813), Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816), and Keats’s

“Lamia” (1819) and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819), are all well-known and

celebrated poems which introduce vampiric figures or make direct references to vampiric

folklore.

Robert Southey (1774–1843) is the first to introduce the traditional vampire as a

character in his poem “Thalaba the Destroyer”. In this poem, Thalaba has a brief meeting

with a vampire, his recently deceased bride Oneiza, who died on their wedding day. He is

forced to kill her again, driving a lance into her body.

Coleridge (1772-1834) shares with Southey the honour of having produced the first

vampire poem in the English language, since the first part of “Christabel” was in fact

written in 1797 and the second part in 1800, as Coleridge himself claims in the preface to

“Christabel”. Although the vampire is not openly mentioned, it is now generally accepted

that vampirism was the intended theme in “Christabel”. Geraldine can only be identified

through some of her characteristics and signs revealed along the poem. The first suggestion

that there is something wrong with Geraldine is when she tries to cross the castle gate and

faints:

The lady sank, belike through pain

And Christabel with might and main

Lifted her up, a weary weight,

Over the threshold of the gate:

Then the lady rose again,

And moved, as she were not in pain.

( lines 129 – 134)

Coleridge seems to be referring to the incapacity of a vampire to enter a house

uninvited, now a patterned aspect in the vampiric tradition. After Christabel helps her to

cross the threshold, Geraldine readily gets over. Apart from that, Christabel’s father’s dog

makes an uncommon “angry moan” (line 148) when Geraldine crosses the court. It was a

common belief that vampires exerted a strange effect on animals. In a scene, with obvious

nuances of lesbianism, the two women lie in bed together for one hour and again the

animals are affected:

O Geraldine! One hour was thine ––

Thou’st had thy will! By tairn and rill,

The night-birds all that hour were still.

But now they are jubilant anew,

From cliff and tower, tu––whoo! Tu––whoo!

( lines 305 - 309)

Barber points out that “visible or not, a vampire may be detected by various

animals, [ ... ], a motif that fiction and folklore have in common. In fiction dogs are likely

to howl or snarl, hackles raised, in the presence of the vampire, [ ... ]” (Barber, 1988: 69).

On the other hand, in order to evince the malleability and lack of consensus in the portrayal

of this creature, he concludes that “In folklore this particular motif is not especially

common ––– indeed, in one area of Yugoslavia, the Moslem Gypsies take a contrary view,

believing that ‘there is no vampire in the village if the dogs are barking, but if they are quiet

then the vampire has come’” (Barber, 1988: 69). Besides, throughout the poem Christabel

is portrayed as a potential victim that needs to be protected from the forces of evil. The

wandering spectre of her mother even tries to repel Geraldine but to no avail.

In “The Giaour”, Byron (1788-1824) shows his familiarity with the Greek

vrykolakas, a corpse that is revived by a demonic spirit and who returns to his own family

to make them his first victims. In the midst of the battles described in the poem, the Muslim

enemy puts a long curse on the title character, the giaour (an infidel, a marginal of the

Christian faith). After his death, his soul would certainly be punished. However, the

Muslim declares that more would come:

But first, on earth as Vampire sent,

Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent;

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race,

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life...

( lines 755-760)

Keats (1795-1821) wrote “Lamia”, a poem which derives from the ancient tales of

lamiai, the Greek vampiric evil spirit. The lamia is described as a demonic female vampire

with serpentine qualities, whose destiny is to suck the blood of children. She has the power,

however, to metamorphose into a beautiful maiden in order to attract and seduce young

men. This facet of the lamia was revived in nineteenth-century Romantic fiction, which

rendered her a literal femme fatale. Philostratus gives a long account of the lamiai in his

book Life of Apollonius. The story portrays a lamia trying to seduce a young man from

Corinth, Lycius. When he is about to marry the lamia, who would turn against him and kill

him, Apollonius, the sage, intervenes. The protagonist in Keats’s “Lamia” is explicitly a

female vampire, since her very name betrays her condition. La Belle Dame, the cruel lady

in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, another poem by Keats also written in 1819, can also be

interpreted as a female vampire. In the ballad, the poet meets a knight by a woodland lake.

The man has been there for a long time, and is evidently dying. The knight says he met a

beautiful, wild-looking woman in a meadow. She does not speak but looks and sighs as if

she loves him. He visits the grotto where she lives. He kisses her to sleep, and falls asleep

himself. He dreams of pale kings, princes and warriors who warn him that he, like

themselves, will soon join them and be the woman’s slave. Awakening, while he “palely

[loiters]”, he meets the poet. There are some evidences in the poem that support a vampiric

reading. All of La Belle Dame’s victims are described as growing pale before dying. Could

this pallor have been caused by loss of blood? The beautiful lady has surely been attracting

young men in order to suck their blood. In stanza X, the knight describes a horrific scene:

I saw pale kings and princes too.

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried ––– La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Has thee in thrall!

The key word in the stanza is kings. Many kings have been killed by La Belle Dame. If we

consider that a king only rules when the other dies, it seems she has been haunting those

meadows and enslaving people for generations and generations. Hence, she must be

extremely old. A traditional vampire characteristic is being very old and looking young.

By choosing the Middle Ages and Classical Greece as settings, both Keats and

Coleridge, and other contemporary authors, added a mysterious and ghostly atmosphere to

their writings, creating dreamy-like, spiritualized characters, as opposed to a more concrete

body that would be predominant in the subsequent novels of the nineteenth century.

When appropriated by nineteenth-century prose, the vampiric characters differ

altogether from the preceding nebulous, ethereal nightmares of poetry. They now acquire

definite characteristics and identities (although multiple ones), and walk unsuspiciously

among the living. Although retaining many of the vampire characteristics extracted from

accounts which had spread around Western Europe in the previous century, nineteenth-

century authors were very selective in the choice of acceptable attributes. According to

Eastern European folklore, the undead were bloated, shaggy, foul-smelling corpses,

restricted near their place of burial, and preying on their neighbours and relatives, or even

on cattle (those who ate the flesh of the cattle would also become vampires). Barber

describes a typical vampire of folklore as:

a plump Slavic fellow with long fingernails and a stubby beard, his mouth and left

eye open, his face ruddy (or dark in colour) and swollen. He wears informal attire –

in fact, a linen shroud ––– and he looks for all the world like a disheveled peasant

(Barber, 1988: 2).

Precautions against the vampires involved warding them off by means of disgusting

actions such as digging them up, and smearing oneself with their blood, or pulling out their

teeth and sucking their gums, besides killing them by staking, decapitation, and burning.

Although some folkloric traits remained, most of these shortcomings were corrected and

the vampire figure evolved over the course of the century. Senf quotes M. M. Carson as

saying in his Folklore Forum that “though the vampire originated in folklore, ‘literature has

greatly reworked and remolded the vampire into a recognizable literary type to suit its own

needs and purposes’” (Senf, 1988: 25).

2. Polidori’s “The Vampyre”: the origin of the modern myth

John William Polidori (1795-1821) is the author of “The Vampyre” (1819), a tale

that founded the entire modern tradition of vampire fiction. According to Morrison and

Baldick, “Not only was his [Polidori’s] tale the first sustained fictional treatment of

vampirism in English, it also completely recast the mythology upon which it drew”

(Morrison and Baldick, 1988: x). Polidori was a young doctor who accompanied Lord

Byron in 1816 to Switzerland as his personal physician and travelling companion. While

they were in Geneva at the now famous Villa Diodati, they were joined in June 1816 by the

poet Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin (soon to become Mary Shelley), and Jane Claire

Clairmont, Byron’s most recent mistress. In order to pass the time, they devised a game

whereby each would tell a ghost story to entertain and terrify the others. They all agreed

with the notion and set about creating their own tales of horror. Mary Godwin was the only

one who took the project seriously. She completed a tale which became Frankenstein, one

of the most well-known narratives of all time. Of the other competitors, Polidori wrote an

incest story called Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus, and Byron an incomplete

tale called “Augustus Darvell”. Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont did not contribute with

any story. Later on, after his dismissal from the Villa Diodati, Polidori wrote a further short

story based on the core idea in Byron’s fragment: a mysterious gentleman touring the ruins

of Ephesus realizes he is about to die. At a desolate Turkish cemetery, where he insists on

stopping, he forces his travelling companion to swear to conceal his death from everyone.

After mysterious commands to his companion, he dies and his countenance becomes

immediately black. This incomplete line of thought was adopted by Polidori later on, after

his breaking up with Byron, when he wrote “The Vampyre”. However, Polidori’s short

story led the fragment to a disctinct direction. He reworked Byron’s core idea as an

explicitly vampiric tale. Polidori’s literary aspirations led him to adapt this fragmentary tale

which Byron did not wish to develop. And there is where his merit resides. He chose to

work on his famous companion’s plot to the best of his abilities, bringing forward a literary

piece that has inspired so many writers down to the present day, and without which,

characters such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula would probably never have existed.

The story begins with the portrayal of an enigmatic figure called Lord Ruthven, who

captivates London’s nobility with his odd, exceptional manner, and soon draws the

attention of a rich young man named Aubrey. The two travel about Europe, but Aubrey can

no longer tolerate his companion’s depravity when Ruthven plots to ruin an Italian virgin.

Aubrey reveals Ruthven’s plot to the girl’s guardians and then travels to Greece without

him to continue his studies. There he falls in love with Ianthe, an uneducated peasant girl. It

is she who tells him (and the reader) about the vampires. Meanwhile, Ruthven arrives in

Greece. Some time later Ianthe is killed by a vampire when she goes to make Aubrey return

home before dark. Aubrey, not knowing that Ruthven is the vampire who killed Ianthe,

joins him to travel about Greece. While travelling around the country, they are attacked by

bandits. Ruthven is mortally wounded, but prior to his death, gets Aubrey to promise not to

reveal for a year and a day anything of his “death” or misdeeds during his life. Ruthven’s

corpse is dragged by the bandits to a nearby mountain, according to his own demands

before dying, where it vanishes after exposure to the moonlight. It is important to

emphasise here that Polidori adds a touch of his own by suggesting that moonlight can

revive a vampire, a condition not found in folklore. After Aubrey returns to London,

Ruthven reappears and reminds him of his oath. This encounter with the undead destroys

Aubrey’s nerves, and he is confined to his room as a lunatic. This promise allows Ruthven

to insinuate himself into Aubrey’s household and seduce Miss Aubrey. They are engaged to

be married, but because of his promise Aubrey feels unable to prevent their wedding. The

wedding ceremony occurs on the day the promise is due, but Ruthven manages to kill

Aubrey’s sister and disappear to ruin new victims elsewhere.

More important than the contribution of Byron’s plot to the story was its original

publication under his name, an unscrupulous ploy to promote sales by Henry Colburn, the

New Monthly Magazine’s proprietor, who had obtained Polidori’s manuscript by obscure

means. Due to this association with Byron’s name, the short story was praised as an

excellent work by German and French Romantic writers, soon translated into various

languages and transformed into the basis of a series of dramatic productions in Paris, which

greatly contributed to bring into popular culture the mysterious figure of the vampire.

Irrespective of the lack of originality of the tale, “The Vampyre” contributed greatly

to the modern concept of the vampire. With the advent of Polidori, the figure of the

revenant took a dramatic leap forward, reducing drastically its folklore’s shortcomings. The

vampire is no longer the shabby, violent beast seeking only for the blood it needs to

survive. Instead, Polidori’s Lord Ruthven is a being with human mannerisms and desires, a

creature that looks human, acts almost human, talks like human, and moves freely and

without fear of detection among the world of men, and, for that reason, altogether more

terrifying. He infiltrates society, inspiring little or no suspicion of his supernatural origin

while going about his diabolical business. He is elevated from his nosferatu (undead)

condition to the aristocratic circles of society, apparently representing himself as a member

of the upper class, a character that spawned a series of other well-known vampires of noble

rank later in the century, such as Sir Francis Varney, in J. M. Rymer’s Varney The

Vampyre; or The Feast of Blood (1847), Countess Mircalla Karnstein in J. Sheridan Le

Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), and of course, the most famous vampire of all, Count Dracula in

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

The final two modifications to the vampire made by Polidori involve mobility and

seduction. Ruthven is the first of many travelling vampires. Auerbach claims in Our

Vampires, Ourselves that “In Slavic folklore, the main repository of vampires before the

Romantics began to write about them, vampires never ventured beyond their birthplace”

(Auerbach, 1995: 16). Ruthven is a world traveller, totally unrestricted in movement,

which tremendously enlarges the reach of his evil power. Whereas in most folklore versions

the vampire had been simply a brainless revenant with no special preferences about the sex

of its victims, Polidori’s creature uses his cunning and charms to attract women. In “The

Vampyre” Polidori gets Ianthe to say that the vampire is “forced every year, by feeding

upon the life of a lovely female to prolong his existence for the ensuing months, [...]”

(Polidori, 1998: 9). This erotic attachment between vampire and victim will, according to

Senf, “become much more than a suggestion in both Carmilla and Dracula, not to mention

many of the 20

century versions” (Senf, 1988: 34).

In spite of all these changes, however, Lord Ruthven is definitely modelled on the

folkloric vampire. We can notice Polidori’s familiarity with the folklore in several passages

of his tale. Lord Ruthven is described as having “dead grey eyes” (Polidori, 1998: 3) and

the “deadly hue of his face [...] never gained a warmer tint, either from the blush of

modesty, or from the strong emotion of passion” (Polidori, 1998: 3), which shows Polidori

knew the vampire to be a dead body. That a vampire is a dead body that requires blood to

sustain his unnatural existence is also explicit in the text, for when Aubrey sees Ianthe’s

corpse he realises that “upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the

marks of teeth having opened the vein [...]” (Polidori, 1998: 12). The narrator’s sister also

“glutted the thirst of a Vampyre!” (Polidori, 1998: 23) in the end. Moreover, the brutal

attack on Ianthe in the forest might be considered a trace of folklore, an atavistic behaviour

still lingering in a now more suble and complex character. Ruthven uses his power of

seduction, on the other hand, to attract Miss Aubrey. He courts her for a while and even

marries her before carrying out his criminal intent.

The importance of Polidori’s work is not related only to changes in the history and

mythology of the vampire. He also introduces innovations in terms of setting. The earliest

Gothic novels and Romantic vampiric poetry are set either in the Middle Ages or exotic

lands, from where they derive much of their mystery. Polidori moves his mysterious tale to

his own era and place, removing the vampire from his obscure rural existence to a great

urban centre like London and to the resorts of international tourism.

3. The rise of a new Gothic villain

Modern readers could wonder with some disappointment why “The Vampyre” is so

deficient in terms of vampire-lore and its accompanying paraphernalia. The fact is that

Polidori’s vampire was created as a metaphor for that kind of libertine, common in Gothic

novels, who may be said to ‘prey upon’ female victims. Polidori follows in fact a

moralizing tendency that could be observed in tales published at the time in literary

magazines. These moral tales were directed mainly against the thoughtlessness of the

fashionable and dissolute young rake. Morrison and Baldick contend that:

Lord Ruthven is really the conventional rakehell or libertine with a few vampiric

attributes grafted onto him. For Lord Ruthven, at least, vampirism is merely a

continuation of rakery by other means; and for Polidori, the ‘vampire story’ is

conceived as a variant upon the moral tale, a tale designed principally as a warning

–– here, against the fascinating power of the libertinism represented by his employer

Byron (Morrison and Baldick, 1998: xix; authors’ emphasis).

Polidori calls his vampire Lord Ruthven because Clarence de Ruthven, Lord

Glenarvon, was the name given to the Byronic character by Byron’s vengeful former lover

Caroline Lamb in her tale Glenarvon (1816). This factor is but one of many that critics

agree that evinces that Polidori’s character is indeed an allusion to Byron. A comparison of

the personalities of Byron and Ruthven reveals many related attributes. Both were

womanizers. Both were aristocrats and travellers, and both were viewed unfavourably

under the eyes of Polidori, who, as Senf suggests, “apparently felt that he was in the

shadow of his famous benefactor just as young Aubrey feels inferior to the more

experienced Ruthven” (Senf, 1988: 24).

Lord Ruthven could in fact be modelled on any rake in eighteenth-century literature.

What characterizes a Gothic villain is his unrestrained indulgence of the passions, which,

according to Chloe Chard in her introduction to Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the

Forest (1791), can take the form of “lust and cruelty”. In The Romance of the Forest one

instance of the dangers of indulgence can be found in La Motte who, the narrator tells us,

“had been led on by passion to dissipation ––– and from dissipation to vice; but having

once touched the borders of infamy, the progressive steps followed each other fast [...]”

(Radcliffe, 1986: 208). A dramatic form such lack of control can take is described in

Lewis’s The Monk, where the narrator informs the reader that Ambrosio, the protagonist of

the tale, finds that “no sooner did opportunity present itself, no sooner did He [Ambrosio]

catch a glimpse of joys to which He was still a Stranger, than Religion’s barriers were too

feeble to resist the over-whelming torrent of his desires” (Lewis, 1995: 238). This

“overwhelming torrent” of unrestrained passion leads him to commit the most heinous

crimes.

By the same token, Lord Ruthven is a cruel man who ruins some of his victims

financially and socially. He gambles not because he needs the money, but because he

enjoys ruining promising young men and having them sent to debtor’s prison, and causing

fathers to be penniless and unable to support their families. In “The Vampyre”, we are told

that:

In every town, he left the formerly affluent youth torn from the circle he adorned,

cursing, in the solitude of a dungeon, the fate that had drawn him within the reach of

this fiend; whilst many a father sat frantic, amidst the speaking looks of mute

hungry children, without a single farthing of his late immense wealth, wherewith to

buy even sufficient to satisfy their present craving (Polidori, 1998: 6).

Ruthven feels a great pleasure in helping the vicious sink even deeper into his vice.

The narrator tells us that “when the profligate came to ask something, not to relieve his

wants, but to allow him to wallow in his lust, [...], he was sent away with rich charity”

(Polidori, 1998: 6). However, his great joy also lies in ruining the reputation and will of the

virtuous. When he sees happiness and laughter, his only pleasure is to kill them. He doesn’t

meddle with adulteresses. Instead, he takes pleasure in seducing virtuous women who up

until then had not had any thought of adultery. Aubrey finds out that “all those females

whom he [Ruthven] had sought, apparently on account of their virtue had, since his

departure, thrown even the mask aside, and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity

of their vices to the public gaze” (Polidori, 1998: 7). Even objects of his charity are selected

on the basis of his ability to ruin them through giving alms. He would prefer to give money

to an alcoholic or drug addict to feed his or her habit than to a starving widow begging alms

to feed her children. To Aubrey’s astonishment, he observes that even Ruthven’s charity

money is infected with a destructive power, for “all those upon whom it was bestowed,

inevitably found that there was a curse upon it, for they all were either led to the scaffold,

or sunk to the lowest and the most abject misery” (Polidori, 1998: 6).

Whereas the conventional Gothic villain is selective, directing his cruelty and lust

against specific victims, insofar as he can derive some personal benefit from them,

Ruthven’s charge is indiscriminate. He rejoices greatly in the destruction of the other, either

the vicious or the virtuous, young or old, male or female. In this sense, he resembles Satan,

who is admittedly the one who is interested in the downfall of humanity, leading astray as

many as he is able to. It is noteworthy, nevertheless, that Polidori shows us that Aubrey and

his social circle are responsible for their own doom. They behave in ways that allow Lord

Ruthven to flourish. Aubrey’s incapacity to distinguish reality from fiction, believing “all

to sympathise with virtue, and think[ing] that vice was thrown in by Providence merely for

the picturesque effect of the scene, as we see in romances [...]” (Polidori, 1998: 4), made

him all the more susceptible to Lord Ruthven. As Senf concludes, “his high ideals and poor

judgement are at least indirectly responsible for his own death and for the death of his only

sister” (Senf, 1988: 39). Instead of being exposed as a fiend, Ruthven is seen as a curiosity

and invited to all the best parties. Corrupt society, bored to death with the lack of the

“violent excitement” (Polidori, 1998: 3) they had once felt, see now an opportunity of

restoring a vicious life.

Regarded as the last major work in the nineteenth century to portray a vampire,

Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1847-1912), which was published in 1897, was influenced by

other nineteenth century popular literature, such as Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Polidori’s “The

Vampyre”, as well as by classic Gothic fiction and folklore. In Dracula, Stoker relies more

heavily on the conventions of Gothic fiction than Polidori. Gothic fiction traditionally

includes elements such as gloomy castles, sublime landscapes, and innnocent maidens

threatened by vicious villains. Botting, referring to Dracula, observes that “throughout the

novel ruins, graveyards and vaults ––– all the macabre and gloomy objects of morbid

fascination and melancholy ––– signal the awful presence of the Gothic past” (Botting,

2003: 146-7). Just like Polidori, however, Stoker modernizes this tradition in his novel

when he moves from the conventional setting of Dracula’s ruined castle into the hustle and

bustle of modern England. The novel combines the Gothic emphasis on mystery with the

realistic emphasis on contemporary, ordinary settings and human beings.

The novel begins with Jonathan Harker, a young English lawyer, travelling to Castle

Dracula, located in the Eastern European country of Transylvania, in order to conclude a

transfer of real estate in England to a nobleman named Count Dracula. When the local

peasants know about his destination they react in fear and give him crucifixes and other

charms to protect him against evil. Harker becomes extremely nervous, but he continues his

journey to the castle until he meets an emissary of the count in the Borgo Pass. The

mysterious coach driver continues on to the castle, arriving in pitch darkness, and the

carriage is nearly attacked by angry wolves along the way. On arriving at the old castle,

Harker finds that Dracula is a well educated and hospitable gentleman. However, after only

a few days, Harker finds himself imprisoned within the castle. He investigates and finds out

that the count possesses supernatural powers and diabolical ambitions. One evening he is

assailed by three seductive female vampires, but the count dismisses them, telling the

vampires that Harker belongs to him. The count escapes Jonathan’s attempt to kill him, and

he swiftly leaves the castle with fifty boxes of earth, bound for England. The last we hear of

Harker, he is weak and sick, left alone with no visible means of escape from the castle.

Meanwhile, in England, Harker’s fiancée, Mina Murray, is visiting her friend Lucy

Westenra, who has accepted the marriage proposal of Arthur Holmwood, while rejecting

the proposals of Dr. John Seward, head of a lunatic asylum, and an American named

Quincey Morris. One night while the two women are out walking, they witness the

approach of a strange ship. When the ship is wrecked on the shore near the town, the only

sign of life aboard is a huge dog which quickly disappears. We soon discover that the only

cargo is a set of fifty boxes of earth shipped from Castle Dracula. Soon after the shipwreck,

Lucy suddenly begins sleepwalking. In her search, Mina finds Lucy in the town graveyard

and believes she sees a dark shape with glowing red eyes hovering over Lucy, but when she

arrives at Lucy’s side the shape has disappeared. Lucy becomes pale and ill, and she bears

two tiny red marks on her neck, for which neither Dr. Seward nor Mina can account. Soon

Mina hears from Jonathan and so she leaves Lucy and goes to nurse him, since he is

suffering from brain fever in a hospital in Budapest. Almost immediatly, Lucy’s condition

deteriorates, and Dr. Seward sends for his old friend and mentor, Professor Abraham Van

Helsing. Van Helsing is particularly disturbed by the two tiny spots on Lucy’s throat and

her apparent but unexplainable loss of blood since there are no signs of hemorrhage. It

becomes necessary to give Lucy numerous blood transfusions, but it was all to no avail.

Van Helsing finally orders that Lucy’s room be covered with garlic ––– a traditional charm

against vampires. Eventually, however, the vampire manages to evade the spells against

him and he attacks Lucy again. One night, the men momentarily let down their guard, and a

wolf breaks into the Westenra house. The wolf’s attack so frightens Lucy’s mother that she

dies of shock, and Lucy, left helpless, is again attacked by the vampire.

After Lucy’s death, Van Helsing leads Holmwood, Seward, and Quincey to her

tomb. He explains to them his belief that Lucy has been bitten by a vampire and has

become one herself. The men remain unconvinced until they see Lucy preying on a

defenceless child, which convinces them that she must be destroyed. They agree to follow

the ritual of vampire slaying to ensure that Lucy’s soul will return to eternal rest. While the

undead Lucy sleeps, Holmwood drives a stake through her heart. The men then cut off her

head and stuff her mouth with garlic. Now they all begin a search for the count and also for

the fifty boxes of earth which he had brought with him to England. Now married, Mina and

Jonathan return to England and join forces with the others. Mina helps Van Helsing to

collect the various diary and journal entries that Harker, Seward, and the others have

written, attempting to piece together a narrative that will lead them to the count. Soon after

the search begins, Van Helsing realises that a dreadful change is taking place in Mina. One

horrific night, Van Helsing and Seward break into Mina’s room, find Jonathan

unconscious, and Mina being forced to suck blood from a deep slash across Dracula’s

chest. In no time Dracula disappears. As Mina begins the slow change into a vampire, the

men sterilise the boxes of earth, forcing Dracula to flee to the safety of his native

Transylvania. Using various methods, including hypnosis of Mina, they follow Dracula all

the way to the Borgo Pass in Transylvania, where they find the last remaining box being

transported to Castle Dracula by a group of gypsies. The men pursue the count, dividing

forces and tracking him across land and sea. Van Helsing takes Mina with him, and they

cleanse Castle Dracula by killing the three female vampires and sealing the entrances with

sacred objects. The others overcome the gypsies, and retrieve the count’s body. Jonathan

cuts off the vampire’s head, while Morris plunges his knife into the count’s heart. The

count himself crumbles into dust, and Quincey Morris, having been wounded by the

gypsies, dies soon after that.

When we compare Dracula with “The Vampyre” we notice some similarities in

terms of characters and plot. Lord Ruthven and Dracula are both depicted as cold, aloof,

and physically different from the men around them. They are sexually alluring, often

violent, and remorseless in the fulfilment of their desires. They are both aristocratic,

wealthy, and strangers to the society in which they stalk. Dracula comes from Transylvania,

and Ruthven’s origin is ignored. The narrator introduces Lord Ruthven as follows: “It

happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a London winter, there

appeared at the various parties of the leader of the ton a nobleman [...] remarkable for his

singularities” (Polidori, 1998: 3).

Like Ruthven, Dracula is more than an aristocratic Gothic villain, though. He can in

fact also be associated with Satan. He stands as a satanic figure most obviously in his

appearance ––– “extremely pointed” ears (Stoker, 2002: 43), “clad in black from head to

foot” (Stoker, 2002: 40), and flaming eyes, thereby echoing the picture of a medieval Devil.

Dracula’s feeding on blood in order to extend his physical life parallels, in a perverted way,

the Christian rite of Communion, in which people drink wine that has been blessed to

symbolize Christ’s blood in order to gain spiritual life. Although Ruthven is also portrayed

as a blood-sucking creature, this fact is not emphasized by Polidori, who is more concerned

with depicting his character’s moral depravity and its ravaging effect on people than with

his destructive power as a vampire. Parallels can also be drawn between some other

characters in the two tales. Ruthven and Dracula both pursue one main heroic figure –––

Aubrey prefiguring Harker in more than one way ––– and both take advantage sexually and

emotionally of someone close to that hero ––– Aubrey’s sister parallels Harker’s wife in the

later work. Aubrey’s nervous breakdown is also mirrored in Harker’s mental collapse in the

face of the horrors they both go through.

Chapter 3 - The vampire as a cultural body

...Gothic narratives never escaped the concerns of their own times,

despite the heavy historical trappings.

Botting, Gothic

... The Gothic can serve as a sort of historical or sociological index: if the genre serves

to manage a culture’s disturbances and traumatic changes, its thematic preoccupations

will allow us to track social anxieties at one remove, in the register of supernaturalism.

Hurley, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction

1. The vampire and its multiple alterities

Gothic fiction has been using monsters in general, and vampires in particular, as

embodiments of fears and anxieties prevalent in certain times. Nina Auerbach claims, in

Our Vampires, Ourselves, that unlike other horrible characters in Gothic literature such as

ghosts, werewolves and other monsters which are “relatively changeless”, “the vampires

blend into the changing cultures they inhabit” (Auerbach, 1995: 6), and this makes them

exhibit different faces according to the society and age in which they are produced.

Scholars agree that the nineteenth century brought drastic developments that forced English

society to question the systems of belief that had governed it for centuries. Darwin’s theory

of evolution, for instance, comes to shake the very basis of long-established religious

doctrines as regards man’s origins and nature, provoking a displacement of human

centrality, casting doubt on man’s special position in the universe. This process of

decentring intensifies as the century progresses and other theories emerge that contribute to

exacerbate man’s feeling of fragmentation and loss of control. Bellei reminds us that man’s

awareness of his “subordination to unconscious forces [in Freud], [...] to economic forces in

Marx, [and his] fragility in producing the truth in Nietzsche” (Bellei, 2000: 21; my

translation), is also responsible for shaking his sense of safety as a conscious and rational

being. Likewise, Industrial Revolution brings profound economic and social change to the

previously agrarian England. It is a time of unprecedented technological progress and an

age in which European nations divide up the world with their empires. By the end of the

century, however, many people begin to challenge the ideals of progress and civilisation

that had defined the era, and a growing sense of pessimism and decline pervade artistic

circles. It is not by chance then that classics of terror like The Strange Case of Dr. Jelkyll

and Mr. Hyde (1886), by R. L. Stevenson (1850-1894), a text that focuses precisely on a

character divided between his social condition of respectability and his irrational

tendencies, meet with tremendous success. These rapid changes provoke fears and anxieties

and the vampire appears in the wake of this artistic trend as a symbol of the ambiguities

generated by such disrupted state. In nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, the vampire is not

only the embodiment of socio-cultural and political fears and anxieties but also of

psychological features inherent in human beings. The representation of the vampire as

monstrous evil and “other”, as a deviant that has to be annihilated at any cost in order to

guarantee the existence of good, is, in reality, the reproduction of a psycho-social

mechanism that makes us see the other, the stranger, as a threat to our identity. What sort of

relationship, then, is there between the vampire and the society that produces it? What fears

and prejudices are incarnated in the figure of the vampire? In this chapter I intend to

establish this relationship as regards vampiric literature produced in nineteenth-century

England, more precisely in the Victorian age. In order to understand this process, a

preliminary theoretical study becomes necessary that encompasses the concepts of alterity

and its construction, of the double, and of the abject body.

2. The construction of identity and difference

A study of how our identities are constructed is extremely important if we are to

consider the way we see ourselves and the others around us. Cultural studies have shown

that one identity is always constructed in relation to another, in relation to what it is not.

Although identity and difference are normally conceived as independent, they are strictly

dependent on each other. Utterances about a certain identity are, in fact, parts of a long

chain of negative utterances about another. By the same token, utterances about difference

also depend upon a usually hidden chain of negative utterances about other identities.

Identity and difference are thus inseparable. A recurrent example used by theorists is the

construction of national identity. When someone says “I am French” we should understand,

in fact, “”I’m not English”, “I’m not American”, “I’m not Russian”, and so on and so forth,

a long chain of negative expressions of identity.

Another important feature of identity and difference is that they have to be actively

produced. Tomaz Tadeu da Silva observes, in his “A produção social da identidade e da

diferença” that they are not part of the natural world or of a transcendental sphere but are

products of the social-cultural world. They are constructed in the context of cultural and

social relations. Scholars agree that identities are produced through the marking of

difference and exclusion, which occurs both by means of symbolic systems of

representation and forms of social exclusion. In social relations, these forms of difference –

–– the symbolic and the social ––– are established by classification systems which

commonly appear under a binary system of oppositions, dividing up the population into

two opposing groups: we/they, I/other. In consequence, the affirmation of identity and the

marking of difference always result in including and excluding operations. Affirming

identity means establishing boundaries, distinguishing what is to remain within or without.

Dividing and classifying, in this case, means detaining the privilege of attributing different

values to the classified groups, establishing hierarchies, electing ––– arbitrarily ––– a

specific identity as the parameter in relation to which the other identities are evaluated and

hierarchised. It goes without saying that the “normal” identity bears all the possible positive

qualities, whereas its counterparts can only be evaluated negatively. Hence, the relation

between the two terms of a binary oppositon involves a necessary imbalance of power

between them. In these dualisms one of the terms is more valued than the other: one is the

norm and the other is “the other” ––– seen as the “deviant” or the “outsider”. Tadeu da

Silva reminds us, however, that insofar as the definition of identity depends on its

difference, the definition of the normal depends on the definiton of the abnormal. He claims

that:

That which is left outside is always part of the definition and constitution of the

“inside”. The definition of what is considered acceptable, desirable, and natural is

entirely dependent on the definition of what is regarded as abject, rejectable,

antinatural. The hegemonic identity is permanently haunted by its Other, without

whose existence it would make no sense. [...] the difference is an active part in the

construction of identity (Silva, 2000: 84; my translation).

Stuart Hall in his introduction to Questions of Cultural Identity refers to this

interdependence between the normal and the abnormal as a “radically disturbing

recognition” (Hall, 2002: 4). Therefore, within our psyche coexist, contradictorily, what we

are and what we are not. The relation between the self and the “other” is the core of our

consciousness. The “other” we abominate and place on the other side of the border is an

integral part of ourselves. The dichotomic view we have of the world, between what is

acceptable and positive, and what is abominable and negative, between the self (positive)

and the other (negative), is an attempt we make to establish and preserve a boundary that

protects our identity, which we want indivisible, distinct and unique, an entity that is whole

and without contradiction.

It is worth distinguishing here between identity and subjectivity. Theoreticians

usually agree that our subjectivity involves our conscious and unconscious thoughts and

emotions which constitute our conceptions of “who we are”, our innermost feelings and

thoughts. Some theorists claim that we live our subjectivity in a social context where

language and culture give significance to the experience we have of ourselves and where

we adopt an identity. Subjectivity includes the unconscious dimensions of the self, which

generates contradictions. We do not, therefore, remain comfortably fitted in an identity, for

due to the unconscious ––– repository of our repressed desires ––– we are subject to forces

that are beyond our control.

3. The Doppelgänger motif

Literature has been dealing with this human being’s internal conflict through the

motif of the double, frequently referred to as Doppelgänger (a word taken from the German

literary criticism), as a way of articulating our fears of what we are and of what we do not

want to be. This motif had its heyday in the nineteenth century, in the wake of the

Romantic movement, and was in many respects a precursor to the Freudian theories of the

unconscious, representing the human as a being divided between an “I” and an “alter ego”,

the latter usually a projection of repressed desires, socially unacceptable.

Nicole F. Bravo, author of the entry about the double in the Dicionário de mitos

literários, establishes a strict relation between the nature of the double and the development

of the concept of subjectivity throughout the time. She argues that:

The seventeenth century saw the launching of the concept of subjectivity through

the formulation of the binary relation subject-object, when up to then what prevailed

was a tendency to unity. This opposition ––– unitary conception of the world /

dialectical conception ––– is reflected by the complete reversal that the literary

myth of the double undergoes. From antiquity up till the end of the sixteenth

century, [the myth of the double] symbolises the homogeneous, the identical:

physical likeness between two people is used to produce effects of substitution, of

usurpation of identity; the twin is mistaken for the hero and vice-versa, each one

with his own identity. [...] From the late sixteenth century onwards, the double

begins to represent the heterogeneous, with the division of the self culminating in

the splitting of the unit (nineteenth century) and even allowing an infinite fracturing

(twentieth century) (Bravo, 1998: 263, 264; my translation).

The motif of the Doppelgänger can be used as allegorical agents to ponder over

moral values. Christianity sees the doubleness of the human being represented in the realms

of the spiritual and the natural. The latter is the dominion of the flesh, of sin and the Devil.

The spiritual realm is ruled by the law of God, which must overcome and subdue the flesh.

The living human being is thus involved in a permanent war between flesh and spirit, good

and evil, being forced to take a stand. This Manichaean view of the world: the belief that

everything springs from two chief principles, good and evil, or light and darkness, exerted a

powerful influence on thought, morals and beliefs for centuries. This concept no doubt

inspired Doppelgänger literature. Initially, evil and otherness are located above or outside

the human. Evil forces are identified with Satan and his demons, just as good is identified

through figures of angels, fairies, etc. There is, however, a progressive internalisation of

these dark forces. Jackson points out that:

The modern fantastic is characterized by a radical shift in the naming, or

interpretation, of the demonic. One of the signs of this shift is a transformation in

the use of the demonic in the Faust myth, one of the most widely disseminated

fictions exemplifying the relation between man and ‘devil’. Whereas Marlowe’s

Doctor Faustus (1596-1604) had introduced demons who appeared on stage to drag

Faustus to hell ––– the reward for having sold his soul for impossible knowledge ––

versions of Faust from the late eighteenth century onwards are much more

equivocal, much less able to locate the devil ‘out there’, apart from the subject. [...]

Over the course of the nineteenth century, fantasies structured around dualism –––

often variations of the Faust myth ––– reveal the internal origin of the other

(Jackson, 2000: 54,55; author’s italics).

Among the first careful analyses of the phenomenon of Doppelgänger in literature

are Otto Rank’s. Rank did a psychoanalitical study of the motif, examining its appearance

in literature and in “primitive” cultures. Freud, in his essay entitled “Das Unheimlich”

(“The Uncanny”), quotes Rank’s conclusions. For the latter, the double is connected to

death and the desire to survive it, love of oneself (narcissism) and anguish of death being

inseparable. Therefore, the immortal soul was probably the first double of the body. With

the soul, the self protects itself from complete destruction. By the same token, the images of

the dead made by the Ancient Egyptians were supposedly another way of duplicating as a

defense against extinction. Freud, in the above-mentioned essay, defends the thesis that the

uncanniness we feel when we face the double is due to the fact that the double makes us

revive a very primitive, long surmounted psychic stage (the primary narcissism that

dominates the child’s and the primitive man’s minds). In other words, the uncanny is

anything we experience in our adulthood that reminds us of earlier psychic stages, either as

part of our individual psychic reality (repressed infantile complexes) or as surmounted

primitive beliefs of the human species. The horror evoked by the uncanny is due, therefore,

not to something external, alien, or unknown but ––– on the contrary ––– to something very

familiar to us that returns, harking back to the fear of death, to the annihilation of the self,

feelings long forgotten and repressed both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. When

encountered later in life the double reverses its aspect, and is perceived as a scary

messenger of death. It now does not protect anymore but rather threatens.

There are numerous novels that deal with the theme of the duality of the human

nature. Some scholars agree that the twin is, in literature, the first form of double. To the

purpose of this work, however, I am concerned with the literature that uses the double as a

figure of the heterogeneous, of the “other”, that is, the double as a reflection of the dark

side of the self, of repressed desires. The double can manifest itself under various forms in

fictional literature: automatons, portraits, statues that come to life, and of course, the human

Doppelgänger. The mirror is frequently used as a motif to introduce a double effect, the

reflection in the mirror being the subject’s other. This is explicitly described in R. L.

Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) when Dr. Jekyll,

transformed into Hyde, describes his feelings on seeing himself reflected: “... when I

looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap

of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human” (Stevenson, 2000: 58). It

is worth noting here that the figure of the double in this novel does not materialise into

another being, apart from the original self, but remains bound to him, since it results from

the physical transformation of the same character. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire,

however, is not reflected in the glass before which Jonathan Harker shaves. As the mirror

image represents the double, we can conclude that Dracula is not reflected because he

himself is the other, the embodiment of evil. He has no other. He is the other. The “other”

cannot see himself in the glass because only the “self” can see his double in it, not the other

way round.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the most famous tale of doubles. It is the first novel to

mention explicitly the duality of the human being, to portray the monster within us and to

theorise on this theme. Dr. Jekyll argues that “man is not truly one, but truly two”

(Stevenson, 2000: 56) and imagines the human soul as a battlefield where good and evil

confront each other, one fighting to dominate the other. Jekyll tries to disentangle himself

from the demonic nature of his being, which does not harmonise with his social ambitions:

to live a life of virtue and respectability. But the potion he invents, which he hopes will

separate and purify each element, succeeds only in bringing the dark side into being –––

called Hyde (a part of Jekyll he must hide from civilisation), a creature repulsively ugly and

deformed, small, shrunken, and hairy. Some critics relate Hyde’s small stature to the fact

that, as Jekyll’s dark side, he has been repressed for years, prevented from growing and

flourishing. Once liberated, however, Hyde gradually takes control and develops fully, until

he holds Jekyll his hostage and destroys him. The strength of virtue and respectability

seems pale and weak before the devastating effect of evil. Which aspect of Dr. Jekyll’s

behaviour, lived by his double, which caused him guilt and shame, should have remained

hidden? This is how he describes it:

[...] The worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has

made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my

imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave

countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures

[...] (Stevenson, 2000: 55).

Many critics interpret Dr. Jekyll’s nocturnal “pleasures” as homosexual practices. Elaine

Showalter, in Sexual Anarchy, claims that “[Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde] can most

persuasively be read as a fable of fin-de-siècle homosexual panic, the discovery and

resistance of the homosexual self” (Showalter, 1995: 107). Among the many reasons put

forward for her interpretation, she includes the fact that the characters are all middle-aged

bachelors who have no relationship with women except as servants; their innermost

feelings are only shared among themselves; no woman’s name is mentioned in the book,

and no romance is even suggested. Furthermore, Showalter adds: “The agitation and

anxiety felt by the bachelor friends of Jekyll’s circle reflects their mutual, if tacit and

unspoken, understanding of Jekyll’s ‘strange preference’ for Edward Hyde” (Showalter,

1995: 111). At the beginning, Jekyll’s friends think he is supporting Hyde. They see that

their rich friend Henry Jekyll includes in his will a rough young man, who frequents his

home freely, receives expensive gifts from Jekyll for his Soho flat, gives orders to the

servants, and cashes large cheques signed by Jekyll. At a certain moment they think that the

doctor is being blackmailed by his young friend. Enfield refers to Jekyll’s house as the

“Blackmail House”. Showalter argues that “For contemporary readers of Stevenson’s

novel, [...], the term ‘blackmail’ would have immediately suggested homosexual liasons

(Showalter, 1995: 112).

Evidently, Stevenson is subtle in the treatment of the theme, as we are in the

Victorian age with its rigid morality and any transgression of moral order, mainly sexual,

would be extremely shocking to the mentality of the time. Hyde’s description, always

associated with deformity and degenerescence, reflects the repulsion and horror felt by the

characters when they approached him. Jekyll justifies these horrible feelings with the

following comment: “... none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of

the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are

commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was

pure evil” (Stevenson, 2000: 59). Such being made out of “pure evil”, the abject monster

that inhabits the human, that causes repulsion and horror, must be annihilated. At the end of

the tale, Jekyll dies by his own hands, and Hyde with him, as should occur to the

transgressive hero of the time. It should have been unacceptable to Victorian tastes if Jekyll

survived to continue his dissolute life.

Another emblematic story of double produced in the Victorian age is The Picture of

Dorian Gray (1891), by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). On contemplating his picture, Dorian

becomes aware of his beauty and utters a wish, in a Faustian way, that the painting could

bear the burden of his age, passions and sins, allowing him to stay forever young. Dorian

converts himself into his effigy, an object of self worshiping that escapes aging, whereas

the portrait becomes the emblem of his inner self, the image of his conscience. He lives a

life devoted to acquiring new experiences and sensations with no regard for conventional

standards of morality or the consequences of his actions. As time elapses, the figure in the

painting ages and decays in Dorian’s place, growing increasingly hideous. A time comes

when he can no longer bear the burden of his “portrait-conscience”, and he resolves to

destroy it. He picks up a knife and stabs the picture, thus fatally wounding himself. In both

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray, the protagonists explicitly claim

that their doubles are reflexions of their evil inner selves, being constituent parts of their

personalities made real, materialised. This is corroborated at the end of both stories, when

they attempt to destroy their doubles but end up killing themselves.

This intimate and parasitic relationship between the double and its self can also be

found between the vampire and its victims. To start with, there is an evident Doppelgänger

process in the transformation of victim into vampire. There must be a natural propensity for

such a transformation of the subject into his vampiric double, otherwise a mere bite would

not be able to trigger it. It is also a life-and-death connection, in which the undead depends

on the human blood to survive. Without the human, his counterpart, he has no life of his

own, for he must stick to his host to feed on his blood in order to remain alive. One more

reason to regard the vampire as double is his identification with the devil in literature, a

figure who, over the course of time, has been progressively internalised as an evil force in

the human being, a manifestation of unconscious desire. Just like Mr Hyde and the portrait

of Dorian are materialisations of the evil in their respective counterparts, Lord Ruthven, in

Polidori’s “The Vampyre” represents the dark side of Aubrey, his personal hell. Ruthven is

described as an evil, destructive force that ravages everything in his way. Even after

learning from his guardians about Ruthven’s degraded and vicious character, and being

able to confirm it personally on several occasions, Aubrey is unable to keep Ruthven away

very long. They separate for a while, but after Ianthe’s attack by the vampire, Aubrey gets

ill and, surprisingly enough, accepts Ruthven to nurse him back to health. As Twitchell

appropriately remarks referring to this episode, “The victim, like the moth to the flame,

seems pathetically drawn to the source of his destruction” (Twitchell, 1997: 110). Even

after recovering, Aubrey is powerless to send Ruthven away and finally Ruthven binds the

reluctant Aubrey with his oath. As the vampire is not restricted to one victim, he can be

considered a collective Doppelgänger. It was Ruthven’s strange otherness, as “The

Vampyre” renders explicit, that attracted members of society to him. As the narrator

comments, “His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house” (Polidori, 1998: 3;

my italics). The well-known incapacity of a vampire to enter a house uninvited could be

taken metaphorically to mean that it is the attraction of the self to his double the sole

responsible for his own doom, that is, it is one’s identification with one’s dark side that

leads to the destruction of the self. Aubrey’s confrontation with his double ultimately leads

to his death.

In Stoker’s Dracula, the self and its double are also clearly represented through Jonathan

Harker and Dracula. Harker is shocked when he sees the Count slither down the side of the

castle, wearing his [Harker’s] clothes and carrying a bag on his shoulder. Harker realises

Dracula’s scheme of blaming him for his evil deeds when he says, “[Dracula] will allow

others to see me, as they think, so that he may both leave evidence that I have been seen in

the towns or villages posting my own letters, and that any wickedness which he may do

shall by the local people be attributed to me” (Stoker, 2002: 67). His suspicions are

confirmed when, soon afterwards, a woman sees his face at the window and identifies him

as the vampire, by shouting, “Monster, give me my child!” (Stoker, 2002: 68). The self and

the Other are here, once more, metaphorically recognized as one.

Although both Stevenson and Wilde assert human nature as possessing two aspects,

as shown through Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian and his portrait, they hint at the possibility of

multiple personalities. As Jekyll suggests, “[...] I hazard the guess that man will be

ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens”

(Stevenson, 2000: 56). The duality of human nature being probably a new, shocking and

frightening concept to the Victorian reader, multiplicity should have been even more so. In

decadent Gothic, this multiplicity appears through the representation of metamorphic

bodies, classified by Kelly Hurley in her essay “British Gothic fiction, 1885 – 1930”, as

“abhuman”. She explains that the abhuman being retains vestiges of human identity but has

become, or is in the process of becoming, “some half-human other ––– wolfish, or simian,

or tentacled, or fungoid, perhaps simply ‘unspeakable’ in its gross changeful corporeality”,

which, still according to Hurley, “confounds one’s ability to make sense of the world”

(Hurley, 2002: 190).

Besides being the Other, and so a heterogeneous double, having Harker as his

counterpart in the first part of the novel, Dracula can also be categorised as abhuman, in

that he owns a fluid body capable of metamorphosing into a multiplicity of forms, such as a

bat, a wolf or even dust. He can present himself as an ancient warrior, a Transylvanian

aristocrat, or a young English gentleman. These disturbing metamorphic bodies, difficult to

be categorised, which “confound one’s ability to make sense of the world” is what Julia

Kristeva calls abject bodies, whose concept will be developed in the next section.

4. The abject body of the Other

Despite feeling his conscience tortured by repentance and guilt, Jekyll felt “a leap of

welcome” before the image of Hyde in the mirror, “exulting in the freshness of these

sensations” (Stevenson, 2000: 58), with the possibility of seeing himself free to give vent to

his dark side. To some, Jekyll’s attraction to the freedom from restraint that Hyde enjoys

mirrors Victorian England’s secret attraction to allegedly savage non-Western cultures,

even as Europe claimed superiority over them. As the western world came in contact with

other peoples and ways of life, it found aspects of these cultures within itself, open

sensuality being one of them, and both desired and feared to indulge them. In fact, society’s

repression of its darker side only increased the fascination.

Julia Kristeva, in her essay Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, sheds some

more light on the process involved in the feeling of repulsion and attraction that we

experience before what she classifies as abjection. Kristeva makes the following comment

on abjection:

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed

against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected

beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite

close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire,

which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside;

sickened, it rejects. [...]. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm,

that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned.

Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion

places the one haunted by it literally beside himself (Kristeva, 1982: 1).

Abjection has to do, then, with a repulsive reaction (horror, spasms, vomiting) to a

threat. What sort of threat? Kristeva goes on to say that abjection is that which “disturbs

identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva, 1982: 4).

The abject disturbs the “I”’s sense of borders and boundaries by blurring the distinction

between what is self and what is not-self, or between self and other; abjection exists in the

liminal space between outside and inside. As Kristeva says, the abject infests reality from

beyond imaginary limits and finishes by devouring the self. The ambiguity of abjection is

partly strange and partly real, and because it so disturbs the self’s sense of order, it destroys

the self. To Kristeva, abjection is, thus, a safeguard of our identity. It is an attempt to

preserve a coherent and independent identity to ourselves and others against the

inconsistencies of the “in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva, 1982: 4) in

our beings, which calls us back to our primal chaos in which we found ourselves before our

entrance into language and symbolic order. This erasing of boundaries depends on a fear of

a return, for something that has been rejected (abjectus= discarded, thrown off) can well

return from “beyond the scope of the possible”. To some extent, this relates to Freud’s

notion of the uncanny. The uncanny is anything we experience in adulthood that reminds us

of earlier psychic stages, of aspects of our unconscious life, or of the primitive experience

of the human species, and which arouses dread and horror. The feeling of uncanniness is,

therefore, derived not from something external but ––– on the contrary ––– from something

strangely familiar to us which becomes unfamiliar through a process of repression.

Kristeva’s abjection corresponds, then, to what Freud calls “the return of the repressed”, a

return of something which has always been in the unconscious and whose sudden

appearance evokes fear and horror. In both the uncanny and the abject there is a blurring of

boundaries between the self and the other, since the other becomes a version of the self

returned in the form of hostility. Kristeva, however, differentiates the uncanny from the

abject by claiming that, besides provoking a more violent reaction, there is nothing familiar

in the latter, “not even the shadow of a memory”, (Kristeva, 1982: 5). According to

Kristeva, abjection is a remembrance of the pre-objectal stage, a period in which one is not

aware of the self because there are no objects to compare oneself to and there is no

language to differentiate anything. The abject, then, marks the moment when the subject

became detached from the mother in order to form a separate ego.

As instances of abjection, Kristeva mentions the inexplicable revulsion experienced

at the prospect of ingesting certain kinds of food, like the skin which forms on milk. The

abject is also related to something rejected like filth, waste, bodily fluids, the dead body,

among other things. Kristeva discusses the effects of viewing a corpse upon the “I” or self.

The corpse, as the abject, “is a border that has encroached upon everything” (Kristeva,

1982: 3), because it comes from the other side (death) of the limit (between death and life)

which allows the “I” to live. The corpse renders literal the fall (since corpse or cadaver =

cadere, to fall), or breakdown, of the distinction between the subject and the object that is

crucial for the establishment of identity and for our entrance into the symbolic order. When

we experience the trauma of seeing a human corpse we are confronted with our own

eventual death made palpably real. Kristeva associates the abject with the irruption of the

real into our lives.

Abjection is paradoxical in that it has capacity to both disgust and seduce the self. A

pole of attraction and repulsion characterises the relationship between the self and the

abject. Abjection is also associated with what Kristeva calls jouissance. Despite our

repulsive reaction against the abject, we are continually and repeatedly drawn to it. The

feeling of jouissance, it seems, is connected to the possibility the abject offers of sending us

back to the primary bond when we were completely taken care of, the moment before “the

immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to

be [...]” (Kristeva, 1982: 10). This powerful fascination of the abject, its capacity to seduce,

may be responsible for the subject’s victimisation. This submission, however, according to

Kristeva, will never be dissociated from repugnance. Pleasure and danger are inseparable

here.

Kristeva argues that all abjection is in fact abjection of the self. All characteristics of

and reactions to the abject above mentioned remain true for abjection of the self. Yet,

according to Kristeva, the abject is made more horrible in the abjection of the self. She says

abjection is felt at maximum force when the subject “finds that the impossible constitutes

its very being, that it is none other than abject” (Kristeva, 1982: 5). Thus, when the self

rejects the ambiguous, the unclean, the self actually rejects itself.

The disturbance of identity and order by the abject can be verified on both the

personal and socio-cultural levels. Jerrold E. Hogle, alluding to the process of abjection in

his introduction to Gothic Fiction, observes that:

Whatever threatens us with anything like this betwixt-and-between, even dead-and-

alive, condition, [...] is what we throw off or “abject” into defamiliarized

manifestations, which we henceforth fear and desire because they both threaten to

reengulf us and promise to return us to our primal origins. [...] all that is abjected is

[...] cast off into figure or figures criminalized or condemned by people in authority

and thus subjected to [...] their gaze and the patterns of social normalcy they

enforce” (Hogle, 2002: 7).

Social control labours to reduce, expel, or constrain what is “other” to the dominant

organisation of power within a specific historical period. Whatever menaces to disrupt the

harmony of a given social order has to be kept under constant gaze, “a gaze that observes

all incongruity, all disorder, all deceit [...]” (Foucault, 1997: 481; my translation), as Michel

Foucault puts it in his História da Loucura when describing the surveillance of the insane

in nineteenth-century British asylums. Social deviance was a major concern in late

nineteenth-century England. The social sciences, psychology and sexology united to

classify and type the criminal, the degenerate, the sexually deviant, simultaneously

asserting the normality of those who did not share their “aberrant” tendencies. The

threatening power of deviance is expressed not only in scientific treatises, but also in

literature. McRae reminds us that:

Novels of transgression reached a wide audience in the final decades of the

nineteenth century, and often caused great controversy. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the

D’Ubervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) are cases in point. In these cases

the transgressions were largely sexual and moral (McRae, 2000: ix).

In transgressive novels, the “other” is categorised, identified as monstrous, abjected and

then exterminated. This is the keynote of many a Gothic novel produced in the period. The

Gothic symbolises this process of abjection with great propriety, for it deals with

contradictory creatures which cross boundaries and threaten the integrity of our identities.

The heterogeneous doubles and the monsters in Gothic literature are abject because they are

despicable parts, expelled from ourselves which return, made real, materialised, threatening

to deconstruct the unstable borders of our subjectivity and the fragile walls of category and

culture.

Cohen, in his essay “A cultura dos monstros: sete teses”, claims that the monsters

in general refuse to be classified. They are dangerous hybrids who disturb because their

externally incoherent bodies resist the attempts to include them in any systematic

structuring. The monster is difference materialised. It is the threat that “seems to emanate

from an outside”, as Kristeva puts it, but which, in reality, originates from inside. Some

monsters horrify because they are difficult to categorise. The vampires, in particular, more

than any other monsters, are instances of monstrous beings capable of blurring various sorts

of borders at the same time, which may explain their vast use in literature in periods in

which predominate many contradictions and insecurity. The undead are creatures that since

their beginning in folklore were symbols of alterity, associated with the outcast. People

became vampires not only by being bitten by one, but also by other means. As Barber

observes, “lists of potential revenants tend to contain people who are distinguished

primarily by being different from the people who make the lists” (Barber, 1988: 30).

Among the many instances, he mentions: the godless (or people from a different faith),

suicides, witches, robbers, highwaymen, prostitutes, deceitful and treacherous barmaids,

and other dishonourable people. There were also those who became vampires due to some

physical defect or anomaly, as when a child was born with teeth, or with an extra nipple,

with a lack of cartilage in the nose, or a split lower lip, or with features that were viewed as

bestial. These lists varied according to different societies, but they had one thing in

common: any social peculiarity might be a sign of diabolical inclinations. James Twitchell,

in his book The Living Dead, observes, as regards potential vampires, that “in dark-eyed

culture the blue-eyed were suspect; in dark-haired societies the blond were exiled ...”

(Twitchell, 1997: 9). The concept of evil, usually associated with the other is, therefore,

relative. Rosemary Jackson, in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, agrees that the

concept of evil transforms according to shifts in cultural fears and values when she argues

that “any social structure tends to exclude as ‘evil’ anything radically different from itself

or which threatens it with destruction, and this conceptualization, this naming of difference

as evil, is a significant ideological gesture” (Jackson, 2000: 52).

Chapter 4 - Victorian society in the mirror

Stoker’s Dracula is a compendium of fin-de-siècle phobias

Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves

The haunting face of the vampire is simply a darker version of our own.

Senf, The Vampire in 19

Century English Literature

1. Fears and anxieties in nineteenth-century England

It is usually agreed that the late nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented

anxiety and uncertainty which resulted, to a large extent, from a radical rupture between

opposing tendencies such as religion and science, sexuality and repression, civilisation and

barbarity, the angelic woman and the liberated “New Woman”. Also, as the end of the

century approached, the British became more and more concerned with the state of their

society, mainly in relation to the decadence of urban life and to Britain’s status as the

dominant empire. Punter and Byron point out that:

England was an imperial power in decline, threatened by the rise of such new

players as Germany and The United States, experiencing doubts about the morality

of the imperial mission, and faced with growing unrest in the colonies. At home, the

social and psychological effects of the Industrial Revolution were becoming all too

clear as crime and disease were rife in the overcrowded city slums (Punter and

Byron, 2004: 39).

It is no wonder, then, that the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves

as inevitably progressive. Challenges to religious belief, moral codes, attitudes to class and

sexual roles, along with urban overcrowding, extreme poverty, industrial pollution and

imperial decline, naturally resulted in the erosion of any optimistic belief in progress. The

disintegration of the middle class traditional values and family structures, upon which it had

based its moral superiority, due to the emergence of the liberated “New Woman” and the

sexual “deviant”, contributed to consolidate the feeling of degeneration that pervaded the

last decades of the century. The deterioration of society, it was concluded, was an aftermath

of man’s deterioration. The concern with the future of civilisation begins to give rise, then,

to a new discourse that seemingly contradicts Darwin’s theory of evolution, in that it posits

that humanity is degenerating rather than evolving. It suggests that, increasingly, it is the

“unfit” who are surviving. According to Darwin, human beings are just a species like any

other in the animal kingdom, evolving from primitive forms of life. This uncomfortably

intimate relation between “animal” and “human” undermines the superior status and

privilege the human species had granted itself. Moreover, as was deduced from Darwin’s

theories, the human beings, like any other animal in nature, are under the influence of

mutation and natural selection and, for that reason, are still liable to metamorphose into

another species, degenerate, or even become extinct.

Based on these premisses, Hurley concludes that “[...] natural history (and by

extension human history) progress[es] randomly, moving toward no particular climax, so

that bodies, species, and cultures [are] as likely to move “backwards” as “forwards”,

degenerating into less complex forms (Hurley, 2002: 195). This belief was shared by many

contemporary theorists in social sciences, law, medicine, and related disciplines, who wrote

books and treatises in which they attempted to provide tools for identifying and

categorising criminal degenerate types, the agents of dissolution and decline. Among these

theorists was Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminal anthropologist. In his work L’Uomo

Delinquente (1876), translated into English as Criminal Man, he identifies socially deviant

behaviour, especially violent crime, with biological atavism. Lombroso’s biological

determinism and Social Darwinism assumptions led him to posit that criminality was

inherited and that the criminal had devolved and, therefore, was an evolutionary regression,

sharing certain bestial physical characteristics and behaviours with other animal species.

Once identified, these physical features of the face or the body could be used to estimate

character and personality traits. Riquelme quotes Lombroso’s introduction to Criminal

Man, reprinted as an appendix to Stoker’s Dracula, in which Lombroso defines the

criminal as:

an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive

humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous

jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms,

extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages,

and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness,

love of orgies, and irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only

to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its

blood (Riquelme, 2002: 388).

Another prominent figure in the period was the Hungarian social theorist Max

Nordau. His major work, Degeneration (1895), focuses on the decline of civilisation and

what has created this degeneration. He identifies the phenomenon of fin de siècle in Europe

as a rejection of the moral boundaries governing the world. Nordau adds to Lombroso’s

concept of the degenerate in that he considers “mental disorder” as important as

physiognomy in identifying the deviant. He believed that civilised man was degenerating

intellectually as well as physically and that the modern era was one of decadence and

confusion. He claims that this is evident in the works produced by the degenerate writers.

Nordau regards mostly contemporary “decadent” art and literature as the originators of

degeneration, in that they instigate and exacerbate nervous disorders within modern city

life. In an excerpt from Degeneration, also included by Riquelme as an appendix to

Stoker’s Dracula, Nordau expresses his apocalyptic view of this process: “Over the earth

the shadows creep with deepening gloom, wrapping all objects in a mysterious dimness, in

which all certainty is destroyed and any guess seems plausible. Forms lose their outlines,

and are dissolved in floating mist” (Riquelme, 2002: 390).

Lombroso describes human degenerates who display the physical characteristics to

be found in monkeys, dogs, reptiles, and birds of prey, to name but a few. These beings

occupying the space between such oppositions as human and beast, civilised and primitive,

male and female, abound in the Gothic of the time. Mr. Hyde, in Stevenson’s The Strange

Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is painted as animalistic ––– he is hairy and ugly; he

conducts himself according to instinct rather than reason. Mr. Enfield cannot find the right

words to describe this liminal body, situated between human and beast: “He is not easy to

describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; [...] He must be deformed

somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point”

(Stevenson, 2000: 8). In Dracula, those contemporary fears of degeneration can also be

clearly noticed. Count Dracula is portrayed with animal traits, and so a degenerate type: he

has protruding teeth, pointed ears, and a hairy hand, which categorises him as a deviation

from the norm. Is he a beast or a human being, or both?

Stoker clearly draws on Lombroso and Max Nordau when he has Van Helsing and

his group talk about the vampire in ways that identify this outsider from Transylvania as an

example of the criminally degenerate. Dr. Seward records in his diary Mina Harker’s

conclusion about Dracula: “The Count is a criminal and of the criminal type. Nordau and

Lombroso would so classify him, and quâ criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind”

(Stoker, 2002: 336). The three female vampires in Castle Dracula and Lucy, after being

infected, are also shown as degenerate to the level of the animal. The fair female vampire,

about to bite Jonathan’s neck, “[...] lick[s] her lips like an animal” (Stoker, 2002: 61,62).

Lucy also becomes a disturbing body. She is identified as an animal when she growls over

her child prey “[...] as a dog growls over a bone” (Stoker, 2002: 219). On another occasion,

Van Helsing and his men decide to go to the cemetery where Lucy was buried to wait for

her to return from a night hunt. The four men hide among some trees near the tomb and

begin waiting. Soon, the men see a ghostly white figure moving through the cemetery. As it

nears them, it becomes clear that the creature is, indeed, Lucy. Dr. Seward writes down in

his diary later on: “Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to

adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness. [...] When Lucy ––

– I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape ––– saw us she drew

back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares” (Stoker, 2002: 218).

This “strong feeling of deformity” Dr. Jekyll’s metamorphosed body evokes in Mr. Enfield

and Dr. Seward’s difficulty in finding the right words to identify Lucy, calling her a

“thing”, denote the limitation of our binary system of classification in dealing with what is

liminal.

Another strong contemporary fear reflected in Dracula is related to racial mingling.

Harker’s concern with the occupation of his country by Dracula’s degenerate race is

expressed through a reaction of horror:

This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where perhaps, for centuries

to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create

a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. The very

thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a

monster (Stoker, 2002: 74).

This idea of Dracula spreading “an ever-widening circle of semi-demons” throughout

London, reflects, according to Showalter, the fin de siècle “fears [...] of racial mingling,

crossbreeding, and intermarriage [...]” (Showalter, 1995: 5). This fear of hybridity as a

cause of degeneracy of a race reflects one of the positions in vogue in the nineteenth

century summarised by Robert Young in his Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture

and Race, in which hybridity is defined as “that miscigenation [which] produces a mongrel

group that makes up a ‘raceless chaos’, merely a corruption of the originals, degenerate and

degraded, threatening to subvert the vigour and virtue of the pure races with which they

come into contact” (Young, 1995: 18).

Fear of the return of aristocracy is also present in the nineteenth century. According

to Punter, “the vampire in British culture, in Polidori, in Bram Stoker and elsewhere, is a

fundamentally antibourgeois figure” (Punter, 1996: 104). Part of Ruthven’s power of

seduction, in Polidori’s “The Vampyre”, comes from the fact that he is an aristocrat. Punter

argues that he “exercised over his victims [...] a kind of droit de seigneur, that kind of

absolute sexual privilege which is concomitant of absolute power, and which is at the same

time a predictable object of middle-class fantasies” (Punter, 1996: 104). At the root of that

feeling of attraction and repulsion ––– a condition of abjection ––– exerted by Lord

Ruthven over the English society, lies his status as an aristocrat. Although the power of

aristocracy had diminished greatly by the early nineteenth century, the middle class feared

its return. In Stoker’s Dracula, Harker expresses, early in the novel, one of the central

concerns of the Victorian era when he notes that “unless my senses deceive me, the old

centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (Stoker,

2002: 60). As a tyrannical aristocrat, coming from an alien world, regarded by the narrators

as violent and primitive, and seeking to preserve the survival of his house, Dracula is a

threat to the security of the bourgeois family in England. As an undesirable immigrant, he

also becomes a cultural threat.

The theory of degeneration was also supported by the German sexologist Richard

von Krafft-Ebing, who wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a famous study of sexual

perversity in which he attempts to catalogue and type all known forms of sexual deviance.

It is usually agreed that Psychopathia was an important part of the scientific community’s

efforts to establish authority over matters of sexuality, an effort to “cure” and control,

establishing a heterosexual status quo by rejecting anyone who did not subscribe to

bourgeois values of marriage and reproduction. Dracula was written in a period when the

categories of “masculine” and “feminine” were being challenged and redefined.

Consequently, it was a period in which conservative groups sought to reestablish the old

norms. The independence of the “New Woman”, or fin-de-siècle feminist, threatened the

status quo, raising questions about the compatibility of her maternal functions, intellectual

development, and social and sexual emancipation. Fear of deviant sexuality also pervaded

English society. Hurly observes that:

During the nineteenth century deviance from sexual norms was identified as both a

symptom and a cause of social degeneration, so that by posing a challenge to

traditional gender roles, liminal subjects like the homosexual [...] were seen as

causes of social unrest and potential threats to national health (Hurley, 2000: 199).

The horror of the “deviant” sexual identity was also stigmatised in the figure of the

vampire. Count Dracula’s effeminate appearance and behaviour (his red lips, long and

pointed nails, and his domestic skills ––– characteristics associated with women) would

suggest sexual deviance in a society concerned with policing gender boundary-crossing. As

sexuality is regarded as one of the main issues related to vampirism, these last two

threateningly liminal subjects ––– the liberated New Woman and the sexual deviant –––

will be further developed in the next sections.

1.1. The liberated “New Woman”

In order to understand the fear and anxiety caused by the “New Woman” in late

nineteenth-century England, it is necessary to give a brief overview of the condition of the

middle class woman in the Victorian age.

Throughout the nineteenth century, great changes could be observed in the patterns

of life of English women due to the effects of industrialisation. The separation between the

home and the workplace, previously amalgamated in the so-called domestic industry,

effected a drastic change in the feminine position. This separation was responsible in large

measure for excluding women from the public world of work and citizenship, shutting them

up in a private domestic sphere, which, according to Eric Hobsbawm in A era dos impérios,

“aggravated their traditional inferiority in relation to men through this new economic

dependency” (Hobsbawm, 2003: 278; my translation). Jane Lewis, an expert in feminine

history, cited by Carol Senf, claims that “changes in women’s material condition –––

especially the separation of the home and the workplace ––– were largely responsible for

all the other changes that narrowed women’s sphere of influence and made her a virtual

prisoner [...] within her own home” (Senf, 1988: 157). This pattern of sexual-economic

division ended up imposing on women the role of domestic management as her main

function. As head of the family and its principal provider, the husband should earn enough

not to require any contribution to produce family income. However, this was not always the

case. If wife and children had to work, their earnings were considered to be only

complementary, which reinforced, still according to Hobsbawm, the traditional belief that

women’s work was inferior and badly paid. After all, women should earn less, since she

was not responsible for the family income. Marriage constituted the expected pattern of life

for most women, as the woman who announced her intention of remaining single would

attract social disapproval and pity. Besides, the jobs offered to women were badly paid.

Anthony Burgess observes, in his English Literature, that the Victorian age:

was an age of conventional morality, of large families with the father as a godlike

head, and the mother as a submissive creature like Milton’s Eve. The strict morality,

the holiness of family life, owed a good deal to the example of Queen Victoria

herself, and her indirect influence over literature, as well as social life, was

considerable (Burgess, 2000: 181).

On returning from the cruel and competitive world of work, the middle-class man

sought refuge in his home, which became his sanctuary. The Victorian woman’s role was to

guard morality and respectability. The inferior position of the wife in relation to her

husband was ratified by the traditional sanctions of religion, law and medicine. Patricia

Branca, in Silent Sisterhood, argues that:

Among the Victorian woman’s legal disabilities was the fact that she could not give

testimony in court, nor sue in court without her husband’s name [...]. A divorce was

very costly and only obtainable through an Act of Parliament. Adultery was the only

cause needed for a divorce when sought by a husband but a wife had to prove an

additional charge ––– either cruelty, desertion, bigamy, incest, rape, sodomy, or

bestiality. A woman had no legal right to her children (Branca, 1985: 7,8).

Moreover, married women were not allowed to own property or to sign contracts, which

excluded them from the business world.

In Victorian England, women’s sexual behaviour was dictated by society’s

extremely rigid expectations. A normal woman, it was believed, was not capable of sexual

feeling. Medical treatises corroborated such belief. Goldfarb, in his Sexual Repressions in

Victorian Literature, quotes Dr. William Acton, a Victorian specialist in sexual matters, as

claiming: “As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for

herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him; and, but for the desire of

maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions” (Goldfarb, 1970: 39). The

image of the asexual and passive Victorian woman was thus constructed with the

endorsement of law, science and the approval of society as a whole. Puritan mentality was

interested in moulding an angelic image of woman. Goldfarb claims that “The Victorians

wanted desperately to believe that their wives and mothers were sexually pure and so they

placed women on a towering pedestal the better to idolize them” (Godfarb, 1970: 41). Thus,

in direct contradiction with the socially depreciated woman, the Victorian woman became

the living image of sexual sanctions. This role, adds Goldfarb, “stabilized the Victorian

family, which was the single most important unit in preserving the order of nineteenth

century England” (Goldfarb, 1970: 41).

During the Victorian age, however, opportunities were opened to women due to

various factors. Hobsbawm enumerates some of them. The rise of a service industry, for

instance, provided women with a greater variety of occupations, whereas the ascent of the

consumer economy rendered them the main goal of the capitalist market. The rise of the

workers’ and socialist movements also motivated women in their search for freedom. The

socialists promised a complete transformation of society, which would lead to a shift in the

old patterns of relationships between the sexes, regarded as a by-product of capitalism. In

addition, the great expansion of secondary and higher education for girls generated new

opportunities of professional careers in education. Other promising options included the

new journalism, politics, and left-wing public campaigns.

It was along this still oppressive conjuncture, Hobsbawm reminds us, that the

feminine emancipation began, in a modest way, strong enough, though, to produce a new

species, the “New Woman”, about whom male sex observers theorised and debated and

who was the protagonist of the so-called “progressive” writers. With new opportunities for

work, education, and mobility, New Women realised that there were alternatives to

marriage and, for that reason, began to criticise society’s insistence on marriage as the only

option for a woman to lead a fulfilling life. New Women generated intense hostility and

fear, since their independence threatened the status quo, raising questions about the

compatibility of their maternal functions, intellectual development, and social

emancipation. The crucial factor in the danger represented by the New Woman was,

inevitably, sex. Senf points out that:

When it comes to sex, the New Woman was more frank and open than her

predecessors. She felt free to initiate sexual relationships, to explore alternatives to

marriage and motherhood, and to discuss intimate matters such as venereal disease

and contraception (Senf, 1988: 62).

Showalter observes that “as women sought opportunities for self-development

outside of marriage, medicine and science warned that such ambitions would lead to

sickness, freakishness, sterility, and racial degeneration” (Showalter, 1995: 39). Doctors,

journalists and politicians united to condemn the New Woman and to celebrate the

traditional female role. In England, according to Showalter, doctors argued that “New

Woman was dangerous to society because her obsession with developing her brain starved

the uterus; even if she should wish to marry, she would be unable to reproduce” (Showalter,

1995: 40). Dr. William Withers Moore, in his speech to the British Medical Association in

1886, warned, adds Showalter, that educated women would become “more or less sexless”,

and the human race would fail to produce geniuses “for want of a mother” (Showalter,

1995: 40).

These arguments were based on the idea that social differences between men and

women were caused by their biological differences. In other words, the social roles

attributed to the sexes were biologically determined. For well-known nineteenth-century

biologists and researchers such as W. K. Brooks, Patrick Gueddes and J. Arthur Thomson,

cited by Toril Moi in her What is a Woman? And Other Essays, the behavioural

characteristics of men and women reflect their sexual characteristics already imprinted on

their sexual cells when they are born. Studying the ovum and the sperm cell, Gueddes and

Thomson conclude that “males are more active, energetic, eager, passionate, and variable;

the females more passive, conservative, sluggish, and stable” (Moi, 19999: 18). This

essentialist and heterosexist view leads them to conclude that the social behaviour of males

and females, such as the one prescribed by the patriarchal Victorian society, is an

expression of nature. Should they be changed, they would cause social disruption.

Among the many differences described between male and female was the

intellectual superiority of men. Moi cites Brooks as claiming that:

Men’s brains enable them to grasp the unknown: discoveries, science, the highest

artistic and philosophical insights are reserved for them. Women’s brains can deal

with the known, the ordinary, and the everyday, keep track of traditions and social

customs; in short, take care of everything that requires ‘rational action without

reflection’. Women preserve the old, men discover the new; ‘the ovum is

conservative, the male cell progressive’ (Moi, 1999: 18).

As can be noticed, there was a clear attempt on the part of biological determinist scientists

and moral customs supporters in the last decades of the nineteenth century to dictate social

policy concerning women, with the purpose of keeping their lives under control.

The emancipation of women, to many, could mean the extinction of the nuclear

family, foreboding degeneration and chaos for the human race. Dracula expresses these

contemporary anxieties in relation to the New Woman. Sos Eltis, in her essay entitled

“Corruption of the Blood and Degeneration of the Race: Dracula and Policing the Borders

of Gender”, argues that Bram Stoker “deliberately located the gothic horror of Dracula in

this late-nineteenth-century world of [...] gender instability and proliferating discourses”

(Eltis, 2002: 451) about sexuality. Dracula is primarily a sexual threat. He is dangerous

because of his influence on women. Both Lucy and Mina are chaste, pure, innocent as to

the evils of the world, and devoted to their respective lovers. Dracula, however, threatens to

transform the two women into their opposites, into women known for their voluptuousness

and unrestrained sexual desire. Senf contends that:

Seducing them [women] to his way of life, he causes them to abandon passivity and

to become sexually aggressive and demanding. This altered behaviour is perceived

by the other characters as a defiance of religious tenets, social custom, and

traditional masculine authority (Senf, 1988: 60).

It is only obvious that the sexually liberated woman would hesitate less than the

traditional woman before Dracula’s sexuality, which would generate greater insecurity in

the masculine world. The three beautiful vampires Harker encounters in Dracula’s castle, as

monstrous embodiments of the New Woman, are both his dream and his nightmare. As a

matter of fact, they embody both the nightmare and the dream of the Victorian male

imagination in general. The women vampires represent what the Victorian ideal stipulates

women should not be ––– voluptuous and sexually aggressive ––– thus making their beauty

both a promise of sexual fulfilment and a curse. Jonathan Harker describes his ambiguous

feelings when, lying on the sofa, he notices the presence of three young women in the

room, and watches them come close:

There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the

same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they

would kiss me with those red lips. [...] I lay quiet, looking out under my eyelashes in

an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I

could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-

sweet, [...], but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one

smells in blood. [...]. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both

thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like

an animal, [...]. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstacy and waited ––– waited

with beating heart (Stoker, 2002: 61,62).

Harker feels a “deadly fear” and a “burning desire” before the voluptuousness and sexual

aggressiveness of the female vampires. Kristeva describes these paradoxical feelings of

attraction and repulsion as constituents of abjection. Harker is confronted with ambiguity:

women with essentially masculine behaviour. This unacceptable other, transgressing gender

roles, which Harker was assuming were fixed in place according to the societal boundaries

to which he adheres, threatens to blur the distinctions between masculine and feminine, in

this way, jeopardising the integrity of his own identity. Through the use of oxymora

(agony/anticipation; sweet/bitter; thrilling/repulsive; etc.) Harker describes his

contradictory feelings. In this internal struggle, desire overcomes fear and Harker, as a

victim of abjection, yields passively to the lust of the vampires. When the Count interferes,

furiously dismissing the three vampires, he frustrates the consummation of Harker’s

expectations, his “languorous ecstacy”. Davenport-Hines compares Harker’s moment of

erotic liberation in the Balkans to “the joys of a naughty spree” (Davenport-Hines, 1999:

258). Away from the repressed Victorian society, Harker experiences, though in a limited

way, the pleasures ––– and insecurities ––– of the instability and precariousness of his

identity. The three vampire-women’s “masculine” sexual assault threatens to undermine the

foundations of a male-dominated society by compromising men’s ability to reason and

maintain control. Thus, the sexually aggressive women in the novel must be destroyed.

The New Woman also generated social concern with the destiny of the children,

since her behaviour would allegedly cause a disruption in the family. Vampirism, then,

represents a threat to the values of domesticity, since the women infected by the vampire

develop not only an exacerbated voluptuousness but also perverted maternal feelings. This

picture would seem even more shocking when, during most of the nineteenth century, it

was widely assumed that the ideal woman was characterised by her natural desire to nurture

and protect children, motherhood being a woman’s highest duties. In direct contradiction to

this assumption, Lucy and the three female vampires in Castle Dracula, instead of

nourishing children, are characterized by their predatory relationship to them. Several

children are lured and assaulted by Lucy in Hampstead, while they play outdoors. Harker is

horrified at realising that the three vampire women feed on babies. He describes the scene:

She [one of the women vampires] pointed to the bag which he [Dracula] had thrown

upon the floor and which moved as though there were some living thing within it.

[...] If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-

smothered child. [...] as I looked they disappeared, and with them the dreadful bag

(Stoker, 2002: 63).

Arthur Holmwood buries a stake deep in Lucy’s heart in order to kill the demon she

has become and to return her to the state of purity and innocence he so values. The

language with which Stoker describes this violent act is unmistakingly sexual, and the stake

is a symbol for the penis, a reassertion of masculine dominance. Dr. Seward narrates:

Arthur placed the point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its dint in the

white flesh. Then he struck with all his might. The Thing in the coffin writhed; [....]

The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; The sharp white teeth

champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson

foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like the figure of Thor [...] (Stoker,

2002: 223).

It is only appropriate that the blow comes from Lucy’s fiancé, Arthur Holmwood. Lucy is

being punished not only for being a vampire, but also for being available to the vampire’s

seduction, since Dracula only has the power to attack willing victims. As Eltis observes,

Holmwood, as “the embodiment of determined, self-controlled masculinity” restores Lucy:

From ‘the Thing’, devoid of gender or humanity to the ‘sweetness and purity’ of the

woman they recognize. The band of male friends have asserted the proper order of

things, and the nymphomaniac vampire, who threatened to infect her lover and

devour the children of the city, is put back in her box (Eltis, 2002: 456, 457).

After Lucy’s transformation, Van Helsing’s men keep a careful eye on Mina,

worried that they will lose yet another model of Victorian virtue to the dark side. Stoker

attributes to Mina many of the characteristics found in the New Woman: she is

professionally independent (although being a teacher was acceptable for women),

intelligent and endowed with a great capacity for independent action and judgement. Eltis

reminds us that Mina:

extends her skills by learning shorthand and typing, the accomplishments of the

modern professional woman. Mina travels fearlessly across Europe to nurse her

fiancé, and her journal is not intended as a record of her girlish emotions, but rather,

‘an exercise book’, in which she will try to train herself in describing the world as

‘lady journalists do’ (Eltis, 2002: 459).

Despite her practical intelligence, capable of offering a valuable aid to the vampire

hunters (in finding out deductively, for instance, Dracula’s return route to Transylvania),

she poses no threat to the masculine world. Although Mina identifies with some of the

characteristics of the New Woman, she rejects others. She writes down in her diary:

If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with her [Lucy] seeing her only in the drawing room, I

wonder what he would say if he saw her now [asleep]. Some of the “New Women”

writers 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! There’s some consolation in that (Stoker, 2002: 109).

Here, although Mina does not explicitly condemn the New Woman, she seems to be

speculating, with a playful tone, about the next step the New Woman will take in terms of

sexual initiative. She seems to be saying, in a sort of guessing game, that the way things are

going with the New Woman, radical as they seem to be, they will take man’s place in

proposing marriage in future. In another mocking reference, Mina criticises the New

Woman’s lack of appetite, after a large meal she and Lucy have at an inn. Furthermore,

Stoker emphasises Mina’s conformity to the conventional Victorian behaviour when he

makes her choose the traditional roles of marriage and motherhood instead of sexual

liberation. Conforming to the basic Victorian values of her day, mainly the one concerning

feminine sexuality, Mina represents the model of femininity to be accepted. Although we

can observe, on the whole, an unfavourable judgement on the New Woman, and a

celebration of the traditional Victorian woman on the part of Stoker, we cannot fail to

notice that through Mina, he creates a character that defies the “either/or” construct, that is,

the rigid dichotomy that fixes the gender roles, in vogue in his days. Van Helsing

summarises Stoker’s attitude towards the New Woman when he states that Mina’s “great

brain [...] is trained like a man’s brain, but is of sweet woman ...” (Stoker, 2002: 334). Mina

gathers in herself both feminine and masculine qualities, the latter being directly

responsible for her friends’success in capturing and killing Dracula. Some critics seem to

agree that the author of Dracula, unlike the conservative voice of his time, sympathises

with a certain combination of feminine and masculine qualities as a basis for a healthy

future for humanity.

1.2. The vampire and sexual deviance

Besides the New Woman, another threatening subject to cause fear and anxiety in

nineteenth-century England is the homosexual. The “decadent”, a euphemistic term used to

refer to the homosexual is, according to Showalter, the masculine counterpart to the New

Woman. They both challenge the institution of marriage and blur the boundaries between

the sexes. The New Woman and the decadent seem also to transgress class boundaries.

Showalter observes that:

The transgression of class boundaries in their fiction gave rise to great alarm; both

celebrated romantic alliances between the classes, with both men and women

turning to working-class lovers for a passion and tenderness missing in their own

class surroundings (Showalter, 1995: 169).

Societal attitudes towards deviant sexuality have varied over the centuries, from

complete rejection through covert acceptance, to complete normalisation, with different

degrees in between. It is usually agreed that from the 1820’s until the late nineteenth

century, the cult of money, profit, efficacy, connected with the development of bourgeoisie,

imposes a more marked differentiation between the sexes. To men is allotted the task of

making products, to women the duty of “making” children. Production and reproduction

serve thus to differentiate even further the spheres of what is masculine and what is

feminine. Hence, the definitions of what is masculinity and femininity shift drastically

during the nineteenth century. Hurley quotes Janet Oppenheim as claiming that:

‘emotional tenderness’ and sentiment, seen as compatible with masculine activity

and resolution in the earlier nineteenth century, were considered somewhat

effeminate qualities by the century’s end, when ‘physical grace, courage, pluck, and

toughness [were] among the highest qualities of manhood’ (Hurley, 2002: 200;

author’s quotation marks).

At the time of emergent capitalism, then, homosexuality becomes less tolerated and

even outlawed in some cases. In France and other countries adopting the Code Napoleon

(French-based civil law) moral repression prevails, since there is no specific ban on same-

sex relationship. In England and other areas with British-based Common Law systems,

homosexuality is legally repressed. Eighteenth-century friendly tolerance disappears.

Androgyny is from now on repudiated and homosexuality becomes clandestine. Hobsbawm

claims that, by mid-nineteenth century, “all secondary sexual characteristics were

grotesquely emphasised: hair and beard in men, hair, breasts and haunches in women

enlarged to gigantic proportions through artificial stuffing, culs-de-Paris, and so on”

(Hobsbawm, 2004: 327; my translation). This context would bring about important changes

not only in people’s private lives but also in both art and literature. Dominique Fernandez,

in his book entitled L’amour qui ose dire son nom, refers to the disappearance of the

castrati from the bel canto as a result of sexual repression. He points out that:

In music, disappearance of the castrati, […]. Voices can no longer be ambiguous:

they must be distinctly male or female. The last castrato sings in an opera by

Rossini, Aureliano in Palmira, in 1813. […] with Verdi, and later with Wagner, a

new vocal ideal invades the theatres. These two composers create the heroic tenor

and the dramatic soprano voice types, one hyper-virile, the other hyper-feminine,

which did not exist till then. Sex difference, henceforth, is as marked in opera as it is

in life (Fernandez, 2005: 178; my translation).

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, repression changes its face. Science and

law unite to repress sexual deviance. Writing about sexuality proliferates during this period,

shaped by the emergent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology and medicine.

All forms of “unnatural” sexuality (that of children, the insane, homosexuals, and so on) are

investigated and categorised, creating a new specification for the individuals, as part of a

larger project of socialisation and control. At an age in which “science” triumphed,

“objective”, irrefutable arguments were required. The term “homosexuality”, coined by the

Hungarian writer Karoly Benkert, appears in print for the first time in 1869, and enters the

English vocabulary, according to Showalter, when Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis is

translated in the 1890’s. Victorian sexology identifies the so-called decadent as a perverse

aberration and a degenerate. Fernandez argues that in 1882, the French physicians Charcot

and Magnan also describe homosexuality, in an article in the Archives de neurologie, as a

“syndrome du processus fondamental de la dégénérescence héréditaire” (Fernandez, 2005:

185). Michel Foucault, in his História da sexualidade, observes that nineteenth-century

homosexuality is no longer a recurrent practice of sodomy, a prohibited act, but is

incorporated into the individual. There is no more distinction between practice and person.

The homosexual is now a species. As Foucault puts it:

The nineteenth-century homosexual becomes a personage: a past, a history, a

childhood, a character, a life form; he is also morphology, with an indiscreet

anatomy, and, perhaps, a mysterious physiology. Nothing of what he is escapes his

sexuality. It is present in his whole being: underlying all his conducts [...] (Foucault,

2001: 43; my translation).

By categorising stray and unproductive sexuality, providing it with reality and

permanence, and incorporating it into the individual, scientific discourse, according to

Foucault, intended to establish clear borders and labels to better exert power over it.

The construction of boundaries around male homosexuality also had the

endorsement of the law. According to Showalter, “The burgeoning homosexual subculture

that had begun to develop in England in the 1870s and 1880s was both identified and

outlawed by the Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885”

(Showalter, 1995: 14), which made sexual acts between men illegal and punishable by

imprisonment. In 1895, Oscar Wilde, as one of its first victims, was imprisoned after being

convicted in a famous trial of “gross indecency” for his homosexuality.

The vampire motif has been used to explore transgressive sexuality of various kinds,

including male and female homosexuality. According to Fernando M. de Barros, in his

article entitled "Parceiros da noite: gays e vampiros na literatura", there is an obvious

reason for this “literary brotherhood” to exist: both vampires and homosexuals “incarnate a

transgressive sexual practice in relation to the bourgeois ethos, a practice straying from the

scope of the species-perpetuating genitality” (Barros, s.d.: 1; my translation).

The first vampire literary production in England with homosexual overtones is

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816). This poem focuses on the vampiric

relationship between Christabel and Geraldine, the vampire. It became the inspiration for

Carmilla (1872), a novella by Sheridan LeFanu (1814-1873), in which the homoerotic

element is even more conspicuous. Carmilla is an undead Countess who seeks out innocent

victims, entering their houses as a guest before destroying their lives. Invading the

motherless (and, consequently, defenceless) families of the tale, Carmilla awakens

repressed desires and vices in her prey, young women of conservative society. Laura, the

narrator of the story, is a passive and helpless victim. When approached by the vampire in

all her malignant splendours, she succumbs without argument or struggle. Before the abject

body represented by Carmilla, Laura is capable of explaining herself only in terms of

paradoxes. As she herself observes: “I did feel, as she [Carmilla] said, ‘drawn towards her’,

but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of

attraction immensily prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so

indescribably engaging” (Le Fanu, s.d.: 37,38). Along with fear and disgust, Laura

experiences what Kristeva calls jouissance, “a strange tulmutuous excitement that was

pleasurable” (Le Fanu, s.d.: 45), which almost led her to her doom. Laura’s indecisive and

disorientated desires are an expression of the disarrangement of her certainties in relation to

her sexuality as imposed by Victorian patriarchal society.

For being exclusively drawn to members of her own sex, and for violating the

passivity of the female gender role, Carmilla constitutes a threat to the nuclear family, so

central to the progress of the bourgeoisie as a class. Hence, she must be annihilated.

Carmilla meets a most horribly vivid and brutal fate at the hands of the patriarchal figures

in the novella. She is subjected to decapitation and staking, and her body is burned. As

Botting points out, “Laura’s suceptibility to Carmilla’s disturbing charms is finally

interrupted by the reassertion of a male order of meaning and sexual differentiation”

(Botting, 2003: 145).

Despite being cruelly destroyed, Carmilla, according to Ken Gelder in Reading the

Vampire, is portrayed in a somewhat sympathetic light in the tale. Firstly, she is given

voice in the story, which enables her to counter patriarchal ideologies and defend herself

from the accusation of leading an “unnatural” life ––– the conventional Victorian view of

lesbianism. Such a view is exposed through the illness (a result of Carmilla’s attacks) that

begins to contaminate and kill young girls in the village. Carmilla contradicts Laura’s father

when he criticises the peasants’ belief in a supernatural cause for the disease. For her, even

the supernatural is part of nature: “[...] this disease that invades the country”, she says, “is

natural. Nature. All things proceed from Nature ––– don’t they? All things in heaven, in the

earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains? I think so” (Le Fanu, s.d.: 53).

Gelder also reminds us of the lingering “queer” desire in Laura’s mind, long after Carmilla

has been killed. Moreover, he points out that “the story is fluid enough to eroticise same-

sex relations in ways which do not appear unnatural and which do not produce horror or

fear” (Gelder, 1996: 61).

As a matter of fact, female homosexuality was more tolerated than male

homosexuality in the nineteenth century. In England, where the laws against the male

homosexuals were very strict, there was no penalty for the lesbians. Fernandez puts forward

one of the reasons for tolerance towards female homoeroticism when he points out that:

This freedom granted to the woman was but the counterpart of the little account

society made of the “fair sex”. Reduced to nothing but “fair”. Woman-object,

decorative bibelot, insignificant creature, whose actions are of no consequence

whatsoever. Two men sleeping together put in jeopardy the dogma of virility, the

fundamental values of society, of the family, of the mother country. Two women

just amuse themselves, spicing with harmless variation their feminine inconsistency

(Fernandez, 2005: 182, 183; my translation).

Fernandez observes that from 1830 onwards and after the conquest of Algeria,

Africa and the Orient become fashionable in France. Under the pretext of depicting harems

and bains turcs, the so-called “orientalist” painters exploit scenes of erotic intimacy among

women. Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger, Jules Robert Auguste’s Les Amies and Théodore

Chassériau’s Intérieur de harem are cases in point. It is no wonder, then, the possibility of

sympathy the story elicits for Carmilla. The publication of an explicitly homoerotic novella

such as Carmilla and other short stories of lesbian overtones during the course of the

nineteenth century could also be explained by such a distinction between male and female

homoeroticism.

What is consented to women, on account of the inferior status to which they had

been reduced, is however, strictly prohibited to men. Thus, the recurrent presence of overt

lesbianism in nineteenth-century vampiric literature finds no echo in male homosexual

vampiric fiction. The nineteenth-century male vampires ––– from Lord Ruthven to Varney

to Dracula ––– invariably plunge their teeth into female victims. According to queer

criticism, however, many of the tales in this period are pervaded by unquestionable

homoerotic overtones.

While the undead are described as heterosexuals in Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (and

so is Lord Ruthven, for that matter), since they are explicitly mentioned as “feeding upon

the life of a lovely female to prolong [their] existence” (Polidori, 1998: 9; my emphasis),

homosexuality is suggested in the story, although discursively coded. What can be noticed

in this and other homoerotic tales is a queerness at the level of language. “The Vampyre”

presents a relationship between a younger and an older man ––– the former being deeply

attracted to the latter. Young Aubrey is initially attracted by Ruthven’s “singularities” and

“peculiarities”. Mair Rigby observes in “ ‘Prey to Some Cureless Disquiet’ : Polidori’s

Queer Vampyre at the Margins of Romanticism”, that “The protagonist’s ‘coded’ interest in

a mysterious older man echoes the discursive production of ‘homosexuality’” (Rigby,

2004: 4; author’s quotation marks). As Aubrey is eager to get to know Ruthven better, he

decides to go on a so-called Grand Tour of Europe with him, a tour which, according to the

narrator, “[...] for many generations has been thought necessary to enable the young to take

some rapid steps in the career of vice [...]” (Polidori, 1998: 5). Commenting on their trip,

Rigby points out that “Polidori is characteristically vague about the nature of the ‘vice’ to

which Aubrey will be introduced, but during a period in which ‘Greek love’ was a common

euphemism for sex between men, it does not seem surprising that they eventually travel

into Greece” (Rigby, 2004: 5: author’s quotation marks).

During their journey, Aubrey decides to break up with Ruthven and proceed on his

own, since he is now sure of the vicious character of his companion. After Ianthe’s attack

by the vampire, Aubrey gets ill, and Ruthven, knowing about his state of health, comes to

nurse him. Although Aubrey, after recovering, is confused and suspicious when he realises

Ruthven is back by his side, he is thankful for the “tender care [Ruthven] had taken of him

during his illness” (Polidori, 1998: 14). To Rigby, this “close physical proximity implied by

[Ruthven’s] ‘tender care’ further suggests a sexualized relationship” (Rigby, 2004: 6).

Many other instances of encoded homoerotic situations are raised and analysed by

queer theorists concerning Polidori’s “The Vampyre”. Ruthven, however, never bites

Aubrey. As a seducer of women, Lord Ruthven is undoubtedly a danger to heterosexual

order. Nevertheless, he proves equally highly skilled, according to Rigby, in “manipulating

homosocial culture” (Rigby, 2004: 6), exerting power over other men.

Just like “The Vampyre”, Dracula apparently emphasises strict male

heterosexuality, since the Count does not bite Harker, leaving him behind as a feast for his

female vampires, when he leaves for London. Nor does Dracula see any of Lucy

Westenra’s suitors as additional sources of blood; instead, he turns to Mina Murray. His

several confrontations with men are realised only in terms of physical combat. Dracula’s

sexuality presents, however, ambiguity and homoerotic undertones. Among the many

homosexual elements pointed out in Dracula by some queer theorists, a crucial one can be

found in the relations of the Count and Harker. Dracula’s homoerotic urges are

demonstrated by Stoker in his nearly-orgasmic desire for his prisoner’s blood. When

Harker cuts himself shaving, the Count’s eyes “blaze[d] with a sort of demoniac fury”

(Stoker, 2002: 50). This word ––– “demoniac” ––– reflects the Victorian view of

homosexuality as perverted and sinful. Later, Dracula reacts with jealousy to the sexual

advances on Harker of the three vampire women. He intervenes indignantly, “How dare

you touch him, any of you? [...] This man belongs to me! [...] I promise you that when I am

done with him, you shall kiss him at your will” (Stoker, 2002: 62,63). It is interesting to

notice in this passage the relation established between the act of biting and sexual

intercourse, or euphemistically, love. Both Dracula and the three vampires use sexually-

connoted vocabulary to describe vampirism. Dracula promises them to let them “kiss”

Harker at their will. The vampires say, a little earlier, “He is young and strong; there are

kisses for us all” (Stoker, 2002: 61; my emphasis). After Dracula thwarts the fair-haired

vampire’s attempt to bite Harker with the exclamation, “This man belongs to me!”, she

turns to him with the accusation, “You yourself never loved; you never love!”, to which he

replies, “”Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it no so?” (Stoker,

2002: 62). Vampirism, then, is strictly connected to sexual desire. The fact that Dracula

admits he can love, when the pivot of their conversation is Harker, is an indication of

Dracula’s latent homosexuality in this episode. For Gelder, Dracula’s “reply to the women

does not reconcile his sexuality in any way ––– it certainly does not suggest that he was

once their lover, only that they ‘can tell’ that he is (or has been) capable of loving in one

way or another” (Gelder, 1996: 75; author’s emphasis).

As the transgressive figures of Carmilla, Dracula and the three vampires in his

castle do not fit the strict heterosexual norms imposed by nineteenth-century patriarchal

society, they do not have the right to live. “Deviant” sexual identity, as a threat to the

bourgeois family, must be suppressed. Lord Ruthven, in Polidori’s “The Vampyre”,

nevertheless, escapes unscathed, while poor Aubrey meets his death, instead. Unlike Van

Helsing, who had an open mind to believe the supernatural, Aubrey doubted the existence

of vampires and ridiculed the other people’s beliefs on this regard and, in this way, he

would not protect himself and others. His pact of silence with Ruthven put society in

jeopardy. For being connivant with the vampire, who is now free to ruin other people’s

lives, Aubrey received his punishment.

Conclusion

This study has focused on the changes the vampire myth underwent from its

inception in folklore through its appropriation in English Romantic literature to decadent

Gothic in the late nineteenth century. It has demonstrated that since folklore, the undead

were strictly associated with the society from which they emerged. Not only did they vary

in shape but also in behaviour. Moreover, the factors that brought them into existence were

also distinct from culture to culture. They had to do with the fears and prejudices prevalent

in their cultures of origin. Thus, in some cultures, children born with some abnormality or

defect were potential candidates to become vampires; in cultures where brown eyes

predominated, a child born with blue eyes was seen as a potential revenant. People who

were morally different would also be included on the list of potential vampires. As can be

seen, the undead were creatures that since their beginning in folklore were symbols of

alterity, associated with the outcast, serving as a tool of social control for the community

leaders. This study shows that what is evil, usually associated with the “Other”, changes

according to shifts in cultural fears and values. The vampire in folklore, then, was already a

monster of a thousand faces, serving diverse purposes and needs.

The fictional vampires, curiously enough, kept the same pattern as the folkloric

vampires: they served the specific needs of the cultures from whence they came. As this

dissertation has demonstrated, the nineteenth century was a period of great changes in

various fields of knowledge, which brought about insecurity, fears and anxieties. The

vampire’s ambiguous body was a perfect means to express these feelings, since its fluid

shifting shape escapes categorisation, having no singular or stable nature or identity. It is no

wonder then that the undead were a recurrent myth in literary works during this period. To

the vampire could be applied the designation used by Conceição Monteiro, in her book

entitled Sombra Errante, to characterise the governess in nineteenth-century England –––

“a structuring figure”, “a signifier round which various signifieds move” (Monteiro; 2000:

15; my translation).

The vampire in nineteenth-century England was mainly a sexual threat. His

transgressive and ambiguous sexuality was a danger to heterosexual order, a threat to the

values of domesticity. He challenged the institution of marriage and blurred the boundaries

between the sexes. As aristocrats, the vampires menaced the consolidation of capitalism. As

undesirable immigrants (Lord Ruthven was of unknown origin, but Carmilla was from

Styria and Dracula came from Transylvania), they constituted a threat to the English

national identity. In Dracula, contemporary fears of degeneration can be clearly noticed.

Lucy, Dracula and his three companions are shown as degenerate to the level of the animal.

Racial degeneration was also a concern, since the danger of mingling with the immigrants

from the British colonies was ever present.

As all these discussions raised issues related to transgressive behaviour and

hegemonic social norms, it was necessary to examine the mechanisms involved in the

social construction of identity and difference. According to Cultural studies, one identity is

always constructed in relation to another, in relation to what it is not, to the foreigner, to the

“Other”. One term of the binary system of oppositions being the norm, the other is seen as

the “deviant” or “outsider, who is abominated for being different. Any sort of difference

becomes monstrous aberration: political, sexual, racial, cultural, and so on. Difference is

frightening because it reveals the relativity, and so the fragility, of an identity. This whole

process of alterity also works at a psychological level. Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection

proved quite useful in explaining the psychological construction of the Other. According to

Kristeva, the self rejects everything that disturbs its identity, its sense of system and order.

Difference then becomes abject. However, just as in socially constructed identity, the not-

self, the other, is in fact part of the self.

Difference, or social deviance in all its aspects, was a major concern in nineteenth-

century England. The threatening power of deviance was expressed in literature, where the

“Other” was categorised, identified as monstrous, abjected and then exterminated. This

clash between the self and the Other has been dealt with in literature in different ways.

Romanticism and the Gothic fiction used the myth of the double to express it, showing that

the Other ––– the pervert, the sinner, the barbarian, and son on ––– is part of the very self

that vilifies it.

As was observed throughout this research, nineteenth-century English society

projected onto the vampire everything that it disapproved of and abominated, everything

that deviated from what it considered standard normalcy. The undead became a displaced

and distorted version of culturally repressed tendencies, as well as the symbol of the Other,

already identified with those tendencies and labelled monstrous. On discussing the anxieties

and fears generated by the vampire, we are, in fact, exposing or deconstructing the various

patriarchal stereotypes of behaviour and values prevalent in a given society. The study of

the vampire also enabled us to find out that the “Other”, who is different from us, is, in

reality, our double ––– an abject body that, after all, is no more than a reflection of

ourselves. We do not escape unscathed when we approach the vampire. He leads us, as

Jeffrey J. Cohen claims in relation to monsters as a whole, to “re-evaluate our cultural

presuppositions in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and our perception of difference, our

tolerance towards its expression. They ask us why we created them” (Cohen, 2000: 55; my

translation). It is, therefore, an indirect way of getting to know ourselves.

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