Sexuality of The Vampire in Gothic literature
The vampire is a figure used repeatedly in Gothic literature, originating from folklore, the typical definition being a ‘reanimated corpse that rises from the grave to suck the blood of living people’.[1] They are seen to be ‘the most sexual of paranormal creatures’,[2] pushing the boundaries of normality as they evoke a sense of freedom by lavishly flouting their sexualities through their incessant feeding. Yet this nature of the vampire is also restrained to an extent in Gothic literature, often as a reflection of the times in which they are written. In order to explore the sexuality of the vampire in Gothic literature, this essay looks at Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a novella published in 1872, Dracula by Bram Stoker, a novel published twenty-six years after Carmilla in 1897, and The Lady of the House of Love by Angela Carter, a short story published a century after in 1979.
The freedom of vampires sexualities in Gothic literature often goes hand in hand with their social class, as ‘the bloodsucking vampire frequently plays an intricate game of manners with his or her victims’.[3] Dracula is a story about an aristocratic, Romanian vampire, Count Dracula, who is looking to implement his vampirism and exploitations of sexuality by moving to England, with the help of solicitor Jonathan Harker. His aristocracy is used as a tool to shift from the alienated vampiric figure of folklore to integrate into society in England, getting close to humanity as he is initially seen ‘as an aberrant human character’.[4] On first impression, Harker states in his journal that Dracula is ‘a tall old man’ but he also notices that there also wasn’t ‘a single speck of colour about him anywhere’ and he ‘stood like a statue’.[5] This shows that Harker recognised Dracula as a human rather than a monster straight away, yet he also noticed his aberrance from his pale complexion and unnatural stance. His aristocratic nature is also clear through his ‘clean shaven face’, his ‘excellent English’ and lavish surroundings of his castle in order to greet Harker appropriately as his guest, as Harker ‘rejoices’ at ‘a well-lit room in which a table was spread for supper’ (Stoker, pp. 22-23). This is Dracula’s first opportunity to use his sense of aristocracy to seek intimacy rather than remaining the alienated vampire of folklore, which were ‘ugly, decaying corpses covered in dirt from the grave’.[6] Dracula therefore becomes the nineteenth-century version of an ‘aristocratic gentlemen with skin like marble’.[7] Dracula converses to Harker of his love of England, stating that he longs “to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London”, “to share its life, its change, its death” (Stoker, p. 27). Dracula uses social class as a means to ‘relocate(s) the narrative to contemporary London’,[8] in which he is then able to play out his monstrous habits of drinking blood by disturbing the ‘quiet femininity and maternal domesticity’[9] that represent Victorian English values through the characters Lucy and Mina, victims of Dracula’s ‘foreign sexuality’.[10]
In Carmilla, her aristocratic nature is used as an advantage as well, as she is offered the guest room and accepted in admirably by Laura and her father; ‘our visitor lay in one of the handsomest rooms in the schloss’.[11] On very first glance of the class advantages surrounding Carmilla, it is clear that she is of nobility, as ‘it seemed to be the traveling carriage of a person of high rank’ which leads to Laura and those around her becoming ‘immediately absorbed’ (Le Fanu, p. 9) by Carmilla’s life, which foreshadows Carmilla’s later absorption of Laura as her health declined as she is bitten by Carmilla in her own home. Carmilla’s mother was seen to be ‘so distinguished and even imposing’ (Le Fanu, p. 10) when she suggests they take Carmilla in as a guest. It is also clear that Laura and her father act differently towards varying social classes, as the slaves are the ones who are dehumanised, described as “ugly, hang-dog looking fellows” who aren’t to be trusted as they might “rob the poor lady” (Le Fanu, p. 13). Carmilla is therefore treated in a completely different manner and immediately trusted, thus able to freely roam using her aristocratic privilege to flout her sexuality through the erotic seduction she presents to Laura and feeding off the women in the village. These instances are just an introductory insight into how both Count Dracula and Carmilla can instigate their way into positions of power and society by using their social class, leading to their exploitations of sexuality. For instance, by working his way to get to England, Dracula is able to seduce and feed off Lucy Westenra, leading to her death when she is discovered with a bare throat, with ‘two little wounds’ which were ‘horribly white and mangled’ (Stoker, p. 157). Likewise, Carmilla’s powerful position allows her to go about her nightly business, quite unnoticed as Laura discusses “the swineherd’s young wife (who) died only a week ago, and she thought something seized her by the throat,” dismissing it for a “plague or fever” (Le Fanu, p. 20).
The result of this nineteenth century, peculiar yet humanlike literary vampire, led to the notion of them also being uncanny creatures, which is ‘that class of the terrifying which leads back to something well known to us’.[12] In Dracula, Harker is unsettled by Dracula’s lamentations of wanting to move to Carfax estate, as he feels that ‘somehow his words and his look did not seem to accord’ (Stoker, p. 31). This shows that whilst Harker is sat having a normal conversation with Dracula, there is an uncanny feeling he experiences in that Dracula’s persona is presented as familiar, yet his uncanny looks, his ‘malignant and saturnine’ (Stoker, p. 31) smile, for instance, creates a sense of uneasiness and fear. In turn, this makes the nineteenth-century vampire even scarier and more dangerous than those of folklore, as they are uncanny creatures of whom ‘ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet it comes to light’[13]. Dracula, therefore, represents nineteenth-century vampires that have shaken off the dirt from their graves, and left behind the old vampire of folklore, using their new powers of social class they have ‘emerged from the twilight of superstition to become literary monsters’[14].
In Carmilla, Laura experiences a feeling of the uncanny when she beholds Carmilla’s face in the guest room, as she states that ‘I saw the very face which had visited me in my childhood at night’ (Le Fanu, p. 14). This immediately creates a sense of the uncanny as Carmilla is recognised, which gives the impression that they are familiar with each other. Yet she is still a ‘beautiful stranger’ (Le Fanu, p. 16), someone whom Laura is immensely drawn to because of their familiarity, yet ‘there was also something of repulsion’ (Le Fanu, p. 16). Laura is, therefore, experiencing the same uncertainty that Harker experiences with Dracula’s humanlike and familiar traits, which are accompanied by a sense of fear, as there is something not quite right about the two characters Carmilla and Dracula; in that they are both vampires, and are not human despite their deceptions. Carmilla could also be seen as Laura’s “double”, ‘a creation dating back to an early mental age’[15] relating to Laura’s first meeting with Carmilla when she was a child. The idea of the double between these two characters takes place in their first conversation. Laura states that she remembers Carmilla’s face from her childhood, in which Carmilla quickly goes on to state a similar experience; “twelve years ago, I saw your face in a dream” (Le Fanu, p. 15). Even their specific visions of this childhood experience are almost identical, in that they were both children, innocently inquisitive of each other. This, therefore, creates a double mirroring effect, the double in this instance comprised of the ‘lustful lesbian vampire Carmilla and passive, obedient Laura’,[16] which becomes increasingly apparent throughout the novella.
Similar to Carmilla’s openly affectionate nature towards Laura, Dracula lets himself loose in England, embarking on a mission of ‘the creation of a race of monstrous women, feminine demons equipped with masculine devices’.[17] The character Lucy Westenra, who is described with great beauty and innocence, ‘Lucy is so sweet and sensitive’ (Stoker, p. 97) is Dracula’s main victim of whom he transforms into a demonic vampire; ‘that thing that was before us’, ‘her eyes blazed with unholy light’ (Stoker, p. 225). Contextually, Lucy’s transformation can be seen as a figure of ‘the sexually aggressive female vampires (which) are representative of the New Woman’.[18] This emerging New Woman rejected typical Victorian values of marriage and repressed sexuality, defying ‘the angel in the house’. For instance, after her transformation, she becomes overtly sexual by stating to Arthur Holmwood, who she is engaged to, that “my arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together” (Stoker, p. 226), deviating from asexual traits of women in the Victorian age. Mina Harker shares similarities with Laura from Dracula also, as they are both victims of the sexual exploitation of vampires and yet their controlled and asexual natures save them from being killed. Carmilla has a similar nature to Lucy, in that she is also overtly sexual towards Laura and poses a threat to those around her. Therefore, whilst the main interloper of the novel, Dracula, takes a more alienated and detached stance, the sexual and exploiting nature of the female vampire is projected through Lucy Westenra and both novels represent fears of female sexuality during a time of the emerging New Woman. Countess Nosferatu in The Lady of the House of Love serves as a critique to these fears of the nineteenth century, as despite her distaste for her vampiric lifestyle, there are still strong undertones of eroticism which lead to her death. The young officer who trespasses in her castle describes her mouth as being ‘extraordinarily fleshy’ with ‘full prominent lips,’ and even likens it to ‘a whore’s mouth’.[19] Therefore, Countess Nosferatu represents a stereotype from the nineteenth-century that results in her infinite entrapment. The rational young officer kills off this stereotype as she falls in love with him, but the Countess has to die along with it as a consequence as she is not able to be human.
The influence of social class in The Lady of the House of Love has much less of a free effect for Countess Nosferatu, rather it lies over her as a constant entrapment to live out her nobility as a vampire, enforced by her ancestors who ‘sometimes peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening’ (Carter, p. 483). This quote shows how controlled she is by her past, the ancestors symbolising the aristocratic vampiric expectation of nineteenth-century Gothic literature which comes from the likes of Dracula and Carmilla. It also alludes to the fact Countess Nosferatu’s appearance is uncanny as the young officer recognises her as being similar to ‘a ventriloquist’s doll’ and an ‘automaton’ (Carter, p. 492). This is also because she is controlled by the expectations put on her by her ancestors, even though it is not what she desires, therefore the Countess mimics societal expectations of the female vampire. The situation Countess Nosferatu is in, and her reluctance for her role, creates a satirised representation of the portrayal of female vampires in ‘conventional vampire fictions’, figures whom usually are seen to ‘connote aggressive female sexuality and excess’.[20] Countess Nosferatu goes against this expectation and does not share the same intense passions that Dracula and Carmilla share, but she is tired of her life and sees it as nothing but an obligation, living out her ‘habitual tormented somnambulism’. When she attacks her prey, it is passionless, and ‘nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition’ (Carter, p. 485). This, therefore, satirises the character of Carmilla, who characterises the ‘conventional vampire’ with the ‘aggressive female sexuality’. Carmilla, unlike Countess Nosferatu, embraces her sexuality passionately, especially in the way she acts with Laura, ‘she used to place her pretty arms about my neck’ and ‘her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses’ (Le Fanu, pp. 18-19). Carmilla was published a century before The Lady of the House of Love, at a time in which ‘writers blamed women for encouraging seduction’,[21] the fin de siècle period at the turn of the nineteenth century which brought about several fears relating to the emergence of the New Woman, a free-spirited woman who was uninterested in marriage and did not conform to Victorian ideals of the angel in the house. Carmilla certainly fits the role of seducer with an excessive sexuality, as she is the interloper who invades Laura’s household and seduces her, Laura being a more passive Victorian woman who is corrupted by Carmilla as the ‘New Woman’. As discussed previously, Carmilla can be seen as Laura’s double, representing her more sexualised self and general sexual side of the woman in Victorian society that was suppressed. The uncanny comes back into place in terms of Laura’s uncomfortable emotions towards Carmilla she had ‘a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence’ (Le Fanu, p. 18). The difference between the nature of both Countess Nosferatu and Carmilla’s personalities shows how the contemporary The Lady of the House of Love reflects upon expectations of female sexuality that was presented in nineteenth-century Gothic literature.
The form of Countess Nosferatu’s tale alludes further to the idea of restraint, as it is a short story, compressing the timeline of the Countess’s life as it ‘focuses on a single character in a single episode, and rather than tracing his (her) development, reveals him (her) at a particular moment’.[22] The Countess’s life is revealed during her monotonous everyday life, ‘wearing an antique bridal gown’ as she ‘counts out the Tarot cards’, creating an immediate Gothic sense of eternal darkness and restraint in her ‘dark, high house’ (Carter, p. 483). This textual format contrasts with Dracula and Carmilla, since they are novels which create ‘a continuum, of necessity, chapter to chapter’.[23] This means that Dracula and Carmilla are given a lot more free roam within the texts so their characters are enabled to have more exploration to implement their vampirism, whereas the short story of The Lady of the House of Love can ‘function exactly in terms of whatever emotion best can serve it’.[24] The emotion that surrounds Countess Nosferatu is one of constant entrapment, as we are instantly plunged into her controlled life in her castle where her ancestors watch over her every move. Furthermore, the young officer is thrust into the story to become the interloper, trespassing into Countess Nosferatu’s castle. He represents rationality and views Countess Nosferatu as a hysterical woman stating that she is ‘so delicate and damned, poor thing’ (Carter, p. 493). The female vampire in this instance is therefore presented as fragile, and the vulnerable victim, as she succumbs to humanity by not killing the officer, yet dies because she is unable to be human as she is cursed, thus ‘the end of exile is the end of being’ (Carter, p. 496).
In conclusion, the freedom of sexuality that vampires represent in Gothic literature shows how it ‘transformed the ethnic vampire into a cosmopolitan citizen of the modern imagination’.[25] However, when looking into contextual factors, the freedom exerted in Dracula and Carmilla was a critique on women in the Victorian age and The Lady of the House of Love furthered this critique into the twentieth century. Therefore, despite the apparent freedom of the aristocratic vampire, the symbolism of their actions caused them to retreat back into a creature that is not to be trusted or admired.
Bibliography
Primary Texts
Carter, Angela, ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. by Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, Carmilla (Whithorn: Anodos Books, 2019)
Stoker, Bram, Dracula (London: Penguin Classics, 1993)
Secondary Sources
Abbott, Stacey, Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World (United States of America: University of Texas Press, 2007)
A. Senf, Carol, The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988)
Baker, David, Green, Stephanie, and Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska, Agnieszka, Hospitality, Rape and Consent in Vampire Popular Culture: Letting the Wrong One In (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
Botting, Fred and Townshend, Dale, Gothic: Nineteenth-century Gothic: at home with the vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 2004)
Filimon, Eliza Claudia, Heterotopia in Angela Carter’s Fiction: Worlds in Collision (Hamburg: Anchor Academic Publishing, 2014)
Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’ in Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, ed. by David Sandner (United States of America: Praeger Publishers, 2004)
George, Sam, and Hughes, Bill, ‘Introduction: From preternatural pastoral to paranormal romance’, In the company of wolves, (2020), Manchester University Press.
G. Fuchs, Rachel, and E. Thompson, Victoria, Women in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Hampshire: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2005)
Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995)
Kistler, Jordan, ‘Rethinking the New Woman in Dracula’, Gothic Studies, 20.1-2 (2020), Manchester University Press.
Krugovoy Silver, Anna, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Melton, J. Gordon and Hornick, Alysa, The Vampire in Folklore, History, Literature, Film and Television (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015)
Pollard, Tom, Loving Vampires: Our Undead Obsession (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2016)
Regan, Sally, The Vampire Book: The legends, the lore, the allure (London: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2009)
Reid, Ian, The short story (London: Methuen, 1977)
Wijkmark, Sofia, ‘Nordic troll Gothic’, Nordic Gothic, (2020), Manchester University Press.
[1] J. Gordon Melton and Alysa Hornick, The Vampire in Folklore, History, Literature, Film and Television (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015) p. 3.
[2] Tom Pollard, Loving Vampires: Our Undead Obsession (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2016) p. 2.
[3] David Baker, Stephanie Green, Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska, Hospitality, Rape and Consent in Vampire Popular Culture: Letting the Wrong One In (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) p. 1.
[4] Carol A. Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988) p. 58.
[5] Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Penguin Classics, 1993) p. 22.
[6] Sally Regan, The Vampire Book: The legends, the lore, the allure (London: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2009) p. 14.
[7] Regan, p. 14.
[8] Stacey Abbott, Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World (United States of America: University of Texas Press, 2007) p. 16.
[9] Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995) p. 89.
[10] Judith Halberstam and Jack Halberstam, p. 89.
[11] Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (Whithorn: Anodos Books, 2019) p. 14.
[12] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, ed. by David Sandner (United States of America: Praeger Publishers, 2004) p. 76.
[13] Fred Botting and Dale Townshend, Gothic: Nineteenth-century Gothic: at home with the vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) p. 184.
[14] Sam George and Bill Hughes, ‘Introduction: From preternatural pastoral to paranormal romance’, In the company of wolves, (2020), (p. 2). Manchester University Press.
[15] Freud, p. 87.
[16] Anna Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 126.
[17] Senf, p. 60.
[18] Jordan Kistler, ‘Rethinking the New Woman in Dracula’, Gothic Studies, 20.1-2 (2020), 244-256 (p. 244). Manchester University Press.
[19] Angela Carter, ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. by Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 483-497 (p. 491).
[20] Eliza Claudia Filimon, Heterotopia in Angela Carter’s Fiction: Worlds in Collision (Hamburg: Anchor Academic Publishing, 2014) p. 124.
[21] Rachel G. Fuchs and Victoria E. Thompson, Women in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Hampshire: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2005) p. 39.
[22] Ian Reid, The short story (London: Methuen, 1977) p. 56.
[23] Reid, p. 63.
[24] Reid, p. 63.
[25] J. Gordon Melton, p. 5.