The kiss of Vampires: Femme Fatales in the Dracula legend

The text below is the excerpt of the book Dracula (ISBN: 9781644616215), written by Elizabeth Miller, published by Parkstone International.

Not all nineteenth-century literary vampires were male. Once the vampire was rescued from the cemetery and brought into polite society, it became an apt representation of the “femme fatale” in new adaptations of the mythological archetypes of the Sirens, Medusa, the Harpies, Pandora, Delilah, Salome, Eve and Lilith.

The motif of the “femme fatale” had been well established in literature by the British Romantic poets; one need think only, for example, of Coleridge’s “Christabel” and John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” As early as 1836 we find Theophile Gautier’s short story “La Morte Amoureuse” (1836), the story of the female vampire Clarimonde who seduces and takes possession of a young priest. The French poet Baudelaire (1821- 1867) who had a significant influence on the Decadent Movement, included in his Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) a poem entitled “The Vampire’s Metamorphosis ” which celebrated the union of sex and death.

The best known and most influential female vampires in nineteenth-century literature was created by the Irish writer, Sheridan Le Fanu, whose collection of stories – In a Glass Darkly (1872) – contained the tale of Carmilla, the prototypical female vampire. In “Carmilla,” Le Fanu not only adds a strong psychological element absent in the earlier fiction but provides us with British fiction’s first female vampires.

The prototype is clearly Geraldine from Coleridge’s poem “Christabel” about the strange woman with the mysterious past who must be helped over the threshold. The story also draws on eastern European vampire folklore. The vampire is destroyed in the manner prescribed so often: the stake through the heart “in accordance with the ancient practice”; she is decapitated, body and head are burned and the ashes are scattered. “Carmilla ” has much of the vampires lore that we have come to associate with Bram Stoker: the sharply pointed canines, as well as the vampire gliding through cracks, entering in the form of mist, producing a languor, maintaining its existence in sunlight and appearing in the form of a beast. Le Fanu was apparently familiar with the eighteenthcentury reports, as his description of destruction of the Carmilla vampire closely resembles several of the accounts in Calmet’s treatise. What is unique about “Carmilla,” however, is not only that the sexual attraction of victim for vampire is more pronounced, but that Carmilla preys solely on other women. Carmilla is the eternal animal embodied within the female, the bestial counterpart if the virginal ideal. She is Laura’s doppelganger, the dark self which struggles against the restrictions rightfully imposed by the patriarchal world.

As the century progressed, the female literary vampires became more frequently appropriated as an image of the misogynist demonization of women who deviated from the idealized norms of chastity, docility and propriety. In 1896, Arthur Symons (“The Vampire” in Lesbia) makes a clear association between sexually aggressive women and sinful bloodlust: “intolerable woman, where’s the name/For your insane complexity of shame?/Vampire!” The “white bloodless creature of the night” who “may not rest/Till she has sucked a man’s heart from his breast,/And drained his life-blood from him, vein by vein.” The vampires as female became a familiar motif in works of art, especially during the 1890s, in works by Albert Pénot, Edvard Munch, Max Kahn and Philip Burne-Jones.

By the time Bram Stoker started to write Dracula, the vampire was a well-established artistic trope. A number of literary conventions were already in place: the vampire is of an old, aristocratic (and usually foreign) family; the vampire is tall, dark, spectral and dressed in black; the vampire possesses sharp fangs which leave two bite marks on the victim; the vampire is a creature of unusual physical strength; the vampire has a strong seductive power over women; the victim’s response to the vampire is ambivalent, revealing both attraction and repulsion; the vampire has the ability to shape-shift into animal form, to enter as mist, to glide through a crack; and the most effective way to destroy a vampire is to drive a wooden stake through its heart.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the vampire began to take on new metaphorical characteristics, drawn from social and cultural conditioning of late-Victorian England. In the midst of continuing debates over Darwin’s theory of evolution, treatises on physiological traits associated with degeneracy, the age of Decadent art and literature, the age of Oscar Wilde, xenophobic tendencies in the wake of mass immigration from eastern Europe and male anxieties about the “New Woman,” Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, the novel that would define the vampires for the twentieth century and beyond.

In the end, Dracula’s story is one of eternal survival-not just of the vampire himself, but of the powerful themes of fear, seduction, and death that have kept him at the heart of horror for more than a century. His reign as the ultimate vampire will likely continue as long as humanity remains intrigued by the darkness within us all.

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