female vampires essay

Women Vampires and Their Women Authors 1950–2000

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This chapter explores how, in vampire fiction by women from around 1950–2000 and beyond, women vampires are created as an imaginative weathervane for social, personal, and sexual freedoms. While some women writers of vampire fictions reinforce stereotypical representations of male vampires as charismatic romantic figures and women as focused on finding handsome vampire lovers, others embrace the insights offered by the growth of feminist views and activism during the period. They trouble norms of domestic and romantic conformity, some creating vampire women with new sexual energies and freedoms, even dangerous to unsuspecting, more conventional men. Some explore varieties of relationships, including same sex and community based, and simultaneously explore different modes of motherhood. The social, sexual, and relationship diversity of these vampire creations is sometimes at odds with and sometimes a reflection of the lives of their authors.

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Wisker, G. (2023). Women Vampires and Their Women Authors 1950–2000. In: Bacon, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82301-6_22-1

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82301-6_22-1

Received : 25 July 2023

Accepted : 25 July 2023

Published : 22 September 2023

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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Columns > Published on October 12th, 2022

Where Is All the Feminist Vampire Literature?

The word ‘vampire’ conjures images of Lestat, Edward Cullen, and Dracula; men whose cursed nature causes them to commit acts of bloodlust that are at once violent and euphemistically sexual. Sure, there are some powerful female figures in vampire literature and lore as well—there’s the 1872 novella, Carmilla , for instance, which predated Bram Stoker’s Dracula by over two decades. There have also been opportunities for modern vampire novels to catch fire with the public consciousness in books like Octavia Butler’s Fledging and The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, which follows a young woman who becomes a vampire while working in a brothel. They’ve enjoyed attention and critical praise, but it’s arguably difficult to shake the notion of ‘vampire’ as fundamentally masculine.

It would be easy to pass the reason for this off as the vampire myth being rooted so firmly to the archetype of Dracula. What immediately comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘vampire?’ For me, my first association will probably always be Bela Lugosi, and I doubt if I'm alone in that connection. After all, Dracula is the character who popularized vampire fiction to a mass audience and it’s hard to separate his shadow from the rest of the subgenre. And to be perfectly clear, I’m not here to stake Dracula. I gave a passing minute of thought to the gendering of vampires one autumn day and wondered…why? Is there a deeper reason why the most culturally pervasive bloodsuckers seem to be men? 

Escaping chrononormativity

As it turns out, there’s some fascinating analysis written on this topic. “ The Vampire, the Queer, and the Girl: Reflections on the Politics and Ethics of Immortality’s Gendering ” by Kimberly J. Lau dives into the relationship between the vampire and “chrononormativity,” a term used in her essay and other scholarship to define “the hegemonic temporal order that undergirds ‘genealogies of descent and the mundane workings of domestic life’ while also ‘organizing’ individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.’”

In the same vein (haha, vampire pun), immortality interrupts the chrononormativity of the expected life cycle for women as child bearers even more noticeably than their male counterparts. The vampire represents nonreproductive sexuality, and there’s a much larger body of academic work and studies out there examining the notion of a sexual double standard that has long awarded men a greater degree of sexual freedom and enjoyment, possibly making the disruption of chrononormativity an easier pill to swallow for male versus female characters. As Lau points out, some of the earliest English vampire fiction was a Byronic fragment with queer undertones about a young man who became fascinated by an older man while on tour of the Continent; women of the time were frequently restricted by domestic expectations and not allowed the mobility that might lead to such a life-altering encounter. 

The Victorian tale of Carmilla , for instance, concerns the physical relationship between two women at a time when such relationships were completely taboo in the society in which the literature was being circulated. Past analysis of Carmilla by Colleen Damman states that “as a woman, Carmilla can only claim her sexuality after death. Thus, vampirism is the only way she can express her own carnal desires. Besides marriage, becoming a vampire is one of the only ways that female sexuality is licensed in the Victorian era.”

An experience outside of patriarchal authority

So where does this bring us to in the modern day? What does the female vampire mean now? Surely we’ve moved past the Victorian standards of a repressive sexual binary that drew out some of the earliest English language vampire tales? (I’ll let you answer that question for yourself, reader. The overturning of Roe v. Wade leads me to believe that there’s still some tension over the idea of handing the reins of the teleological narrative over to women).

The vampire’s life outside of death represents “an experience that exists outside patriarchal authority,” thus the general unease surrounding feminist vampire literature, which takes the female character outside of reproductive futurism. Lau argues that vampire fiction represents a “double standard that promises an uncontainable queer surplus for male vampires but a constant return to the patriarchal order for female vampires whose legacies grow out of the canonical English-language vampire narrative.” She points out that even when female vampires are coupled with male partners, their inability to bear children represents “a queer heterosexuality—a union eternally resistant to reproduction, always already positioned against reproductive futurism—and this results in their cultural invisibility.”

This could explain some of why the narrative of the Twilight series felt so ineffective; in her quest to become an immortal vampire, the main character, Bella, also rushes to collect a husband and has a half-vampire child, following all of the teleological human goal posts to the letter before then (seemingly) being released into a kind of delayed afterlife. Lau also writes that “the vampire narrative as simultaneously fantasy literature and cultural fantasy exposes the limits of hegemonic life/time and raises questions about what might be possible if we think creatively and expansively about living ‘in excess of the real.’” I love that phrasing, because it brims with possibility for horror as a genre.

This is by no means an expansive discourse on the topic of feminism and vampire literature. Are there vampire stories out there that should be a critical part of this thread of discourse? What would you like to see in new vampire fiction? Let us know in the comments.

Get  Fledgling by Octavia Butler at Bookshop or Amazon

Get  The Gilda Stories   at Bookshop or Amazon

Get Carmilla  at Bookshop or Amazon

About the author

Leah Dearborn is a Boston-based writer with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in international relations from UMass Boston. She started writing for LitReactor in 2013 while paying her way through journalism school and hopping between bookstore jobs (R.I.P. Borders). In the years since, she’s written articles about everything from colonial poisoning plots to city council plans for using owls as pest control. If it’s a little strange, she’s probably interested.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the catalyst for bringing the gothic vampire genre to Teen television. This was later succeeded by the airing of True Blood and The Vampire Diaries with the similar concept of Vampire Teen drama. Additionally when previously studied, Buffy was seen to contain elements of feminism , with it representing female characters as strong-willed. Similarly, such elements are also seen in The Vampire Diaries, hence leading to the examination of this study that looks at the relation of genres and themes to the representation of women in Vampire Teen TV. Consequently, this study mainly uses the literature review and textual analysis to achieve the purpose of this study. The methods used in approaching the research questions are a semantic and semiotic approach in analyzing the genre and female representations found in The Vampire Diaries.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Vampire Narrative

Vampire Narrative

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on August 24, 2018 • ( 3 )

The play between mythological and modern significance, between mystical and scientific visions of horror and unity, sexuality and sacred violence, is focused in the figure of the vampire. In Mary Braddon ’s ‘ Good Lady Ducayne ’ (1896) the vampire theme signals the barbarities that result from human vanity and scientific illusions. Centring on a naïve young companion growing weaker and weaker from a mysterious ‘mosquito bite’, the mystery is explained as a series of blood transfusions designed to extend her old and withered mistress’s life beyond natural limits. A scientific version of the quest for eternal life, the story highlights the horrible illusions of alchemical powers that surround contemporary science. In contrast, Sheridan Le Fanu ’s ‘ Carmilla ’ (1874) makes no attempt to rationalise superstition within the bounds of everyday realism or nineteenth-century science. The Gothic features of the narrative temporally and geographically distance the story from the present. The events are framed as a case from the files of Le Fanu’s psychic doctor, Martin Hesslius. Castles, ruins, chapels and tombs signal the Gothic tradition and its atmosphere of mystery and superstition. At the centre of the mystery is ‘Carmilla’, a beautiful young woman who arrives at the castle of an aristocratic family. Uncannily, Carmilla is the very image of a figure who appeared, years before, in a childhood dream of the family’s daughter Laura. The latter, attracted to and repulsed by Carmilla, establishes an intimate acquaintance. Deaths occur in the locality, accompanied by superstitious rumblings. Oblivious, Laura soon becomes the prey of Carmilla. Laura is saved however, by the intervention of the guardian of one of Carmilla’s other victims. As vampire lore is expounded, and her tomb discovered, Carmilla is subjected to the traditional measures of decapitation and a stake through the heart, a perfectly natural end in a story in which superstition, legend and folklore are part of the everyday reality.

The story’s sexual images, none the less, have a resonance in the context of the late nineteenth century. Female sexuality, embodied in Carmilla’s languor and fluidity, is linked, in her ability to turn into a large black cat, with witchcraft and contemporary visions of sexual, primitive regression and independent femininity: feline, darkly sensual and threatening in its underlying, cruel violence, Carmilla’s unnatural desires are signalled in her choice of females as her victims and the alluring as well as disturbing effects she has on them. Exciting amorous emotions in Laura that are far from innocent, the attraction is shadowed by an incomprehensible fear and anxiety when Carmilla’s romantic passions are articulated in terms of blood, sacrifice and fatal possession. Laura’s susceptibility to Carmilla’s disturbing charms is finally interrupted by the reassertion of a male order of meaning and sexual differentiation. The secrets of Carmilla’s behaviour and her resemblance to an old portrait are explained as vampiric immortality. Her changing yet singular identity is disclosed as a play on words: she has masqueraded under names that are anagrams of Carmilla. The curiously ambivalent power, the superstitious allure of the vampire herself, lingers in the memory of Laura, haunted by the dual images of ‘beautiful girl’ and ‘writhing fiend’ (p. 314), images that only partially described the polymorphous representations of female sexuality.

In the setting of Dracula stock features of the Gothic novel make a magnificent reappearance: the castle is mysterious and forbidding, its secret terrors and splendid isolation in a wild and mountainous region form as sublime a prison as any building in which a Gothic heroine was incarcerated. The place of a heroine, however, is taken by the naïve young lawyer Harker. 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. Dracula is more than a Gothic villain, however, more than the mercenary and mundane bandit that they too often turn out to be. As the sublime synthesis of the human and supernatural terrors of Gothic writing, he is both villain and ghostly diabolical agent whose magic and power cannot be reduced to mere tricks or effects of overindulgent, superstitious imagination: more than rational, he serves to elicit rather than dispel superstitious beliefs, demanding, not a return to reason and morality, but a reawakening of spiritual energies and sacred awe. The form of the novel testifies to the excessive, unpresentable nature of this demand. The letters and journal entries telling different but connected parts of the same story compose a whole whose immensity, like the unrepresentable horror of Dracula’s unreflecting image, remains obscure.

Dracula’s narrative fragments are of a distinctly modern cast. Though alluding to the Gothic devices of lost manuscripts and letters, Dracula’s fragments are recorded in the most modern manner: by typewriter, in shorthand and on phonograph. There are other indicators of modern systems of communication: telegrams, newspaper cuttings, train timetables are all signs of contemporaneity as are the medical and psychiatric classifications, the legal documents and the letters of commercial transaction. Not only useful in recording the story, these systems provide the information necessary to follow Dracula’s trail and investigate his plot. The modernity of the novel’s setting is also signalled by the professional status of the men who combine against the vampire: apart from the aristocratic leftover, Arthur Holmwood , they are lawyers and doctors at the centre of late Victorian commercial life. Even Mina, by no means a ‘New Woman’, acknowledges in her secretarial abilities shifts in the nature of work within and outside the family. Van Helsing is a combination of professor, doctor, lawyer, philosopher and scientist. Like his former student, Dr Seward, and his systems for classifying psychiatric disorders in his asylum, Van Helsing is well versed in contemporary theories: the criminology of Lombroso and Nordau is cited, as are the ideas of Charcot concerning hypnotism and the notion of unconscious cerebration. Dracula’s archaic, primal energy is reformulated in scientific terms: his ‘child-brain’ a sign of criminal regression which is also characterised by his egocentricity (p. 389). Renfield, the inmate of Seward’s asylum and ‘index’ of the Count’s proximity, also displays the characteristic criminal traits of secrecy and selfishness. In his strange eating habits, progressing from flies to spiders, sparrows and, he hopes, kittens, Renfield selects a bizarre food chain which links animal to human life in a caricature of Darwinian theory. Reconstructing natural events with its scientific explanations, modernity also supplants the myths, the explanations of the past, with its own version of things: the occult powers of Dracula’s castle, Van Helsing suggests, might well be natural, mysterious forces of geological and chemical origin (p. 411).

Under the unifying and priestly command of Van Helsing the men of middleclass Victorian England reinvigorate their cultural identity and primal masculinity in the sacred values that are reinvoked against the sublimity of the vampiric threat. In the face of the voluptuous and violent sexuality loosed by the decadently licentious vampire, a vigorous sense of patriarchal, bourgeois and family values is restored. Out of the collective fragments of the text a new masculine image is assembled in opposition to the dark, inverted figure of pure evil and negativity. Dracula is the dark double of the brave and unselfish men whose identity is forged in their struggle; he is the regressive in-human otherness lifted from the realm of individual psychopathology into a cultural field as its absolute antithesis. Without mirror image or shadow, Dracula is a pure inversion. On a symbolic level he is the mirror and shadow of Victorian masculinity, a monstrous figure of male desire that distinguishes what men are becoming from what they should become. He forms a mirror that must be destroyed since its already fragmented textual composition signals regressive narcissism, perverse egoism and a terrible duplicity of appearance, unreality and un/naturalness that threatens all cultural values and distinctions. Dracula’s duplicity is multiple, doubling Harker by donning his clothes in order that his disappearance is not linked to the castle. Dracula is also a foreigner trying to pass as English. On a symbolic level he passes for Christ, Beast and various identities within the family. This has the effect, as in the case of his interception of Harker’s true letters and ordering him to write brief notes, of a dissimulative disruption of proper systems of communication.

Dracula’s crossing of boundaries is relentless: returning from the past he tyrannises the present, uncannily straddling the borders between life and death and thereby undoing a fundamental human fact. In crossing the borders between East and West he undoes cultural distinctions between civilisation and barbarity, reason and irrationality, home and abroad. Dracula’s threat is his polymorphousness, both literally, in the shapes he assumes, and symbolically in terms of the distinctions he upsets. His significance is dangerously overdetermined: in the scene where he is interrupted in the act of pressing Mina’s mouth to his bleeding breast he appears as an inversion of Christ as Pelican, nourishing his subjects with his blood in an unholy communion, and as a mother suckling Mina with the milk of his blood. ‘The blood is the life’, as Renfield reiterates throughout the novel. The exchange of bodily fluids renders the scene shockingly sexual, its violence as masculine as any act of rape. Blood, indeed, is linked to semen: Arthur, after giving blood to his fiancé, Lucy, states that he feels as if they are married. The fluid exchanges present a perverse sexuality, unnatural in the way it exceeds fixed gender roles and heterosexual distinctions. Dracula’s fluid, shifting and amorphous shape is, like Carmilla’s, threatening because it has no singular or stable nature or identity. Meanings, identities and proper family boundaries are utterly transgressed in the movements of vampiric desire and energy. For all his sovereignty and violence, Dracula is, in respect of his polymorphousness, strangely feminised and, like Lucy, condensed into an objectification of total excess, ‘a Thing’ (p. 277, p. 293), as inhuman, ‘hellish’ and ‘inorganic’ as Hyde (Jekyll and Hyde, pp. 94–5). Lucy is presented as a ‘Thing’ just before the band of men symbolically subject her to phallic law by driving a stake through her heart and decapitating her. Restoring the boundaries between life and death, body and soul, earth and heaven, the ritualised killing of vampires reconstitutes properly patriarchal order and fixes cultural and symbolic meanings. The vampire is constructed as absolute object, the complete antithesis of subjectivity, agency and authority. The ritual killing also restores systems of communication in which women remain objects for male exchange. By way of women Dracula attacks men; through women he will contaminate and colonise the teeming metropolis of London. In the name of women the good men respond to the threat. Through and over women their bonds, relations and identities are established, Lucy, for instance, being courted by Arthur, Quincey and Seward.

Women constitute the objects and supports for male exchanges and identities, supports that are narcissistic in their reflections on and between men. Dracula’s mirror thus returns the novel to its specific cultural and sexual context even as it serves to project sacred identities into a universal, metaphysical dimension. Dracula’s effects, imaginarily, in the way individuals perceive his threat, and symbolically, in the cultural significance assigned to him, are infectious, producing doubles and reversals in images that contaminate all limits. As the males of the novel consolidate themselves against Dracula they begin to duplicate as well as reverse his effects. The mirror that Dracula composes for them becomes a mirror of male desire, of what men, in the 1890s, have to become in order to survive. The hunter becomes the hunted, and vice versa, as Dracula is driven out of western Europe. In the process western civilisation and rationality grow increasingly barbaric and irrational. Superstition, both religious and folkloric, takes precedence over reason. Male emotions become more visible: Van Helsing lapses into hysteria after Lucy’s funeral (p. 225); Arthur sobs hysterically on the paternal and maternal shoulder of the professor after impaling her and later bursts into tears in Mina’s arms (p. 279, p. 295). Having found its maternal place by arriving on Mina’s shoulder, male hysteria is a sign of the breakdown and longing for proper social bonds. These are nostalgically invoked by Quincey in his recalling of ‘yarns by the campfire’, dressing ‘one another’s wounds’ and drinking ‘healths on the shore of Titacaca (p. 83). The bonding produced by exclusively male adventures forms an idyllic boy-scout past that is reconstituted and sanctified in the pursuit of the vampire. In the final stages of the chase Seward observes how ‘those adventurous days of ours are turning up useful’ (p. 461). Van Helsing appeals to this spirit when he describes how the vampire may be beaten by the ‘power of combination’ and the unselfish devotion to a cause (p. 306). It is a cause that requires the letting of blood. In an earlier context, Van Helsing says to Quincey ‘a brave man’s blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble. You’re a man, and no mistake. Well, the devil may work against us for all he’s worth, but God sends us men when we want them’ (p. 194). The jolly fortitude of this statement is tested later when Quincey loses more than the amount of blood required in a transfusion.

Manhood, blood and bravery form the cornerstones of Van Helsing’s fatherly notion of cultural and spiritual renewal. The appeal to male strength, blood and bravery culminates in the violence of the hunt that marks the return of a buried warrior tradition represented and mourned at the beginning of the novel by Dracula’s description of his heritage: ‘the warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told’ (p. 43). Engaging in battle with Dracula, Van Helsing’s vampire-killers reawaken racial memories and myths of blood and honour: Quincey is described as a ‘moral viking’ and Arthur is compared to Thor as he impales Lucy (p. 225, p. 277). To combat the racial myths associated with the creature originating in the East, myths of northern tribes, myths linked to Gothic notions of freedom and strength, are invoked. A warlike paganism is combined with Christianity, a sacralisation of racial myths whose function within an embattled and aggressive cultural and imperialist imagination is starkly emphasised when Van Helsing invokes divine sanction for their project: in God’s name they ‘go out as the old knights of the Cross’ (p. 412). The appeal to past history and romance is not merely invocative of a fictional tradition: it alludes to the belligerent pursuit of a religious cause, in the Crusades, against the nonChristian peoples of the East. In the context of Gothic fiction this seems like a nostalgic appeal to a long-dead world, a disappeared past imagined as noble, strong and purposeful. It is also a return to myths and fictions that reinvent a sacred unity for the degenerate 1890s. The return to myth, the invocation of romantic fictions within a Gothic fiction, has an uncanny effect on the values of domesticity and patriarchy whose superiority, stability and naturalness are finally affirmed at the close of the novel. These start to seem like myths themselves. Indeed, throughout the novel there are no examples of model families. The only biological parents, Lucy’s mother and Arthur’s father, die, while other paternal and maternal figures are only surrogates: Hawkins bequeathes his property to Harker and Mina in a fatherly gesture, Van Helsing is a good father to everyone, as Mina is their mother. Dracula is allotted the role of bad father. The absence of family underlines the nostalgia for the family that is literalised by the birth of a child at the end. Structurally inscribed throughout the novel in the paternal and maternal duplicates, the myth is only realised in the closure of the fiction.

The making real of this mythical model of the family demands, for a culture disintegrating without it, blood, expulsion and sacrifice: family values are restored by the ritual destruction of Dracula and the sacrifice of female sexuality embodied by Lucy, and are vitally monumentalised in the self-sacrificing death of Quincey and his subsequent and nominal immortalisation in the Christian name of the Harkers’ son. The romance quest provides the structure of a male fantasy of sacred, immortal power, of its originary values restored in the present by violent, sacrificial energy. The horror embodied by Dracula reawakens the primitive and powerful emotions of his opponents, emotions of attraction and repulsion in which his intimate doubleness is expelled and repeated in another terrible expenditure of energy. Civilisation and domesticity needs to retain and channel its buried natural, even barbaric energies, signified in hunter and warrior myths: its spirit, unity, strength and immortality are nourished by the undead myths of its own duplicitous self-image.

Turning the Gothic romance into a male quest romance, Dracula feeds off prevailing cultural anxieties concerning corruption, sexuality and spirit. For Van Helsing, the penetration of evil mysteries and the redemption of proper identities by means of sacred horror involve clerical and ideological powers. As a scientist and psychic doctor his powers are rational and more than rational like the world investigated by Hesselius and another popular, secular and yet strangely magical figure, the detective, as exemplified by Arthur Conan Doyle ’s Sherlock Holmes . The mysteries, terrors and horrors explained by his penetrating mind, endowed with a rationality that seems more than rational, are, though ultimately mundane and deviously criminal, imbued with an aura of the fantastic, spectral and diabolical. Dracula’s adventurous romance also alludes to the tales of adventure that, from Scott ’s romances onwards, provide a more popular and exciting alternative to domestic realism. The associations of Dracula with the East are important in this respect. For the East, at the high point of Victorian imperialism, provided many wonderful adventures and strange tales, which, in Kipling’s stories about India and, similarly, in Rider Haggard ’s narratives of Africa, projected the darkness of Gothic fears and desires on to other cultures, peoples and places.

Source: Botting, Fred, and Dale Townshend. Gothic . London: Routledge, 2004. Aguirre, Manuel, The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990. Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda, The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art, London and Toronto, Associated University Presses, 1982. Briggs, Julia, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story, London, Faber & Faber, 1977 Craft, Christopher, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Representations 8 (1984): 107–33 Frayling, Christopher (ed.), Vompyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, London, Faber & Faber, 1991. Le Fanu, J.Sheridan, In a Glass Darkly (1872), Gloucester, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1990 Pick, Daniel, ‘“Terrors of the Night”: Dracula and “Degeneration” in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Critical Quarterly 30 (1984):71–87 Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ed. Bonamy Dobree, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980. Spencer, Kathleen L., ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, English Literary History 59 (1992):197–225. Stoker, Bram, Dracula (1897), ed. Maurice Hindle, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2014.

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Carmilla’s Kindred: The Vampiress in Verse

Women Write About Comics celebrates the 150th anniversary of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla with a series of posts on female vampires in nineteenth-century literature.

The figure of the vampire entered literary history with German poet Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s 1748 piece “Der Vampir” . Ossenfelder’s vampire was a predatory man, and the female of the species would not appear until later. When the time came, however, it was once again the poets who dreamt up many of the earliest examples. Before J. Sheridan Fanu wrote Carmilla , a veritable pantheon of vampiresses was to be found in verse.

It is Robert Southey who can lay claim to introducing vampires to English literature. His first published contribution to the vampire canon was a poem that originally appeared in 1799 as “A Ballad, Shewing How an Old Woman Rode Double, and Who Rode Before Her”. Southey would later republish and revise the poem, in the process lending it the rather more succinct title “The Old Woman of Berkeley” (Vamped.org has a detailed article on the poem’s convoluted publication history)

According to Southey’s introduction, the poem is based on a story “related by Matthew of Westminster, and Olaus Magnus, and is also to be found in the Nuremberg Chronicle.” It depicts an elderly, ailing woman calling for her two pious children – a monk and a nun – and confessing that she has lived a life of sin and black magic:

“All kind of sin I have rioted in, And the judgement now must be; But I secured my children’s souls, Oh! pray, my children, for me! I have suck’d the breath of sleeping babes, The fiends have been my slaves: ‘I have ‘nointed myself with infant’s fat, And feasted on rifled graves. ‘And the Fiend will fetch me now in fire, My witchcrafts to atone; And I, who have rifled the dead man’s grave, Shall never have rest in my own…’

She requests an elaborate funeral, which involves her coffin being bound in consecrated chains and surrounded by church bells that toll over the next three days and nights, “To drive from thence the fiends who come/To bear my corpse away”. Even the church itself is to be locked tight for the period.

She passes away and the funeral is performed in accordance with her wishes. Over the course of the next three days, the church is surrounded by the hideous roar of unseen fiends. Finally, an earthquake strikes and knocks the church open, allowing infernal forces access to the old witch‘s corpse:

And in HE came, with eyes of flame, The Fiend to fetch the dead, And all the church with his presence glow’d Like a fiery furnace red. He laid his hand on the iron chains, And like flax they moulder’d asunder; And the coffin lid, which was barr’d so firm, He burst with his voice of thunder. And he bade the Old Woman of Berkeley rise, And some with her Master away; And the cold sweat stood on the cold cold corpse, At the voice she was forced to obey. She rose on her feet in her winding sheet, Her dead flesh quiver’d with fear, And a groan like that which the Old Woman gave Never did mortal hear.

The story ends with the old woman being carried away on horseback by the Devil, never to be seen again – although her shrieks are heard for miles around.

Although “The Old Woman of Berkely” often turns up in discussions of early vampire poetry, this classification is questionable. Yes, the witch rises from her grave; but it is implied that she is being carried straight to hell in a parody of the final resurrection, not left to linger in the manner of a vampire. She does mention sucking the life from infants, which is certainly vampire-like. Note that this occurred during her life rather than after her death, and is presented as just one detail in a list of sins, most of which have no specific relation to vampirism (as an aside, Southey would later change the line “And feasted on rifled graves” to “I have call’d the dead from their graves”, adding cannibalism to the mix).

While the poem is not about a vampire in the strictest sense, it does show that Southey was interested in the key ingredients of the vampire motif. He explored the theme more directly in his 1801 epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer .

The narrative of Thalaba deals with the Domdaniel, “a Seminary for evil Magicians under the roots of the Sea” mentioned in a previous volume, Denis Chavis and Jacques Cazotte’s Continuation des Mille et Une Nuits (translated into English as Arabian Tales: Or, A Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments ). In Southey’s poem, the magicians of Domdaniel hear a prophecy that they shall be overpowered by the descendant of a man named Hodeirah. They try to escape this fate by killing Hodeirah; but the prophecy turns out to be self-fulfilling: they neglect to kill his son, Thalaba, who swears vengeance. Backed by Azrael, the Angel of Death, Thalaba pursues a long journey until he finally confronts the sorcerers in Domdaniel, giving his life and receiving a reward from the Prophet Mohammed in the hereafter.

The world through which Thalaba journeys is riddled with demons and monsters. The magicians take advice from a Teraph – the torn-off head of a newborn baby that acts as a demonic oracle – while their toolkit includes a severed hand worked into a magical Hand of Glory. Elsewhere, we learn of flesh-eating Gouls and an animated statue that guards a certain garden. Not all of these elements come from the legends of the Middle East; this is not surprising when we consider how, in his hefty footnotes to the poem, Southey reveals a considerable contempt for the aesthetics of the Islamic world.

In one note, explaining why he had a character quote from Job, he comments that he would have included a quotation from the Koran only “if the tame language of the Koran could be remembered by the few who have toiled through its dull tautology.” He derides the non-figurative illuminations in Persian manuscripts as being “as absurd to the eye as nonsense-verses to the ear” and goes on to remark that “[t]he little of their literature that has reached us is equally worthless.” As for Chavis and Cazotte’s Arabian Tales , from which he borrowed the setting of Domdaniel, Southey confidently assures us that “they have lost their metaphorical rubbish in passing through the filter of a French translation.”

While clearly captivated by the exotic imagery of the Arabian Nights , Southey shows no interest in any sort of cultural fidelity and freely inserts folkloric concepts from further afield – including what has been hailed by the British Library as arguably the first appearance of a vampire in English literature.

During the course of the story, Thalaba falls in love with a maiden named Oneiza, only for her to suddenly die on the day of their wedding. Together, Thalaba and his father-in-law Moath visit Oneiza’s grave at midnight to call her forth:

“Now! now!” cried Thalaba, And o’er the chamber of the tomb There spread a lurid gleam Like the reflection of a sulphur fire, And in that hideous light Oneiza stood before them, it was She, Her very lineaments, and such as death Had changed them, livid cheeks, and lips of blue. But in her eyes there dwelt Brightness more terrible Than all the loathsomeness of death.

Moath is aghast at the sight. “This is not she!” he exclaims. “A Fiend! a manifest Fiend!” A divine voice calls upon the two men to strike her, and Moath obeys:

…Moath firm of heart, Performed the bidding; thro’ the vampire corpse He thrust his lance; it fell, And howling with the wound Its demon tenant fled. A sapphire light fell on them, And garmented with glory, in their sight Oneiza’s Spirit stood.

There follows a tender moment where the angelic spirit of Oneiza, replacing the hideous vampire, encourages Thalaba to complete his quest so that they can meet again in paradise.

Southey had clearly done research into the topic of vampires, as the above sequence is accompanied by a long footnote discussing allegedly true vampire cases like that of Petar Blagojević . What stands out, however, is less the resemblance that the Oneiza episode bears to its historical inspirations, and more how much it prefigures a famous plot thread in Bram Stoker’s Dracula : the death, resurrection and final slaying of Lucy Westenra.

Next: Otherwordly women in the poetry of Coleridge and Keats.,,

Doris V. Sutherland

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The Top Ten Female Vampires in Literature, Film and Television

Female vampires are just as deadly as their male counterparts. Like the males of the species, they are cunning, beautiful, seductive and blood thirsty. They don’t have as strong a presence in media as male vampires, but when they do they show their fangs. Some of my favorite female vampires aren’t even overtly sexual, though a lot of female vampires tend to be. They are closely reminiscent to succubi in that way. Female vampires who are overtly sexualized are both a warning and a lure to the power of darker sexual pleasures. But it’s the blood these vampy women crave more than anything, and they are willing to use whatever tactics they can to get to their precious food sources.

Just don’t under estimate the female vampire, for she can ensnare you with all the powers of Dracula himself.

Here is my top ten list of sexy sirens of blood:

[Literature and Film]

The wonderful thing about Carmilla is she predates Count Dracula by 25 years! Perhaps Dracula took pointers from the Vamp Queen when he rolled out of his coffin the first time. That would certainly make for an interesting roll-reversal story, and some claim there is a chapter missing from the original Dracula that does portray Carmilla visiting him.

Anyhow, Carmilla has been adapted several times for film, but not with the same success rate as Dracula. It could be because her tale was shorter than Dracula’s. Her first appearance was in literature, where she is done the most justice as a character. Her story was first published in a magazine called, “The Dark Blue” in 1871 and 1872.

I think my favorite portrayal of her in film is The Vampire Lovers . Only because Ingrid Pitt really brought out the character in a seductive, temperamental way.

[Literature and Film: Queen of the Damned]

Those that know me know my love of Anne Rice and the vampire chronicles. I’ve been a fangirl since I was 12. I have read them all, several times over, my favorites being that of the first couple books leading right up to the end of The Queen of the Damned novel. Akasha, as well as the two red-headed twin vampires that haunt her, are some of my favorite female vampires to date. They are preternatural monsters, especially Akasha, who is the most devoid of humanity. And while I wish they would remake the Queen of the Damned movie so I could see the Queen done proper justice, I will say that the movie isn’t without merit. If you think of it like a glorified music video, it’s a little more fun to put up with.

[Television: Buffy The Vampire Slayer]

Buffy was a fun show, and while it had many amazing monsters for our slayer to fight, the vampires were always there. They were Buffy’s old faithful, and when she needed to blow off steam or hunt SOMETHING, the vampires were there for her. Later in the series we are introduced to an interesting vampire couple: Drusilla and Spike. Fans of the show adored this twisted pair, but even on her own, Drusilla is a force to be reckoned with. When Spike gives her a new lease on life, she shows her fangs in full force. No longer is she just the broken, crazy doll we see when we first meet her. Now we see the vicious, soulless predator under the skin.

Comics are great for capturing the brutality of vampires, and if I was to suggest a comic with a sexy, sultry vampire heroine, I would suggest Vampirella. She’s actually a good guy in this, though still a vampire trying to sustain herself on blood. And her costume is a bit…revealing. But part of the fun of female vampires is they flaunt sexuality and desire at us, making us face our carnal natures.

Miriam Blaylock

[film: the hunger].

The Hunger is one of my top favorites in all of vampire cinema. It’s so beautifully done, and respects the vampire creature with both gothic passion and pain. I won’t give too much of the story away, but Miriam Blaylock is her own kind of Dracula. She feeds, she loves, and she has great tragedy. And if you do watch this one, you’ll get a really young vampire David Bowie for your efforts to go along with beautiful lesbian vampire-love.

Santánico Pandemónium

[film: from dusk till dawn].

I wasn’t sure I was going to put her on here, as she is only seen in From Dusk Till Dawn for like 10 mins or so, but she makes an impact in those few minutes! She’s apparently a very powerful vampire, though we don’t really feel that when she’s staked quickly. It’s rather a shame. Because the way she moves, the way she commands the attention of everyone in the room just screams vampire. In those few moments we see her, we are spellbound. And for a moment, no one really cares what she is until she reveals her true face.

[Film: Underworld]

The Underworld series is fun vampire fluff. It’s the popcorn of vampire cinema in my opinion. But Selene is a bad ass in it, and she really portrays a certain female vampire that isn’t shown as much as the sexy, seductive version. Selene is the cold-hearted killer, at least until she falls in love. Even when she does fall in love she’s still rather chilly about it, as learning to express her unbridled passion is not what she’s been trained to do for decades. She’s a killer, through and through, and we sometimes need that reminder about vampires. Especially the female ones.

Pamela Swynford De Beaufort

[television: true blood].

Pam is one of my favorite vampires on the show. She’s sexy, smart, a bad ass fighter, and so much more. Pam combines the vicious killer vampire with the sexy siren troupe beautifully, making in my mind one of the more devious vampires going. And True Blood doesn’t skimp on showing you how vicious the vampire creature can be, which is another thing I love. Pam’s loyalty really sets her apart from others of her kind too. She protects Eric fiercely, and is always willing to lay down her unlife for him. I don’t think it’s just because he’s her maker either.

[Literature and Film: Interview With The Vampire]

Interview with the Vampire brought to light what would happen if a child was made a vampire. Claudia is one extreme version of that idea made “flesh.” She’s beautiful, seductive, terrible, and tragic. Her mind grows up even while her shell does not, and over time, we see how that impacts her unlife. We feel sorry for her. When I read the book and she died, it broke my heart. Not because she was dead, but because of what her death meant. Claudia is a warning, and her whole existence serves to remind us that vampires ARE abominations. We sometimes forget when we see how lovely they are that they are monsters under all that glamour.

[Literature and Film: Let The Right One In]

And last, but certainly not least, is Eli. Let The right One In is a powerful and dark story that shows how monstrous vampires can truly be. It’s one of those rare gems that has been adapted beautifully from the book onto screen.

Eli is the other extreme of child vampires. She’s pretty, but not glamorously so like Claudia. She’s just as vicious, but more brutal in her methods. And she has similar problems. The plight of child vampires is one that expresses the pain of being trapped between too many worlds. Death and life, child and adult, human and monster. Eli’s viciousness and inhumanity comes from survival and her own dark nature. Whatever child-like innocence she once had was erased long ago with her humanity. She doesn’t put on any poetic airs in her gestures or mannerisms. Eli is just a predator. Through and through. Yet somehow…Oskar loves her for it. Probably because he is so desperate to be loved by anyone.

Agree with our list? Did we miss any of your personal favorites? Let us know in the comment section below.

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Sheridan Le Fanu

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Carmilla , a tale of a female vampire who preys on young women, centers on the anxieties associated with female sexuality. Le Fanu was one of the first writers to depict a female vampire, and he consistently associates vampirism with eroticism. The disguised vampire Carmilla ’s longing for Laura is primarily sexual, and her craving for the blood of young women suggests that female sexual desire—particularly homosexual desire—is inherently threatening. Despite that Carmilla frames female sexuality as negative, the mere fact that Le Fanu acknowledges the existence of female sexuality is a divergence from the traditional gender roles of the time period, which often prevented women from demonstrating any sort of sexual desire.

Le Fanu emphasizes the sexual nature of Carmilla’s attraction to Laura even more than the vampire’s violent nature, as it is her “looks” that “won” Laura over. This asks the reader to see an intimate connection between vampirism and sexuality. Laura’s first encounter with Carmilla, which occurs twelve years before the main plot, sets this relationship up. Laura dreams of a young woman who crawls into bed with her, who “caressed” her, an act that soothed rather than frightened her. Years later, Carmilla engages in similar behavior, crawling into bed with Laura and treating Laura like her possession. Carmilla’s behavior resembles that of a passionate lover, though she never outright says that she sees Laura as anything more than a friend. While Laura has conflicting emotions for Carmilla, she can’t deny that she is fascinated by Carmilla and wishes to be close to her, feeling an intense physical response to Carmilla that certainly indicates an attraction.

Laura’s simultaneous attraction to and fear of Carmilla relates to the fact that Carmilla is free from the control of men. While she is with Carmilla, Laura is allowed to exist within a world that is not entirely controlled by men, which causes her to respond both physically and emotionally to Carmilla’s temptation. When Carmilla first arrives, Laura, confused by her guest’s displays of affection, wonders if perhaps Carmilla is a male suitor in disguise. The only way she can understand Carmilla’s desire is by believing that she might be a man, which shows the extent to which female sexuality was repressed. Not only does Carmilla experience sexual freedom, but she also has earned physical freedom from men by consistently escaping capture by the men who seek to destroy her. As a result, she never needs to conform to typical expectations—her permanent youth, and the presence of only her mother , ensures that she never needs to marry or rely on any man.

Laura’s feelings for Carmilla grow into both “adoration” and “abhorrence,” a “paradox” which reflects the uncertainty she feels towards sexual freedom. Le Fanu is explicit that Laura’s escalating illness is sexual in nature, and that Laura can only be “cured” once the source of her illness, Carmilla (and, specifically, the attraction they both feel for one another) has been eliminated. The illness comes to Laura in a female form, and she is overcome with “strange” sensations that both frighten and fascinate her. The result of these sexual encounters is shown to be deadly. Despite that Le Fanu defies gender norms by depicting female desire, he ultimately restores traditional norms by showing female desire as dangerous, and by making men—who are otherwise pushed to the fringes of the story—defeat Carmilla. Thus, as is traditional, men are the heroes who defeat the dangerous, erotic woman. At the end of the book, Laura’s father travels with her around Italy in an attempt to “cure” her, thereby placing her back within the norms that she escaped through her relationship with Carmilla. However, Laura is not wholly cured; it seems that she no longer wishes to be placed within a masculine narrative now that she has experienced the freedom that Carmilla gave her.

This complicated ending embodies the ambiguity about gender norms at the heart of Carmilla. On the one hand, it seems that Le Fanu is advocating for a degree of gender equality, implying that women have the potential to be just as evil and sexual as men. Furthermore, Le Fanu doesn’t wholeheartedly condemn lesbianism, despite the prejudices of the time. Since Laura doesn’t want to escape the consequences of her relationship with Carmilla, it seems that the relationship has been, in some way, freeing and liberating to her. However, Carmilla’s sexuality is still shown to be dangerous (as shown by Laura’s illness) and worthy of punishment, evident in Carmilla’s eventual defeat. Overall, then, the book takes no simple moralistic attitude towards gender and sexuality, challenging some norms and beliefs while upholding others.

Women and Sexuality ThemeTracker

Women and Sexuality Quotes in Carmilla

The first occurrence in my existence, which produced a terrible impression upon my mind, which, in fact, never has been effaced, was one of the very earliest incidents of my life which I can recollect….I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder, and ceased whimpering. She caressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her….I was now for the first time frightened.

“Before then I had no idea of her danger. I have lost her, and now learn all, too late. She died in the peace of innocence, and in the glorious hope of a blessed futurity. The fiend who betrayed our infatuated hospitality has done it all. I thought I was receiving into my house gaiety, a charming companion for my lost Bertha. Heavens! what a fool have I been!”

I saw the very face which had visited me in my childhood at night, which remained so fixed in my memory, and on which I had for so many years often ruminated with horror, when no one suspected of what I was thinking.

“If you were less pretty I think I should be very afraid of you, but being as you are, and you and I both so young, I feel only that I have made your acquaintance twelve years ago, and have already a right to your intimacy; at all events it does seem as if we were destined, from our earliest childhood, to be friends. I wonder whether you feel as strangely drawn towards me as I do to you…”

In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thought about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the feeling.

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her…” You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.”

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.” … I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so.”

“The time is very near when you shall know everything. You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”

“Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood.”

It would be vain my attempting to tell you the horror with which, even now, I recall the occurrence of that night. It was no such transitory terror as a dream leaves behind it. It seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompassed the apparition.

For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of me…Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced to it.

….and of having spoken to people whom I could not see; and especially of one clear voice, of a female’s, very deep, that spoke as if at a distance, slowly, and producing always the same sensation of indescribable solemnity and fear…Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself.

Its horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigor of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to become fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred different ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victims…. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent.

The following Spring my father took me a tour through Italy. We remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.

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The Vampire in the House: Femininity, Female Body and Sexual Desire in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Victorian Medical Texts on Hysteria

11 Pages Posted: 14 Aug 2020 Last revised: 17 Aug 2020

Anish Baskar

University of Manchester

Date Written: May 12, 2020

The title of this essay, ‘The Vampire in the House’ is borrowed from Tamar Heller’s 1996 article on Hysteria, Female Sexuality, And Female Knowledge In Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' (1872). The title contradicts the idealised catchphrase “angel in the house” with Le Fanu’s embodiment of monstrous female characters that exercise revolutionary agency over their own bodies and sexuality. The main objective of this study is to delineate the relationship between Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Victorian medical texts on hysteria in order to highlight the representation of femininity, the female body and sexual desire (including homosexual desire) during the Victorian era, with relevance to Le Fanu’s demonstration of vampires. Most importantly, this essay delves on the question of whether Carmilla offers a critique to medical ideas about female hysteria or conform to them.

Keywords: Hysteria, Vampiric Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Lesbianism, Queer-Gothic Fiction, Feminism

JEL Classification: Y93

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Anish Ananda Baskar (Contact Author)

University of manchester ( email ).

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Oxford Rd Manchester, M13 9PL United Kingdom +91 7200058699 (Phone)

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