#vampire mythos

[lovelylonelymoonlight]

“Vampires can see in mirrors cause the backing is made out of aluminum and not silver.”

INCORRECT vampires can see themselves in mirrors through sheer force of need to make sure their aesthetic is on point

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in “Carmilla” and “Dracula” (I)

Every time I encounter media where Carmilla is either the servant of Dracula or in love with him (very often both simultaneously), I want to flip tables. 

Carmilla not only despised men, but she was a veiled depiction of a lesbian woman. As an innocent human, she was preyed on and murdered by a male vampire who was obsessed with her and yet emerged from her grave a cunning and powerful figure who cleverly exploited the womanly tropes of her time (the helpless and delicate flower) to dupe and charm men into doing exactly as she wanted in pursuit of her goals. Her romantic interests and desires for companionship were reserved exclusively for women. Every time I see her being relegated to the role of love interest for a man, I feel like her nature and personality being denied, misused and erased.

Back in Ye Olde Days (1996), I discovered a fascinating article by Elizabeth Signorotti which put forward the theory that Dracula was written as a patriarchal response to the unleashed female power and sexuality depicted in Carmilla. This remarkable article, which I have split into parts and transcribed below, explains better than I ever could the power of Carmilla and the ways in which its themes of female empowerment and agency were perceived as a threat.

Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in “Carmilla” and “Dracula” (part I)

Of the vampire tales to date, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has unquestionably become the most popular and the most critically examined. It constitutes, however, the culmination of a series of nineteenth-century vampire tales that have been overshadowed by Stoker’s 1897 novel. To be sure, many of the earlier tales provide little more than a collective history of the vampire lore Stoker incorporated in Dracula, but Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s little known “Carmilla” (1872) is the original tale to which Stoker’s Dracula served as a response. In “Carmilla” Le Fanu chronicles the development of a vampiric relationship between two women, in which it becomes increasingly clear that Laura’s and Carmilla’s lesbian relationship defies the traditional structures of kinship by which men regulate the exchange of women to promote male bonding. On the contrary, Le Fanu allows Laura and Carmilla to usurp male authority and to bestow themselves on whom they please, completely excluding male participation in the exchange of women, normative as discussed by Claude Levi-Strauss and more recently by Gayle Rubin and Eve Sedgwick. Stoker later responded to Le Fanu’s narrative of female empowerment by reinstating male control in the exchange of women. In effect, Dracula seeks to repossess the female body for the purposes of male pleasure and exchange, and to correct the reckless unleashing of female desire in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla.” 

In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss argues that women are “valuables par excellence from both the biological and the social points of view... without which life is impossible.” As “valuables,” women are seen “as the object of personal desire, thus exciting sexual and proprietorial instincts... [and also as] the subject of the desire of others, ... binding others through alliance with them.” Women, then, become the means of alliance, the ”supreme gift” that binds men together and creates social order. For Levi-Strauss, marriage most significantly reveals men’s complete control of women. He argues that traditionally “the total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, where each owes and receives something, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners between whom the exchange takes place.” As an essential and valuable “sign” to be possessed and exchanged, woman’s sole purpose is to provide the passive link between men.

Levi-Strauss’ exploration of the role women play in creating male alliance is further examined in Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” and in Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men. Whereas Levi-Strauss ultimately romanticizes the exchange of women, Rubin examines the specific implications for women resulting from his argument. She states that Levi-Strauss’ “exchange of women” is shorthand for expressing the “social relations of a kinship system... [where] men have certain rights in their female kin...[and where] women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin.” Since women are “transacted” by men, they become only “a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it” and are denied the “benefits of their own circulation.” Rubin further stresses that “compulsory heterosexuality is a product of male kinship” because “women... can only be properly [valued] by someone ‘with a penis’(phallus). Since the girl has no ‘phallus’, she has no ‘right’ to love her mother or another woman.” In her examination of Levi-Strauss, Rubin underscores woman’s historical subjection to male desire and her exclusion from the social order governed by male alliance.

Sedgwick broadens Rubin’s argument by investigating “compulsory heterosexuality” as a distinguishing factor in female relationships and in male relationships. She argues that men’s relationships are defined by “homosocial desire,” that homosocial relationships between men must be distinguished from socially threatening homosexual unions, and the only way to eliminate the homosexual threat between men is to include a woman in the relationship, forming a (safe) triangular configuration rather than a (threatening) linear, male-to-male union. She contends that contrary to women’s relationships “patriarchal structures [assure] that ‘obligatory heterosexuality’ is built into male-dominated kinship systems, [and] that homophobia is a necessary consequence of... patriarchal institutions [such] as heterosexual marriage.” Women function in this system as signs and tools to ensure the survival of male relationships and to deflect the threat of homosexuality by serving as a link between men.

Sedgwick sums up social perceptions of women’s and men’s relationships as “diacritical opposition between the ‘homosocial’ and the ‘homosexual,’” an opposition that ”seems to be much less thorough and dichotomous for women, in our society, than for men.” She argues that all women in our society who promote the interests of other women (by teaching, nurturing, studying, marching for, or employing) are “pursuing congruent and closely related activities. Thus the adjective ‘homosocial’ as applied to women’s bonds... need not be pointedly dichotomized as against ‘homosexual’; it can intelligibly dominate the entire continuum.” The unity of the lesbian continuum, “extending over the erotic, social, familial, economic, and political realms, would not be so striking if it were not in strong contrast to the arrangement among males.” That arrangement, as Levi-Strauss has defined it, is a system of alliance between men that requires, in some form, the exchange of women to bind men and (as Sedgwick implies) to stave off homosexual anxiety. Sedgwick makes clear that women’s relationships are not governed by homophobia; therefore, excluding men from female friendships or from access to women poses more of a threat to male kinship systems than to female. Thus, female homosocial bonds potentially carry tremendous power to subvert or demolish existing patriarchal kinship structures, which is precisely what happens in “Carmilla.”

Throughout most of the nineteenth century the central figure in vampire tales was a male whose relationships were used to depict various conflicts in contemporary society. James Twitchell observes in The Living Dead that nineteenth-century writers mainly used the vampire “to express various human relationships, relationships that the artist himself had with family, with friends, with lovers, and even with art itself.” Other critics note that the vampire, a dead body that drinks blood and preys on innocent victims to sustain its own life, acts as a complex metaphor: it could represent the economic dependence of women; the parasitic relationship between the aristocracy and the oppressed middle and lower classes: unrepressed female sexuality; eugenic contamination; enervating parent/child relationships; and, of course, sexual relationships deemed subversive or perverse in hegemonic discourse.” Perhaps most interesting is Nina Auerbach’s contention that the demonized (or vampirized) woman in nineteenth-century literature and art really depicts a “hero who was strong enough to bear the hopes and fears of a century’s worship.” Auerbach’s comment may be true in some instances, but by and large the majority of women in vampire tales, at least in the early and mid-nineteenth century, were far too marginalized and victimized to be seen as heroic; like the male protagonists of those tales, who brutalized them, women vampires were generally perceived as loathsome and diseased.

Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” - the first vampire tale whose protagonist is a woman vampire - marks the growing concern about the power of female homosocial relationships in the nineteenth century. All of Carmilla’s predecessors - Lord Ruthven, Varney, Melmoth - were men. Le Fanu’s creation of a woman vampire anticipates the shift toward the end of the century to predominantly female vampires. In both art and literature, women and specifically women’s bodies became progressively associated with the vampire. One explanation for this shift, as Carol Senf points out, is the “growing awareness of women’s power and influence... [as] feminists began to petition for additional rights for women. Concerned with women’s power and influence, writers... often responded by creating powerful women characters, the vampire being one of the most powerful negative images.” But women’s potential power alone does not fully explain the proliferation of women vampires. The female body itself was demonized. According to Sian Macfie, “the function or dysfunction of the female body was juxtaposed with notions of the perceived threat of vampirism... [and these notions] were largely based upon a sense of women’s association with blood [as a result of menstruation]. However, the idea of female vampirism also came to be understood in a more figurative sense. In addition to the idea of literal contagion of the blood, vampirism came to be associatively linked to the notion of moral contagion and especially with the ‘contamination’ of lesbianism.” Citing Havelock Ellis, who hypothesized that “homosexuality... occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence who... influence others,” Macfie concludes that “the notion of vampirism also came to be used metaphorically to refer to a social phenomenon, the ‘psychic sponge.’ The psychic sponge was understood to be a woman who was perceived [as] a drain on the energy and [the] emotional and intellectual resources of her companions.” As a result of women’s perceived link with vampirism, by the late nineteenth century “close female bonding and lesbianism are conflated with notions of the unhealthy draining of female vitality.”

“Carmilla“ is the vampire tale that most readily defines the established patriarchal systems of kinship discussed above and that most provokingly challenges nineteenth-century notions of the “contamination of lesbianism“ and the female “psychic sponge.“ Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) depicts an equally interesting lesbian vampire relation, offering insights into fin-de-siecle stereotypes of female sexuality and gendered identity, but Le Fanu’s tale is the first to investigate disruptive lesbian desire. Although “Carmilla“’s denouement is ambiguous, Le Fanu refrains from heavy-handed moralizing, leaving open the possibility that Laura’s and Carmilla’s vampiric relationship is sexually liberating and for them highly desirable. The ontological change in Laura between the beginning of the narrative and the end is never reversed, suggesting that her shifting desires are, for her, healthy and vital.

Le Fanu originally published “Carmilla” in the short-lived Victorian periodical The Dark Blue, then added the prologue and included the tale in In a Glass Darkly, five unrelated narratives held together by the figure of Dr. Hesselius, a student of psychic phenomena whose case histories make up these stories. Not only “the greatest” of Le Fanu’s works, “Carmilla” is also the most daring. It depicts a society where men increasingly become relegated to powerless positions while women assume aggressive roles. Le Fanu pushes his male characters, who lose all control over their women, towards the edge of his narrative. Ineffectual in either understanding or treating Styria’s baffling (female) “malady,” Le Fanu’s men suffer exclusion from male kinship systems because they are unable to exchange women. Instead, women control their own exchange, prompting W. J. McCormack to observe that in “Carmilla” “feminine nature is powerful, destructively powerful, and its objects become hypnotized (or hyperstatically controlled) in its power.” Le Fanu untethers “destructively powerful” feminine nature in “Carmilla” and refuses to thether it by the end of his story.

Part II is here.

[ocdcowgirl]

my personal vampire mythos 🧛🏼‍♀️🧛🏼‍♂️

[deep-silent-complete-blog]

The legendary Yugoslavian vampire film, a completely different and some would say, more authentic take on the vampire mythos. Until copies surfaced a few...

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in “Carmilla” and “Dracula” (IV)

By Elizabeth Signorotti (1996)

Part I - Part II - Part III

Thesis: Carmilla is a story of female empowerment, and Dracula is a patriarchal response to it.

Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in “Carmilla” and “Dracula” (part IV)

Stoker’s familiarity with Le Fanu’s vampire tale is certain. Farson claims that Stoker was “absorbed in the vampirism in ‘Carmilla,’ published two years after he left Trinity” but more convincing evidence is found in the original first chapter of Dracula, which Stoker deleted when his publisher requested that he shorten the book to reduce printing costs. In this section, he alludes to “Carmilla.” At the opening of this chapter, Jonathan Harker loses his way as he sets out for Castle Dracula on Walpurgis Nacht, a night “when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked, when all evil things of earth and air and water held revel.” A shaft of moonlight reveals he is in an overgrown graveyard with a great, snowy-white marble tomb before him.

Impelled by some sort of fascination, I approached the sepulchre to see what it was, and why such a thing stood alone in such a place. I walked around it, and read, over the Doric door, in German:

Countess Dolingen of Gratz

In Styria

Sought and Found Death 

1801

On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble - for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone - was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back, I saw, graven in great Russian letters: ‘The dead travel fast.’

The reference to Styria recalls the Austrian setting of “Carmilla” and invites comparison between the two vampire tales. Whereas “Carmilla” abolishes male rights over women, Dracula reasserts those rights. This is indeed the key distinction between Dracula and “Carmilla,” one that Stoker apparently had in mind from the opening -albeit deleted- chapter of this book.

Stoker’s overriding concern in Dracula is the threat of rampant female sexual desire. Senf rightly points out that this ancient, aristocratic vampire who prays on the wives and fiancees of England’s working class reveals, among other things, the “power that negative social values from the past often have over the present.” As Troy Boone further concludes, the novel suggests that “a new understanding of sexuality and decay is necessary for any attempt to attain social order and growth” and that “for all its apparent ‘reification’ of dominant political beliefs, [Stoker’s text] exposes the dangers of failing to challenge their authority.” Both Senf and Boone present valid arguments, but, like other readings in Dracula’s critical legacy, theirs fail to emphasize the degree to which Stoker responds to the threat of female sexuality in Dracula. In Stoker’s text Dracula - and Dracula’s sense of sexuality- actually dominates very few of the scenes, whereas the sexually-charged female vampires - those at Castle Dracula, Lucy and Mina- receive most of Stoker’s attention. 

For his first “experiment” in Dracula, Stoker presents the problem of Lucy’s sexual aggressiveness, a problem to which he ultimately provides a violent solution. Although Lucy’s sexuality does not become rabid until her vampiric possession, Stoker presents her from the beginning as exhibiting personality traits potentially dangerous in women. In a letter to Mina, Lucy asks, “why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her?” Her wishing for the right to have more than one sexual partner -a reality for males such as Stoker himself- makes her a threat to established gender roles. Stoker feels obliged to inform the reader that her wishes were unseemly when, in the same passage, she again asks Mina, “why are men so noble when we women are so little worthy of them?” Lucy serves as Stoker’s paradigm of woman-gone-wrong and predictably suffers from it.

In his attempt to redress Carmilla’s defiant behavior, Stoker imbues Lucy with Carmillaesque qualities. Her sleepwalking, which indicates a propensity towards vampirism in Dracula, first occurs in her childhood, just as Carmilla first visits and “infects: Laura during her childhood. In both works, the tendency towards socially aberrant behavior arises in early childhood, but while Carmilla’s and Laura’s behavior remains unrestrained, Lucy’s is eventually checked. Stoker also suggests that Lucy has lesbian tendencies. In a letter to Mina she says, “I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing, as we used to sit; and I would try to tell you what I feel. I do not know how I am writing this even to you. I am afraid to stop, or I should tear up the letter, and I don’t want to stop, for I do so want to tell you all.” Lucy’s wish to share her secrets while undressing suggests her desire to reveal “what is more properly concealed,” something she knows is “wrong.” The men in the text can control Lucy and Mina’s homosocial relationship as long as they both remain accessible; they cannot, however, control what Lucy presumably has in mind.

As if to temper her questionable behavior, Stoker denies Lucy her inheritance rights and places her firmly within the male-governed kinship system. Lucy’s mother, who controls the Westenra estate after her husband’s death, dies shortly before Lucy’s marriage to Arthur Holmwood. Mrs. Westenra, Dr. Seward tells us, “had for some time expected sudden death from her heart, and had put her affairs in absolute order... with the exception of a certain entailed property of Lucy’s father which now, in default of direct issue, went back to a distant branch of the family, the whole estate, real and personal, was left absolutely to Arthur Holmwood.” Separating Lucy from her inheritance fictionally and historically positions her in a “long tradition in which women do not inherit.” Even before Lucy’s wedding, Mrs. Westenra (whose role is the “corrected” equivalent of Carmilla’s subversive mother) ensures Lucy’s total dependence on her future husband. If her daughter had any wild ideas about being financially independent in marriage, she has permanently disabled her.  

Once Dracula kisses Lucy into sudden sexuality, she grows “voluptuous,” “savage,” “wanton,” and “diabolically sweet.” Dracula’s “authorizing kiss... triggers the release of the latent power and excites in [Lucy] a sexuality so mobile, so aggressive, that it thoroughly disrupts... [compartmentalized conceptions] of gender” (Craft 228). Dracula’s kiss enables women to become sexual penetrators. Using their sharp teeth to penetrate men, they reverse traditional gender roles and place men in the passive position customarily reserved for women. In “Carmilla” the penetration of female vampires - in effect, the female appropriation of the phallus - is seen as an act of empowerment; in Dracula, however, Lucy’s unmanageable sexual penetration is presented as inherently evil because it threatens fixed gender distinctions. In an attempt to cure Lucy of her reckless sexuality, Van Helsing and his crew of “brave men” perform massive blood transfusions on her. By having her drained blood replaced with a “brave man”s blood,” Lucy might survive. The act of transfusing blood, of penetrating Lucy’s body with the phallic needle and enabling the men to deposit their own fluids in her, conjures up images of gang rape. As Rubin stresses, “women [in some societies] are frequently kept in their place by gang rape when the ordinary mechanisms of masculine intimidation prove insufficient.” Ironically, Lucy’s wish to marry “as many [men] as want her” violently comes true. Each transfusion symbolizes a kind of ghastly marriage and prompts Van Helsing to fret that “this so sweet maid is a polyandrist.” Stoker gives Lucy what she wants and teaches her a lesson at the same time.

But the gang transfusions fail to cure Lucy’s sexual recalcitrance, prompting Van Helsing’s crew to attempt to mask her sexuality by surrounding her with pungent garlic flowers. While garlic plays a symbolic role in traditional vampire folklore, in Dracula its role is dual. More than just a traditional means of discouraging Dracula’s visits, the ability of garlic to disguise odors, especially body odors, suggests, as Alain Corbin argues in The Foul and the Fragrant, “a way of denying the sexual role of the sense of smell, or at least of shifting the field of olfactory stimulation and allusion.” Van Helsing and Dr. Seward saturate Lucy’s body and environs with garlic flowers not only to keep Dracula at bay but possibly to disguise the sexual odors her newly excited body exudes.

Lucy’s unresponsiveness to ordinary mechanisms of masculine intimidation while alive permits Van Helsing and company, after her death and resurrection as an Undead, to resort to the most violent means of correction available to them. Cora Kaplan argues that traditional fictional “punishment for female sexual transgressions... [is] the immediate loss of social status.” For Stoker, though, the traditional punishment is not severe enough to rectify Lucy’s transgressions. Instead, he employs vampire lore’s extreme phallic corrective: staking and beheading Lucy. In this scene, Stoker’s gang of brave, noble men carry candles dripping “sperm” (D 197) into Lucy’s tomb. Even more sexually alive in the coffin, Lucy’s “body shook and quivered and twisted in violent contortions.” But before she can perform any other sexually suggestive gyrations, Arthur, shining with “high duty” drove “deeper and deeper the mercy bearing stake” into her chest (D 216). This act of transfixation “cures: Lucy and returns her to the accepted role of sexually passive female. Arthur and his companions have repossessed the body, permanently fixing her in the “stabili[zed] distinctions of gender” (Craft 224) and the male system of alliance. Lucy’s sexuality is “corrected.”

Part V will be posted soon...

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in “Carmilla” and “Dracula” (III)

By Elizabeth Signorotti (1996)

Part I - Part II

Thesis: Carmilla is a story of female empowerment, and Dracula is a patriarchal response to it.

Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in “Carmilla” and “Dracula” (part III)

Laura’s father is equally ineffectual as a protector of women. On the evening Carmilla disappears from the schloss (another breach of the separate sphere ideology, in which women are “expected to isolate [themselves] within the home” [Senf 55]), Laura and her maids “grew frightened... [and] rang the bell long and furiously. If my father’s room had been at that side of the house,” Laura says, “we would have called him up at once to our aid. But alas! He was quite out of hearing.” The physical remoteness of her father’s room mirrors his removal from all transactions involving either Laura or Carmilla. Le Fanu emphasizes Papa’s ineffectuality by locating him at the schloss’ perimeter as well as the narrative’s edge. Realizing his disempowered state, Laura “began to cool a little, and soon recovered [her] sense sufficiently to dismiss the men” she had summoned. They, like Spielsdorf and Papa, can offer nothing vital.

Carmilla’s sexual possession of Laura foils Papa’s attempts to marry her to General Spielsdorf, a match that could reestablish the male bond and the male exchange of women. By the time Spielsdorf returns to Styria, Laura’s illness is visible. Her father laments, “I wish our good friend, the General, had chosen any other time; that is, I wish you had been perfectly well to receive him.” Laura’s father fears her malady will reduce her value on the husband market, yet he still hopes Spielsdorf is “thinking of claiming the [Karnstein] titles and estates.” Her father says this “gaily,” Laura tells us, “but the General did not recollect the laugh, or even the smile;... [instead] he looked grave and even fierce.” Spielsdorf realizes that Papa has no right to “transact” his daughter, who has already assumed that right and made an exchange with Carmilla. Although Veeder argues that Laura laments her exclusion from the “relationship among males” in which her father participates, no evidence for this exists in the text. On the contrary, Laura relishes the liberating feelings resulting from her alliance with Carmilla: the “gentle, and somehow not unwelcome possession” and the “peculiar cold thrill [against her breast preceding] a sense of exhaustion.” Rather than envying the relationship among males, the two women enjoy the power of female alliances.

Laura’s and Carmilla’s female alliances result in a rejection not only of marriage but of motherhood as well. Senf notes that “during the nineteenth century [it was assumed that] motherhood was a woman’s highest duty.” Their transgressive relationship disrupts the laws of procreation necessary to maintain social order. Le Fanu, however, refrains from making them culpable for their procreative transgression and from condemning his vampiric representation of lesbian desire, leaving “Carmilla” more open-ended than may at first appear.

“Carmilla”‘s resolution follows the traditional means of vampire extermination, but the neat resolution “fails to contain the larger forces of which Carmilla is only a single manifestation.” Realizing that Carmilla is the vampire responsible for the mysterious malady plaguing Styria, Spielsdorf and Papa enact the obligatory staking scene (significantly termed “transfixation” - literally, nailing down something gone wild - by the Catholic church) then burn her body and scatter her ashes in the river. This scene, however, only ambiguously ends Carmilla’s existence. Since Le Fanu suggests “that a vampire’s victims must become vampires themselves,” he raises questions in the reader’s mind “about the ultimate fate of both Laura and Mlle. Rheinfeldt.” Indeed, we learn that “it is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply... according to a ghostly law... [and that a vampire] spectre visits living people in their slumbers; they die, and almost invariably, in the grave, develop into vampires.” Moreover, in the prologue to “Carmilla” the editor of Laura’s story informs us that he “was anxious to reopen the correspondence commenced by Doctor Hesselius, so many years before, with a person so clever and careful as his informant seems to have been. Much to my regret, however, I found that she [Laura] had died in the interval.” By the time the tale reaches its readers, both Laura and Bertha have died, yet presumably they continue to live as ressurected vampires, perpetuating the chain of female alliances begun by Carmilla.

The conclusion to Laura’s tale is as ambiguous as the extermination of Carmilla. During the spring following Carmilla’s transfixation, Laura’s father takes her on a tour through Italy. The year-long tour represents his attempt to reinstate Laura in the male chain of exchange, to reinscribe her into the world of her father and cure her of the lesbian desire she still maintains. But his attempt fails. Laura has tasted the sweet fruit of self-determination and fulfilling desire and does not wish to return to her pre-Carmilla life. She writes that, despite the passage of time, “to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations - sometimes the plaful, 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.” Laura ends her account fancying that Carmilla is poised to enter the drawing room. This image suggests her longing for Carmilla to re-enter her, to penetrate her once more. By this point, Laura has changed as a result of her vampiric love. No longer a mere “sign,” she has become a fleshed-out, desiring woman. Far from restoring Laura to her father’s systems of exchange, the conclusion of her narrative confirms the reader’s suspicion that everything Carmilla represents, if not Carmilla herself, remains loose and desirable in Styria.

Like the unframed Karnstein portrait, the entire “Carmilla” narrative is incompletely framed. In the brief prologue the editor comments: “upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates.” Yet the narrative ends without presenting either Dr. Hesselius’ note or the editor’s concluding remarks. Instead, “Carmilla” ends with Laura’s reverie. The frame that opens the tale is never closed, recalling the lack of closure around Carmilla’s effigy. The prologue’s editor also informs us that Laura was Doctor Hesselius’s “informant,” but Laura’s pointedly addressing her story to a “town lady like you” eliminates the male link between her and her reader and provides a direct route from one woman to another. Le Fanu’s incomplete narrative frame supports the perception of “Carmilla”’s women as free from male systems of control or exchange. Laura’s relationship with Carmilla is not sandwiched between an editor’s and doctor’s comments and then exchanged with the reader; rather, like Spielsdorf’s and Papa’s failed attempts to contain these women, the editor similarly fails to frame them in his narrative. Laura addresses her female reader directly, eliminating any intervening male agent, just as she and Carmilla eliminated the middle-man in their own exchange.

Dracula is Stoker’s response to Le Fanu’s portrayal of female empowerment. If Le Fanu frees his female characters from subject positions in the male kinship system, Stoker decidedly returns his to exchange status and reinstates them in that system. Stoker’s female characters are “supreme gifs” (Levi-Streuss 65) whose exchange finally binds Dracula’s “little band of men” together. In Dracula, Stoker creates what Frederic Jameson would call a “laboratory space” to carry out “experiments” on female characters, ultimately achieving an “imaginary vengeance” against the rising power of women, particularly against women who assert control over their own sexuality. It is usually assumed that Stoker sought vengeance against women in Dracula because of his hostility toward prostitutes who had infected him with tertiary syphillis (see, e.g. Robert Tracy 46). But the root of Stoker’s struggle with women’s sexuality can be traced to his relationship with his wife. In 1878 he married Florence Balcombe, who one year later gave birth to their son, Noel. Stoker’s granddaughter believed that Florence “refused to have sex with Bram” after Noel’s birth, which has led to the perception of her as a “cold,” “aloof” woman who was “very anti-sex” (Farson 213,214). Whether or not she was sexually frigid is debatable. What is clear, though, is that her behavior toward her husband was unconventional - that sexually she did not fulfill her part of the marriage contract. In creating Dracula, then, Stoker was probably less concerned with achieving vengeance against a particular group of women who had infected him than he was with asserting control over a whole range of women, who, like his wife - indeed, like women throughout Victorian England who welcomed the New Woman movement - had violated conventional expectations about women’s sexuality. Rather than embrace sexually self-determining women such as Laura and Carmilla, Stoker placed the women of Dracula firmly under male control and subjected them to severe punishments for any sexual transgression.

Part IV can be found here.

[allengreenfield]

The Last Voyage of the Demeter: The Real-Life Lore Behind Dracula in History | SYFY WIRE

The Real-Life Lore Behind Dracula in History

Even more than a century after publication, the character of Count Dracula remains one of the most enduring ever created. Much like Dracula

[allengreenfield]

Dracula: June 30 - by DraculaDaily - Dracula Daily

Dracula: June 30

somebody's got an incredible skincare regimen