Plot
The novel opens in Heyst, Belgium, where 21-year-old Harriet Brandt meets two English women, Margaret and Elinor. Harriet reveals that she was raised in a Jamaican convent, following the death of her parents ten years prior. When she came of age, she used her inheritance to move to Europe to start a new life. Although one of the women finds Harriet distasteful, Margaret Pullen likes Harriet. Harriet is fond of Margaret's young child, but Margaret is cautious about letting Harriet hold her. Harriet reminisces about her childhood on a plantation, saying that she misses its overseer because he let her whip the slaves when they were lazy. After Harriet touches her, Margaret suddenly feels drained and begs Harriet to let her go. After finding out that she is wealthy, a local aristocrat, the Baroness Gobelli, invites Harriet back to England. Harriet spends more time with Margaret's child, who becomes severely ill.
A medical professional—Doctor Phillips—is summoned. He does not know what is wrong with the child, but recognises her surname because he knew her father. The baby grows ill and dies. Harriet travels to England, and Harriet begins spending many hours with the Baroness' young son, Bobby. She also meets and falls in love with a socialist, Anthony Pennell. Bobby also becomes ill, and the Baroness accuses her of being cursed with both "black blood" and "vampire blood". Harriet, frightened, returns to Doctor Phillips, who tells her about her family history. Her father was a doctor who performed experiments on his plantation's slaves until they revolted and killed him, and her mother was the daughter of a slave of the Judge of Barbados. He advises Harriet that she should never marry, and instead withdraw from society. Shortly thereafter, Bobby dies.
Harriet returns to Anthony, who tells her that Dr Phillips' theory is ridiculous, and that they should ignore him and marry. For their honeymoon, they travel to Nice. The next morning, Harriet wakes to find Anthony dead beside her. She leaves a written will bequeathing her possessions to Margaret Pullen, and then kills herself by taking chloral.
Analysis
Race
The text associates Harriet's mixed race background with her vampirism. H. L. Malchow notes that vampires and mixed-race individuals elicited similar fears from Victorian readers; the ability of both to pass—as human or white-skinned—resulted in anxiety about "pollution of the blood". Ifill advanced that thought, writing that Harriet's efficacy as a vampire-predator is determined by her ability to pass, giving her access to victims. In Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood, Aspasia Stephanou points out that Harriet's mother—the child of a slave—passed on "not only the inherited black [...] blood of her mother, but also the vampire strain". Stephanou argues that Harriet's vampirism is associated with her blackness because Victorian readers conceived of blackness as hypersexual and gluttonous. Others have concurred. Academic Ardel Haefele-Thomas notes that Marryat racialises Harriet by comparing her to animals, such as snakes. The novel's English characters are made to feel sick by the way she eats.
[Harriet]: “We had plenty of niggers on the coffee plantation, regular African fellows with woolly heads and blubber lips and yellow whites to their eyes. When I was a little thing of four years old Pete used to let me whip the little niggers for a treat when they had done anything wrong. It used to make me laugh to see them wriggle their legs under the whip and cry!”
— Florence Marryat,The Blood of the Vampire
The novel's treatment of race is not always read as straightforwardly xenophobic. Haefele-Thomas says that Marryat characterises the British as "hypocritical and unsympathetic" to marginalised groups. Ifill concurs, noting that Harriet's pleasant childhood memories of whipping slaves reflects upon "the morally unwholesome conditions in the Western world". The Washington Post's literary critic Michael Dirda posits that the novel supplies non-vampiric explanations for the deaths occurring around Harriet, suggesting that she might be a victim of racial prejudice.
Gender and sexuality
Gender and femininity has been considered alongside the novel's treatment of race. Both Helena Ifill and A. N. Bulamur associate Harriet Brandt with the anxiety posed by the New Woman—a 19th-century idea characterised by financial independence and confidence. Approaches to gender and sexuality in The Blood of the Vampire are frequently mingled with race. For example, Sarah Willburn analyses Harriet's "psychical" feeding on Margaret as an instance of Stephen Arata's reverse colonisation. [lower-alpha 2] Willburn goes on to discuss how Harriet's feeding is characterised as "a lesbian threat [...] unsophisticated, practically accidental", but nonetheless "a serious threat".
Comparisons to Dracula and Carmilla
The Blood of the Vampire is overshadowed by two other Gothic vampire novels—Stoker's Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872). As a result, comparisons between the three are fairly common. Susan Ziegler writes that the supernatural explanation for vampirism in Dracula is dismissed in favour of a medical one, making it an aspect of her race. In Dracula, the primary association of blood is with Christianity, compared to Marryat's novel which makes it symbolic of heredity and eugenics. Marryat's vampire is separated from Le Fanu's Carmilla is that Harriet is completely unaware she is a vampire; Haefele-Thomas points out that only the title would indicate to Victorian readers that they were reading a vampire story.
Critics have also noted similarities. Greta Depledge's introduction to a 2010 version observes that, in Dracula, Carmilla, and The Blood of the Vampire, the deaths of the three main vampires come as the result of medical intervention. Of Carmilla's vampire hunters, two are medical practitioners; Dracula's Van Helsing and Seward are both doctors; and Dr Phillips influences Harriet's decision to kill herself. Depledge relates that the medical profession is tied to the female vampires of each text because of the Victorian diagnosis of hysteria—a condition of excess emotionality in women. To deal with her vampirism, Dr Phillips instructs Harriet to practice self-help and self-reliance; this is similar to the advice given by medical professionals to treat the incurable hysteria.
Haefele-Thomas argues that, although there is "no clear evidence" Marryat had read Carmilla, it is likely. Both novels reflect anxieties over an increasingly multicultural Britain.
Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish author who is best known for writing the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving and business manager of the West End's Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned.
Carmilla is an 1872 Gothic novella by Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu and one of the early works of vampire fiction, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by 25 years. First published as a serial in The Dark Blue (1871–72), the story is narrated by a young woman preyed upon by a female vampire named Carmilla, later revealed to be Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. The character is a prototypical example of the lesbian vampire, expressing romantic desires toward the protagonist. The story is often anthologised, and has been adapted many times in film and other media.
Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. An epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, investigate, hunt and kill Dracula.
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales, mystery novels, and horror fiction. He was a leading ghost story writer of his time, central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M. R. James described Le Fanu as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". Three of his best-known works are the locked-room mystery Uncle Silas, the lesbian vampire novella Carmilla, and the historical novel The House by the Churchyard.
A vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the vital essence of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead humanoid creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods which they inhabited while they were alive. They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance, markedly different from today's gaunt, pale vampire which dates from the early 19th century. Vampiric entities have been recorded in cultures around the world; the term vampire was popularized in Western Europe after reports of an 18th-century mass hysteria of a pre-existing folk belief in Southeastern and Eastern Europe that in some cases resulted in corpses being staked and people being accused of vampirism. Local variants in Southeastern Europe were also known by different names, such as shtriga in Albania, vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania, cognate to Italian 'Strega', meaning Witch.
Vampire literature covers the spectrum of literary work concerned principally with the subject of vampires. The literary vampire first appeared in 18th-century poetry, before becoming one of the stock figures of gothic fiction with the publication of Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), which was inspired by the life and legend of Lord Byron. Later influential works include the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1847); Sheridan Le Fanu's tale of a lesbian vampire, Carmilla (1872), and the most well known: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Some authors created a more "sympathetic vampire", with Varney being the first, and more recent examples such as Moto Hagio's series The Poe Clan (1972–1976) and Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire (1976) proving influential.
Wilhelmina "Mina" Harker is a fictional character and the main female character in Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula.
Dracula's Daughter is a 1936 American vampire horror film produced by Universal Pictures as a sequel to the 1931 film Dracula. Directed by Lambert Hillyer from a screenplay by Garrett Fort, the film stars Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden in the title role, and Marguerite Churchill, and features, as the only cast member to return from the original, Edward Van Sloan – although his character's name was altered from "Van Helsing" to "Von Helsing".
Vampire films have been a staple in world cinema since the era of silent films, so much so that the depiction of vampires in popular culture is strongly based upon their depiction in films throughout the years. The most popular cinematic adaptation of vampire fiction has been from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, with over 170 versions to date. Running a distant second are adaptations of the 1872 novel Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. By 2005, the Dracula character had been the subject of more films than any other fictional character except Sherlock Holmes.
The Vampire Lovers is a 1970 British Gothic horror film directed by Roy Ward Baker and starring Ingrid Pitt, Peter Cushing, George Cole, Kate O'Mara, Madeline Smith, Dawn Addams, Douglas Wilmer and Jon Finch. It was produced by Hammer Film Productions. It is based on the 1872 Sheridan Le Fanu novella Carmilla and is the first film in the Karnstein Trilogy, the other two films being Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971). The three films were somewhat daring for the time in explicitly depicting lesbian themes.
Lesbian vampirism is a trope in early gothic horror and 20th century exploitation film. The archetype of a lesbian vampire used the fantasy genre to circumvent the heavy censorship of lesbian characters in the realm of social realism.
LGBT themes in horror fiction refers to sexuality in horror fiction that can often focus on LGBTQ+ characters and themes within various forms of media. It may deal with characters who are coded as or who are openly LGBTQ+, or it may deal with themes or plots that are specific to gender and sexual minorities.
Illness or Modern Women is a play by the Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek. It was published in 1984 in the avant-garde journal manuscripte of Graz and premiered on the stage of the Schauspielhaus Bonn on February 12, 1987, directed by Hans Hollmann. The play was published in book form by Prometh Verlag in 1987 with an afterword by Regine Friedrich. The title "parodically conflates women with illness." The play is based on an earlier, shorter radio play by Jelinek called Erziehung eines Vampirs, which appeared in 1986 on Süddeutscher Rundfunk.
Count Dracula is the title character of Bram Stoker's 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula. He is considered the prototypical and archetypal vampire in subsequent works of fiction. Aspects of the character are believed by some to have been inspired by the 15th-century Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler, who was also known as Vlad Dracula, and by Sir Henry Irving, an actor for whom Stoker was a personal assistant.
"Dracula's Guest" is a short story by Bram Stoker, first published in the short story collection Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914). It is believed to have been intended as the first chapter for Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, but was deleted prior to publication as the original publishers felt it was superfluous to the story.
"Olalla" is a short story by the novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson. It was first published in the Christmas 1885 issue of The Court and Society Review, then re-published in 1887 as part of the collection The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables. It is set in Spain during the Peninsular War.
The Unwanted is a 2014 American thriller film written and directed by Bret Wood. It is based on the novel Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu but was transposed from a Gothic tale set in Austria to a Southern Gothic setting. It stars Christen Orr in the title role, a woman who comes to a small town in the Southern US to investigate the mother she never knew. Along the way, she meets Laura and her father Troy, locals who may know something about her mother. It premiered at the Atlanta Film Festival on March 31, 2014, and Kino International released it on DVD on July 14, 2015.
Vampires: The World of the Undead is a 1993 illustrated monograph on cultural history of vampires and vampire folklore and literature. Written by the French professor of English literature and specialist in vampire myth, Jean Marigny, and published in pocket format by Éditions Gallimard as the 161st volume in their 'Découvertes' collection.
Irish Gothic literature developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the writers were Anglo-Irish. The period from 1691 to 1800 was marked by the dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy, Anglo-Irish families of the Church of Ireland who controlled most of the land. The Irish Parliament, which was almost exclusively Protestant in composition, passed the Penal Laws, effectively disenfranchising the Catholic majority both politically and economically. This began to change with the Acts of Union 1800 and the concomitant abolition of the Irish Parliament. Following a vigorous campaign led by Irish lawyer Daniel O'Connell, Westminster passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 removing most of the disabilities imposed upon Catholics.
