The Blood of the Vampire – Vampirism, hysteria, sexual aggression and the ‘other’
The following commentary reveals important aspects of the plot. Readers new to the novel might wish to treat this introduction as an afterward.
There is no getting away from the fact that 1897 was a significant year for vampire fiction - as most readers will know, this was the year Bram Stoker published Dracula. One of the reviews of The Blood of the Vampire laments that Bram Stoker’s gothic tale inspired so many ‘imitations’: ‘Mr Bram Stoker has much to answer for.’[19] The review is scathing of Marryat’s story, arguing that although Marryat was trying to be ‘creepy’, her vampire character, Harriet Brandt, ‘is no more terrifying to grown-up minds than would be the turnip-bogey of our childhood’ and that Marryat has failed to be sufficiently ‘appalling and blood-curdling.’ Perhaps, in fact, it is the reviewer that has got it wrong? Can we be sure that Marryat wanted to be ‘creepy’? I would suggest, and this introduction will discuss, the possibility that Marryat has presented us with a ‘heroine’ who encodes many late nineteenth-century concerns such as transgressive women and sexuality, race, and ideas of heredity. The homage to gothic fiction is there in the title and the references to Obeah witchcraft and spiritualism that the text contains. The themes, however, deal with much more prosaic everyday issues in the late nineteenth-century, but issues that caused enormous amounts of anxiety and hand-wringing. Marryat’s penchant for writing female characters who display the potential to challenge gender norms and stereotypes suggests that she is using her character of Harriet Brandt to give voice to these issues, rather than merely attempting to be ‘terrifying.’ The fact that Marryat might have been looking to display characteristics and concerns of real women is borne out if we concur with Octavia Davis, in her quite brilliant essay on this novel, where she argues that the traits Marryat imbues Harriet with were the same ‘destructive characteristics she attributes to herself and to other women, indicating that she had incorporated and internalized claims that white middle-class British women exhibited vampiric tendencies similar to those of the degenerate Other.’[20]
Therefore it is important not to read this novel with the expectation of experiencing the feelings of horror or terror that we might expect when reading a more typical ‘gothic’ novel. What this introduction aims to do is outline some of the socio-historical background from the nineteenth century through which we might contextualize this text. Susan Zieger states that although ‘this neglected novel is about vampirism, it is not a supernatural novel … Marryat medicalizes Harriet’s vampirism.’[21] And this introduction will develop ideas surrounding the medicalisation and patho-logisation of vampirism in due course. Brenda Hammack’s essay on the ‘Scientizing of Hybridity’ in The Blood of the Vampire, argues that ‘Marryat’s portrait of a female vampire reads like a medical case study.’[22] Hammack considers the hereditary legacy of the vampire bat bite that Harriet’s grandmother received and looks at ideas of inter-species hybridity in late nineteenth-century writing and gives an interesting discussion of animal imagery in this text.
Harriet Brandt is not, therefore, one of the blood-sucking un-dead but harbours a much feared pollutant, or contagion, in her otherwise ordinary human-form. Her looks belie the threat that she is perceived to be, and it is ideas surrounding the possible danger of her contaminating potential that shall be explored further. Some of the major themes of this novel include the medical pathologisation of women, sexually transgressive behaviour, heredity, eugenics, the non-white ‘other’, and the occult. So despite the lack of blood-chilling terror, this novel does give us scope for further consideration of interesting themes and ideas.
Hysteria and fictional female vampires
I want, at first, to consider ideas surrounding the interpretation of vampirism as a fictional representation of hysteria. Hysteria was perceived to be a significant problem throughout the nineteenth century with medical journals, books and treatises providing an astounding amount of literature which looked at the causes, treatment and effect of this loosely defined condition. Broadly speaking, the diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ was regularly applied to female behaviour that transgressed gender norms. Any woman who behaved in a way that was considered troublesome or transgressive was quite likely to have her behaviour pathologised and find herself diagnosed as an ‘hysteric.’ It is not difficult to see, therefore, how the analogy between the deviant behaviour of female vampires and hysterics can be made. More specifically, parallels between the vampiric woman and the hysterical woman can be established by close reading of texts both literary and medical. We should, therefore, consider for a moment two of Harriet Brandt’s more well-known vampiric sisters, Bram Stoker’s Lucy and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. In considering the representation of hysteria through vampirism, Judith Halberstam’s essay on Dracula in which she explores how the vampire figure is open to numerous interpretations relating to race, class and gender, has provided a useful interpretative tool. She writes: ‘Gothic fiction scavenges from many discursive fields and makes monsters out of bits and pieces of science and literature.’[23] Halberstam goes on to argue that ‘‘Gothic’ describes a discursive strategy which produces monsters as a kind of temporary but influential response to social, political and sexual problems.’[24] The presentation of a monstrous woman with vampiric tendencies, if not a ‘full-blown’ vampire, clearly encodes nineteenth-century fears which surr-ounded women who exhibited signs of behaviour perceived to be trans-gressive. The figure of the vampire is clearly a malleable concept and can be adapted to represent fin-de-siècle fears that threatened the stability of gender ideologies concerning women.
The portrayals of Carmilla, Lucy and Harriet Brandt establish the very strong parallels between vampirism and hysteria and show how writers used established and recognisable tropes to depict demonic characters that symbolised transgressive women. Furthermore, the presence of doctors in texts that feature vampiric women substantiates a medical interpretation of their behaviour. Carmilla is finally destroyed by a group of men, two of whom are medical; Van Helsing and Seward in Dracula are both doctors – turned vampire hunters; and in this novel Dr Phillips gives Harriet the information and knowledge which, ultimately, plays a significant part in her decision to end her own life. Medical writing throughout the nineteenth century details most explicitly how challenging the female hysteric was perceived to be by the medical profession. By displaying a plethora of signs, symptoms and behavioural traits the vampiric/hysteric invites the medical establishment to determine a diagnosis and construct a label for her perceived abnormal conduct. The hysteric, as with the female vampire, presents a call to arms to medical men.
The full extent of the range of symptoms and behaviour likely to beset the diagnosed hysteric are fully explored in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The chapters of Dracula that narrate Lucy’s deterioration and emergence as a fully-fledged vampire draw on a wealth of material that finds close parallels with medical diagnoses of the period. Lucy becomes a fantastical horror image, which, in the first instance, appears to be pure imagination. However, the gradual delineation of her behaviour and condition is not that far removed from the diagnostic writing of medical professionals in the nineteenth century. The depiction of Lucy with which Stoker provides the reader reads like a detailed case history of a nineteenth-century hysteric. Through the medium of developing vampirism Stoker uses contemporary medical images to embody his demonic character. Christo-pher Bentley writes that: ‘the traditional view of vampirism […] has been partly displaced by a more modern attitude which sees vampirism as a disease and a perversion possibly amenable to medical treatment.’[25] The behaviour of the diagnosed nineteenth-century hysteric was indeed seen as a perversion of the accepted feminine norm that was confronted with the full power of the medical establishment in an attempt to ‘cure’ the disease. We see Harriet’s vulnerability to the medical establishment most clearly in this novel.
There is a moment in Le Fanu’s story ‘C
armilla’, when the eponymous ‘heroine’ suffers what is quite clearly an ‘hysterical’ attack when she witnesses a funeral procession:
She sat down. Her face underwent a change that alarmed and even terrified me for a moment. It darkened, and became horribly livid; her teeth and hands were clenched, and she frowned and compressed her lips, while she stared down upon the ground at her feet, and trembled all over with a continued shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies seemed strained to suppress a fit, with which she was then breathlessly tugging; and at length a low convulsive cry of suffering broke from her, and gradually the hysteria subsided.[26]
Tamar Heller cites the above passage as being ‘the story’s most explicit reference to hysteria.’[27] Heller, in her study of this story argues ‘the language used by nineteenth-century medicine to diagnose the female patient echoes throughout “Carmilla”.’[28] Carmilla’s story is littered with descriptions of her appearance and actions which could have been lifted straight from the pages of a case history of a typical nineteenth-century hysteric. As with the critical reception of ‘Carmilla’, other critics have noted the ‘hysterical’ characterisation of Lucy in Dracula. That Lucy’s hysteria is integral to her vampirism and cannot be considered as a separate disease or perversion again becomes evident when the novel is studied in tandem with contemporary medical material. Elaine Showalter sees Lucy as ‘a sister to Dora and other female hysterics.’[29] Showalter’s reading of Lucy is contemporaneous with evolving psychoanalytical thought at the fin de siècle, and such a reading could also be relevant to Harriet Brandt in this novel. The depth of Lucy’s hysterical character-ization, and that of Harriet, does, however, encompass a much broader historical frame of reference with the image of the ‘classic’ hysteric being something that has evolved over decades of medical investigation and classification from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The image of the nineteenth-century hysteric was not new to the fin de siècle: the power and resonance that Lucy and other female vampires of this period have is indebted to an image, knowledge and understanding of much longer duration.
Marie Mulvey-Roberts, in her reading of Dracula, states that ‘Lucy’s behaviour on both sides of the grave would have led many Victorian doctors to diagnose her as a classic hysteric.’[30] It is clear that Stoker’s depiction of hysteria then, encompasses decades of nineteenth-century knowledge about the hysteric type. Marryat too displays a knowledge and understanding of the patriarchal and professional desire to control female behaviour, label it and treat it, and this is encoded through the character of Dr Phillips who pathologises Harriet’s life, her heredity and her future with his warnings and prophecies (or prognosis) of what is likely to happen to her. What is evident in this story and in Dracula and ‘Carmilla’ too, is not just the threat of physical danger that the female vampire poses but the moral danger too. In ‘Carmilla’ it is not long before Laura begins to exhibit incipient signs of a hysterical diagnosis:
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. […] Without knowing it, I was now in a pretty advanced stage of the strangest illness under which mortal ever suffered. (p. 281)
Late in the century Caesar Lombroso, in his extensive study of female offenders, wrote about hysterics: ‘imitation is an absolute contagion among them.’[31] The threat of the vampiric/hysteric was believed to be real and dangerous in ways physically, socially, sexually and morally. In a Lancet article from 1873 we read: ‘It is ever to be borne in mind that the disease [of hysteria] is moral as well as physical.’[32] Doctors who took on the task of treating hysterical patients deemed it necessary to tackle women’s moral management, reinforcing gender ideologies of the time about appropriate behaviour for women, and who was responsible for governing this, as Phillips does with Harriet. Harriet’s racial background adds yet a further dimension, as I shall discuss below.
It is clear, therefore, that wherever there is a vampire, a doctor is never far away. As with the hysteric female, male medical authority seeks to control and contain her potential for damage and it is Dr Phillips who informs everyone, including Harriet, of the nature of her contagion. After the death of Bobby, Baroness Gobelli’s revelation to Harriet that she carries ‘the curse of black blood and the vampire’s blood which kills everything which it caresses’ sends Harriet to him for more information and she begs to be told if Baroness Gobelli’s statements are true. The link with the deaths that have populated her life becomes impossible to ignore. Dr Phillips’s knowledge about Harriet is his power and, in effect, his information, albeit unwittingly, brings about her death. Harriet resists the power of the medical authority temporarily by marrying in defiance of the doctor’s advice. But, as we see, with the death of her husband she accepts her fate, and Dr Phillips’s words of authority.
Arguably, Dr Phillips achieves what was believed to be the primary goal of a physician when dealing with an hysteric:
The true course is to gain the patient’s confidence; and this is usually not difficult up to a certain point, for the insane or hysterical mind, in spite of itself as it were, tends to lean trustfully upon the strong and healthy mind, provided the circumstances of the case are carefully and delicately probed by the physician in the exercise of his office; a firm and genial tone of authority being at the same time adopted.[33]
Harriet is offered no cure. Dr Phillips gives her advice on the moral management of her ‘condition’ when he tells her to shun close relation-ships. Such advice was in-keeping with the more conservative of medical professionals at the time: ‘The true therapeutic indications are to improve physical strength and raise moral tone by restoring confidence and resolution, by promoting and cultivating self-help and self-reliance.’[34] Harriet’s only solution is to fall back on her own resources. When told not to marry she responds:
“And that is the truth, medically and scientifically – that I must not marry?”
“I think it would be unadvisable.” (p162)
By seeking confirmation of the medical and scientific validity of this advice Harriet is responding to the established authoritative voice. Marryat, in Dr Phillips, is portraying the power that comes with know-ledge, the esteemed superiority of medical wisdom. Dr Phillips’s advice coincides with contemporary medical opinion about the treatment of hysterics. G. H. Savage, a well known name in the medical profession for his treatment of hysterics, is forthright in his belief that: ‘I do not believe myself that hysteria is generally benefited by marriage.’[35] Savage goes on to state categorically: ‘I should never advise marriage as a cure for hysteria.’[36] Similarly Maudsley wrote extensively about the dangers posed to a young man who marries a hysteric.[37]
As stated in the first part of this introduction, The Blood of the Vampire is one of the few Marryat novels to have received any critical attention. Sian Macfie in her paper ‘They suck us dry: A Study of Late Nineteenth Century Projections of Vampiric Women’[38] focuses much of her attention on Marryat, as she deals extensively with the ‘psychic’ vampire. She sees Harriet as poised between ‘the fantastic and the realistic’ and acknow-ledges that Marryat: ‘medicalizes vampirism.’[39] However, whilst referring to women and ‘moral madness’[40] Macfie reflects on the way that ‘the rise of the 1890s cult of the ‘New Woman’ was to demonize her, to classify her as sick, as evil, as vampiric.’[41] And it is this idea of ‘sickness’ that repeatedly recurs and strengthens the link to the pathologisation of female behaviour and, thus, the diagnosis of hysteria.
Quite limited progress had been made in medical thinking about hysteria throughout the nineteenth century. Physicians were in as much disagreement about the diagnosis and treatment of the condition at the end of the century as they had been decades earlier. It is not hard to see, therefore, why writers of f
iction utilized this medical and social conun-drum to imbue their characters with recognizable traits and to exploit and expand them for fictional purposes. Writers of sensation fiction, such as Marryat, expanded the hysterical parameters so as to embrace more extreme levels of characterization and plot. Throughout fiction in the nineteenth century the hysteric or ‘mad’ woman was demonised and this presentation took on a variety of forms.[42] Writers looked for ways to represent challenging women and sought to exploit the real fears society had about the evolving role and nature of women within contemporary culture. By presenting images of patriarchal society’s worst nightmare, the progression to true evil crescendos as the century closes. Whilst the portrayals of the ‘hysteric’ may vary in their configuration, the underlying neuroses of both the hysteric and the world around her are consistent.
Unlike her blood-sucking sisters, Carmilla and Lucy, Marryat’s creation does not have a bloody end at the hands of others. And, as discussed, throughout her life as a ‘vampire’ Harriet does not commit any blood-sucking attacks, she is an unwitting, psychic vampire, drawing the life out of those who are close to her. Octavia Davis studies the work of Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson The Evolution of Sex (1889) in her reading of this novel and relates Harriet’s psychic vampirism to their theory of ‘female anabolic absorption of energy.’ Davis argues that ‘according to mainstream contemporary science, women lose blood and energy because of their sexuality, but female anabolism revitalizes them at the expense of the world and people around them.’[43] I would suggest that Marryat’s delineation of Harriet Brandt moves between this very modern scientific interpretation and a more retrograde acknowledgement of female hysteria as it was understood across the nineteenth century and the concerns that surrounded the perceived sexually transgressive ‘new woman.’ However, certain descriptions of Harriet’s appearance draw parallels with the blood-sucking demons of Stoker with which we are more familiar. We note Harriet is described as having “blood-red lips.” The blood-filled lips are a regular feature of the female vampire. This description, coming early on in the text is, perhaps, a red-herring, leading us to suppose that Harriet will be a more familiar blood-sucking vampire. Marryat, however, belies our expectations by providing us with a vampire whose attacks are much more pervasive and subtle. The overt sexuality surrounding the image of “blood-red lips” is important, however.
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