In Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire (1897), the nineteen-year-old orphaned heiress, Harriet Brandt, embodies the social turbulence of the fin de siècle with her shifting identity as a human and vampire, British and Jamaican, a former convent girl with dubious sexual orientation, and nurturer and killer of her loved ones. The white upper-class guests of Hotel Lion d'Or, a seaside resort in Belgium, feel motion sickness due to her multiethnic and interspecies identity that shakes patriarchy, scientific authority, and Orientalist cultural distinctions. They feel nausea because they are disturbed with her "unrefined" blood, unexplainable psychic powers, and sexual decadence that contaminates the hotel. The people Harriet cares for at the hotel-a baby girl and her husband Anthony-die due to her uncontrollable ability to drain the life energy of those close to her. Harriet's loved ones gradually die because they are not "fit" to survive in fin-de-siècle Europe, where racial and gender categories were becoming unstable. Her suicide after unwittingly killing her newlywed husband suggests that she herself cannot embrace her liminal identity. In the novel, sickness serves as a metaphor for the social disorientation of the fin de siècle that takes the lives of Victorians, who cannot adapt to changing sociopolitical conditions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.