Vampires and the empire: fears and fictions of the 1890s

Warwick, Alexandra

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511553707.011

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Ironically, the articles on Marryat's neglected novel discuss vampirism and sickness literally not metaphorically. Alexandra Warwick (1995) traces the connection between infection and gender; Susan Zieger (2008) describes Harriet's need for intimacy as an addiction to love; Sian Macfie (1991) writes how women with venereal diseases were regarded as vampires. There are also numerous studies that examine Harriet's psychic powers in light of medical discourses: Zieger (2008) argues that "Marryat medicalizes Harriet's vampirism" (p. 216) by having a physician investigate her heredity; Brenda Hammack (2008) observes that "Marryat's portrait of a female vampire reads like a medical case study" (p. 886).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fin-de-Siècle and Motion Sickness in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire

Baypinar

2019

Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%