Drink the Blood of the Patriarchy
When it comes to how women are portrayed in victorian novels, far too often they were weak and without agency. Is that a fair representation of women in Victorian times — besides the actual monarch Queen Victoria…? I dunno, ask Stephanie Buck.
But what I can write about is a novelist who’s name rhymes with #metoo: Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.
Le Fanu (yes, Irish. No, not a pen name) published the 1872 English language novella Carmilla, a work still cited as one of the best of Gothic horror and an enormously influential work in the vampire genre. In fact, it’s the most dramatized piece of vampire fiction after you-know-what.
Le Fanu popularized something that had been largely ignored in novelized vampires: a female antagonist. But he kept one mainstay — his female vampire still attacked females, as did pretty much all Victorian-era vampires. It’s a trend noted by several critics: vampires fight with men, but they seduce women. The same held true with Carmilla.
Put a pin in that.
Because Le Fanu also co-owned the Irish newspaper The Dublin Evening Mail.
The newspaper was a capable publication and at a quick glance, barely distinguishable from any other broadsheet anywhere else in the world.
But the paper did make efforts to include theater reviews for its readers. There was no on-staff reviewer, however. Instead, the work was done by a volunteer who wrote the reviews, unpaid, simply for love of the theater.
And guess who that unpaid theater critic was?
Bram Stoker.
Stoker would go on to write a certain vampire book you may have heard of. But remember the pin we stuck earlier? Le Fanu introduced a female vampire to the genre. Stoker, ever the one-upsman, had FOUR female vampires. And while Le Fanu stuck with the tradition of innocent, virginal women being seduced by vampires, Stoker let his female vampires seduce an innocent, virginal man.
It’s rarely pointed out that there are FIVE vampires in the book Dracula, and FOUR of them are women.
Of course, Dracula still seems to have some sort of power over the women, so I’m not exactly calling this a victory for suffrage. But as Queen Victoria herself once tweeted, “I don’t understand feminism at all #GoodWhipping.”
However, if one sees a line from Carmilla to Dracula’s vampire brides and the turning of Lucy Westenra; and if one views vampirism as sexual freedom and sexual freedom as empowerment and empowerment as good; then we can at least curtsy to the Irish writer with the Huguenot name, Joseph Sheridan La Fanu.
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