Dracula’s Daughters: Angela Carter and Pierrette Fleutiaux’s Vampiric Exchanges

Abstract

The literary vampire is the Gothic voyager par excellence. From Lord Byron’s The Giaour (1813) and Dr John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) to Charles Nodier’s melodrama Le Vampire (1820), and from the Baudelairean flâneur feeding off the sights and sounds of the modern cityscape to Count Dracula’s sea voyages to Victorian England, this liminal figure haunts the nineteenth-century Anglo-French literary imagination. Not only a subject of Gothic narrative, the vampire is also emblematic of its textual practices and processes. In the introduction to European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760–1960 (2002), Avril Horner foregrounds the voracious character of the Gothic novel as ‘a vampirelike phenomenon that thrives on the blood of others’.1 Focusing on the vital role of translation and the complex rhythms of cross-Channel exchange in its parasitical progression, the essays in Horner’s collection overthrow the ‘tyranny of Anglo-American narratives of the Gothic’2 by unveiling both fictional and critical excesses and exclusions, and effecting an exploration of the genre in its neglected European lineage. If the genre’s lineages and histories have been mapped largely along an Anglo-American axis, so too have they been delineated by the distinction drawn between ‘male’ and ‘female’ Gothic forms—a demarcation, albeit a contested one, that continues to cast its own tyrannical shadow over the history of Gothic endeavours.