Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897): Negotiating Anxieties of Genre and Gender at the Fin de Siècle

Helena Ifill

doi:10.46911/gswj1008

Abstract

The heroine of Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), Harriet Brandt, is an energy sucker and a formidable predator. However, unlike Bram Stoker’s famous vampire (Dracula was published in the same year), she is also a tragic figure who only realises towards the end of the novel that she has killed the people she is closest to. Marryat at once grants her female vampire freedom and disempowers her. Furthermore, Harriet’s vampiric nature and mixed-race ancestry potentially cast her as a racially threatening Other, but one with whom the reader is increasingly encouraged to sympathise. Marryat also plays with genre, especially the popular genre of the Female Gothic, and mixes Gothic elements such as the vampire with distinctly un-Gothic ones, such as the Belgian seaside resort of Heyst, in order to reflect the comparatively liberated, but still precarious, position of women at the end of the nineteenth century. This article analyses character, setting and genre in order to show that the figure of Harriet is a reflection upon the position of not just the New Woman, but fin-de-siecle British women more generally.

Highlights

Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire appeared in 1897, the same year that Bram Stoker published Dracula
Beautiful and financially independent, meaning she can get close to her victims. She can travel freely, not having to worry about inconvenient boxes of earth as Count Dracula does. Another significant difference is that whereas the vampires in Dracula are intentional hunters, Harriet is a tragic figure who only realises towards the end of the novel that it is her “love that [has] killed” those she is physically and emotionally closest to (Marryat [1897] 2010: 161)
Marryat engages with questions of women’s relationship to individual agency, responsibility and liberty which had been prevalent in Victorian society since the emergence of the “Woman Question” earlier in the century, but which were restated with new urgency as a response to the rise of the New Woman

Summary

Introduction

Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire appeared in 1897, the same year that Bram Stoker published Dracula. Some dismissed Marryat’s novel as one of a “swarm of ill-conceived and ill-executed imitations [of Dracula] by inferior writers” (“Fiction” 1898: 29), Marryat’s novel does not feature the kind of fanged bloodsucker that such a judgement may imply Her vampire, Harriet Brandt, is an energy sucker, whose abundant vivacity is stolen from the people around her.. Beautiful and financially independent, meaning she can get close to her victims She can travel freely, not having to worry about inconvenient boxes of earth as Count Dracula does. By offering analyses of character, setting and genre, this article argues that the figure of Harriet is a reflection upon the position of not just the New Woman, but fin-de-siècle British women more generally, who found themselves with unprecedented levels of freedom and responsibility, but not necessarily with the education or upbringing to allow them to enjoy these maturely or safely

Degeneration and Ethnicity

New Woman and Everywoman