Lovely Apparitions and Spiritualized Corpses Consumption, Medical Discourse, and Edgar Allan Poe's Female Vampire

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines the associations of consumption with the disease of tuberculosis and vampirism, as well as the ways nineteenth-century medical discourse and vampire narratives facilitated the creation of a pathologized female body. Early nineteenth-century medical discourse and literature on consumption exalted the materiality of the consuming female body by transforming suffering into something beautiful, pure and spiritual, or even sexual. Poe's consuming brides, however, embodied the horrifying reality of the decomposing body that remains alive. In particular, Poe's “Ligeia” (1838) is an eloquent example of this tension between idealism and materiality. By reading Poe's vampire tales through the context of antebellum metaphysics and discourses on consumption, I argue that his unique treatment of female vampires simultaneously responds to, and deviates from, these topics. Influenced by Schelling's philosophy, Poe's vampire tales are shuddering examples of woman's materialized spirit. Following his own thread of gothic materialism, and moving away from American Transcendentalists, Poe offers ghastly visions of an absolutism that is at once distinctly feminine and horrific.