Female Vampire Research Articles

Vampirism as a Shadow in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Through the studies of literal and metaphorical meanings of eating in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), this article investigates how the depictions of food and eating culture in Transylvania are the results of misrepresentations. Contrast to the illustrations about the consumptions of food in the Western table which accompanies the spirit of unity, the predatory images of vampires in Transylvania can be easily associated with an idea that communion is absent in the foreign land. The purpose of this article is, thus, to subvert the binary oppositions between East and West, with the focus on the descriptions of food and eating. For this goal, the examinations in this article include: three female vampires’ language which involves the sense of communion, the Western characters’ eating at a table which turns out to be a defective place in achieving the spirit of unity, and a lunatic character R.M. Renfield’s abnormal eating habits that can be interpreted within the contemporary socioeconomic contexts. Ultimately, this article is to show how the vampiric images in Stoker’s Dracula function as shadows that cover the violence of the Western middle-class capitalists in the contemporary capital-oriented society.

Carmilla, Camilla: The Influence of the Gothic on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

Carmilla, Camilla: The Influence of the Gothic on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

Dracula's daughters: the female vampire on film

Dracula's daughters: the female vampire on film

Cerita Pontianak: Cultural Contradictions and Patriarchy in a Malay Ghost Story

This article explores the synergistic relationship among competing premodern and modern worldviews and gendered power differentials in Malay culture as reflected and constituted in the Malaysia cerita hantu (ghost story) about Pontianak (a female vampire). Narrative and feminist theory are used to suggest that this seemingly mundane and simple ghost story actually operates as one means of making sense of/negotiating the tensions between traditional mysticism and contemporary logocentrism. At the same time, the cerita Pontianak maintains and perpetuates an ongoing hegemonic masculine-feminine dichotomy (perhaps not surprisingly) because of and in the context of shifting cognitive paradigms.

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

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.

Seeing Red: The True Story of Blood by T. L. Kyi

Kyi, Tanya L. Seeing Red: The True Story of Blood. Illus. Steve Rolston. Toronto: Annick Press, 2012. Print. Seeing Red is an informative, humourous, gory, and decidedly irreverent treatment of a subject close to all of our hearts. Canadian author Tanya Lloyd Kyi is best known for the 50 Questions series for young readers, featuring topics as diverse as fire, poison and underwear. The very clever illustrations, by award-winning comic and graphic novel artist Steve Rolston, are presented in shades of black, grey, and (naturally) blood red. The main narrative provides a fascinating overview of the red stuff, human and otherwise, and the central role it has played in history, culture, and science. Alongside the text in each chapter, the reader is treated to a comic book featuring (in a nod to Bram Stoker) a boy named Harker who keeps a notebook of his blood-filled adventures as he finds himself at the centre of the topic under discussion. And throughout, the author provides a wealth of related trivia and factoids using insets on subtle background graphics of red blood cells and band aids. Individual chapters focus on ritual and religion, coming of age, food and drink, family ties and genetics, medicine and forensics, and the human fascination with violence. And while not following a strict chronology, the author clearly demonstrates how human understanding of this vital fluid has developed throughout history. The chapter Rites of Passage should be of particular interest to pre-teens, with its graphic descriptions of how various cultures have developed painful and bloody initiation rituals to mark a boy’s transition to adulthood, and of the wide range of celebrations and taboos surrounding a girl’s first menstrual period. The ever-popular vampire is featured no more prominently than any other topic in the text, with only a couple of sections in the chapter Sips and Suppers that discusses the utility of blood in all manner of drinking and dining. But the introduction of a cute young female vampire to Harker’s story midway through the book will no doubt appease any disappointed Twilight fans. Pop culture references abound, and the author’s black humour skewers major religions and historical figures alike. A discussion of hemophilia features an illustration of Queen Victoria handing a jumbo pack of bandages to her daughter with the words “Don’t forget your dowry dear.” There’s no lack of gory detail in this book, from Aztec priests ripping beating hearts from the chests of their captives, to classifications of blood spatter velocities and how they correspond to different levels of violent injury. This book would be a great addition to any public or school library. Each chapter ends with a few questions from Harker’s notebook that may provide some interesting starting points for classroom discussion: “Is it okay to sacrifice animals for religious reasons? How is that different than killing for meat, or hunting for sport?” The reader is provided with a list of titles for further reading, and a selected bibliography. And with its fairly in-depth indexing, Seeing Red provides a handy reference to a lot of bloody information. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Elizabeth WallaceElizabeth Wallace is the Collections Manager in the Science and Technology Library of the University of Alberta. She holds an undergraduate degree in Geography and Environmental Studies, and an MLIS, both from McGill University. She has been a Science and Engineering librarian for her entire professional career, working in both public and academic libraries in the U.S. and Canada.

Murderesses in German Writing, 1720–1860: Heroines of Horror (review)

Reviewed by: Murderesses in German Writing, 1720–1860: Heroines of Horror Eric Schaad Susanne Kord, Murderesses in German Writing, 1720–1860: Heroines of Horror. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 266 pp. Kord’s study of female criminality and cultural history is a thrill to read, not only for its wonderful insights, well-documented discussion, and lively arguments, but also for the logical order within the chapters and varied nature of the content. The title of her book is descriptive in calling its material “German writing”—signaling its utilization of not just literature but all kinds of written records—but misleading in the sense that the focus strays from the murderesses themselves. The content includes the legalistic and scientific, the popular and the literary, the uncanny and the sensationalistic. Instead of serving as the focal point of each chapter, the featured “heroines of horror” provide insights into female criminality and also into criminality in general. Each chapter focuses on a crime type that is mainly or exclusively in the domain of the feminine and pairs that with a legal topic, such as criminal psychology, the death penalty, interrogation techniques, and torture—all central issues in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany and most of Europe. The case studies include the Medvegya outbreak (the case that brought vampires into Western European consciousness), the “busiest female vampire” of all time (54), and the last woman in Europe to be executed [End Page 293] as a witch. Thus, though these and most of the other featured cases are largely forgotten today, even in academic circles, they represent not niche examples extracted to support a thesis but central cases in their day. Chapter 1 lays out the purpose of the book, setting up an interpretive framework, goals, and the cultural and historical context. Chapter 2, about witchcraft, offers an insightful history of trials and an outline of how “witchcraft moves into the discursive underground” in the eighteenth century (33). Chapter 3 highlights the central role that gender plays in the history of vampire accounts. In the first part of chapter 4, about husband-killers, I had hoped for more substantial discussion on the representation of Maria Wächtler’s deviant behavior. The topics with heavy emphasis—interrogation techniques and employment of torture—as well as the contrast between court record and pamphlet versions, while very interesting and engaging, seemed to illuminate little about women or crime, or about Wächtler specifically. This chapter improves, however, with the more detailed exploration of the Ruthardt case and with the many comparisons to the previous case, which enrich that discussion both in terms of its significance for criminal and cultural history and its portrayal of gender roles. Concluding the chapter, Kord offers an excellent synthesis, stressing the important role of these two female criminals in the aesthetics of horrific literature and as an impetus to social change. Chapter 5 examines women guilty or accused of infanticide. The central role of shame in these accounts allows for a much more personal exploration of the women’s feelings and of the progression in their portrayal. Kord’s most interesting section addresses shame, or lost honor, in a feminine context, which serves as a tacit counterpoint to similar phenomena in a masculine context, epitomized, perhaps, by Schiller’s “The Criminal of Lost Honor” (“Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre”). Without making it the thrust of her discussion, Kord invites such comparisons along gender lines by ushering in pertinent historical artifacts, well-placed and adorned with skillful and engaging argument. Chapter 6 leads off boldly by dispelling the myth of poisoning being primarily a female mode of murder; and the last chapter, though interesting, devotes itself more to the ritual of execution and confession than to analysis of female criminals themselves. Furthermore, a clear feminine aspect to executions or confessions does not emerge from the discussion, disappointingly. The many detailed examples are indeed exclusively female but could have just as easily been male to support the various points. One provocative idea is the assertion that the “mob” at public executions represents a feminine entity (with the state being masculine). The book ends without a summation or conclusion, consistent with how Kord positions it in the...

Isotopic Data Do Not Support Food Sharing Within Large Networks of Female Vampire Bats (Desmodus rotundus)

AbstractReciprocal altruism is considered to be particularly stable when occurring in small networks. Using a stable isotope approach, we tested in colonies of vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) whether food sharing occurs among few or many females; vampires are known to regurgitate recently ingested blood for starving conspecifics. Accordingly, the isotopic signatures of vampires depend not only on individual prey choice but also on the extent of food sharing among isotopically contrasting conspecifics. By measuring the stable carbon isotope ratio in tissues with varying isotopic retention in individual vampires (blood: approx. 2 wk; wing membrane tissue: approx. 2 mo; fur: >6 mo), we estimated the variation in the percentages of carbon derived from pasture (via blood from cattle and horses). We expected to find narrow ranges of percentages in individual vampires, because we anticipated food sharing only within small female networks if food sharing happened at all. Overall, vampire bats obtained 79.2 ± 12.3% of carbon from grazers. The range of percentages was small within the majority of individuals in relation to that across all individuals, suggesting that most vampires were isotopic specialists. We expected females to be more isotopically generalistic than males, as food sharing was observed to occur more often between females than between males. Indeed, stable isotope evidence suggested that more females obtained carbon from isotopically contrasting sources than males. This pattern is consistent with food sharing in small groups of female vampires, provided that food sharing occurred at all.

Sins of the flesh: anorexia, eroticism and the female vampire in Bram Stoker's Dracula

This article discusses anorexia as an aesthetic ideal rather than as an actual illness, as well as its erotic connotations in the context of Victorian literature and culture. The nineteenth century regarded anorexia as a gendered disease: like other so-called ‘female maladies’, it is connected with male standards of femininity and the devastating effects it has on women's self-image. The sometimes contradictory representation of anorexia in literature offers a particularly interesting insight into cultural assumptions of what was (is?) considered as ‘truly feminine’. I will concentrate on the analysis of vampire women in Stoker's Dracula, since the female vampire manifests all the contradictions in Victorian and fin de siècle assumptions of femininity. In the novel, all the vampires except the Count himself are female, and the transformations these women undergo are mainly manifest in their bodies. The act of eating in Dracula becomes not only aesthetically and culturally unacceptable but monstrous and grotesque, the vampire thereby becoming an exaggerated representation of the Victorian culture of anorexia and personifying male fears about women and hunger. Stoker's message seems to be that the fleshy sensual woman is not only sexually incontinent but fatally dangerous, thus needing to be corrected – if not savagely eliminated.

Women and Death: Representations of Female Victims and Perpetrators in German Culture 1500–2000 ed. by Helen Fronius, Anna Linton

MLR, 105.2, 2010 613 (notably Alexanderplatz), enriched with a vast range of intriguing allusion and comparison. (A filmography and indexing of textswould have been useful.) Above all the topographical approach makes for brilliantly imaginative analyses of film and photography: of Kuhle Wampe; of Umbo's uncanny photomontages; of the filmic symphonies; ofTurkish Berlin and the running women in recent films. University of Nottingham Elizabeth Boa Women and Death: Representations ofFemale Victims and Perpetrators inGerman Culture 1500-2000. Ed. by Helen Fronius and Anna Linton. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2008. 267 pp. $75; ?40. ISBN 978-1-57113-385-4. This first of three volumes from a research project includes twelve essays, lengthened by 44 pages of notes and a 3 5-page list of works cited. The intro duction describes portrayals that suggest amurky history of the life-force innate in women countered by or deliberately invoking death. Stefanie Knoll highlights voyeurism and revulsion indances of death, thewoman often representing narcissism, voluptas, or infidelity.The spectator, provoked by the composition, enjoys rather than learns. Ruth B. Bottigheimer examines the use of Bible stories and fairy tales to support social values and define gender roles. The Grimms' stories, she claims, ineffectivelyfeminized evil, in contrast to the less chauvinist Bechstein versions popular in the nineteenth century.Anna Linton's ba lanced account of virgin sacrifices undergone by Iphigenia and Jephthah's daughter emphasizes conflicts between the state and the family, civilization and barbarism. Fathers emerge as tragic vulnerable heroes, with daughters dying in typically limi nal situations. Bettina Bildhauer interpretsKriemhild in theNibelungenlied neatly as the passive and suppressed object of the interpreter's [Hagen's] attack' (p. 61). The work is a symptom of itshost culture, and amodel of the origins of violence. Essays byMary Lindemann on narratives of dismembering women inNorthern Germany 1600-1800, and byHelen Fronius on images of infanticide in eighteenth century Germany, define provocatively the development of attitudes to gruesome cases. The Enlightenment, the cultural background inHamburg, and new liter ary stylesmarked a changing interest in torture and eventual confessions as a stage towards nineteenth-century realist and detective novels. Real crime inspired popular fiction and became a hallmark for new cultural attitudes. Poems showed that infanticide often came from thewickedness Tor which theman is ultimately responsible' (p. 97), but the hidden issuewas 'theunregulated reproductive female body, so difficult to control, which develops amurderous potential when not safely contained within the bourgeois family unit' (p. 98). Literary texts portrayed weak, gullible, and betrayed women, whereas court cases apparently recorded male at tempts to explain away a problem central to sexual politics, either psychologically or pathologically and oftenwith undisguised brutality. Anna Richards argues effectively that grief among eighteenth-century women was characterized by extreme subjectivism, their emotions increasingly influenced by enlightened moral views, but not allowing debate on 'the relationship between 614 Reviews the self and the other, themind and theworld' (p. 126). JurgenBarkhoff enquires with relish into female vampires, victimhood, and vengeance inGerman literature around 1800, and their apparent development frompassive victims into aggressive, predatory monsters. Examples by Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann demonstrated cultural conflict or magnetization on the nightside ofmesmerism, with parasitic male empowerment at the cost of thewoman' (p. 139). In an account ofmurderous women inGerman opera, Lawrence Kramer spells out musical parallels between Mozart's Donna Anna and Strauss's Salome. His analysis of the unvoicing of Salome primarily by the orchestra includes phrases that go to the heart of thematter. Unvoicing, he suggests, engenders an act of violence, the opera catching itselfand itsheroine 'in the act' (p. 155). The femme fatale, especially in the visual arts, focuses Kathrin Hoffmann Curtius's examination of sexuality and gender hierarchies inspiring artists around 1900. She contrasts an infamous Lustmorderin with depictions of the femme fatale to show the link between active female sexuality and dangerous aggression to wards males, who emerged either as virtuous heroes or as vengeful murderers. Clare Bielby's suggestive account of representations in 1962 of Vera Bruhne ex plains fascination with the 'natural order' and a need for theMadonna figure in German society after its collapse in 1945. Links between Nazism and Marlene Dietrich, Bruhne and the camp guard Use...

The impossibility of vision: vampirism, formlessness and horror in Vampyr

This article argues that the shifting bodily borders of male protagonist, David Gray, and female vampire, Marguerite Chopin, evoke horror in Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932). Situating the film within the ‘loose, ambiguous narratives’ of European art cinema, it is suggested that the film's central trope is the confounding of spectator's ability to make sense of the events taking place within the text. Gray's bodily borders vacillate throughout the film, moving between active and passive and alive and dead, evoking formlessness and uncertainty. Vampyr even includes an uncanny moment in which Gray looks upon his own dead body laid out in a coffin. Even when Gray is active, the mesh screens, closed windows and locked doors distance him from his object of pursuit and undermine his gaze. Through the formless female vampire, oblique narrative and form and white mise-en-scéne, Vampyr reveals the impossibility of vision and the limitations of the spectatorial gaze.

Florence Marryat’s Female Vampire and the Scientizing of Hybridity

This essay relates the titular character of Florence Marryat’s 1897 novel, The Blood of the Vampire , to other sexual/racial hybrids of the nineteenth century such as Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner. Marryat draws upon pseudoscientific theories of “maternal impressions” to create Harriet Brandt, a female vampire whose depiction might not have been out of place in contemporary medical journals such as The Lancet . Her sympathetic and realistic portrait of Harriet exposes the instabilities in fin-de-siècle thinking about race, gender, and species.

The female vampire community and online social networks: Virtual celebrity and mini communities: Initial thoughts

The female vampire community and online social networks: Virtual celebrity and mini communities: Initial thoughts

Dressing up as Vampires: Virtual vamps - negotiating female identity in cyberspace

Dressing up as Vampires is an ethnographic audience study investigating issues of identity and the masquerade within the active female vampire fan community. Drawing on previous theoretical material by Milly Williamson (2005), Paul Hodkinson (2002) and wider methodological approaches such as Lori Kendall (1999) this paper will focus on the negotiation of female fans’ identities across various online networks such as MySpace, LiveJournal, VEIN (Vampire Exchange Information Network) and Yahoo newsgroups. Its objective is to explore how identity is constructed in the virtual community via imagery (avatars & graphics), photography and text and to what extent this online persona encroaches and impacts upon fans’ ‘real lives’. 
 
 Through analysis of these online networks I will suggest that female vampire fans use the Internet as an extension of their identity, and although they may construct an alternate persona within cyberspace, this usually serves as a reinforcement of their idealised ‘real life’ identity.

Unnameable Desires in Le Fanu's Carmilla

AbstractIn his 1872 vampire novella Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu encodes forbidden passions through the use of names. Written at a time when samesex relations were punishable by imprisonment, Carmilla's naming and wordplay suggest the Sapphic seductions between a female vampire and her unwitting descendant without being dangerously explicit. In every incarnation over the centuries, Carmilla must adopt an anagrammatical variation of her original name, each of which carries its own host of interpretations hinting at the forbidden same-sex desires in the text. Ultimately, however, Le Fanu had to conform to the conventions of his time and has a posse of men solve the riddle of Carmilla's name and her demonic desires. By the novella's end, Carmilla's derivations are decipherable, her history traceable, and her fate reduced to a patriarchal paronomasia.

Vampire bat reproductive control by a naturally occurring phytooestrogen

Rabies transmission by wild animals has not being controlled satisfactorily. One major rabies vector to humans and cattle is the hematophagous vampire bat Desmodus rotundus whose distribution is still increasing in the Americas. Of all of the strategies currently in place to control this vector, none of them are really specific and some have ecological impacts. In the present study we used a naturally occurring phytoestrogen on a small vampire bat colony. After collection, bats were fed bovine blood containing 200 microg coumestrol for a 30-day period. After treatment, gonads were excised and processed for histological evaluation. Data indicate that coumestrol adversely affects gonad histology and has a possible impact on the fertility of both male and female vampire bats.

Terror as White Female in Mudrooroo’s Vampire Trilogy

Mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy, The Undying, Underground and The Promised Land was published at the end of the last century amid an unrelenting public questioning of the author’s claim to Aboriginal heritage through a matrilineal link. The Gothic narratives feature a white female vampire named Amelia (an anagram of Lamiae), whose violent acts of penetration and (dis)possession act as metaphors for the colonial invasion of Australia by the British. The article reads the trilogy mainly through Barbara Creed’s theorization of the monstrous feminine and examines the ways in which Mudrooroo presents his post-conquest female vampire as castrating and all-consuming. It also argues that it is possible to see Mudrooroo’s female monster as a textual representation of the legendary soulless mother who would devour her own son to feed her sense of self and reality - with all the connotations of the author’s discredited claim to Aboriginal identity this implies.

Fading into Innocence: Death, Sexuality and Moral Restoration in Henry Peach Robinson's Fading Away

Fading into Innocence: Death, Sexuality and Moral Restoration in Henry Peach Robinson's FadingAway Jannie Uhre Mogensen Pain melted in tears, and was pleasure; Death tingled with blood, and was Ufe. -Swinburne1 The arts . . . can provide an invaluable entrée into the diversity of the universal experiences of death, dying, grief, and loss. -Sandra L Bertman2 The business of art, L. Tolstoy wrote, Ues in this: "to make that understood and felt which in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible".3 The didactic element is certainly present alongside the aesthetic in the works of the Victorian art photographer Henry Peach Robinson. Translating sentiment into graphic forms, his work FadingAway (1858) makes ametaphysical concept of death accessible for scrutiny and comprehension. The composite work iUustrates the romantic vision of death by tuberculosis. Its subUminal element of sexual passion makes it an interesting study in relation to the nostalgic Victorian denomination of death as restorer of innocence. Rather than restricting its purpose to photographicaUy capturing the empty sheU of the fading body, it iUustrates a moraUsing , anti-sexual standpoint. Its admonitory ideaüsm aims subUminaUy at purifying the spirit of the beholder, playing on reUgious and moral strings of sentiment recognised and valued by a Victorian audience. It finds a uterary counterpart in some of the more gothic works of the Victorian Renew (2006) J. Mogesen period. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla in particular draws expUcitly on the aUegorical equation of sex with death, with the female vampire as a sexual but salvageable aggressor/victim. As Robinson and Le Fanu both conclude, innocence can indeed be regained for females who are victims of their passions. AU they have to do is die. As long as there has been art, death has been artisticaUy represented. Craftsmen of aU times have pursued the death-theme in various forms and Victorian artists were no exception. Were one to make a Ust of Pre-RaphaeUte and similar paintings from the period depicting beautiful women in their final pose, it would include Arthur Hughes's Ophelia (1852), SirJohn Everett Muíais' Ophelia (1852),John Atkinson Grimshaw's Ekine (1877), John WiUiam Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott (1888) and Ophelia (undated), and Holman Hunt's The Lady of Shalott (1886-1905) - to name a few. The dead ladies evoke the tradition of the classical female nude, going back at least to Cranach. With her languid passivity, the exposed muse has served her purpose of visual stimulation throughout the centuries with Utile change in appearance. Her horizontal figure always Ues manipulably 'open' before the spectator and her facial expression always bears witness to a resting inteUectuaUty. The tradition of depicting such females as desirable objects is reminiscent in the death portrayals. Certainly , females are at their most passive when dead. As Dijkstra has observed, "representations of beautiful women safely dead remained the late-nineteenth-century painter's favourite way of depicting the transcendent spiritual value of passive feminine sacrifice" (Ruby 37). The positive valuation of such images was a natural response given the Victorian ideal of self-assertion through selflessness - an ideal that was conspicuously EvangeUcal in its paradox and influenced many contemporary artists and men of letters. The dead maidens similarly evoke the tradition of 'innocent sleepers' in Victorian art. Sleep and death have long been equated; in classical Greece, the sons of night were Hypnos, god of sleep, and his twin Thanatos, god of death (Ruby 63). Lewis CarroU's photograph of young Xie Kitchen, covered in virginally white robes and smiUng in her sleep, is emblematic of the sighing of adult males over pasvolume 32 number 1 Fading into Innocence sive, aUegedly innocent female children at the time. From a superior position as observer, the spectator could ponder if the presence of Original Sin was indeed darkening the girl's spirits, or she was truly 'innocent.' For the dead girl, sleep has become eternal; but She occupies theUwisCarroll¡ XkKtcbinAsleep, 1873 same ethereal dreamland sphere as the sleeper. As Michael Bartram rightly concludes, many "photographs of sleeping children echo the formulae of the numberless paintings and drawings which assuaged the contemporary horror of infant mortaUty: the sick, dying, and dead young people...

Operant conditioning of licking in vampire bats,Desmodus rotundus

Four adult female vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), weighing 28–35 g, were autoshaped to keypress to obtain 0.5-ml quantities of defibrinated cattle blood reinforcer. Keypressing required 7 g of force, and response rates were moderately low (500–600 presses/h). Because of the force requirements, the apparatus was then modified so that licking from a tube would deliver the blood reinforcer. Bats were trained on variable-ratio, fixed-ratio, variable-interval, and fixed-interval schedules. Some of the schedules produced lick-response rates averaging 60/min. With conditioned suppression (light stimulus paired with brief electric footshock), bats learned within 15 sessions to completely suppress operant licking while the light was on.

Coleridge's "Christabel" and Lefanu's "Carmilla"

SEVERAL years ago in a study of Coleridge's poem Christabel' I advanced the then novel theory that the unfinished tale is essentially a vampire story, one of the first and by far the subtlest of the many such stories in the English language. The theory was received with considerable interest and general approval, though there were, of course, some partial or complete skeptics. I now wish to suggest that the long prose narrative published with four other stories in In a glass darkly in 1872 by that once famed master of the Gothic, J. Sheridan LeFanu, contains so many strange parallels to that it seems possible that LeFanu had either made the same interpretation of Coleridge's poem as I was to make, and had reflected it, consciously or unconsciously, in his story; or else he had been reading more or less the same sources as Coleridge read, and applied them with often surprisingly similar results. For Carmilla is openly and admittedly a vampire story, and its author makes much of the way in which he, or at least one of his characters, Baron Vordenburg, has steeped himself in vampire lore. First of all, the antagonists in both stories, Geraldine and Carmilla, are female vampires; and female vampires are comparatively rare, at least in the earlier period of vampirology. More than this, the main victims, Christabel and Laura, are women; and such restriction of sexwomen to women-is even rarer. Kipling's version of the vampire, with her exclusively male quarry, is a purely modern refinement.