‘Desire with loathing strangely mix’d’: the vampire as femme fatale and fatal femme

I know how vampires are born. I also know what you are thinking right now: you think of the bite, the blood. But it is not blood that makes a vampire. No. It is the wanting. Vampires are forged in the heat of desperate desire …

-‘The Tale of Christina’, Cecilia Tan ¹

Lamia, Lilith, serpent and seductress; the rich history of the female vampire serves to remind us that she did not appear recently as a feminist response to a heterosexual male-dominated society, but has been with us since the dawn of creation. Literally.

The suggestive figure of the vampiric femme fatale, the female counterpart to the Byronic anti-hero, makes an early appearance in Christian and pagan folklore as a deity associated with both death and rebirth, but principally with excessive sexuality. According to Hebraic tradition, Adam’s first wife, Lilith, refuses to assume a subordinate sexual position – therefore, defying the first patriarchy – and is cast out ². In retribution for her sin, Lilith’s offspring are destroyed and Adam is given a new companion, Eve, who is also disobedient. Lilith returns, immortal, undead, and vengeful, ready to feed cyclically on Eve’s progeny. The myth of Lilith knows other origins, for instance, the bloodthirsty goddess Kali in Hindu folklore or the serpentine Lamia in Greco-Roman folklore, but all these myths serve to ambivalently render the fatal woman an object of unbridled sexuality and mortality, both desirable and detestable.

In contrast to the male vampire’s fatal seduction, whose sexuality is defective and confined to the upper regions of the body, the female vampire proves to be more intimate and irresistible to victims of both sexes.

Nina Auerbach contends in Our Vampires, Ourselves that what principally characterised nineteenth-century vampirism was the vampire’s ability to affiliate himself with his victim and to share an intimate relationship, which was subsequently suppressed. The female vampire, however, feeds on her victim-lover without killing him/her. In order to sustain her homo-erotic cravings for desire and love (which become stronger in contemporary vampirism and supplant the craving for blood), the female vampire must suspend her victim-lover’s life and protect it from a patriarchal society which refuses to understand and seeks to destroy the aberration. ³

This same patriarchal society would have us believe that only male vampires possess the license to feed on humans (especially on women), therefore ‘when a woman becomes a vampire herself, she has no more agency than she did when she was human’.⁴ The growth from passive vampire (Keats’s Lamia) to voluptuous vampire bride (Stoker’s Lucy Westenra) and to sado-masochistic gothic vixen (Kerry in Pat Califia’s ‘The Vampire’) is as much a matter of gender history as it is a question of personal ideology. In fact, authorial gender matters less than the reader’s expectations from the temporal setting. Indeed, the first writers to depict the vampiric femme fatale in all her decadent, licentious and lesbian glory were not female but male, with the trend only reversing lately with the plethora of adult fiction available on the market.

The horror and fascination that feeds the femme fatale mythos is wholly psychosexual in nature. The female vampire proves to be not only castrating, but a veritable preying-mantis that feeds on men and women till the point of death, and confined not to this earthly realm but also returning from the grave endlessly until destroyed. This destruction is deemed a male prerogative as female vampirism flies in the face of male sexual potency, threatening male hegemony. The patriarchal force, in the guise of scientist, exorcist or slayer, must stake its claim, with the phallic surrogate being transmuted in the most known of all vampire icons – the sharpened stake. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the Un-dead Lucy is relentlessly pounded into by Arthur Holmwood on Van Helsing’s orders:

The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault.

And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth seemed to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over. ⁵

The un-dead Lucy Westenra arouses both desire and loathing in her male suitors-turned-violators, yet nothing arouses more male loathing in perceiving the object of desire directing its sole attention on her own sex. In a clever retelling of the Dracula story, Dr. Van Helsing suggests a bewildered Jonathan Harker, ousted of both bed and wifely attention, to ‘kill the evil in her by driving your, uh, stake into her. Then both she and your wife will be released from their unnatural compulsions.’ ⁶

The first worthy appearance in literature of the female vampire whose amorous interests are exclusively female occurs in Coleridge’s poem ‘Christabel’ (1816), becoming the Byronic vampire’s precursor, but not progenitor. It was ‘Christabel’ which fed Lord Ruthven, since the poem’s reading opened the Diodati ghost-story session with desired effect. Shortly after Byron’s recital, Percy Shelley ran shrieking out of the room, muttering some nonsense about a woman with eyes in lieu of nipples.⁷ No such image, however, proved to inspire those two fledgling monsters of Romanticism which emerged soon after.

‘Christabel’ was also the first vampire work in which two obtrusive, but hitherto, unimaginable aspects – psychic feeding and homo-eroticism – were to leave their mark in the changing literary world of vampires. Psychic vampirism is integral to vampire literature, and is as commonplace as the ubiquitous image of blood, which in more contemporary narratives it has tended to displace. Coleridge fused psychic vampirism with homo-eroticism – indeed, there is no latter without a strong dependence on the former. Moreover, Coleridge’s arousing of ‘desire with loathing strangely mix’d’ ⁸ is a theme which bursts through the confines of homo-erotic vampirism and serves to explain the rapid shift from eros to thanatos which vampirism has pronounced as its canon.

Although no actual bloodletting occurs, Coleridge nevertheless reveals in stages the vampiric identity of the wraith-like Geraldine, whose midnight appearance bewitches Christabel. ‘The moon is behind, and at the full’,⁹ Coleridge tells us, but Geraldine almost outshines the moon,

Dressed in a silken robe of white

That shadowy in the moonlight shone ¹⁰

and with it, all of Ruthven and Varney’s lunar resurrections. Geraldine’s kind seek the moon only as a means of identification into a secret sisterhood – remnants of the cult of Diana perhaps? – something which is denied to the Byronic vampire and his kind. Yet, Geraldine has to be carried ‘Over the threshold of the gate’, ¹¹ inasmuch the same manner that a vampire cannot enter a household unless invited in, and grows weak at the sight of

The lamp with twofold silver chain […]

fastened to an angel’s feet. ¹²

Geraldine next becomes surrogate mother – and lover – to motherless Christabel, and accompanies her to bed, where she peremptorily undresses. Christabel perceives her naked breast, ‘a sight to dream of, not to tell’, ¹³ which Geraldine asks her provocatively to touch. That touch undoes Christabel and binds her to Geraldine. Like a dove slowly strangled by a serpent (recall the stork with the snake in its beak in Byron’s ‘Fragment’),¹⁴ Christabel (now getting weaker) can only hiss in hapless anger as the vampire (now stronger) turns her predatory eyes, ‘Each shrunk up to a serpent’s eye’, onto Sir Leoline, from rescuer now turned meddling and disruptive patriarch.¹⁵

In comparison, vampirism in Keats’s ‘Lamia’ (1819) is more ambiguous, principally because, again, energy rather than blood is transferred.¹⁶ Keats not only retains Lamia’s physical serpentine qualities, but exults in their ambivalency:

She was a Gordian shape of dazzling hue

Vermillion-spotted, golden, green and blue …

So rainbow-sided, touched with miseries

She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf

Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self.¹⁷

Lamia is no ordinary beauty and neither a source of evil. She is also one of the first vampire who attempts anthropomorphosis; in her yearning to be both woman and feminine, and not serpentine and sexual, she eventually renounces her role as temptress and vampire for the love of a man. Clearly, the two roles cannot co-exist. While she can still charm her lover with her eyes and with her voice, Keats has his Lamia ‘[pass] the city gates, [with Lycius knowing] not how’.¹⁸ Unlike Coleridge’s Geraldine, Lamia has no need to be carried by her lover.

Vampirism follows the first law of thermodynamics – being essentially a process of energy transfer it cannot be lost, but is passed onto someone else. Once divested of her supernatural powers, it is Lycius’s turn to don Lamia’s scales because

The serpent – Ha! the serpent! certes, she

Was none.¹⁹

Keats duly informs us that ‘Soon [Lycius] had drunk her beauty up’²⁰ and

this passion, cruel grown, took on a hue

Fierce and sanguineous as‘t was possible.²¹

Even so, Lycius wants more than his fair share of love and beauty – he seeks to

entangle, trammel up and snare

[Her] soul in [his], and labyrinth [her] there.²²

The serpent image shifts once again, this time onto the sage-exorcist Apollonus, who

possess’d his lashless eyelids stretch

Around his demon eyes!

while poor Lamia ‘withers at their potency’. Apollonius’s ‘cold philosophy’ furthermore divests Lamia of her painfully acquired humanity and revests her with superstitious dread, in order to be summarily staked.

The sophist’s eye

Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly

writes Keats.²³

Again, as in Stoker’s narrative, the male patriarchy demonstrates weariness with wanton femininity, subjecting it to its own rules of sexual submission, with the penetrative act sealing the female vampire’s fate at the end. Keats’s conscious tampering with Philostratus’ story demystifies the occult symbolism of the serpent-vampire while simultaneously refashioning it, turning vampire into victim, subject to the depredation of males. Lamia’s tragic flaw lies in her being more fatally femme than a femme fatale, wanting to be loved but ending up in feeding voyeuristic male-sexual fantasies instead.

The female demon myth explored by the great Romantic poets was to find its final distillation in the highly erotic lesbian vampire story ‘Carmilla’ (1872), written by an Irishman, Sheridan Le Fanu, and pre-dating the work of another Irishman by twenty-five years (whose work in turn predated, fed upon, Le Fanu’s). ‘Carmilla’ is an interesting attempt to render Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ into prose, and to explore further the sterile dynamics of lesbian love via vampirism. Here again, Coleridge’s ‘desire with loathing strangely mix’d’ becomes the formula for all homo-erotic vampire stories to come. Laura, who narrates the strange events in retrospect, is like Christabel, an annoyed, unassuming and passive subject of the patriarchal condition, until the enigmatic Carmilla comes along and changes things: ‘I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said, ‘drawn towards her’, but there was also something of repulsion […]’.²⁴

Carmilla’s peculiar arrival – being disgorged out of a black stagecoach that overturns near a stone cross – heralds a cycle of inexplicable events that shadow Christabel’s closely. Carmilla is lifted inside the castle, sleeps until noon, does not eat, appears languorous and goes on nocturnal rambles. Laura wonders even ‘whether [their] pretty guest ever said her prayers’.²⁵ Carmilla also ‘has the sharpest tooth – long, thin, pointed, like an awl […]’ which she uses to pierce Laura ‘deep into [her] breast’ and suck her blood.²⁶ Nowhere, not even in Coleridge, is the breast image carried this far. Le Fanu’s explicit eroticism would be later explored by Stoker but penetration would soon move slightly higher up, attaching itself to the throat instead. Agony and ecstasy would eventually be restored with more delirious passion in the seventies novels of Anne Rice and her female successors of vampire fiction.

Laura’s counter-identification with her lesbian lover is complete when both she and Carmilla share the same childhood dream. From this moment onwards, Carmilla feeds on Laura, ‘gloating on [her] with increasing ardour the more [Laura’s] strength and spirits [wane]’.²⁷ Echoing Geraldine, Carmilla says: ‘You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever’.²⁸

Although the narrative Le Fanu proposes is wholly fantastical – General Baron Spielsdorf agrees as much – Le Fanu’s vampirism is all the more powerful because of its familiarity (Laura’s unheimlich in her dream-like recollection of Carmilla). Carmilla confutes the fantastic with the possible; she may have passed through keyholes or solid doors, or shape-shifted, not into a serpent, but into ‘a sooty black animal that resembled a monstrous cat’.²⁹ The fact however, remains that Laura’s sexual initiation by the succubus elicits only ‘vague and strange sensations’,³⁰ ‘The prevailing one being that pleasant, peculiar cold thrill which we feel in bathing’.³¹

As in ‘Christabel’, the victim’s danger is intensified by her father’s short-sightedness, who only sees the name-analogy between Carmilla (Baron Spieldorf’s story about Millarca, and the legendary Mircalla, Countess Karnstein) late into the narrative. Yet, the vampire is disposed of, and the plague lifted – or is it? Recall Christabel, whose infatuation with the treacherous Geraldine leads her for an instant to fancy herself a snake and hisses back at her lover. Laura does not resort to such theatrics, but she still fancies hearing ‘the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door’.³²

Le Fanu enforces the folkloric vampire tradition but his concern is more with reviving a taboo subject that Coleridge used as a sub-text in ‘Christabel’ – the offense which Queen Victoria found unbelievable – female homosexuality. Thus, Carmilla can scorn the inefficacy of anti-vampire trinkets and Laura can dismiss ‘the deadly pallor attributed to that sort of revenants’ as ‘mere melodramatic fiction’.³³

Female vampires, those perverse descendants of Lilith, Eve and the serpent, are perceived to be a threat to male hegemony because they are the ultimate epitome of flagrant hedonism, bound together with their (generally) female victim in a relationship where males are virtually excluded. This relationship tends almost always to be symbiotic – why should the vampire kill her source of food and pleasure? – however, the mortal lover usually proves to be too weak to sustain the relationship indefinitely, and must be nourished in turn. Ritual blood-letting is necessarily accompanied by a ritual blood-sharing as a deviant substitute for sex, a practice which eventually came to precede the sexual act itself in contemporary vampire fiction. Indeed, this female homo-erotic sexual awakening, threatening sanctioned relationships by marrying vampire and victim, defiler and defiled, resonates deep into the fiction and practices of the latter century with the female vampire’s cry, ‘We live for desire eternally’.³⁴

Endnotes

¹ Cecilia Tan, ‘The Tale of Christina’, in Dark Angels: Lesbian Vampire Stories, ed. by Pam Keesey (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1995), p. 77.

² An interpretation of the Book of Genesis reveals that before God fashions Adam a female companion from his ribs (2:22), in an earlier passage (1:27) the creation of woman has already been made: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.’ In The Alphabet of Ben Sira (written circa eight – tenth century AD), Lilith is revealed to be this woman, however refuses to submit to Adam since she was created equally: ‘She said, ‘I will not lie below,’ and he said, ‘I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.’ Lilith responded, ‘We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.’ See ‘Lilith’, in New World Encyclopedia <http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Lilith> [accessed 25 February 2010].

³ Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 38-41.

⁴ Ibid. p. 39.

⁵ Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 242.

⁶ Zana, ‘Dracula Retold’ in Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories, ed. by Pam Keesey (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1993), p. 20.

⁷ James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 80.

⁸ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Pains of Sleep’, in The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ([n.p]: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1994), p. 389.

⁹ ‘Christabel’, in The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 18.

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 59-60.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 132.

¹² Ibid., pp. 183-4.

¹³ Ibid., p. 253.

¹⁴ The outcome of the Villa Diodati ghost-story session in June 1816 resulted in Byron’s Fragment, which was published as an appendix to his poem Mazeppa and in response to John Polidori’s assertive claims that Byron had plagiarised his Vampyre. Augustus Darvell, a ‘being of no common order’ and ‘wasting away’ in front of the narrator’s eyes, requests that his death be kept secret from all men. Byron writes: ‘As he sat, evidently becoming more feeble, a stork, with a snake in her beak, perched upon a tombstone near us; and, without devouring her prey, appeared to be steadfastly regarding us’. See Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1991), pp.126-30.

¹⁵ The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, op. cit. p. 585.

¹⁶ Keats found the germ of the story in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy where it is credited to Philostratus, a Greek biographer of the first century AD who wrote the memoirs of the Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Philostratus describes an incident in which a Lycian youth, Menippus, is seduced by an empusa who wants only to destroy him. Apollonius eventually unmasks her human disguise and ruins the vampire’s plans. See Raymond T. McNally, A Clutch of Vampires ([n.p]: New English Library, 1976), pp. 23-6.

¹⁷ John Keats: Complete Poems ([n.p.]: The Softback Preview, 1993), p. 147.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 151.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 153.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 150.

²¹ Ibid., p. 153.

²² Ibid., p. 153.

²³ Ibid., p. 157.

²⁴ J. Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Carmilla’, in In a Glass Darkly ([n.p.]: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993), p. 258.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 274.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 275.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 278.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 261.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 274.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 278.

³¹ Ibid., p. 278.

³² Ibid., p. 314.

³³ Ibid., p. 312.

³⁴ Dark Angels: Lesbian Vampire Stories, op. cit. p. 77.

References

Auerbach, Nina, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ([n.p.]: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1994)

Frayling, Christopher, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1991)

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, ‘Carmilla’, In a Glass Darkly ([n.p.]: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993)

McNally, Raymond T., A Clutch of Vampires ([n.p.]: New English Library, 1976)

Stoker, Bram, Dracula (New York: Harper Collins, 2000)

Tan, Cecilia, ‘The Tale of Christina’, in Dark Angels: Lesbian Vampire Stories, ed. by Pam Keesey (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1995)

Twitchell, James B., The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995)

Zana, ‘Dracula Retold’ in Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories, ed. by Pam Keesey, (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1993)

John Keats: Complete Poems ([n.p.]: The Softback Preview, 1993)

‘Lilith’, in New World Encyclopedia <http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Lilith>

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