"Eating death": hunger, power, and the female vampire of the fin de siècle

This thesis examines the overarching narrative of sinful female appetite that conflates eating with immorality, sexuality, and perversity. I begin by tracing nineteenth-century depictions of Eve, Lilith and the lamia as antecedents of the female vampires of the fin de siècle. I use these mythic women as an entrée into Victorian cultural associations with food and eating and analyze the ways that female vampires in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) evoke nineteenth-century anxieties about food, fat, and female appetite. Female vampires reflect moral uneasiness over gustatory indulgence and their unrestrained appetites represent a plethora of perverse desires. The vampires of Carmilla, Lilith, and Dracula seem to embody divided femininity, changing from the “angel” to the “whore.” However, they personify (at all times) all of the complexities and contradictions of femininity. These women are “desiring-machines,” and variously embody singular qualities that are just part of their complex, ever-shifting subjectivities. They are light and dark, feminine and masculine, virginal and sexual, pure and corrupt, vaginal and phallic, weak and powerful, dead and alive, animal and human, victim and victimizer, mother and abortionist. By combining these extremes, they are the “abject” – concomitantly both alluring and repulsive – and their destruction suggests an inability for the patriarchal figures to permit female complexity and their desires to crush female subversion. Vampirism acts as a liberating “fall” for the constrained women featured in Lilith, Carmilla and Dracula, even as the texts validate and valorize their destruction.M.A.Includes bibliographical referencesby Kerry L Boyle