The Transatlantic Vamp: Sexual Geopolitics in the Silent Film Era

In 1915, a vamp became a popular trend in American motion pictures with the release of A Fool There Was, starring Theda Bara. As the first cinematic vamp, Bara played a female vampire, a sort of femme fatale who ruined white middle-class men by seducing them with her exotic sexuality. This article will analyze racial and sexual characteristics of both the vampire and Theda Bara as an actress from the geopolitical perspective. An examination of the social, political, and cultural context in the U.S. of the age reveals that the sexual threat of Bara's vampire reflects American white middle-class male anxiety about domestic security. At the turn of the century, immigrants from the Mediterranean aroused this anxiety among xenophobic people who had been influenced by the negative racial discourse. Assuming the Mediterranean origin, Bara's vampire symbolizes the racialized sexual “other”, threatening the “proper” sexual norm. In the light of Anglo-American diplomacy of the period, the vampire in the film can also be construed as a political agency that menaces the white male homosocial alliance between Britain and the U.S. Considering the emerging nexus between Hollywood and the US government, the vamp / Theda Bara in A Fool There Was is subversive of the white male-dominated American film production with her exotic seductiveness