The Bitten Word: Feminine Jouissance, Language, and the Female Vampire

This thesis examines the parallels between the female vampire’s fang (that which punctures phallogocentric discourse as well as other female bodies) and the pointed nib of the female narrator’s pen. Drawing on feminist and psychoanalytic theory, I read the vampiress’ bite as reworking the positions of the female vampire and her companion within a male dominated Symbolic and consider how both women ingest language only to expel it transformed as that which speaks their desire. Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella, serves as the referential center of this project and frames my interpretations of Crashaw’s 17th century Teresian poems, Coleridge’s “Christabel,” and filmic adaptations of Carmilla. These texts, like the bodies of the women they describe, are inherently vampiric, and the boundaries of both are rendered fluid as the female vampire and her companion redefine ontological boundaries through the act of writing, of biting, and of creating spaces of possibility