How is the Feminine vampire used to explore and portray the Anglo-Irish fear anxiety of the Native Catholic ‘other’ within the Irish 19th Protestant Century Gothic?
By Hannah Dwyer
This essay explores how Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker use the feminine to explore and portray Anglo-Irish fear of the Catholic ‘other’ in their respected works, Carmilla and Dracula.
The term ‘protestant gothic’ can be seen as an oxymoron as the Anglo-Irish were a “a notoriously hardheaded social class which habitually chided the catholic masses for their infantile superstition”; yet the genre was certainly “dominated by the protestant class” (Snow 2015). The protestant ascendancy that has existed in Ireland for generation meant that the Anglo-Irish “lived as a people apart, separated from the Gaelic Irish majority by religion, language and culture” (Snow 2015). The English overpowered the Irish people and “began forcefully colonizing Ireland, and reimagining, the island in its own image” but they were still the minority. So, the Anglo-Irish, that was “linked to the English Anglo-Saxon bloodlines, asserted themselves as the manly, counterpart to a feminine Native-Irish population” (Snow 2015).Even though the Catholics were treated as the weaker feminine counterpart to the masculine Anglo-Irish, it didn’t stop them in uprising and fighting against the penalizing laws that were aimed to keep them submissive to the English crown. From the 1760s onward, “serious agrarian violence increased across Ireland” as “the draconian Penal Laws enacted following William III’s victories at the Battles of the Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691) and the ensuing Treaty of Limerick (1691) kept the Catholic tenantry suppressed” (Davis 2013). The Act of Union 1800 cemented that the disputes of land will forever unsolvable and caused a “crucial change was that the problem of Ireland was seen to be eternal and as such it could not ‘die’” so Ireland was “approaching the world of the undead” (Davis 2013). In all, “the Irish gothic was close to the English gothic in terms of the dual interests in the early British and Irish history”, but “after 1798 the terrors of the gothic became much more explicitly related to those of contemporary life in Ireland, and the realism became much more horrific and dangerous than previous fantasy literature has suggested” (Foster J.W. 2006). Once “Anglo-Irish writers had accepted that the land problem in Ireland was probably insoluble, the novels moved from the superficially social realist (though already containing elements of the unreal) to the overtly surreal” One-way Anglo-Irish writers used the surreal was to turn to the gothic, specifically using the vampire, to express their views and fears of the social climate within Ireland at the time (Davis 2013). In fact, many have “situated the vampire within the discourses of colonialism and empire more broadly” and “specifically within an Irish colonial context” (George and Hughes 2015). The link between “ideas of dispossession and of sexual betrayal are part of the way in which Irish Catholics are regularly feminised within the Irish gothic” (Foster J.W. 2006). Both Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker used the vampire -specifically the female vampire- to express how the colonisation of Ireland has left the Anglo-Irish to fear the Native Catholic ‘other’ but with focus on the feminine in their respected texts Carmilla and Dracula. In this essay I will looking specially how the feminine is used to portray Anglo-Irish fear of the Catholic ‘other’ in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).
Within these Anglo-Irish Gothic texts women are seen as valuables. As “valuables,” women are “the object of personal desire, thus exciting sexual; and proprietorial instincts [and also as] the subject of the desire of others, binding others through alliance with them” (Levi-Strauss 1971). The archetype of the female vampire as the sexual temptress is seen in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla through the titled character as well as the Dracula’s brides and Lucy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Visual culture “emphasizes the voracious sexuality of the female body and more so of the female vampiric body” (Hobson 2016). The “symbolic connections of blood and female sexuality, this imagining of female hyper sexualisation occurs via the intersection of women’s political power and sexuality and through renderings of both sexual desire and sexual violence” (Hobson 2016). Beliefs about womanhood “centre on a notion of idealized feminine weakness and passivity and one specific type of weakness: the purported moral weakness manifested through the voracious and destructive nature of female sexuality” (Dijkstra 1996). In contrast, the “female vampire with her heightened physical strength and her longevity move her firmly into the utterly uncontrollable category” (Dijkstra 1996). Therefore, “embodies all of the culture fears of women’s sexuality; especially that is unquenchable and uncontained by male dominated institutions such as the Church, the family and even the government” (Dijkstra 1996). If the female vampire is the opposing force to societal order, then it is understandable how readers can make the connection that the female vampire is a representation of the Catholic other for Anglo-Irish gothic writers. The female vampire is the stand in for the ever-present threat of the Native Catholic majority in Ireland and their desire to dissemble the Anglo-Irish authority as the Catholics were perceived as the feminine counterpart to the masculine, dominant presence of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland at the time. Hence, we can easily explore how the feminine is being used, with the female vampire, to portray the Anglo- Irish fears about the Native Catholic other.
The gothic “began as a mode of dealing with the past and thus it has continued to the present day,” and Le Fanu’s work includes the “protestant religious and political polemics” that still haunt the country (Punter 2002). In Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the novel is narrated by Laura who is a young woman of English and Austro-Hungarian descent; she lives in a solitary castle with her elderly father who is an exiled Englishman. Laura is romantically pursued by the mysterious Carmilla, who is beautiful and seductive. It is eventually revealed that “her young guest is a vampire descended from the Karnsteinds, and extinct Styrain family to whom Laura is distantly related through the aristocratic bloodline of her deceased mother” (Mishler 2020). Although, from the beginning “the chateau’s origins remain somewhat hazy, the house is related to Laura’s maternal family, as the maternal is subsumed, controlled, and ordered within the paternal bloodline, and inheritance Carmilla seeks to reclaim and repossess” (Mishler 2020). The interior of the chateau, with “that rude, lofty, brown room, with the clumsy furniture of a fashion three hundred years old” aligns the domestic ace with the feminine and inexplicably lined to Laura’s Styrian mother. Additionally, the history of the father’s bloodline is notably absent from the household, yet England holds an important identity within the home and for Laura who “never saw England” (Le Fanu). Laura and her father replicate a “Little Britian” as they recite Shakespeare and drink tea in their Anglicized castle; this displacement “within the unfamiliar, archaic world of eastern Europe, appears as a symbol of the cultural isolation, dislocation, and decline of the Anglo-Irish, most prominently represented by the aristocratic Big House and landed estates of rural nineteenth-century Ireland” (Le Fanu). Carmilla’s insurgence into the family can be perceived as the metaphor of the resurrection of the Catholic coming back to reclaim the land that was taken from them by the English as the “narrative ends with a symbolic return to the feminine ancestral homeland” (Mishler 2020). There is a constant focus of the threat coming from/ being caused by the feminine, be that stemming from Carmilla herself or from Laura’s maternal ancestry. This can be seen as an allegory of the Anglo-Irish anxiety of potentially not having sustainability in Ireland as well as their fear of their misplaced anglicised transformation of Ireland is constantly at threat of the Native Catholic resurgence.
Moreover, the titled character aims to frighten the readers on two different levels. Firstly, Carmilla is “frightening because she is a woman out of control both sexually and physically” and secondly, like Dracula, “she is a vampire, a revenant, who returns from the grave to create mayhem” (Halberstam 1995). She is a “deathly power, incarnated in the vampire, threatens to overthrow traditionally established modes of behaviour embodied in the forms Laura, her father” and the people that live in the village near them (Snow 2015). What is the most terrifying about Carmilla is that she brings out “the fears of being unable to draw secure boundaries between the interior and exterior, watching and being spectacle, dream and lived experience have emerged as paramount” for the Anglo-Irish (Stoddart 1991). However, the “boundaries between self and other might be effected, but no real exchange is possible, so long as Laura does not partake in Carmilla’s life” (Potter 2022). As “Carmilla’s power over Laura grows, so too does the alienation between the narrative’s men and women” and “Le Fanu allows Laura and Carmilla to usurp male authority and to bestow themselves on whom they please, completely excluding male participation in the exchange of women” (Signorotti 1996). Furthermore, there is a depiction of duality within Carmilla, being that Carmilla is both the feared Catholic other but also the Anglo-Irish oppressor. There is no doubt that there are “ubiquitous depictions if Irish Catholic nationalism as a form of vampirism” to signify Le Fanu’s own “telling commentary one the Irish ‘problem’, with its recourse to Gothic tropes” (McCarthy 2014). In the Gothic, the past is never finished which suggest the depiction of Carmilla’s otherness is reminiscent of the “still-surviving yet disposed and ousted Irish Catholic aristocrat” (McCarthy 2014). Also, this can give another example to explain Laura’s hesitancy towards Carmilla, as she is drawing out repulsion and allure to the similarity and differences between the two women. This contradictory feeling continues to grow for Laura as she starts to develop “fits” as her passion for Carmilla intensifies, “but they are weirder and more forceful than that word encompasses” (Ridenhour 2013). When Carmilla embraces Laura, covers her with kisses, and tells her: “I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine”; Laura’s reaction should naturally be to recoil from this odd behaviour but she doesn’t. Assuming that Carmilla is a metaphorical representation of the Native Catholic Irish, then her telling Laura that she lives in her warm life, but Laura will die in hers can be perceived as a threat to the Anglo-Irish. The Native Catholic are allowed to survive under Anglo-Irish ruling, but they would not allow the same if they were given the opportunity to tip the power scale. So, the women are already locked in a mirrored symmetry, where Carmilla continually feeds, and Laura continually gives her blood. Thus, Carmilla is used as representation of the Anglo-Irish fear and anxiety of the past Irish Catholic coming back to reclaim their power. However, Carmilla is also presented as the Anglo-oppressor as well; this is also seen most clearly during the funeral service of the peasant girl that she killed. Carmilla face “underwent a change that alarmed and even terrified” as it “darkened and became horribly livid; her teeth and hands were clenched, and she frowned and compressed her lips, while she stared down upon the ground at her feet, and trembled all over with a continued shudder” (La Fanu). Carmilla’s change was caused this fit was due to the “strangling people with hymns” (La Fanu). This is a clear example of the Anglo-Irish fear of the Native Catholic other and their religious practices; it expresses the notion that their religious service almost cast an unwanted spell on to Carmilla which further the idea that the feminine vampire was used in Le Fanu’s to present the anxiety that the Anglo-Irish had with the catholic other.
As mentioned in the introduction, the “violence between the Protestant Ascendancy and the Catholic tenantry was endemic in 19th-century Ireland”, as “both sides committed atrocities as violence begat violence” (Davis 2013). In Anglo-Irish literature perhaps the most powerful motif, implicit or explicit” (Davis 2013). Bram Stokers Dracula novel may have released after Carmilla, it still considered the “ultimate novel of the “undead” and the ultimate Anglo-Irish Agrarian novel” (Brodman and Doan 2013). For Snow, “Dracula has entered into the public consciousness more powerfully and, true to its subject matter, has enjoyed a more vital afterlife than le Fanu’s tale” (Snow 2015). Unlike Carmilla, the novel was written from multiple perspectives as it’s “formatted as a series of letters, journal entries, telegrams, and other forms of communication written by nearly every major character, with the exception of Dracula himself” (Felix 2024). Though Stoker never mentions Ireland in Dracula, the landscape is eerily like that of the Irish countryside. The Irish “country possesses a dark, desolate and stormy grandeur… from the strange existing opposition of religion, politics, and manners, the extremes of refinement and barbarism are united, and the most wild and incredible situations of romantic story are hourly passing before modern eyes” (Killen 2014). Thus, it is easy to see similarities between the ancient and forgotten land of Eastern Europe and Ireland with Stoker ever mentioning Ireland specifically at all. In fact, as Harker moves further from “London and further from the luxuries of modernity, like trains that run on time”, we can see how it is a mirror of the migration of Englishmen moving from their well-developed area in England to vast green landscape of Ireland (Stoker). Also, Harker’s journey to Transylvania “forced him to confront an antiquated landscape fierce Catholicism, and feudal vampire”, as Harker witnesses the “casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease” and “green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses” (Brodman and Doan 2013). Again, the imagery of Transylvania in Stoker’s novel mirrors that of the landscape of Ireland, as the land was soaked in “violent, criminal, priest-ridden, autocratic, full of mouldering ruins and religious and fanaticism” that was “a society ripe for a Gothic treatment” (Eagleton 1995). Thus, we can believe then that Stoker’s novel is based on Ireland as “race and empire begin and home, and … both colonization and the animus against the Catholicism were inherently bound up with the subjugation of the Celtic periphery” (Gibbson 2004). Especially as “Stoker did not get any information about vampires firsthand in Transylvania” as “he never went there; in fact, it was not even his original intention to have his vampire come from Transylvania” (Day 2006). In an interview with a reporter from the British Weekly shortly after Dracula was published, Stoker was asked the question, "Is there any the historical basis for the vampire legend?" This was his reply:
“It rested, I imagine, on some such case of this. A person may have fallen into a death-like trance and been buried before the time. Afterwards the body may have been dug up and found alive, and from this a horror seized upon the people, and in their ignorance, they imagined that a vampire was about.” (Stoddard 1897)
Here, Stoker is stating that for him the ‘vampire’ was never a real thing but something that stemmed from uneducated fear. We can infer that this ignorance and fear can be transferred that onto the Native Catholic people of Ireland as it would statically be more common for a “death-like trance” to occur to a catholic due to their population outnumbering the Anglo-Irish. Also, the Native Catholics would more likely be afflicted to famine (Great Famine 1845-49) and deceases due to close living quarters. Therefore, we can see influences of Ireland within Stoker’s Dracula and consequently connect the vampires within Stoker’s novel to the Anglo-Irish fear of the Native Catholic ‘other’. Correspondingly, “colonial powers identify their subjects’ peoples as passive, in need of guidance, incapable of self-government, romantic, passionate, unruly, barbarous- all of those things for which the Irish and women have been traditionally praised and scorned” (Meaney 1991). Again, with have this duality of the Catholic Irish and the feminine.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the women are a constant source of conflict. In the novel, “all the vampires except the Count himself are female: it is relevant to consider that, although Renfield and Harker are attacked, only women mutate into vampirism” (Domingues-Rue 2010). At the time, Victorian women were in a society “where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels, they must be monsters” (Gilbert and Gubar 2004). Most of fear stemmed from the anxiety around “women’s sexuality particularly centres on women who embrace their sexual hungers and who act as agents of their own desire, and the female vampire embodies those cultural concerns” (Dijkstra 1996). It raises the notion that women’s sexuality is inherently destructive if left unchecked and/ or controlled by men. So, the female vampire is the perfect metaphor for an unstoppable force that drains their victims of their strength, sexual energy and perceived masculine essence. The female body and sexuality are a “problematic entity enticing men to spiritually bereft and physically exhausting sexual encounters, leaving the man weakened and demoralized” (Dijkstra 1996). This is seen most clearly during Harker’s encounter with Dracula’s three brides. Harker describes the three vampires’ brides as that there was “something about them that made [him] uneasy. Some longing and at the same time some deadly fear” (Stoker). They had a “deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive”, all of which caused a “burning desire” within Harker (Stoker). There is this conflict between inquisitive desire and moral superiority within Harker when he meets the brides as they are both sexually aggressive and enticing. The brides take on the masculine role in this interaction with Harker by making him the submissive victim as he closed his eyes in “a languorous ecstasy and waited-waited with beathing heart” for the brides to take his body. The fear of the sexual and power in women is continued in the novel through Lucy and Mina where we are faced with the English being colonized by this evil other which the feminine is most respective to this evil presence. The reader is forced to “instead of viewing the colonized other as it’s opposite, English subjectivity must confront and recognize the internalized aspects of the other within itself and embrace its hybridized identity” (Snow 2015). The first English woman to turn into a vampire is Lucy, who is introduced as the friend and correspondent of Mina Murray. Lucy is vulnerable to Dracula because “she has a habit of sleepwalking, apparently inherited from her father. Whether she resumes this habit because of Dracula’s arrival in England or it is coincidence is left unclear, but it is during one of her episodes that she is attacked” (Felix 2024). In Chapter 8, Mina realises that Lucy has sleepwalked out of the house and when she eventually finds Lucy she notices:
“There was undoubtedly something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure. I called in fright, ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ and something raised a head, and from where I was I could see a white face and red, gleaming eyes”(Stoker).
The interaction is an “allegory for sexual assault, given both the phallic nature of the bite and Lucy’s inability to consent while she was unconscious” (Felix 2014). From this violent interaction, Lucy becomes a vampire and her “body has been robbed of its soul not by death itself, but by un-death” (Potter 2022). Her “sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness”[1]. Mina’s interaction with Dracula when he feeds on her is significantly different compared to Lucy’s:
“With [Dracula’s] left hand he held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away from her arms at full tension; His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast, which was shown by his torn open dress” (Stoker).
This gives the allusion of the maternal act of breastfeeding, which is a steep feminine contrast to the violent, and very masculine act against Lucy. Rather than “allowing the colonial force drain life from her, Mina is nourished by their encounter” and “while Dracula does drink from Mina, he also replenishes what he has taken” (Snow 1015). Therefore, this exchange represents “the ideal relationship between the colonizer, England, and the colonized, Ireland” (Snow 2015). Mina is allowed to survive her contact with Dracula and be connected by blood whereas Lucy must be destroyed. The mixing of the blood is very important as “blood drinking and blood loss, coming together in the uncanny relationship between vampire and victim, are the main driving forces of the novel” (Potter 2022). Lucy’s blood collaboration with Dracula was violent and sexual and it created this unnatural beast that kills the next generation with ease, whereas Mina’s mixing of blood with Dracula was more maternal, symbolising this new evolution of Ireland where there is a hybridity between the Anglo-Irish and the Native Catholics. The birth of Quincey Harker concluded the novel and it “signals the necessary hybridity of future generations” as the child “holds the blood of all of the major characters of Dracula; mina and Jonathan through birth and the blood of Dracula, Lucy and the men through Lucy’s transfusion”, so “he is the ultimate manifestation of Irish hybridity” (Potter 2022). Therefore, by the end of the novel, Stoker is trying to present a solution of the Anglo-Irish fear and anxiety of the Native Catholic other by suggesting there needs to be a peaceful collaboration of blood or else the county will be suspectable to a demonic feminine threat that will suck the life out of the Anglo-Irish.
In conclusion, “Ireland as a whole is readily identifiable as a gothic space in popular culture” (Kileen 2014). However, in order “to grasp the notion of a political unconscious, one would need to imagine that our everyday social practices and relations, with all their implicit violence, longing and anxiety, were all the time waving a kind of fantastic subtext to themselves in some entirely imaginary place” (Eagleton 1995). Gothic in general “incarnates a set of stories within which human individuals are at the mercy of larger powers” (Punter 2002). This is shown clearly within both Le Fanu’s and Stoker’s texts. Though, Stoker's “delineation of the female vampire certainly owes much to Le Fanu's tale of repression, especially the theme of the respectable Victorian gentleman's anxieties about aggressive, unbridled female sexuality” (Day 2006). If Le Fanu describes his “female characters from subject position in the male kingship system” then “Stoker decidedly returns his to exchange status that reinstates them in that system”, but that system now contains a hybridity of the two oppositions in Ireland. Yet, both use the feminine vampire as the physical representation of the Anglo-Irish fear and anxiety of the Native Catholic other as there was nothing more terrifying than an uncontrollable woman who is presenting a masculine energy.
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