This is the first in a series of blog posts that will update weekly, addressing late 19th and early 20th Century vampire fiction:
So, I'm not entirely sure where I first
encountered the expression, “the female body is a leaky vessel”,
but I know it was at some point during my BA. I was reading one of
those books I used to get to peruse – the ones with titles like,
Queering the Middle Ages1.
Anyway, I liked the phrase. It stuck
with me all through the writing, reading and note-taking I did on
archetypes in folk ballads and the legality and theology behind
pre-1750 marriage, simply because that is a brilliant way of looking
at the whole squeamish, misogynist mess surrounding bodies in our
culture. The female body is leaky.
For we have, do we
not, a dichotomy in the dominant social discourse? A myth of two genders who
fall under that generic term of 'mankind'. Two genders, one of which
does it all properly, and another which doesn't exactly play
ball, which is – not to put too fine a point on it – faulty.
After all, women don't have a discreet pattern of arousal. They don't
have nice, neat interaction with the reproductive process, an
inoffensive little flap of tissue that hangs down, and – in theory
- only makes its presence felt, only making a mess when it is
called upon to do its duty. If the male member realises that it is
not wanted, it can – at least theoretically – make its retreat.
After the business is done, it need only wash itself and we are back
to square one, back to the unperturbed, normative, sexless body
of inert masculinity.
Without that
pattern of arousal, while the female body can never be considered
entirely sexual, it is also never - socially, politically, or even
physically – inert. In terms of sexuality, the female body is
leaky.
If it were not
enough that women can't have a man's proud, upstanding organ, not
enough that their bodies have – potentially – limitless ability
for sexual performance2,
women menstruate. If you have unprotected sex with them, women
drip. And after that there is pregnancy with all its
discharge, morning sickness, blocked sinuses, swelling middles and
stress incontinence. There is labour with all the blood, faeces,
vomit, amniotic fluid and 'show' – that nightmare combination of
sneeze and nosebleed which makes its presence felt through jellied
lumps sliding from woman's vulva just as she enters active labour.
(Consider this a public service announcement for all expectant
mothers. No-one ever tells you about 'show'.)
I apologise to any
gentlemen who are now running for the smelling salts, but suffice to
say all this unspeakable mess doesn't even take us to the baby, which
(covered in meconium or otherwise), flops out, followed by a
blue-white sinew of umblilical cord and a chunk of bloody yech
that is the after birth. When that's all done, then comes the
lactating: tits like Catwoman's, and the superpower of being able to
shoot milk across a room, ruining five bras in half an hour.
Honestly, if you're
beginning to sympathise with some of the more paranoid ramblings I
encountered during my degree, I can see your point. You may
sympathise with that old moderate, St Jerome, who got his head in
such a twist over the idea of pregnant women that he had the urge to
punch them in the bump.3
Or you may feel there was some grounding in the medical treatise that
claimed women's menstruation was how they rid themselves of the
impurities they got from congress with lepers.
Lovely.
Also, what?
We went pretty
quickly from 'ugh, girl cooties' to 'fornicating with lepers'. What
with the moral and social stigma attached Hansen's disease and
extra-marital sex in that period, that's a pretty extreme explanation
for a routine process of ejecting useless tissue.
But that's just it,
isn't it? This discourse of leaky women who drip and bleed and gush
plays very easily into a belief that women are leaky in their moral,
as well as physical selves. After all, to the medieval imagination,
women, were the agents of the fall. In the dichotomy of heaven/earth,
king/state, head/body, women were very much supposed to occupy the
latter position in each balance. This rhetoric is remarkably
pervasive. Go to the right places, you'll still hear it today: “Just
as Jesus is the head of the church, so the man is...”
God created mankind
in his image. He created women in his image, as well. He just created
them a bit different, a bit more bodily, a bit more earthy, a bit,
well, leakier. So it stands to reason, doesn't it, that if
something is bodily rather than spiritual, animal rather than
civilised, 'faulty' rather that 'normative', it is simultaneously
less male, less human. Indeed, it becomes female.
I promised you
vampires, didn't I?
There are lots of
ways this nasty little myth wriggles itself into our culture. There
are lots of ways it played out in the medieval discourse that I'm not
going into here. What's interesting me right at this minute is the
way my passion number one (perceptions of gender, sexuality and
marriage, particularly in the medieval and early modern period) has a
curious intersection with what is probably passion number three.
Namely,
vampires.
Yes, that's it.
Sorry it took me so long.
What this is really
all about is a vague trend I have noticed from reading far, far too
many vampire novels: the later the narrative, the more likely it is
that male vampires will be portrayed as attractive, as desirable, as
sympathetic. A female vampire not only retains a more or less steady
attractiveness over time, but is in fact far less likely to occur the
later the narrative.
The folkloric
vampire and its liminal state:
We don't really see
vampires as bodily any more. No, don't start listing all the gruesome
vampire films you've seen – if you're reading this, you're probably
an expert and therefore don't count. Instead, go and ask an average
seven year old what a vampire looks like. Because in this,
post-Dracula world, most people's first impression of a
vampire is essentially a smoothed down version of Bela Lugosi –
male, adult, white.
 |
| We all know what a vampire looks like |
Vampires didn't
used to be like that. They didn't even, in the words of a thousand
internet warriors,used to be 'bad-ass'. No. Vampires used to be
leaky.
They are spirits,
characters, identities that cannot be contained within the useful
boxes that society and morality would teach us. They are death
leaking into life, sexual desire seeping into the virginal
bed. They are a combination of hysterical grief and lust. The
folkloric ghouls, squeezing bloated from their graves, dripping blood
from rotting maws, crawling back to infect those they beloved with
the miasma of death and they are leaky in the extreme. If it is better to
marry than to burn, traditional vampires reminded people of the
destructive power of desire which had no respect for the proper
sacraments, for holy days, for the fact that marriage lasts only
until death. Like corruption, like the pox, the vampires trickle in
to any crack left in the vessel – any invitation, any little flaw
in your armour of hygiene and righteousness.
Yes, newsflash,
vampires are about sex. No, not only about sex, of course, but it
plays a major part. They are about morality, about corruption, about
disease. They are about damnation and sin. They were created in a
culture that saw no clear distinction between spiritual, moral and
physical cleanliness. What better way to reject one's spiritual
nature than to remain on earth in physical form? What better way to
spread damnation than to crawl from your grave and corrupt your
spouse, your children, your family - those connected to them through
bodily means.
As much as from
medical ignorance, from fear of illness, the myth of the vampire
arises from fears of intimacy, of the way an 'earthly' bond can
override the moral strictures of community and faith. It has its
foundation in the obsessive attachment that strictures of religion
and custom are intended to contain. Vampires were unreasonable,
unreasoning in their appetites. They put human interaction before the
law of God.
In the head/body,
male/female dichotomy, these are female flaws, female traits.
Whatever their gender, vampires were codified as female, as the the
body, and as such, they leak.
Ruthven, Varney
and Carmilla:
From these myths we
draw the shattered beginnings of the vampire in literature.
What is strange, in
the light of recent prejudices, is that vampires arrive on the
literary stage having shaken off the majority of the grave mould. We
have Lord Ruthven (1819), tall, magnetic, alarmingly cold. We have
the beautiful, passionate Carmilla (1871). We have Sir Francis Varney
(1847) who – while unspeakably ugly – dresses and speaks like a
man of fashion.
Still, these
vampires are leaky. As Polodori tells us, “their veins became
distended to such a state of repletion, as to cause the blood to flow
from all the passages of their bodies, and even from the very pores
of their skins.” The mask they present, the refinement, is merely a
pretty show that masks their wicked nature. The body that you lust
after is merely food for the worms.
They
are tempters, these vampires. Their danger is encoded as specifically
related to Eve and to the Fall. Of course, they provide heavenly
shows - wealth, affection, clever words and fine sensibilities –
but these delights are transient, physical, worldly. What the vampire
offers is the secular, sexual world, and it is offered at the cost of
the immortal soul. Ruthven, “knew so well how to use the serpent's
art” that he could corrupt even the most chaste. “There is not
one of them,” says the cynical Mr Leek, of Varney, the
Vampyre, “who would not marry
the very devil himself and be called the Countess Lucifer... always
provided there was plenty of money”.
And money there is,
or at least class, because these vampires are modern, wealthy,
titled. Here, of course, we enter another of those discourses that
will come up when studying vampires: the corrupting influence of
class, the brutality of an outdated aristocracy, the vampire in the
Marxist sense. It is not to be overlooked that, as well as tempters,
these vampires are awful snobs.
Ruthven
is the opposite of charitable: he will give money to those whom it
will fund in greater iniquity, but will meet the deserving poor with
disdain. Sir Francis's intermittent gentility depends much on the
class of his victims: to the aristocratic Flora he is courtly,
villainous, and ultimately quits the field; to the
impoverished-genteel Helen he is overbearing, until her faith for her
penniless lover leads him to great magnanimity. The lower
middle-class Mary, however, is faced with a wily, scornful beau who
eventually ruins both her and her mother. Although Carmilla takes the
majority of her sustenance from the working classes, she is firm: “I
don't trouble my head about peasants.” Indeed, when a 'peasant'
brings himself to her notice, she responds with an oration that would
shame the tyrannical Lord of a melodrama, “My father would
have had the wretch tied up to the pump, and flogged with a cart
whip, and burnt to the bones with the cattle brand!”
All three prefer the rich, the
aristocratic, the innocent. But
this attitude is not high-mindedness, it is another mark of the
vampire's attachment to corporeal things: transient beauty, material
wealth, earthly rank. This
snobbery, this cruelty, is merely another marker of the vampire's
leaky nature. Ruthven oozes gold to the least reputable of
characters, insinuates himself into positions of innocence, leaks out
poison. Carmilla manipulates her way into the intimacy of the female
home and brings corruption with her hot, uncomfortable kisses along
her hostesses cheek. Varney is voluble, charming; he bleeds out
words, language, as well as spreading his ever-diminishing wealth.
Femininity and
Effeminacy:
The leakiness these
vampires show is moral, is bodily, is material. To be precise, it is
effeminate.
Internet
pedant that I am, I use that word as the parallel of 'emasculate',
rather than as a synonym for 'feminine'. To be feminine is to
practice probity, chastity, to be silent, to be soft. Mulier,
people still argue, has its root in mollior.
For a man to be
emasculate is to go against the nature that was granted him by God –
it is for him to go from hard, virile, purposeful and to descend to
something weaker, softer, more female. For a woman to be effeminate
she must make a similar failing in femininity. She must be sly,
insinuating. She must gossip, spend, leak. But, as we know, women are
by nature leaky and have been so since Eve. As femininity is already
construed as softness, to sink to effeminacy is not to become
'harder', it is to cease being soft as in 'yielding', and to become
soft as in 'faulty.' To call a woman emasculate is to point to her
divinely ordained estate. To call a man effeminate is to mark him
with the worst character possible.
And,
female or male, these vampires are effeminate.
Carmilla is described as languid, chatty, girlish. She has no energy
for useful pursuits, sleeps until late, but she will waste an entire
day in animated gossip. Sir Francis, for all his bluster about
swords, is sneaky and treacherous in a fight. He prefers talking and
trickery to the bluff action of Jack Pringle and Admiral Bell. Often,
he is mentally unstable, even hysterical, wouldn't you say? When he
spends money, he is ostentatious, like a peacock. Lord Ruthven,
meanwhile, is that most despicable of things: a seducer, a man
concerned more with masturbatory, compulsive pleasures than upright,
virile masculinity. He has, we are told, “nothing in common with
other men”.
In
order to work that “serpent's art”, to bring other men down to
their level, the vampires must find a point of weakness in the armour
of righteousness. In these early stories, that weakness tends to be
feminine, too.
------
1For
the record, my degree was awesome.
2Assuming,
of course, that the woman in question has legs which do not tire.
3That's
how I remember it, anyway.
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