The Blood of the Vampire

by Florence Marryat

  Dr William Acton famously wrote, in 1875, that: ‘the human female would not, for her own gratification, allow sexual congress.’[72] The idea of the Victorian woman as devoid of sexual urges has been largely dis-credited, indeed Michael Mason, in his research, has found little in the literature of the day that indicates this was a widespread belief.[73] However, the point is not whether anyone believed this, rather the levels of anxiety that the very notion of female sexuality produced. As frequently as Harriet’s sensuality is emphasised, it is explicitly linked to her racial background:

  “The girl is a quadroon, and she shews it distinctly […] her wide mouth and blood-red lips! […] by the way she eats her food, and the way in which she uses her eyes […] she has inherited her half-caste mother’s greedy and sensual disposition.” (p77)

  Once more we are brought back to Harriet’s inherited legacy: ‘if this girl is anything like her mother, she must be an epitome of lust.’ (p71) Thus, throughout, Harriet is made monstrous and so different as to be a definite object of fear. Furthermore, the continual repetition of references to her blood-red lips means the reader never forgets for a moment that Harriet is a vampire of sorts. But, more than this, her malady, her very disease, is her racial origin:

  “She possesses the fatal attributes of the Vampire that affected her mother’s birth – that endued her with the thirst for blood which characterised her life – that will make Harriet draw upon the health and strength of all with whom she may be intimately associated – that may render her love fatal.” (p79)

  It is impossible to critique the demonisation of Harriet and her mother without reference to another famous literary Creole, Bertha Mason. It is interesting that Marryat, in 1897, was still fictionalising the same fear and racism toward the Creole woman that Charlotte Brontë worked into her 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, fifty years earlier: “Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; – idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a mad woman and a drunkard! […] Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points.”[74] Harriet shared her mother’s greed for food, with Bertha the inherited lust is for alcohol. Bertha’s vampirism is referred to in the novel. Her apparition reminds Jane “Of the foul German spectre – the Vampyre.” (II p. 58) Bertha’s brother, when describing her attack on him makes her vampire tendencies clear: “She sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart.” (I, p. 275) But her affinity to Harriet is cast in her Creole blood: “the true daughter of an infamous mother.” (II, p. 88) Infamous not just for behaviour but also for non-white, and therefore polluted, blood.

  Vivisection

  While the inherited legacy of her mother’s non-white blood is crucial to contemporary concerns over eugenics and racial purity at this time, the brief but explicit knowledge we are giving of Harriet’s father, Henry Brandt, serves a significant purpose in this novel and relates to contem-porary fears surrounding another aspect of nineteenth-century culture. Marryat’s presentation of Harriet’s father is unrestrained:

  “This man Brandt matriculated in the Swiss hospitals, whence he was expelled for having caused the death of more than one patient by trying his scientific experiments upon them. The Swiss laboratories are renowned for being the most foremost in Vivisection and other branches of science that gratify the curiosity and harden the heart of man more than they confer any lasting benefit on humanity. Even there Henry Brandt’s barbarity was con­sidered to render him unit for association with civilized practitioners, and he was expelled with ignominy. Having a private fortune he settled in Jamaica and set up his laboratory there, and I would not shock your ears by detailing one hundredth part of the atrocities that were said to take place under his supervision and in company of this man Trawler, whom the girl calls her trustee, and who is one of the greatest brutes unhung. … Brandt did not confine his scientific investigations to the poor dumb creation. He was known to have decoyed natives into his Pandemonium who were never heard of again which, raised at last, the public feeling so much against him that, I am glad to say, his negroes revolted and, after having murdered him with appropriate atrocity, set fire to his house and burned it and all his property to the ground.” (p67-68)

  This background allows Marryat to, albeit briefly, critique another wide-spread late nineteenth-century concern – vivisection. Those readers familiar with Marryat’s 1894 novella The Dead Man’s Message will remember how Professor Aldwyn wakes, after what he believes was a nap, to discover that he is, in fact, dead. The Professor has entered the first sphere of the spirit world and is told that he will remain here until he acknowledges and repents his earthly sins – the main one of which was to be a vivisecting scientist. However, whilst the vivisecting of animals was well known, the idea of vivisecting humans is perhaps less appreciated. However, I would suggest that the practice Harriet’s father is accused of has a long and troubling history. Zieger refers to the story of Harriet’s father as ‘a unique plotline in nineteenth-century British literature.’[75] Perhaps the setting for these horrors being a Jamaican plantation is unique, although Davis makes the suggestion that ‘Henry Brandt, bears a striking resemblance to the scientist of The Island of Dr Moreau, published by H.G. Wells the previous year.’[76] However, Brandt’s torturing and vivisecting his former slaves (slavery was outlawed in Jamaica in the 1830s) encodes ideas surrounding experimental medicine that was believed to be practiced on vulnerable groups across the period we loosely define as the long nineteenth-century. In 1798 Mary Wollstonecraft, in her posthumously published work Maria narrates the experiences of a character admitted to hospital. She writes: ‘Everything appeared to be conducted for the accommodation of the medical men and their pupils, who came to make experiments on the poor, for the benefit of the rich.’[77] In Middlemarch in 1871 George Eliot’s Lydgate’s is a forward thinking and innovative doctor who could well have believed that the only way to advance human medicine was to explore the avenues opened up by the practice of vivisection – human or animal. Certainly his innovative ideas raised the suspicion that he would experiment on the poor of the community:

  “Medical knowledge is at a low ebb among us,” said Mr Bulstrode, who spoke in a subdued tone, and had rather a sickly air. “I, for my part, hail the advent of Mr Lydgate. I hope to find good reason for confiding the new hospital to his management.”

  “That is all very fine,” replied Mr Standish, who was not fond of Mr Bulstrode; “if you like him to try experiments on your hospital patients, and kill a few people for charity, I have no objection. But I am not going to hand money out of my purse to have experiments tried on me. I like treatment that has been tested a little.”[78]

  The popular novelist Ouida was one of the many well-known writers who feared the movement of vivisection from animals to humans: in 1897 she wrote about her fears that vivisection would lead to the ‘scientific torture of lunatics.’[79] We see in Stoker’s Dracula, in Dr Seward’s diary for 20th July, Seward reflecting on his wish to understand better his ‘homocidal maniac’ Renfield. He writes:

  Men sneered at vivisection, and yet look at its results today! Why not advance science in its most difficult and vital aspect – the knowledge of the brain? Had I even the secret of one such mind – did I hold the key to the fancy of even one lunatic – I might advance my own branch of science to a pitch compared with which Burdon-Sanderson’s physiology or Ferrier’s brain-knowledge would be nothing! (p. 71)

  David Ferrier was considered by many to be the founder of modern brain surgery and he published his many researches on the brains of primates during the latter half of the nineteenth century. He regularly worked from a laboratory at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum which had a regular supply of animals on which he could experiment. He also carried out investigations using the case notes and post mortem results on the brains of patients who died at the asylum.[80] It is not difficult to see why fears such as those held by Ouida and others gained momentum. Marryat details the vulnerability of charity hospital patients in
her 1898 novel An Angel of Pity, a female patient, broken down by nervous disorder, is subjected to pointless examinations and tests as she lays dying, so that the chief surgeon of the hospital can instruct his students:

  “You will observe, gentlemen, that this is a very singular and interesting case of hysterical catalepsy. The patient is a single woman of forty, and these fits or convulsions have been going on now for some time. Apparently they proceed from perfectly natural causes; but they can undoubtedly be produced by artificial means, and the using of such means in intricate diseases is the only method by which we can judge scientifically of the ulterior course of the complaint. … This patient, you will observe, gentlemen, … is, or appears to be, in extremis, but an inducement of the convulsions she has suffered from will be followed by immediate sensibility.” At the same moment he passed his hand beneath the bedclothes at the foot of the bed, and Number Twenty-two, giving a loud shriek of pain, twisted herself out of her nurse’s arms, and sitting blot upright in the bed, threw her body about in the most violent manner, foaming at the mouth, while blood spirted (sic) from her nose and eyes and ears, and stained the coverlet of the bed. Mr. Lesquard sat immovable at the foot, smiling furtively at the dying creature’s anguish, whilst the other doctors and the two students bent forward to watch the effects of his experiment.[81]

  Lesquard had stabbed the patient’s foot with a lancet in order to precipitate an attack. To what extent Marryat is critiquing the outlawed practice of slavery and the abuse of slaves, in her depiction of Henry Brandt is unclear. Given her known anti-vivisection stance, that she is equally concerned with portraying the barbarities of which the vivisecting scientist often stood accused is likely. However, the vulnerability of Brandt’s victims, being elderly former slaves, positions them alongside other vulnerable groups of the time but has the ugly dimension of racist oppression and exploitation.

  Conclusion

  Towards the close of the novel Harriet concludes that she is “a social leper.” (p176) There is a brief interlude when Harriet resists the advice given to her by Dr Phillips but this is not a particularly empowering action. By the time she learns everything Phillip’s knows about her hereditary legacy she has fallen in love with the writer, Anthony Pennell, and whilst Pennell opposes Phillips’s authority Harriet is not liberated by her decision to be with him, she merely submits herself to the authority of a husband. Her response, when he dismisses all she has been told, is to do likewise. Pennell’s intentions are not portrayed as being entirely altruistic: ‘He felt as though he had captured some beautiful wild creature and was taming it for his own pleasure.’ (p180) Once more it is Harriet’s very un-English qualities that have been the attraction. Pennell’s desire to capture Harriet is ultimately destructive, proving the predictions the medical profession made regarding the marriage of hysterics to be correct. Pennell is suffering: ‘he had felt weak and enervated ever since coming to Mentone.’ (p181) He has become Harriet’s latest victim: “you draw my very life away.” (p182) Sian Macfie refers to an 1897 Burne-Jones painting ‘The Vampire’ ‘in which he depicts a vampire-woman descending upon her victim, a man who lies sleeping on a couch as if exhausted from love-making. Burne-Jones’ painting draws upon late nineteenth century notions of the libidinous woman as vampire.’[82] By portraying Anthony’s death on his honeymoon tour with Harriet, Marryat has presented the reader with a literary representation of the image seen in Burne-Jones’ painting.

  Macfie uses her reading of Pennell and Dr Phillips to critique Marryat’s handling of the importance of science and medical thought at that time. She states that Pennell is used by Marryat to ‘critique […] the scientist’s rationality.’[83] We must not forget, however, that Pennell dies exactly as predicted by the ‘rational’ scientist, Phillips. Pennell is described as a ‘lover of Mankind’ who ‘waged a perpetual warfare against the tyranny of men over women; the ill treatment of children; and the barbarities practised upon dumb animals and all living things. He was a liberal minded man.’ Macfie says that: ‘Pennell’s words echo through the subtext like the voice of the novel’s unconsciousness. … His voice subverts that of the scientist and that of the narrator who mimics the scientist. Marryat the novelist is thus ironically undercut by the fictional author who is her own creation.’[84] However, I leave it to the reader to decide who, if anyone, is the voice of Marryat in this novel. She details the prejudice of the time and Pennell’s liberal opposition to these prejudices. And, at all times, we should refrain from trying to lift the novel from its socio-cultural context.[85] As we see in the medical references of the time, the views Phillips expresses were fairly standard in terms of the perceived overt sexuality of the non-white ‘other’. It is important to remember the complex ideologies regarding race and sex during the nineteenth century and not expect a nineteenth-century writer to have attitudes towards race and racial diversity that would be more in keeping with present day views. Much of nineteenth-century literature is littered with views towards the non-white ‘other’ that make decidedly uncomfortable reading and aspects of this novel are no exception.

  Harriet’s suicide is, perhaps, inevitable. She uses poison, the favoured method of suicide by young persons ‘especially female.’[86] In her suicide note Harriet acknowledges that her hereditary legacy could not be beaten: ‘My parents have made me unfit to live. Let me go to a world where the curse of heredity which they laid upon me may be mercifully wiped out.’ (p187) Davis suggests, in her essay, that Harriet is most likely pregnant at the end of the novel, although there is no explicit indication of this in the text. However, Harriet’s belief, in line with mainstream nineteenth-century scientific thinking, that she could pass on her hereditary curse is explicit; moreover the knowledge that her contagion renders her unable to form close attachments makes the prospect of life look unbearably bleak.

  Ultimately, in this novel, Marryat presents a sympathetic portrayal of a character who encodes many aspects of fin-de-siècle society that caused great anxiety amongst contemporary readers. That Harriet does not instill blood-chilling terror in us does not prevent her from being an interesting case-study from late nineteenth-century literature.

  Suggestions for further reading:

  Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon. The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 1982).

  Davis, Octavia. ‘Morbid Mothers: Gothic Heredity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire’, in Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature, ed. by Ruth Bienstock Anolik (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland and Company, Inc, 2007), pp. 40-54,

  Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  Hammack, Brenda Mann. ‘Florence Marryat’s Female Vampire and the Scientizing of Hybridity’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 Vol. 48, No. 4 (2008), pp. 885-896.

  Heller, Tamar. ‘The Vampire in the House. Hysteria, Female Sexuality, and Feminist Knowledge in Le Fanu’s Carmilla’, in The New Nineteenth Century Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian Fiction, ed. by Barbara Leah Harman & Susan Meyer(New York and London: Garland Pub Inc, 1996), pp. 77-95.

  Macfie, Sian. ‘They suck us dry: A Study of Late Nineteenth Century Projections of Vampiric Women’, in Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day, ed. by Philip Shaw & Peter Stockwell (London & New York: Pinter Publishers, 1991), pp. 58–67.

  Malchow, Howard, LeRoy. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain (California: Stanford University Press, 1996).

  Wilburn, Sarah. ‘The Savage Magnet: Racialization of the Occult Body in Late Victorian Fiction’, Women’s Writing Vol. 15, No. 3 (2008), pp. 436-453.