Female vampiressexuality and mother-daughter relationships in five vampire stories in english

Abstract

Female characters in vampire stories are the object of this study. I refer to their appearance as female vampires in nineteenth-century literature as well as their development in the twenty century and deal with their portrait as vampires’ victims in some stories. These characters have kept on appearing for centuries in mythological, folkloric and literary texts, probably because their portraits convey encoded messages that more common representations of female figures did not allow their writers to express. My study focuses on the revision of the relevance and function of some female characters in representative texts from the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in order to demonstrate the close relationship that exists between these fictional characters and the condition of real women at different times in history. More concretely, I focus on female sexuality and on mother-daughter relationships. I begin with the study of the female protagonists of three well-known nineteenth-century vampire stories: “Christabel”, Carmilla and Dracula, so as to offer a comprehensive analysis. Besides, I intend to unveil the relevance of the study of the mother figure in these texts. With regards to the selected text from the twentieth century, even though Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” is included in one of her most famous collection of short stories, in my opinion, its female protagonist has not been fully studied. In this way, I intend to offer an exhaustive analysis of this female vampire. Finally, The Historian (2005) has been mostly analysed as popular literature while its main fictional quality has been overviewed. Therefore, I intend to offer a detailed analysis of the novel paying special attention to the female characters and the importance of their role in the development of history. The thesis is divided into different chapters. The first two chapters offer a general approach to the topic. In the first one I make an overview of the recurrence and popularity of the figure of the female vampire in literature in English and in cinema. This chapter is organised by grouping and relating those texts and films that show the same type of female vampires, and its aim is to demonstrate the importance of this character through its recurrence and reinvention. Chapter two aims at summarising some of the most interesting and relevant studies and critical approaches to vampire literature in general and to the analysis of the female vampire in particular. For example, I examine folklore, psychological and gender perspectives. Moreover, in this second chapter, I dedicate two different sections to the main issues that will be analysed in the different texts: sexuality and motherhood. These two introductory chapters are followed by four chapters devoted to my analysis of the selected vampire stories from literature in English. I focus on female characters that belong to very different periods of time. From the early nineteenth century poem “Christabel” (1797-1800), going through Carmilla (1872) and Dracula (1897) towards the end of the century, and the last ones from the second part of the twentieth century: “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979) and The Historian (2005) ―this last one in fact, an early twenty-first century text. My intention is to vindicate and demonstrate the importance of analysing female characters in vampire stories because they are revealing of women’s actual circumstances throughout the ages. In my study I demonstrate that women’s sexuality and the mother-daughter relationship are two topics that can and should be deeply analysed in vampire stories since they are recurrent concerns of these texts as well as of gender studies.