In Christian Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio“, she writes, about the man looking at the woman’s portrait: “He feeds upon her face by day and night, / And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, /…../Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams” (Rossetti 9-14). The “feeds upon her ” part seems sort of vampiric to me, but it’s interesting that Rossetti is referring to a British man. Most of the vampire-like connections we’ve talked about have been applied to foreigners, like Count Fosco and his animals, mesmerism, and love of sugar. Yet pretty much all the men in what we’ve read so far have fed on women. Even though the Count is the one with vampiric undertones, living with Percival is what sucks the life out of Laura. Hartright also feeds on Laura, in a similar way to the artist in “In an Artist’s Studio”; he has a picture he painted of Laura that looks back on as he is telling the story (Collins 51). The “true kind eyes” part makes the woman sound very innocent, endearing and submissive, a lot like Laura, but then the final line reveals that the woman only looks this way in an idealized version that the man imagined when he painted her. This reminded me of Perkins and Donaghy article, ” A Man’s Resolution: Narrative Strategies in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White” where they argue that Walter is an unreliable narrator and has his own motivations that bleed into everyone else’s narratives, since he is presumably the editor of all the “evidence” he compiled (Perkins & Donaghy 400). All this made me wonder if any of the New Women writers exploited vampire tropes when writing about bad husbands and men. “The New Woman Fiction” from the Victorian web mentioned that New Woman fiction dealt with the issues of “venereal diseases” and “domestic [and sexual] violence” (The New Woman in Late Victorian Fiction section), and I think those were both the two major shock factors in Dracula.
2 thoughts on “Vampiric Men?”
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I’m fascinated by your analysis of “In an Artist’s Studio” and the implications of vampirism with the feeding upon the woman. Your connection to The Woman in White is necessary and relevant. How could vampirism also correlate to the concept of the painter and viewers of portraits having the power and right to view the female subject, though the woman in the painting not being able to see us? Your comment questioning whether New Woman writers use vampire tropes to describe “bad husbands and men” is interesting and I wonder how these harmful representations of men treating women poorly relates to their twisted ways of loving women too. In other words, how does “feeding off of her” relate to love and passion?
Speaking of Dracula, Count Dracula follows the same pattern as Count Fosco—he is not English, in other words, he’s a foreigner, and subject to tropes that sometimes purposefully alienate him from the English protagonists. But interestingly, the Count is the only male vampire shown in Dracula—only English women are corrupted first by him, utilizing the fear and shock factor you mentioned of sexual violence (especially as enacted by a foreigner). While the connection between vampirism and sex, and sexual violence, is similar to that you find in The Woman in White, there is no direct connection to Sir Percival because none of the English men end up turning to vampires—save for perhaps Renfield, a patient in a mental asylum who exhibits vampiric qualities. He provides wise insight into the allure and freedoms of vampiric power, but because it is all attributed to insanity, he is also an “othered” character who does not get the initial credit that a character like Sir Percival does (prior to his secret being revealed).
I’d like to point out the timeline of the vampire trope as well—while Dracula is the novel that solidified certain ideas about the trope, Victorian literature is a little bit obsessed with the sexual vampire. The 1819 The Vampyre (John William Polidori) is often cited as the story that established this “sexual vampire” trope. Carmilla (Sheridan Le Fanu) of 1972 is still widely popular today for its representations of the “sexual vampire” as a homoerotic entity. All this to say, it makes total sense that the references you mention are all across The Woman in White and In An Artist’s Studio! I’m surprised they didn’t jump out at me—great analysis of this pattern.