{"id":2202,"date":"2025-03-24T22:09:22","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T22:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=2202"},"modified":"2025-03-24T22:09:22","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T22:09:22","slug":"vampiric-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2025\/03\/24\/vampiric-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Vampiric Men?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Christian Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio<\/span>“, she <\/span>writes,<\/span> about the man looking at the woman’s portrait<\/span>:<\/span> “He feeds upon her face by day and night, \/ And she with true kind eyes looks back on him<\/span>, \/…..\/Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams”<\/span> (Rossetti 9-14). <\/span>Th<\/span>e “feeds upon her ” part<\/span> seems <\/span>sort of vampiric<\/span> to me,<\/span> but <\/span>it’s<\/span> interesting that Rossetti is referring to a British man. Most of the vampire-like connections <\/span>we’ve<\/span> talked about have been applied t<\/span>o foreigners, like Count Fosco and his animals, mesmerism, and love of sugar.<\/span> Yet <\/span>pretty much all<\/span> the men in what <\/span>we’ve<\/span> read so far have fed on women. Even though the Count <\/span>is the one with vampiric undertones, living with Percival is what sucks the life out of Laura. <\/span>Hartright also feeds on Laura, in <\/span>a similar way<\/span> to<\/span> the artist in “In an Artist’s Studio”; he has a picture he painted of Laura that looks back on as he is tell<\/span>ing the story<\/span> (Collins 51)<\/span>. <\/span>The “true k<\/span>i<\/span>n<\/span>d<\/span> eyes” part makes the woman sound very innocent<\/span>, <\/span>endearing<\/span> and submissive, a lot like Laura<\/span>, 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. <\/span>This reminded me of <\/span>Perkins and Donaghy article, ” A Man\u2019s Resolution: Narrative Strategies in Wilkie Collins\u2019 <\/span><\/span>The Woman in White<\/span><\/span>\u201d where they argue that Walter is an unreliable <\/span>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<\/span> (Perkins & Donaghy 400). All this made me wonder if any of the New W<\/span>omen writers exploited vampire tropes <\/span>when writing about bad husbands and men. <\/span>“The New Woman Fiction” from the Victorian web mentioned that New Woman fiction dealt with the issues of <\/span>“venereal diseases” and “<\/span>domestic [and sexual] violence<\/span>” (The New Woman in Late Victorian Fiction section), and <\/span>I think those<\/span> were both the two major shock factors in <\/span><\/span>Dracula<\/span>.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Vampiric Men?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135984],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}