Victorian culture and vampirism

Tamar Heller’s essay “The Vampire in the House” was quite interesting.  At first, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I suppose I was just expecting a bunch of weird, ill-defined connections between vampirism and female hysteria in Victorian culture.  Sometimes these essays that make connections between fiction and reality are kind of a stretch (for example, for a film class we discussed an essay linking the Western movie “High Noon” to the McCarthy era or communism or something).  However, while some of it was a bit hard for me to follow, I was pleasantly surprised.  This essay contained a lot of insight into Victorian culture and how it relates to “Carmilla” and vampirism in general.

To be honest, thought, I found it hard at times to follow all of the concepts presented in the essay.  Whether it was due to the essay’s language or its abstract concepts, I’m afraid I was only able to get away with a few main points and notes.  To me, the thing that was most interesting to read about was how little people knew about medicine and the human body in those days.  It seemed as though female repression in Victorian culture lead to many misconceptions about women and sexuality.

“Since Victorian culture associated menstruation with the incursion of unruly desires, we can read Carmilla’s advent in the story—the entry of the woman who drains blood—as symbolizing the menarche of the adolescent narrator.” (82)

“First associated solely with boys, but then, from the 1860s onward, increasingly linked with girls, masturbation was the target of a vehement and weel-organized nineteenth-century medical campaign arguing that autoeroticism caused hysteria in girls and was encouraged by such practices as eating red meat.” (83)

Passages like those were very interesting.  It would be very hard to make a connection like that today, but when looking at the writing in the context of the time period in which it was written, this kind of stuff starts to make sense.  These concepts now just seem completely ridiculous.  Associating menstruation with “the incursion of unruly desires”?  Autoeroticism “encouraged by such practices as eating red meat”?  These things are obviously very dated ways of thinking, but it is easy to tell that their purpose was to scare women into acting a certain way rather than to actually inform.

So, while most of the connections presented in “The Vampire in the House” seemed to be mostly based on misinformation of the Victorian era, they certainly provided a lot of insight on when the book was written, and the mindset of people in society at that time.  While I didn’t fully understand all of the information presented, I think I got enough of it to be able to better understand the underlying themes that were present in “Carmilla”.