This thesis examines the overarching narrative of sinful female appetite that conflates eating with immorality, sexuality, and perversity. I begin by tracing nineteenth-century depictions of Eve, Lilith and the lamia as antecedents of the female vampires of the fin de siècle. I use these mythic women as an entrée into Victorian cultural associations with food and eating and analyze the ways that female vampires in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) evoke nineteenth-century anxieties about food, fat, and female appetite. Female vampires reflect moral uneasiness over gustatory indulgence and their unrestrained appetites represent a plethora of perverse desires. The vampires of Carmilla, Lilith, and Dracula seem to embody divided femininity, changing from the “angel” to the “whore.” However, they personify (at all times) all of the complexities and contradictions of femininity. These women are “desiring-machines,” and variously embody singular qualities that are just part of their complex, ever-shifting subjectivities. They are light and dark, feminine and masculine, virginal and sexual, pure and corrupt, vaginal and phallic, weak and powerful, dead and alive, animal and human, victim and victimizer, mother and abortionist. By combining these extremes, they are the “abject” – concomitantly both alluring and repulsive – and their destruction suggests an inability for the patriarchal figures to permit female complexity and their desires to crush female subversion. Vampirism acts as a liberating “fall” for the constrained women featured in Lilith, Carmilla and Dracula, even as the texts validate and valorize their destruction.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
English
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
Identifier
ETD_5686
PhysicalDescription
Form (authority = gmd)
electronic resource
InternetMediaType
application/pdf
InternetMediaType
text/xml
Extent
iii, 52, [3] p.
Note (type = degree)
M.A.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
Note (type = statement of responsibility)
by Kerry L Boyles
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Females in literature
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Vampires in literature
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Food habits in literature
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Camden Graduate School Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = local)
rucore10005600001
Location
PhysicalLocation (authority = marcorg); (displayLabel = Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.