Female Sanguinary Capitalism in Victorian Vampire Fiction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2025.17.13Keywords:
capital, Marx, Victorian Gothic, vampire, Dracula, CarmillaAbstract
The historical residue of the Victorian-era vampire is yet to release its firm grip on its contemporary revivals, allowing additional spaces for new historical and socio-political insight into the effect of Marxian capitalism as “economic vampirism” (Morrissette 2013: 637) on fin-de-siècle nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. The class-consciousness of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and Sheridan LeFanu’s novella Carmilla is also yet to be comprehensively explored in terms of elucidating the inextricable link between Victorian vampire and industrial capital. Well-established Marxian tropes in Dracula and overlooked in Carmilla, such as capital, class conflict and the bourgeois work ethic, require attention and reinterpretation; while undetected ones in both fictions, estrangement, animalisation, emasculation, factory working conditions, child exploitation, deterritorialization, call for a thorough examination. Furthermore, the neglected potential of female vampires as sanguinary capitalists within the framework of nineteenth-century political economy is also established in this paper. Thus, in applying relevant (post)Marxist ideas of economy and political philosophy to a materialist reading of Stoker’s and LeFanu’s works of Gothic horror, an unprecedented relationship is set up between female Victorian vampire and industrial capitalism. In establishing this relationship, the undeniable intuition of Marxian ideas in Stoker and LeFanu is further broadened. While Marx stops short at only correlating the vampiric sucking of blood with capitalist draining of value and life-force from labour and labourer, these masters of the Victorian Gothic genre construct an unprecedented, comprehensive insight into the machine of industrial capitalism via the literary trope of the female vampire. Thus, the female sanguinary capitalist is, distinctly from her male counterpart, an ambiguously spectral force of estrangement.
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