Florence Marryat
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About this book
Harriet Brandt, hungry for life, has personality features of the snake, tigress, panther and puma. Brandt is a ‘hybrid’ in many senses including as a ‘quadroon’, i.e. a quarter Black from her Black grandmother. As a result, Brandt is a threat to the purity of English blood. In the same way as Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents the vampire as on a campaign to create a hybrid race and infect the purity of the human race by creating a vampire strain, such is the suggestion of Victorian fears of Brandt.
In The Blood of the Vampire, the masterful author Marryat plays with Victorian thinking, and raises questions which were assumed but not openly discussed.
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To date there are no cinematic adaptions of Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire. This is an opportunity to create a film based on the classic novel which has many links to the racial, gender and sexual zeitgeist of the 21st Century.
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Dan Abramson
Sydney Australia
November 2022
A powerful analysis of The Blood of the Vampire
This is an extract from Bulamur, A. N. (2019) "Fin-de-Siècle [end of 19th Century] and Motion Sickness in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire", Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences, 18 IDEA Special Issue, 60-70.
The Colonial Strikes Back: Harriet Usurps the English Blood
Other than Harriet’s defiance of traditional female roles, what makes the European hotel guests sick is their encounter with the black blood that is allegedly monstrous and vampiric. Blood is alarming because it shows that English blood is not purely white, but mixed. Elaine Showalter (1991) writes: “Racial boundaries were among the most important lines of demarcation for English society; fears not only of colonial rebellion, but also of racial mingling, crossbreeding, and intermarriage, fueled scientific and political interest in establishing clear lines of demarcation between black and white, East and West” (p. 5). The multiethnic and multilingual vampire, however, disturbs the clear-cut boundaries between white and black and even anticipates transnationalism, “the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space” (Ong, 1999, p. 4). The sickness of Harriet’s loved ones stands for the assumption that mixed blood is a disease that spreads through marriage or immigration.
Anthony dies because, by taking a Creole wife, he goes against the purpose of marriage to produce healthy English children. Love is not a private emotion, but a social responsibility to follow the law of eugenics, which, “taken from the Greek eugenes,” means “good in stock” (Richardson, 2003, p. 2). Indeed, the intermarriage of a white British man with blue eyes and a half-Creole woman turns deadly as Anthony follows his heart instead of his duty to guarantee the racial quality of his offspring. The daughter of “a fat, flabby, half-caste” Jamaican woman, Harriet does not fit into the standards of the Eugenics Society that regards whiteness to be natural: “a eugenic girl is a healthy girl, and a healthy girl is an attractive girl” (Richardson, 2003, p. 81). Harriet’s former lover Captain Ralph supports the law of eugenics as he marries Elinor, not his half-Jamaican lover: “[…] she has black blood in her, her mother was a half-caste, so you see it would be impossible for any man in my position to think of marrying her! One might get a piebald son and heir” (p. 143). The racially mixed blood seems contagious, as Harriet’s white British admirers — her husband and her teenage admirer Bobby — die due to their encounter with a half-Jamaican woman.
The characters’ common symptoms of weakness and fainting can also be regarded as phobic reactions to a British-Creole woman with black blood. Minna Vuohelainen (2013) defines xenophobia as a chronic “irrational fear of all foreigners […] tied to the imperial and migrational conditions of the fin de siècle [end-of-century, here the 19th Century] which, […] witnessed increasing contact between the British and a number of foreign peoples”. Quoting from fin-de-siècle medical accounts on phobia, she writes that the common symptoms of xenophobia are nausea, loathing, horror, “cold perspiration,” pallid countenance, weakness, and “loss of blood [or] general sickness”. The xenophobic rhetoric of the fin de siècle can be traced in Blood, as Harriet’s loved ones unwittingly react to her racial ambiguity: the nuns at the convent in Jamaica grow pale due to the presence of the white-skinned woman who resembles the colonizer; Anthony feels “weak and enervated” during their honeymoon (p. 181). Margaret’s symptoms of illness also derive from her homophobic as well as xenophobic reaction to Harriet, whom she compares to a poisonous snake.
The following dialogue between the hotel guests suggests that fin-de-siècle Europe is not ready to welcome the racially unidentifiable woman:
[…] “Is she Spanish?”
“O! no; her parents were English. She comes from Jamaica!”
“Ah! a drop of Creole blood in her then, I daresay! You never see such eyes in an English face!”
“What’s the matter with her eyes?” asked Elinor sharply.
“They’re very large and dark, you know, Elinor!” said Mrs. Pullen, […].
Whereas Ralph Pullen flirts with the exotic woman, the female characters elevate Victorian beauty standards by regarding her dark “long-shaped” eyes and “wide mouth” as unnatural. Assuming that race connotes character, the ladies despise Harriet as “a half-tamed savage” who is not fit for English society. The narrator, on the other hand, perceives Harriet’s dark physical traits as indicators of her violent character and attributes her brutality against Elinor, while they fight over Ralph, to her Jamaican heritage:
“All the Creole in her came to the surface […]. Her dark eyes rolled in her passion”.
While unraveling racism in Europe, the colonial encounter teaches Victorian ladies that their homeland is not homogeneously white as they believed it to be.
Harriet herself believes in white supremacy and identifies herself English: when Margaret notices her accent, Harriet exclaims: “But I thought - I hoped - that I spoke English like an English woman! I am an Englishwoman, you know!”. She is disgusted with blackness and even prefers white babies to “nasty” “little niggers,” who nauseate her with their horrible smell. Even at the age of four, she supported British colonial power by whipping her parents’ slaves at their Jamaican plantation:
“We had plenty of niggers on the coffee plantation, regular African fellows with woolly heads and blubber lips and yellow whites to their eyes. When I was a little thing of four years old Pete used to let me whip the little niggers for a treat when they had done anything wrong. It used to make me laugh to see them wriggle their legs under the whip and cry!” “O! don’t, Miss Brandt!” exclaimed Margaret Pullen, in a voice of pain. “It’s true, but they deserved it you know, the little wretches, always thieving or lying or something!”
The two women’s conversation on slavery reveals complex power relations in British colonialism: a social outcast herself, Harriet regards Africans as sickly “little wretches,” who deserve punishment for their wrongdoings. Ironically, Margaret disapproves of slavery but supports her husband’s fight for British imperialism. Indeed, both women have blood money: Harriet’s father makes a fortune out of slavery in Jamaica; Margaret’s husband “toil[s] out in India for baby and herself” (p. 8). When Harriet commits suicide, Margaret inherits the money that was gained through slavery on the Jamaican plantation. Even in death Harriet identifies herself an Englishwoman by leaving her blood money to Margaret to redeem herself for killing Ethel.
Having accepted white supremacy, Harriet is blind to her power to destroy the myth of the healthy and physically superior white race by inflicting Europeans with sickness. Indeed, she regards herself as a sick woman who pollutes her environment: “I am a social leper, full of contagion and death,” she says, and commits suicide, which, for Alexandra Warwick (1995), empowers Harriet as a self-prosecutor: “The voluntary nature of her death is important, it is an acknowledgement of her own guilt and her danger to others. There is no need for her to be pursued and staked like Lucy [in Dracula], she sacrifices herself […]”. While regarding suicide as an act of empowerment, Warwick overlooks the fact that Harriet sacrifices herself for the well-being of the white European race that is threatened by her racial hybridity. Although the colonial woman strikes back, usurps British blood, and “suck[s] them dry”, she reaffirms British colonial power as Harriet hopes to purify the environment she allegedly contaminates by committing suicide. In her suicide note to Margaret, Harriet writes: “My parents have made me unfit to live. Let me go to a world where the curse of heredity which they laid upon me may be mercifully wiped out”. The fact that she considers herself unfit to live in late nineteenth-century Europe suggests that she cannot survive the turbulence of the fin de siècle that shakes hierarchical racial and ethnic categories.
The Cross-Species Woman
The racially hybrid new woman destabilizes the authority of fin-de-siècle science with her interspecies identity that is simultaneously human and vampiric. Hammack (2008) is surprised that Marryat’s characters do not “comment on the absurdity of the vampire-bat feature of her backstory”. However, the vampire myth that Hammack (2008) finds absurd challenges the “secular, rationalist, anti-clerical” premise that “all phenomena in the universe operated on determinable, mechanical laws, rendering any supernatural intervention or ‘spiritual’ entities impossible” (Ledger and Luckhurst, 2000, p. 221). A Catholic and spiritualist, Marryat herself challenged the empiricist belief that knowledge can be gained only from experience. She defended spiritualism in the periodical (London Society) she edited, and even had séances with a trance medium who allegedly helped her encounter “the spirit manifestation of her dead daughter, also called Florence, who died in 1860 at just 10 days old” (Hill, 2008, p. 335). A prolific writer’s involvement in spiritualism calls into question the enlightened image of Victorian England that is in between modernity and tradition. The novel unsettles the readers by locating spiritualism in both Europe and Jamaica and by imagining an interspecies identity that cannot be scientifically explained.
Marryat’s pro-spiritualist novel imagines an intercelestial protagonist who defies easy categorizations of animal and human with her “blood-red lips,” “small white teeth”, “boneless hands and feet”, and her power to “suck [her] victims’ breaths until they die”. Harriet’s interspecies identity is also evoked with subtle comparisons between Harriet, who has the finest voice in Jamaica, and the Sirens, the daughters of the river god in Greek mythology, who caused the shipwreck of many boats by luring the sailors to their island with a rocky coast. Doctor Phillips warns the hotel guests against Harriet by evoking the beautiful but dangerous Sirens with enchanting voices: “she is still more dangerous than I imagined her to be! Those tones would be enough to drag any man down to perdition”. Like the Sirens, Harriet both fascinates and endangers the hotel guests “as she ran over the strings of her mandoline in a merry little tarantelle which made everyone in the room feel as if they had been bitten by the spider from which it took its name, and wanted above all other things to dance”. Indeed, if not by a spider, the guests are metaphorically bitten by the vampiric woman, who casts them under her spell with her energy-draining powers and trances them with her dance.
Blood also challenges the Orientalist division between the “rational” England and its “magical” colonies by drawing parallels between Madame Gobelli, a fraudulent medium from London, and Harriet’s voodoo Jamaican mother, who both defy Victorian ideals of decorum as “obese” and “enormous” women. The cultural and ethnic differences between the two dissolve as the “devilish” Baroness with “bloodthirsty sentiments” replaces Harriet’s mother and regards Harriet as her daughter. As the Baroness boasts of her magical powers that raise the dead, the novel locates “Obeah” — “folk magic, sorcery and religious practices of West African origin” — in the so-called enlightened England. Although the Baroness falsely claims to be a medium, it is her engagement with spiritualism that protects her from Harriet’s deadly powers. The hierarchical racial and class distinctions fall apart as the slaves and servants of Harriet’s father’s plantation, the Jamaican heiress, and London’s elite all participate equally in spiritualism.
Marryat imagines a contact between the two seemingly opposing discourses of the supernatural and science, as Doctor Phillip believes in the vampire myth and lacks a scientific explanation for Harriet’s psychic powers: “She possesses the fatal attributes of the Vampire that affected her mother’s birth — that endued her with the thirst for blood which characterized her life — that will make Harriet draw upon the health and strength of all with whom she may be intimately associated—[…]”. Harriet’s suitors discredit the doctor’s assessment that paradoxically connects vampirism and science. Captain Ralph considers the doctor mad to believe that Harriet’s love is deadly; Anthony dismisses the doctor’s advice against his marriage to Harriet due to her vampiric lineage: “He is an old fool, a dotard, a senseless ass, and I shall tell him so! Vampire be hanged!”. “Doctor Phillips be damned!,” exclaims Anthony; ironically he himself is damned for insisting on “tenable” evidence and dismissing Harriet’s own warning about her psychic powers. Marryat, in Dr Phillips, does not portray “the esteemed superiority of medical wisdom,” as Depledge (2010, p. xvii) claims, but connects science and spiritualism by having a scientist believe in vampirism and accept Harriet’s abhuman identity.
Indeed, in Doctor Phillips, Marryat challenges the association of science and progress by showing how medical research in Europe involves violence. In his conversation with Margaret, the doctor unravels the brutality in Swiss hospitals, where Harriet’s father Henry Brandt became a vivisector:
He was a scientist perhaps — a murderer certainly! […] This man Brandt matriculated in the Swiss hospitals, whence he was expelled for having caused the death of more than one patient by trying his scientific experiments upon them. The Swiss laboratories are renowned for being the most foremost in Vivisection and other branches of science that gratify the curiosity and harden the heart of man more than they confer any lasting benefit on humanity. Even there Henry Brandt’s barbarity was considered to render him unfit for association with civilized practitioners, and he was expelled with ignominy.
The novel questions the progressive nature of science as Henry Brandt vivisects his patients for medical investigation and animals for his own gratification. Having met him in Jamaica, Dr Phillips tells Margaret how Henry tortured and imprisoned natives in his Pandemonium, the capital of Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, until his servants took revenge by slaughtering him. Ironically, the Doctor vicariously enjoys the murder of Henry and his mistress “in the most torturing fashion the servants could have devised”. The science of the fin de siècle no longer seems secular and progressive as the doctor curses the “godless” vivisector, who uses science not for humanity’s benefit but to gratify his desire for violence.
Conclusion
Overall, embodying the turbulence of the fin de siècle, Harriet Brandt’s liminal [transitional] identity creates motion sickness in the characters (and the Victorian readers) by shaking socially constructed categories of race, gender, and species.
John Ruskin (1853) laments that the unified, fixed, and harmonious notion of identity will fall apart in the modern era: “[…] men: - Divided into mere segments of men - broken into small fragments and crumbs of life […]”. Harriet exemplifies Ruskin’s envision of a fragmented identity as a British-Jamaican heiress, a human and a vampire, a former convent girl with an unclear sexual orientation.
At the beginning of the novel, the “loud and discordant bell” that invites the hotel guests to dinner is an indicator that the Victorian ideals of symmetry, regulation, and moral propriety are about to crumble with the arrival of a mixed woman with an unclassifiable identity.
The single female traveler’s homelessness and her temporary stays at the hotels also stand for her traveling identity that is always on the move. Indeed, the hotel guests show symptoms of vomiting - dizziness and nausea - because they are repelled by the destabilization of patriarchal gender roles and cultural differences between the enlightened England and its “backward” colonies.
With Harriet’s psychic vampirism, Marryat shows how sexually decadent women and ethnic minorities are cast as monstrous entities that inflict death and sickness on Victorians.
The doctor’s belief in Harriet’s vampiric lineage is also terrifying because it paradoxically connects spiritualism and science. The trope of infection in Blood serves as a metaphor for the turbulent transitional period that drains the life energy of those who dread changing gender roles, the interconnection between England and Jamaica, and the rise of spiritualism that defies scientific authority.
Bulamur, the author of this article, is Associate Professor Doctor at Boğaziçi University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Western Languages and Literatures. The extended version of this article was published as the 4th chapter of Bulamur's book Victorian Murderesses: The Politics of Female Violence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016).
References
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This book is as relevant and fascinating today as in Marryat's time! I hope you enjoy the Austi Classics edition of Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire.
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