Video Transcript:
Vampires do not appear to hold the same appeal in media as they once did, but why? Portraying and playing with our deepest fears, not least of which is death—or worse, becoming the monster ourselves—some of these creatures spent the ‘90s, the aughts, and the first half of the 20-teens struggling with what they are, striving to reconcile their monstrosity with the human they long to still be, and, typically, falling in love with human women. I see the decline of vampire media as partly an indication of the political climate: since the 2016 election cycle, real life has taken a dark turn, and perhaps because our society seems overrun with monsters in disguise, media has, in general, turned away from the monsters it has held dear for decades, embracing heroes and villains both complicated and flat, but clinging desperately to the inevitable conclusion: the unambiguous triumph of good. It would seem the monster craze is petering, so why look at a vampire tale now, particularly one overlooked for over a hundred and twenty years? My reasoning is intersectional and twofold: this particular Victorian woman, who is, unbeknownst to her, both mixed race and a vampire may give us valuable insight into some of the social problems that seem to escalate daily in the headlines—and this may prove especially transformative if we get to actively drive her identity formation in a game, rather than passively watching her story unfold on the page or screen.
Informed by scholarship spanning topics of gender, race, monstrosity, and games, this video essay serves to frame my text-based video game, The Blood of the Vampire, which takes up at the end of the novel of the same name, and allows players to explore the psyche of a vampiric woman of color as she discovers what she is capable of in London, 1897.
Gender Trends
Gender roles in vampire media of the past three decades seem to follow a certain pattern: the protagonist may be female, but the monster is male; love triangles with another man or male monster[1] are common; and the human woman is the foundation of the male vampire’s conflicted humanity and keeps him wanting to be “good”. These women are unexceptional, or are not revealed to be special until later in the series. All of these conventions replicate accepted gender norms and perpetuate harmful myths about gender, particularly that any unexceptional woman can attract the interest of an exceptional man, even if he is monstrous (read abusive); conventional wisdom seems to have it that if she just gives him the love he needs, he will turn away from monstrosity to humanity, all for her, and they will live happily ever after. For her suffering, the woman holds out hope that the monster will eventually empower her with his strength and immortality, or she clings desperately to her humanity in spite of her love for him. Those are comforting messages in a world that otherwise insists that women must strive to “lean in” and “have it all,” even if their situation makes it impossible.[2] This is the message of white feminism that often discounts and undermines the struggles of women of color, not to mention any woman facing economic or health hardships.
Vampire media often play with the contradictions clashing between the powerlessness of women and the power of monstrosity, power that is therefore alluring. In the Twilight series, Bella Swan comments as she tries to convince Edward to turn her “I can’t always be Lois Lane. I want to be Superman, too,” she says.[3] But since she can’t convince Edward to turn her, Bonnie Mann explains, Bella’s modus operandi becomes self-sacrifice to the extreme: self-annihilation.[1] She puts herself in near-deadly scenarios so she can glimpse Edward, who has abandoned her. Mann connects Bella’s approach to life to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which describes the woman’s journey to adulthood and fulfillment as necessarily the death of herself and her rebirth as an extension of her lover, in this case, Edward, who also takes on the role of the involved parent Bella feels she does not have. Bella is eventually turned, but not until she and Edward have married and consummated their union, resulting in a pregnancy, and he turns her then only because she is dying in childbirth. So much for Superman. Vampires have certainly become one of society’s super-anti-heroes, but women tend to be denied this role to build narrative tension, and people of color tend to be denied it entirely.[4] As Barbara Creed points out in her book The Monstrous-Feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis, “The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or female subjectivity” (Creed 7). White men in our society fear women and people of color becoming more powerful, and so, with a few notable exceptions, we see the same kinds of stories and themes over and over again.
Likewise, the monstrous-feminine in video games demonstrates fears about powerful women. Witcher 3’s Ladies of the Wood are human-eating, mind-controlling forces of nature, and, similar to Half-Life’s Gene Worm, the first Borderlands game features a vault monster called “The Destroyer” worthy of Creed’s vagina dentata and primordial mother discussions; while it is a dimension-hopping, god-like creature, the player-character and their team just kill it. Games are overrun with hyper-sexualized succubi, goddesses, and demons.
That said, some games have depicted well-rounded, ambiguous female characters who could be deemed monstrous, but as non-protagonists, their development is secondary to and supportive of the player’s direction of the male main character. None of them are women of color. Flemeth and Morrigan of the Dragon Age series are formidable witches and shape shifters. Sorceresses in The Witcher 3 are for the most part allied with the game’s protagonist; however, social institutions both secular and religious find their powers politically dangerous and morally reprehensible, so some nations make it their business to hunt and execute them. Sirens of the Borderlands series are at least playable, but they, too, are victimized for their abilities, in this case exploited like any other natural resource and essentially used as battery packs by Borderlands 2 villain Handsome Jack.
All this leaves me wondering where to find the female monster as a heroic, central character, not just the monstrous-feminine or powerful, hunted side-kick. If male monsters can question what is left of their humanity, wrestle with morality, and struggle with relationships, why can’t female monsters? The answer, of course, is that they certainly can. They just have to be written this way.
On Game Design
Choosing to design a game in the first place used to mean reaching an audience of mostly young, white men, but as recent studies indicate, gender, race and ability are far more equal in terms of who is consuming games, so composing a video game now means reaching a very wide and diverse audience. Beyond that, because of the qualities of the games medium, this audience will not be told what to think, but will get to experiment with ideas through play, so meaning creation is far more reliant on the audience. Communicating messages is only a part of why we create video games, but if messages remain rooted in all aspects of game design, including mechanics, they can be subtle enough to avoid preaching while still carrying the weight of a game designer’s intention.
Designers seem to agree that the most compelling way to communicate a message is through a mechanic of meaningful decision-making, and many have found interesting ways to toy with players’ power of choice by taking it away or giving them none when they thought they had some.[5] Yet this approach is not simple. What is a meaningful decision? How do players get invested in characters enough to make anything in a game meaningful? If they do invest, how should gameplay and story interact? Are cinematics the best or only way to communicate story? If not, then what are the other options? None of these questions have just one answer, but many possible ones depending on the goals behind the game design and what players and designers prefer. Solving these problems for any particular game takes creativity and collaboration.
Greg Costikyan discusses his game design theories in “I Have No Words and I Must Design,” and his experience in multiple gaming genres, particularly pen-and-paper role-play, gives him a perspective on design that I appreciate. Although Costikyan views stories in a highly traditional way, which Jenkins rightly views to be rather limiting and not conducive to creating the most innovative video games,[6] I am with him in terms of what makes for a compelling experience of gameplay for me, that is a game that plays like the most flexible Game Master at the most interesting table of players in a pen-and-paper role-play setting imaginable. That means that the best games (by which I mean the games players come back to over and over again and that hold their significance over time) are responsive to player actions in a way players can see,[7] offer players a wide variety of ways to play and choices to make, and include an element of randomization, which makes play more unpredictable.
Miguel Sicart has written several texts examining the systems of ethics implemented in video games, and one major takeaway of his work is that the best mechanics of ethics in games consist in giving the player choices that have realistic consequences, which the players have to deal with in some meaningful way. Games must make players care about the non-player characters (NPCs) and world around their avatar and then make decisions that determine the fate of their characters. This brings us to a more specific discussion of the characteristics of this novel that I wanted to represent in a game.
Literary Analysis
Margaret: “Men are fickle creatures, my dear! It will take some time yet to despoil them of the idea that women were made for their convenience.”
Elinor: “I am afraid the man is not born yet for whose convenience I was made!”
(Margaret and Elinor, The Blood of the Vampire 66)
The Blood of the Vampire by Florence Marryat, published in 1897—the same year as Dracula—was written with a cultural critique in mind specific to Victorian England, and therefore its protagonist, Harriet Brandt, encompasses certain traits, flaws, and allusions to guide the reader into pitying Harriet’s unfortunate situation while still picking out the details that logically condemn her. Yet in her near total success in passing—for white, for human—and in her mixture of innocence and guilt in the destruction of those around her, she could easily be developed into a woman who does not succumb, but overcomes, into a much-needed introspective, monstrous heroine. The video game I have designed in text-based form allows players to take up Harriet’s story at the point of her suicide and choose how she will cope with her life-draining power if she cannot escape it through death. The game foregrounds identity formation with interest in how it is accomplished through decision-making and what, if any, affect it may have on the player. This section gets into a closer reading of the novel while elaborating on the design choices made for the game.
Harriet Brandt is an independently wealthy young woman traveling to Europe as a tourist. Her naïveté only makes her more appealing, but Marryat’s descriptions of her are often unsettling, focusing on animal metaphors, the color red, Harriet’s voracious appetite, and her apparent inability to keep her wild emotions in check.[8] With her disarming enthusiasm for life, she befriends Margaret Pullen. But when Margaret’s baby falls ill and dies, the family’s doctor, Doctor Phillips quietly informs them that because of Harriet’s mixed-race heredity and sinful parents, which he knows of because of his travel to the West Indies, he believes that Harriet is a psychic vampire, unknowingly feeding on the life energy of others. Alarmed at being accused of this when another death occurs, Harriet confronts the doctor on the subject.[9] She worries that his claim is true, outlandish though it seems, but her fiancé, Anthony Pennell, persuades her to marry him anyway.[10] When she wakes to find him dead on their honeymoon, she is overcome with grief and commits suicide, foreclosing further development and denying her the chance to untangle her racial and vampiric identities.[11]
Most scholars writing about this novel see Harriet Brandt merely as a grab bag of Victorian socio-political issues. They use Harriet as a piece of evidence, an example of whatever archetype they are concerned with rather than seeing her value as a fully developed character in her own right. She is merely a tool for proving points, a constellation of archetypes that they can pick and choose from as it serves their arguments. She is the Tragic Mulatta, the West Indian woman, the fallen Angel of the House, the failed New Woman, the passing-for-white woman whose secret heredity undoes her; she is the thwarted feminist, the dangerous seductress, the cautionary tale of miscegenation, the persistent reminder of slavery, and the consequence of British imperialism, counter-invading the British domestic sphere from the colonies and threatening its stability from within.
All these things she may well be, but I interpret this novel with a slight difference. I believe that the endings many of Marryat’s female characters’ suffer, usually in suicide or subduction into domesticity,[12] serve as a biting critique of Victorian culture, illustrating the consequences of restrictive values for women, and Harriet Brandt is perhaps the most extreme example of this in her supernatural status, which none of Marryat’s other heroines boast. Furthermore, Harriet is a well-developed heroine, not just a set of stereotypes. Her husband-to-be Anthony Pennell provides this perspective on her character and heredity in the novel, commenting on her complexity several times. He initially describes her thus to Margaret Pullen:
You led me to expect a gauche schoolgirl, a half-tamed savage or a juvenile virago. And I am bound to say that she struck me as belonging to none of the species… Miss Brandt possesses the kind of beauty that appeals to animal creatures like ourselves. She has a far more dangerous quality than that of mere regularity of feature. She attracts without knowing it. She is a mass of magnetism… Miss Brandt is too clever for Ralph, or any of you…[13]
He uses some of the same language as Doctor Phillips—“animal,” “dangerous,” “magnetism”—but his interpretation of it is not troubled by concerns about her mixed-race heritage and is overall sympathetic and admiring. The danger he alludes to is the commonplace, universal danger of attraction, of falling in love—not the danger of being consumed by a supernatural power or of bringing down the entire nation through racial taint. Confronted for the first time with the revelation of her mixed-race heredity, he merely states, “I do not believe in stigmas being attached to one’s birth… the only stigmas worth thinking about, are those we bring upon ourselves by our misconduct.”[14] While these observations might make an intersectional feminist want to cheer, they are nonetheless valid only because a white man voiced them.
When Madame Gobelli accuses Harriet of carrying “the black blood, the vampire’s blood which kills everything it caresses,”[15] and Harriet rushes to see Doctor Phillips to confront him about the truth of her parentage, he—who has been described as “so mild and courteous, so benevolent and sympathetic”[16] urges Harriet to calm herself: “you are over-excited. You must try to restrain yourself.”[17] Her fiery temperament is a gendered “problem,” but is far more so related to her mixed race, which threatens on a national scale. The main indictment of Harriet rests with the Gothic theme of the exotic: the underlying fear (and willful ignorance) of the cruelty of British imperial rule in the Caribbean and the possibility of what consequences the traumas suffered there might bring home, in this case, a monster in disguise come to seduce and weaken English gentlemen, consume English babies, and show English women a favorable alternative to domesticity and propriety.
Hammack has written of this novel that one might replace the word “vampire” with the word “hysteric” and the novel would be exactly the same,[18] and the hallmarks of hysteria feature most prominently in Harriet’s disinterest in emotional control. Hysteria was so loosely defined that it could easily have been implicated as the cause of the decline and deaths of those exposed to a woman suffering from it. This points back to the period’s flawed beliefs about medicine, particularly in reference to the feminine. Any ailment—physical or psychological—that could not be accounted for was chalked up to hysteria, the afflicted women were accordingly treated as weak and ill, and society marched on. In Idols of Perversity, Bram Dijkstra quotes William J. Robinson, an authority on eugenics, who writes, “… the hypersensual woman, to the wife with an excessive sexuality… Just as the vampire sucks the blood of its victims in their sleep while they are alive, so does the woman vampire suck the life and exhaust the vitality of her male partner—or victim.”[19] Harriet’s life-force drain is a perfect example of this, a metaphor for her open sexuality, exuberance, exotic appeal to men, and the danger she poses to all of British society, should she be allowed to take root in England, and of course if she were to reproduce and pass on the curse of heredity.
In the novel, Harriet ends up convinced of her own monstrosity, but in the game, she cannot escape her identity. As players take her through the gamespace, their decisions about her attitudes and actions are what bring about the ending she receives, one of six possibilities, each riddled with ambiguity. It is my hope that Harriet can be a catalyst in video games culture to not only start thinking about gender more critically and with greater self-awareness of the consequences of writing unambiguous women, but also to take action in creating complicated and heroic women.
Game Mechanics and Specifics
In designing any game, but particularly a game focused on race and gender questions, mechanics are at the forefront of concern. Game mechanics dictate what is possible in narrative, and mechanics communicate meaning that can enhance or undermine the game’s message to productive or devastating effect. Harriet’s power is the siphoning off of life energy of those around her, so one of the core mechanic of the game must be a power drain that rejuvenates Harriet, and while in the novel she has no control over her power, the game must put this power in the players’ hands in order to be effective. Since players need to be in control of Harriet’s vampiric abilities, it is necessary that Harriet becomes aware of them almost immediately, and because video games are a visual medium, players need to be able to see the drain happening.
[Here is a bit of the original demo for the game. I abandoned it because of issues of access; the engine required Linux, and I wanted the game to be widely available on mobile devices, so we switched to using Unity to make the game more accessible.]
I wanted players to be able to actively direct Harriet’s character development over the course of the game, so I created a system of branching conversation trees that led players down different possible paths for Harriet’s character. These conversations plus players’ decisions of how to use—or not use—the drain ability combine to bring the player to one of the six endings.
I chose to go with text-based in part because of my biggest design worry about the game: how to represent Harriet physically. She is mixed-race, but passing for white, and that is a very difficult thing to render digitally, especially with a limited development team and not much budget. It also has serious political implications.
I tried this out a couple of ways—the woman walking was the earliest version and the floating spectre is the final version—but I wasn’t completely happy with either. The text-based version, while it has all the quirks and annoyances of any text-based game, makes representing Harriet physically unnecessary. When the game informs players that Harriet is mixed-race, but passing for white, it is up to them to imagine what that means. I like that this holds true to the experience of reading the novel, but without sacrificing ludic elements.
Players can explore Victorian streets, a park, and two homes, using their energy abilities at will. Margaret’s house holds what I consider to be the game’s emotional climax. Margaret lost her child to Harriet’s energy-drain, so the player enters Margaret’s home to find her dejected, a state soon revealed to be the result of the presence of the baby girl’s spirit in the house. The loss of her child haunts any mother, and in the gamespace, that metaphor can take on a physical shape that can be confronted face-to-face. The player may choose to send the baby’s spirit on, consume its energy, or leave it be, each option with its own set of consequences. Harriet’s ability to come to terms with the death of this child is the central feature of her character development in the game, as it settles this heart-breaking scenario, which was left unresolved for both Harriet and Margaret in the novel. The scene foregrounds questions of motherhood and maternal love that are lurking just below the novel’s surface, and which concern Harriet very much in her problematic matri-lineage and broken bonds with her own mother and grandmother.
[You can see the scene playing out here]
All of Harriet’s possible endings are ambiguous. In one, she removes herself from England, staying abroad as a lady of means who wields political power, but is emotionally distant. In another, Harriet embraces her power to the point that she becomes a vigilante, attacking and draining anyone she perceives to be bad. In a third, Harriet wakes to find Anthony alive again, and she stays with him, but regrets having to hide her power and behave as a proper English lady.
[I want to briefly explain this scene, I call it the Ether, and it is the last scene of the game. In it, Harriet meets her mother. To put my depiction of her in perspective, Doctor Phillips describes Harriet’s mother in the novel, and if his racism was uncertain before, it runs clear now. He says, “She was not a woman, she was a fiend… A fat, flabby half-caste… with her sensual mouth, her greedy eyes, her low forehead and half-formed brain, and her lust for blood.”[20] Unlike Doctor Phillips’s grotesque characterization of her, in the game, she appears as a normal slave woman. She guides the player through a series of choices in the conversation, offering more insight into what monstrosity might mean for Harriet: carefully controlled inner strength; power to empower the disempowered; the ability to dictate and police morality; or, abominable and unwanted, a power that must be extinguished lest it consume her. At this point in the game, players can choose death for Harriet, just as she chose it for herself, but with an array of other options and gameplay encouraging alternative readings of psychic vampirism’s energy transfer, most players will likely go with something else.
Conclusions
Since completing design of this game, I have begun to think that I have underplayed Harriet’s race. The novel doesn’t make it easy; she is passing for white, even to herself, and there are only subtle hints that she is not what she seems. I considered having players use a character creation program after playing the game to see how they imagined Harriet as they played, and I would also like to survey players to understand why they chose to play as they did, whether for the sake of the fun and experimentation games allow, for some diversity-based perspective, and for personal reasons. Those tweaks may be added later.
Fairly early on, if a player takes the opportunity, they can learn that Harriet also has the ability to give back energy to empower others, using it to breathe life into the dying or empower the weak. Game Harriet is far less fiery and more level-headed than novel Harriet, mainly because her identity in the game is meant to be a creation of the player’s, reflecting their ideas about how she should cope with her situation rather than relying on Marryat’s construction of Harriet’s personality. I did not want the game to ascribe a code of ethics to her actions or assert the same characteristics imposed, perhaps unfairly, on Harriet in the novel, as judgment is meant to rest entirely with the player. It is possible to go through the game and take no one’s life energy at all, just as players can choose to never give any up by empowering anyone. Harriet’s fate in life or death, marriage or spinsterhood, domesticity or politics lies solely where it ought to be: in the players’ hands.
As a character, Harriet Brandt has the complexity necessary to inspire audiences searching for a realistic intersectional protagonist, if only she survives the revelation of her monstrosity and productively redefines herself as an admirable, monstrous protagonist, which is possible in the video game I have designed. Her story is relevant in our current struggles with sexism and racism in our communities—both on- and offline—and can serve as a rich example of self-acceptance and determination of one’s own destiny in spite of race—or whatever identities certain sectors of society may not esteem in us. Whatever Harriet’s ending, the real effect of the story resides in players, and I can only hope that Harriet’s character becomes one of many interesting characters exploring themes of internal conflict through monstrosity in video games.
Critique is not enough, and in this case, activism means composition, it means design, because the power of expression, of agency, lies in design. We cannot afford to wait for the games we want to see in the world; we have to make them ourselves.
References
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Directed by Joss Whedon. 1997-2003. Television show.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Dragon Age 2. Bioware, 2011, Video game.
Hammack, Brenda Mann. “Florence Marryat’s Female Vampire and the Scientizing of Hybridity.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 48, no. 4 (Autumn 2008) 885 896. JSTOR.
Jones, Bethan. “Buffy vs. Bella: Gender, Relationships and the Modern Vampire.” The Modern Vampire and Human Identity. Ed. Deborah Mutch. New York: Macmillan, 2012.
Jurich, Marilyn. Scheherazade’s Sisters: Trickster Women and Their Stories in World Literature. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Mann, Bonnie, “Vampire Love: The Second Sex Negotiates the 21st Century,” Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality. Eds Housel and Wisnewski. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2009. 131-145.
Marryat, Florence. The Blood of the Vampire. New York: Valancourt Press, 2009.
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin De Siècle. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
Sicart, Miguel. Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
—. The Ethics of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
—. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
Slaughter, Anne-Marie. “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” The Atlantic. July/August 2012, accessed 21 April 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant have-it-all/309020/
True Blood. HBO. Television show. 2008-2014.
Twilight. Summit Entertainment. Film series. 2008-2012.
The Vampire Diaries. The CW. Television show. 2009-2017.
[1] Twilight (2008); True Blood (); The Vampire Diaries (); Buffy the Vampire Slayer ()
[2] Anne-Marie Slaughter famously wrote “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” a critique of cultural expectations of women to be perfect wives and mothers on top of being highly successful in their careers. This “having it all” idea plays into the debate surrounding Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” feminism, which posits that since women deserve an equal share of the leadership responsibilities in society and that men should likewise share domestic duties, women should be ambitious and strive for high-powered careers. These debates point to cultural expectations of women’s perfection; we are literally demanding that women fit the “strong” woman archetype we are seeing in media in their actual lives, and that is not only impossible, but is psychologically, emotionally, and physically damaging.
[3] Mann, 141
[4] The most notable exception to this is Tara from HBO’s True Blood; I am not focusing on her here because she is not a protagonist, and because she stands very nearly alone as a vampiric person of color. Vampirism is not power for her, but is portrayed as rape, which complicates the broad-strokes trends I am discussing.
[5] The Stanley Parable is the most widely played, though there are instances of thus in many games, such as in Bioshock: Infinite when you have to take baby Elizabeth from her cradle in order to leave the room. You cannot go back and you cannot continue until you do so. There is only one choice, but the game forces the player to make it anyway, foregrounding their lack of control, creating a much more emotional moment, and touching on themes of destiny, memory, and the bearing the past has on the present.
[6] Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Computer 44 (2004): s3. Print.
[7] If it is hidden from them, they may feel that their choices do not matter mechanically, which takes away their sense of agency; they will feel they are on rails.
[8] Hammack, “Florence Marryat’s Female Vampire and the Scientizing of Hybridity,” 887
[9] Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 193
[10] Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 202
[11] Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 226
[12] Depledge’s essay “Ideologically Challenging: Florence Marryat and Sensation Fiction” reads Marryat challenging accepted gender and racial norms in Victorian society through her female protagonists. Depledge writes, “Many of her later novels from the last two decades of the nineteenth century feature strong-minded women who speak out against articifically imposed gender restrictions which have become socially entrenched” (311), citing Regina Nettleship and Isobel of The Root of All Evil (1880), Ada of The Confessions of Gerald Estcourt (1867), Nita of The Nobler Sex, and Rachel of Woman Against Woman (1865).
Kimberly Snyder Manganelli adds to this list a heroine of Marryat’s very similar to Harriet Brandt; Manganelli discusses Marryat’s Daughter of the Tropics and protagonist Lola Arlington, who is West Indian, in her book Transatlantic Spectacles of Race. She describes Lola’s status as an octaroon and tragically in love with an Englishman: “…Lola exhibits self-loathing, wishing to forget her ties to her mother and grandmother: ‘She hated and despised them! She hated herself sometimes for having sprung from so unworthy a beginning, and almost wished she had been born a veritable negress than endued with blood that had a taint upon it’ (1:64)” (Manganelli 154), which is very close to how Harriet Brandt feels about her own “taint,” which we are meant to see as primarily racial, and only monstrous as an extension of the racial taint. In her suicide note, Harriet writes, “Do not think more unkindly of me than you can help. 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” (Marryat 227).
[13] Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 166-7
[14] Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 168
[15] Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 188
[16] Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 192
[17] Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 193
[18] Hammack, The Blood of the Vampire Introduction, xvi
[19] Robinson qtd in Djikstra, 34
[20] Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 83
Lauren Woolbright is an Assistant Professor in New Media Studies at Alma College in Alma, Michigan. She can be reached at woolbrightle [at] alma.edu
