Women Write About Comics celebrates the 150th anniversary of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla with a series of posts on female vampires in nineteenth-century literature.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon is an author who, with her 1862 book Lady Audley’s Secret, helped to establish a vogue for the so-called sensation novel. Fiction of this type generally focused on sordid family scandals rather than the supernatural, a trait that distinguished it from its ancestor genre, the Gothic novel. As well as doing her part in popularising the ghost-free sensation novel, however, Braddon dabbled in tales of the supernatural and the weird – and in the process, touched upon the theme of the vampire.
The most relevant example is her 1896 story “Good Lady Ducayne.” The protagonist here is eighteen-year-old Bella Rolleston, who goes looking for work so that she can support her mother, and finds a position serving as a companion to an elderly recluse named Lady Adeline Ducayne. The job initially seems to be perfect: Bella is paid well by her employer, is surrounded by the luxuries of the Grand Hotel where Lady Ducayne resides, and makes a friend with a girl named Lotta Stafford. There is a touch of the fairy tale about the whole situation: when Lady Ducayne first arrives to meet Bella, she does so in a carriage straight out of Cinderella.
Over time, however, Bella’s feelings change. She becomes homesick – her mother’s well-being is more important to her than a comfortable home for herself – and even loses her friend Lotta when the latter goes away on a trip. Moreover, she learns that Ducayne’s previous companions had not simply dropped out with health problems, as she had been told: they had each ended up dead.
Lady Ducayne herself is something of an enigma. She has “a face so wasted by age that it seemed only a pair of eyes and a peaked chin” and it is unclear as to exactly how old she is: a local parson, who has heard her reminisce about certain historical events, suggests that she is over a hundred. She evidently has secrets known only to her physician, Dr. Parravicini Leopold, who is himself a strange and not entirely reputable figure. Bella also begins having a recurring dream:
The dream troubled her a little, not because it was a ghastly or frightening dream, but on account of sensations which she had never felt before in sleep—a whirring of wheels that went round in her brain, a great noise like a whirlwind, but rhythmical like the ticking of a gigantic clock: and then in the midst of this uproar as of winds and waves she seemed to sink into a gulf of unconsciousness, out of sleep into far deeper sleep—total extinction. And then, after that blank interval, there had come the sound of voices, and then again the whirr of wheels, louder and louder—and again the blank—and then she knew no more till morning, when she awoke, feeling languid and oppressed.
The dreams are accompanied by what she believes to have been attacks by mosquitoes. Dr. Parravicini, when she shows him a particularly nasty wound, concurs: “he has caught you on the top of a vein. What a vampire!”
However, there is another medical man who is prepared to offer a second opinion: when Lotta returns, she brings with her Dr. Herbert Stafford, her brother. After Lotta dissuades her from trusting Dr. Parravicini (“That dreadful man with the yellow face? I would as soon one of the Borgias prescribed for me”) Bella tells Stafford of her dreams.
Acting as something of a proto-Van Helsing figure, the good doctor develops suspicions about what is happening, and confronts Lady Ducayne on the matter:
Stafford saw a small, bent figure crouching over the piled-up olive logs; a shrunken old figure in a gorgeous garment of black and crimson brocade, a skinny throat emerging from a mass of old Venetian lace, clasped with diamonds that flashed like fire-flies as the trembling old head turned towards him.
The eyes that looked at him out of the face were almost as bright as the diamonds—the only living feature in that narrow parchment mask. He had seen terrible faces in the hospital—faces on which disease had set dreadful marks—but he had never seen a face that impressed him so painfully as this withered countenance, with its indescribable horror of death outlived, a face that should have been hidden under a coffin-lid years and years ago.
Ducayne reveals that she was born the day Louis XVI was guillotined (this would make her over 120 years old at the time the story was published) and has been kept alive with the help of her physician. But Dr. Parravicini is himself growing old, and she desires to replace him with a younger doctor, one more open to modern developments – a young doctor like Stafford.
But Stafford refuses, offering a revelation of his own when he declares his knowledge that Ducayne is being treated with blood taken from multiple young women, the most recent being Bella:
“I could take upon myself to demonstrate—by most convincing evidence, to a jury of medical men—that Dr. Parravicini has been bleeding Miss Rolleston, after putting her under chloroform, at intervals, ever since she has been in your service. The deterioration in the girl’s health speaks for itself; the lancet marks upon the girl’s arms are unmistakable; and her description of a series of sensations, which she calls a dream, points unmistakably to the administration of chloroform while she was sleeping. A practice so nefarious, so murderous, must, if exposed, result in a sentence only less severe than the punishment of murder.”
Lady Ducayne agrees to dismiss her homicidal physician and also lets Bella go free with a large helping of money. Bella, meanwhile, remains completely unaware of the unsavoury revelations and goes away thinking of Ducayne as a most generous employer – a drily humorous ending characteristic of the story, peppered as it is with wry observations about social relationships.
As a tale of an older woman prolonging her life by draining the blood of young girls, “The Good Lady Ducayne” can be seen as a late-Victorian update of the legends surrounding Elizabeth Bathory. Whether Braddon was familiar with the Bathory narrative is uncertain, given that the crimes attributed to this Hungarian countess were not particularly well-known in the English-speaking world at this time. That said, R. A. von 1894 biography Die Blutgräfin: Elisabeth Bathory had been published in 1894 and, although in German, received a degree of coverage in the Anglophone press, thereby introducing the figure of Bathory to a wider audience and – potentially – inspiring a few vampire stories in the process.
It is more likely, however, that Braddon’s inspiration lay not in folklore but in contemporary medical science. A telling exchange occurs when Lady Ducayne interviews Stafford about his medical qualifications:
And you know all the new-fangled theories, the modern discoveries—that remind one of the mediæval witchcraft, of Albertus Magnus, and George Ripley; you have studied hypnotism—electricity?”
“And the transfusion of blood,” said Stafford, very slowly, looking at Parravicini.
Although blood transfusion was still a suspect area of medicine at this point – and would remain so until Karl Landsteiner’s discovery of blood groups at the turn of the century – it was nonetheless a topic of discussion. Thomas G. Morton’s Transfusion of Blood and its Practical Application had been published in 1877, Charles Eggerton Jennings’ Transfusion: its History, Indications, and Modes of Application in 1884. Meanwhile, the December 27 1884 edition of The Medical Record ran a column entitled “Is Blood-Transfusion Justifiable?” that summarised the findings of one Professor v. Bergmann. Bram Stoker would later include blood transfusion as a major plot element in Dracula, contrasting cutting-edge medical science with age-old superstition.
Viewed in this context, “Good Lady Ducayne” seems less like a typical vampire story and more like a work of science fiction. And, like many a science fiction writer after her, Mary Elizabeth Braddon was willing to distort the facts of recent scientific developments in the service of a good story.
Braddon tackled something closer to the more traditional vampire in her 1860 story “The Cold Embrace.” The main character here is Leo, a “young, handsome, studious, enthusiastic, metaphysical, reckless, unbelieving, heartless” painter. Leo falls in love with his cousin Gertrude and the two become engaged, but decide to keep this a secret from Gertrude’s father Wilhelm – not because of the incestuous connotations (Wilhelm is also foster-father to Leo, his orphaned nephew) but because Wilhelm desired a wealthier son-in-law. At this point, Leo feels that his love for Gertrude is strong enough to survive the grave:
[T]hey were now betrothed, and death alone could part them. But the young student, the scoffer at revelation, yet the enthusiastic adorer of the mystical asks:
‘Can death part us? I would return to you from the grave, Gertrude. My soul would come back to be near my love. And you–you, if you died before me–the cold earth would not hold you from me; if you loved me, you would return, and again these fair arms would be clasped round my neck as they are now.’
But she told him, with a holier light in her deep-blue eyes than had ever shone in his–she told him that the dead who die at peace with God are happy in heaven, and cannot return to the troubled earth; and that it is only the suicide–the lost wretch on whom sorrowful angels shut the door of Paradise–whose unholy spirit haunts the footsteps of the living.
His passion is not as strong as he purports, however. While away on a trip, Leo hires a model for his art. This is a woman who “bewitched his fancy – that fancy which with him stood in place of a heart.” Her forgets all about his former lover until, after returning from his trip, he sees men retrieving the body of a drowned girl. Asking to see it, he finds that it is none other than Gertrude:
‘You have a corpse there, my friends?’ he says.
‘Yes; a corpse washed ashore an hour ago.’
‘Drowned?’
‘Yes, drowned. A young girl, very handsome.’
‘Suicides are always handsome,’ says the painter; and then he stands for a little while idly smoking and meditating, looking at the sharp outline of the corpse and the stiff folds of the rough canvas covering.
Life is such a golden holiday for him–young, ambitious, clever—that it seems as though sorrow and death could have no part in his destiny.
At last he says that, as this poor suicide is so handsome, he should like to make a sketch of her.
He gives the fishermen some money, and they offer to remove the sailcloth that covers her features.
No; he will do it himself. He lifts the rough, coarse, wet canvas from her face. What face?
The face that shone on the dreams of his foolish boyhood; the face which once was the light of his uncle’s home. His cousin Gertrude—his betrothed!
Hard-hearted Leo promptly forgets about Gertrude once again and pursues his artistic passions. Then, while outside a cathedral late at night, he feels something – a pair of cold arms around his neck, and wet hands clasped at his chest:
It is not ghostly, this embrace, for it is palpable to the touch–it cannot be real, for it is invisible.
He tries to throw off the cold caress. He clasps the hands in his own to tear them asunder, and to cast them off his neck. He can feel the long delicate fingers cold and wet beneath his touch, and on the third finger of the left hand he can feel the ring which was his mother’s–the golden serpent–the ring which he has always said he would know among a thousand by the touch alone. He knows it now!
His dead cousin’s cold arms are round his neck–his dead cousin’s wet hands are clasped upon his breast.
Leo tries to escape his dead cousin’s embrace, but he finds that it follows him wherever he goes: in an empty street, at an inn, even in the midst of a Parisian masked ball, those cold arms are always there to caress him. The haunting causes Leo to lose his artistic tendencies, his hedonistic love of life, and finally his health. The story ends with the authorities finding all that is left of him: “The body of a student, who has died from want of food, exhaustion, and the breaking of a blood vessel.”
The tragic tale of Gertrude and Leo belongs ultimately to the tradition of the ghost story, just as the tale of Lady Ducayne is really a work of macabre science fiction. Between these two pieces, however, Mary Elizabeth Braddon covers the key elements of the vampire archetype.
Next: The visual vampires of Hume Nisbet.
