Carmilla’s Kindred: Vampire Brides

Carmilla's Kindred header

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.

John Polidori’s 1819 story “The Vampyre” did much to popularise vampires in literature, while poems like Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and “Lamia” were testament to the lasting appeal of the otherworldly-bride motif. It was only a matter of time before it became fashionable to combine the two themes and create tales of vampiric lovers; one such specimen can be found in Henry Thomas Liddell’s 1833 volume The Wizard of the North; The Vampire Bride; and Other Poems.

The main character of “The Vampire Bride” is Count Albert who, during his wedding, feels a sudden shudder and drops his wedding ring. When he bends down to pick it up, he hears a mysterious groan coming from beneath the altar, while the smell of a grave fills the church. He does not let this bother him and goes ahead with the ceremony. Later, he happens to drop his ring again; he picks it up and, on a whim, places it on the finger of a nearby statue – a statue which, he notices, seems to have smiled at him. He then finds that he is unable to get the ring off again, and is disturbed to see more movement from the statue:

Fast and faster it clove, still he earnestly strove
To detach that charmed gold;
When the finger of stone doubled slowly down,
And the bridegroom’s blood ran cold.

Albert is unable to retrieve the ring, even after sending a page to smash off the statue’s finger. Seemingly forgetting the whole affair, he returns to his bride – only for her to undergo a terrible transformation:

He turned until his lady true
And he felt her flutt’ring breath;
When an icy chill through his veins did thrill,
And he shrunk from the grasp of death.

And a bitter, bitter cry broke forth in agony,–
“Save me! for mercy! save!”
For in his arms he did hold a figure damp and cold
And the couch smell’d like a grave.

“Thou this day didst me wed, and I come to thy bed,
Thy nuptial joys to share;
And in token true, the sapphire blue
On my finger still I wear.”

Another bitter cry, and he senseless did lie–
For the phantom marble prest
Its loathsome form ‘gainst his bosom warm,
And weigh’d down his lab’ring breast.

The next morning, Albert awakens to find the “spectre Bride” departed. He is reunited with his true wife and tells her the terrible news: that the wedding ring has been claimed by the demon who, consequently, now has him as a groom. Later, when Albert sleeps, the vampire bride returns to him:

He lay like a corse ‘neath the Demon’s force,
And she wrapp’d him in a shroud;
And she fixed her teeth his heart beneath,
And she drank of the warm life-blood!

And ever and anon murmur’d the lips of stone,
“Soft and warm is this couch of thine,
Thou’lt to-morrow be laid on a colder bed–
Albert! that bed will be mine!”

The vampire departs, and Albert is left close to death come the morning; but the embrace of his true bride restores him to the full flush of life. The power of the virtuous bride is a major part of the narrative: when Albert orders the church altar to be moved so that the ring can be dug up from below, a team of labourers try and fail to shift the stone – until the bride joins in, at which point “Up sprung the lighten’d stone.” Beneath the altar lies a coffin, and a terrible sight lies inside:

They lifted the lid, and the shroud they undid,
But what they saw underneath–
The horrible sight that congeal’d them quite–
I almost fear to breathe.

Beneath a shroud, stain’d and spotted with blood,
A female naked lay!
On her clenched hand shone a sapphire stone,
In her corpse there was no decay!

The labourers flee at the sight; but once again, the bride offers salvation. Clutching a crucifix, she jumps into the coffin and orders the vampire to relinquish the ring in the name of God:

When the zone they unlaced from around its waist,
Its bright eyes with fury gleam’d;
When they thrust a dart through its swollen heart,
It convulsively shiver’d and scream’d.

And the red blood thereout did gush and did spout,
Till it sprinkled the chancel roof;
So vehement it sprung, that no fountain e’er flung
With like force its waters aloof.

But the carcass foul of the carrion Goule
Grew flaccid, and meagre, and thin–
As a huge bladder blown, when the air is gone
Shrivels up into wrinkled skin.

The horrors are not quite over, however, as hidden below the coffin is a passage leading to the catacombs “Where the Gouls and Sprites keep on Sabbath nights/Their unholy Carnival.” The people take the vampire’s body from the church (“But none could declare how it ever came there,/In consecrated earth”) and inter it at the ramparts, “Where the murderer’s limbs are thrown”. A miraculous whirlwind then appears, completely destroying the coffin, vampire and all: “So the wrath Divine, in Philistia’s shrine,/Hurl’d Dagon from his throne.”

Liddell was not above borrowing from earlier sources in writing “The Vampire Bride” and openly acknowledges this in his commentary on the ballad. Two lines describing the whirlwind – “It came rushing and roaring, like a cataract pouring/Over a mountain rock” – are lifted directly from Robert Southey’s “The Old Woman of Berkeley”. The sequence with the statue stealing the ring is modelled closely on an eleventh-century narrative summarised by Sir Walter Scott in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (the supernatural entity in this case is Venus; Scott cites the tale as an example of a pre-Christian deity being demoted to fairy or demon). As for the central narrative of the vampire bride, well, Liddell was clearly familiar with Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, as his introduction points the reader to that poem’s footnote dealing with real-life cases of alleged vampirism.

Illustration by James Clerk Maxwell from the manuscript of his 1845 poem "The Vampyre" showing an armoured knight sharing a boat with a hostile female vampire.
One of James Clerk Maxwell’s illustrations from the manuscript of “The Vampyre”.

Using a metre now associated almost exclusively with comic verse, Liddell’s poem has not aged well. That said, it has a little more going for it than James Clerk Maxwell’s “The Vampyre” from 1845. Written in deliberately archaic language and possibly influenced by Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, Maxwell’s narrative concerns a “douchty knichte” who, while riding through the woods, encounters the “boniest ladye that ever he saw”. She invites him to her wee, wee boat and the two set off to sea together; but during the voyage, the douchty knichte witnesses the ladye fair transform into something more horrible:

He lookit at her bonie cheik,
And hee lookit at hir twa bricht eyne,
Bot hir rosie cheik growe ghaistly pale,
And scho seymit as scho deid had been.
The fause fause knichte growe pale wi’ frichte,
And his hair rose up on end…

The woman is none other than his former lover. Exactly what passed between the two beforehand is largely left to the reader’s imagination, but it becomes clear that the woman is now a vampire:

Then spake the ladye,-“Thou, fause knichte,
Hast done to mee much ill,
Thou didst forsake me long ago,
Bot I am constant still;
For though I ligg in the woods sae cald,
At rest I canna bee
Until I sucke the gude lyfe blude
Of the man that gart me dee.”
Hee saw hir lipps were wet wi’ blude,
And hee saw hir lyfelesse eyne,
And loud hee cry’d, “Get frae my syde,
Thou vampyr corps uncleane!”

The once-douchty knichte tries to escape, but alas, he is cornered aboard the wee, wee boat. His spurned lover has her final revenge:

And the vampyr suckis his gude lyfe blude,
Sho suckis hym till hee dee.
So now beware, whoe’re you are,
That walkis in this lone wood;
Beware of that deceitfull spright,
The ghaist that suckle the blude.

Nobody can pretend that this is a timeless classic of Scottish verse, although allowances can be made when we consider that James Clerk Maxwell was only fourteen when he wrote it. Which, incidentally, marks it as an early contribution to a most venerable subgenre: vampire poems written by fourteen-year-olds.

The works of Liddell and Maxwell show that, even before the nineteenth century had reached its halfway mark, the vampire bride was already in danger of becoming a hoary old cliche. Fresh blood was needed, and it was duly provided by modernist prophet Charles Baudelaire.

Baudelaire’s first volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), provoked controversy upon its original publication in 1857, with some of its contents being censored. Dedicated to Théophile Gautier, who had created a vampire temptress of his own in his 1836 story “La morte amoureuse”, the book includes two poems dealing with the vampire theme: “Le Vampire” and “Les Métamorphoses du vampire”.

In “Le Vampire” – originally published in 1855 – Baudelaire uses the vampire as a metaphor for a lover who the narrator has come to detest. Although the poem lacks supernatural elements of the more literal sort, it does compare the subject to a horde of demons (“un troupeau/De démons”) and to vermin feeding upon a corpse (“Comme aux vermines la charogne”), two images that place it right at home in Gothic territory.

In the final two verses of the poem, the narrator contemplates murder, turning to a knife and some poison. In a surreal touch, he hears these two implements scoffing at his plan. They remind him that, even if he were to go through with killing his lover, he would only try to bring her back again: “Tes baisers ressusciteraient/Le cadavre de ton vampire!” (“Your kisses would resurrect the corpse of your vampire!”)

Baudelaire played with the vampire motif in a more direct, but nonetheless unorthodox manner in “Les Métamorphoses du vampire”, one of the six pieces in the book to have been censored by the authorities. This poem opens with a seductive woman “En se tordant ainsi qu’un serpent sur la braise” (“writhing like a snake on embers”) as she boasts of her sexual prowess. She claims that she can dry tears on her breasts, cause the elderly to laugh like children, and even provoke angels to damn themselves in her name.

The second and final verse makes an abrupt shift from eroticism to horror. The narrator states that he has had all marrow sucked from his bones — “Quand elle eut de mes os sucé toute la moelle…” — and turns over to find not a buxom temptress, but a bloated figure resembling a waterskin filled with pus (“Qu’une outre aux flancs gluants, toute pleine de pus!”) or an effigy swollen with blood (“…mannequin puissant/Qui semblait avoir fait provision de sang”).

The narrator closes his eyelids in fear. When he opens them, he sees that the woman has transformed again, this time into the broken fragments of a skeleton; these tremble and make a sound like a weathervane or a sign on a metal pole blowing in the wind:

…Tremblaient confusément des débris de squelette,
Qui d’eux-mêmes rendaient le cri d’une girouette
Ou d’une enseigne, au bout d’une tringle de fer,
Que balance le vent pendant les nuits d’hiver.

In these poems, Baudelaire divests the vampire of coffins, crypts and all of the other Gothic standards – and demonstrates that there is still a bloody, beating heart at work. Carmilla’s kindred had been marching through poetry for half a century, and their journey was only just beginning.


Next: From poetry to prose — and into the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Series Navigation<< Carmilla’s Kindred: Belles Dames sans MerciCarmilla’s Kindred: A Good Lady and a Cold Embrace >>
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Doris V. Sutherland

Doris V. Sutherland

Horror historian, animation addict and tubular transdudette. Catch me on Twitter @dorvsutherland, or view my site at dorisvsutherland.com. If you like my writing enough to fling money my way, then please visit patreon.com/dorvsutherland or ko-fi.com/dorvsutherland.

One thought on “Carmilla’s Kindred: Vampire Brides

  1. Astonishingly, this is the same James Clerk Maxwell who would later become one of Britain’s greatest physicists of the nineteenth century, developing the core pre-quantum theory of electricity and magnetism!

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