“Fears and Femininity at the Fin-de-siecle: Of Vampires and Vampire Slayers”
Carla Kungl
The figure of the vampire in popular culture is an apt metaphor for many things, as critics have pointed out.
Nina Auerbach has rather famously noted in Our Vampires, Ourselves that every generation creates its own
vampires; we make our vampires what we need them to be. 1 Gordon and Hollinger, in their introduction to the
collection Blood Read, build on this notion of our own relationship to vampires: “contrary to the old legends that
vampires have no reflection, we do indeed see many diverse reflections—of ourselves—as the vampire stands
before us cloaked in metaphor.”2
Two of the more timeless concerns that vampires can reflect for us, or in us, according to Gordon and
Hollinger, are “sexuality, of course” and “power.” 3 In relation to women, these fears remain as potent today as they
did at the end of the 19th century, when images of the female as vampire, or at least as vampiric—sucking the life
out of healthy manhood—were widespread. Metaphorically, these female vampires can be seen as a representation
of society‟s fear of women‟s growing role in the public sphere at the perceived expense of their child-bearing duties.
Thus, literary female vampires threaten both by seducing men into abandoning their duty and by trying to release
other women from their roles and duties as proper wives and mothers.
In contrast, one of the most popular figures at the turning of the 21st century is a woman who slays
vampires, a seeming reversal of fortune for the female character. Now the woman warrior instead of the draining
virago, Buffy (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) works like many fantasy women characters of popular culture, who
provide a site to contest the dominant imagery and ideology of womanhood.
In this paper I want to turn on its head a commonplace which has been stated about Buffy the Vampire
Slayer—that the show, in depicting its metaphorical battles against the demons of growing up, promotes a healthy
counterpoint to images of women as frail and weak; that Buffy specifically is an excellent role model for girls to
look up to.4 I find this ready-made “female empowerment” slogan a little too easy: for me, Buffy, as a signifier in
popular culture for women‟s strength, inhabits a very uneasy position between her vampiric predecessors and what
would seem to be women‟s new-found glory.
Popular culture itself has long been aligned with the feminine; the strained relationship came to a peak in
the 1860s and 1870s with women writers of sensation fiction. As mass-produced literature designed to evoke
emotions, it became contrasted with fiction deemed “masculine” by the current gendered critical discourse: a
solitary work of genius, meant to inspire, the “high literature” produced by men.5 At the same time, because its
subject matter and heroines often disrupted traditional patterns of accepted women‟s behavior, it was “also feared
and censured as a non- or even anti-feminine form. ”6
Women‟s uneasy relationship with mass culture continued as print culture escalated in the 1880s and
1890s. In common perception, women became aligned with mass culture, extending from the same reasons that they
had been aligned with earlier sensation fiction: there were more women writers than in previous decades; they wrote
for a much wider audience, since compulsory education created a whole new generation of working class readers;
and because women had the leisure to read, they were seen as primary “consumers” of this new literature: cheaply
produced, written for the masses, throwaway, popular. As Goodlad writes: “the massification of fin-de-siecle culture
was defined and experienced as a process of feminization.”7 Wicke draws an even tighter connection between
women and vampiric activity, which she associates with mass culture, and the changing relationship of women to
this culture: “it is its [the mass cultural„s] seductive invasion of the home that allows the domestic to become the
site, the opening puncture wound, for all the techniques of mass culture.”8
In this atmosphere, it is not hard to recognize women as metaphorical vampires: consumers, those who
drain others. Thus, the intersection of vampires in 19th century literature with women‟s increasing entrance into the
public sphere through mass culture is not surprising. Bram Dijkstra, in Idols of Perversity, examines representations
of fear of women through the art created during the fin-de-siecle, the vitriolity of which is so pronounced that it
documents a “veritable iconography of misogyny.”9 Reiterating the connection other theorists have made between
consumption, commodification, and womanhood, Dijkstra argues that by 1900, as a mode of representation, the
vampire specifically “had come to represent woman as the personification of everything negative that linked sex,
ownership, and money.”10
And yet, forgotten in the passing of time, in part because of Dracula‟s overbearing shadow, is this
preponderance of female vampires in lesser-known literature and short stories from the latter half of the 19th and
early 20th centuries. For example, in Richard Dalby‟s collection of vampire stories, thirteen of the first seventeen
stories, written between 1867 to 1914, feature a female vampire. 11 “The Stone Chamber” by H.B. Marriott Watson
(1899) seems to exemplify this time period„s “natural” alliance between fear and the female. The ancestral home of
Marvyn Abbey had a bloodthirsty past, as our narrator reads in an ancient volume recounting the legend. Two
brothers and the wife of one of the brother‟s all died strangely and tragically on the same night. Our narrator writes
that “The names of Sir Rupert Marvyn and Priscilla, Lady Marvyn, shook me strangely, but particularly the latter.” 12
There were rumors of an affair between Lady Marvyn and her brother-in-law, and while the narrator speculates that
this foreign lady of unknown parentage was drawn into the dissolute ways of the Marvyn family, he reads that
“according to a second rumor, chronicled by the author, there was some doubt if the woman were not the worst of
the three.”13 She is then described by the narrator as the woman whose “infamous beauty had brought a terrible sin
between the brothers.”14 We find out at the end of the story, that while all three were buried in the stone chamber
which served as the family vault, only two were really dead; Lady Marvyn in bat form continues to bite and weaken,
literally drive to insane anger, anyone who sleeps in room located above the chamber.
Many common tropes of late 19th-century female vampires are brought up here: the woman is the
interloper; the woman cannot be successfully contained by her current generation and is only able to be defeated in a
later one (the more scientifically advanced fin-de-siecle); the discovery and eventual defeat of this vampire is often
as accidental as it is purposeful; the hand that defeats her is male; her prey is both male and female; she is usually
either aristocratic or foreign and often both; in some way she is figured as decadent, an outsider. Carmilla, in the
short novel of the same name by J. Sheridan LeFanu, is a more famous example of the aristocratic vampire preying
on newer generations; Dijkstra claims that this story, along with Stoker‟s Dracula, “are central documents of the late
19th-century war on women,”15 direct expressions of the dualistic belief that designated women either virgin or
whores, angels or devils.
“Good Lady Ducayne” (1896) portrays a different vampiric situation from the sensual relationship found in
“Carmilla,” in many ways more modern, as her creator, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was herself a paragon of the
popular. In this case, the good Lady Ducayne and her Italian doctor prey on young companions, who have been
hired because of their strong constitutions, by slowly draining their blood. These girls sicken and die in her employ,
and Bella Rolleston is on her way to doing so as well until rescued by a doctor friend who has fallen in love with her
and notes quite emphatically that those are not mosquito bites on her arm. Bella is released from her duty, bought off
with a check for 1000 pounds and an admonishment to “go and marry your doctor.” 16 Braddon‟s short story can be
read particularly as an economic indictment, as Lauren Goodlad‟s article contends; to take her argument a step
further as it intersects with the specific fin-de-siecle concern of women‟s employment, the story is exceptionally
brutal: in this case, even the lowly and despised position of paid companion, one of the few acceptable jobs for
poverty-stricken middle-class women, becomes dangerous work; as always, the lesson seems to be that women
should marry and be taken care of, by their husbands and by money handed to them regardless of the circumstance.
Women‟s paradoxical relationship to the public sphere—asked to remain home and yet aligned with the popular—
becomes even more pronounced during the late 19th century; they struggle to inhabit the mass culture they both
create and consume, a mass culture which Goodlad writes is “at once experienced as monstrous, feminine, and
(increasingly) ubiquitous.”17
What do these popular female vampires have in common then with Buffy, the 20th century vampire slayer?
At face value, nothing much. My interest in this topic first began when I tried to figure out why there were so few
female vampires on the show, especially given my interest in the metaphorical use of vampires to represent late 19th
century fears of women‟s burgeoning role in the public sphere. So if these vampires weren‟t “popular,” who was?
Buffy, who had the strength to slay them. And then I wondered about Buffy‟s popularity, and came to the strange
conclusion that her character is imbued with traits even more alarming than the bloodsucking fiends she fights
against. I want to complicate what seems to have become a fully documented assertion that Buffy serves as an
excellent role model, a premiere example of society‟s new warrior women, or what Frances Early has termed a
transgressive “open image,” making Buffy “inherently unsettling” as she creates the “potential for intentional social
change.”18
Yet I think all of these critics would agree with Sherrie Inness‟ argument in Tough Girls (1999), that this
portrayal doesn‟t necessarily translate into a sign of women‟s rising influence in real life. Inness writes: “the ever-
changing depiction of the tough girl has offered women an illusion of freedom and power but has, simultaneously,
operated to support the gender status quo.”19 This ambivalence is not surprising: images from popular culture
usually lag far behind society‟s changing norms, holding on longer to those stereotypes that are comfortable to the
majority of viewers.
So it is in this intersection that I want to place Buffy the Vampire Slayer: between a medium desirous of
maintaining status quo and the “new” image of toughness that Buffy promotes and indeed seems to be rewarded
for—the show succeeded beyond anyone‟s dreams, going from a 12-episode mid-season replacement on the ratingsbasement WB Network to a both wildly popular and critically-acclaimed series. So, the line goes, in society‟s
changing mores, we now accept and even look up to women who are tough, who have strength.
I want to posit a different way of looking at that strength and argue that it is society‟s fears about women‟s
strength, rather than acceptance of it, that have as much to do with Buffy‟s popularity as it did with 19th-century
female vampires. Sherrie Inness provides examples throughout her book of the ways that toughness in women is
“limited, confined, reduced, and regulated.”20 Such is the case, I would argue with Buffy: modern-day fears are
potently distilled and contained in her, as the “one girl in all the world, a Chosen One, one born with the strength
and skill to hunt the vampires.”21 Thus, 19th-century fin-de-siecle fears of either woman‟s strength (as the New
Woman) or her ability to drain the strength of men (as a vampiric image) are both reified and re-imagined in Buffy:
after all, it is Buffy‟s preternatural strength that makes her “a freak,” as she puts it. If 19th-century female vampires
were created to be killed, a distillation of fears of their society, then ultimately our society has performed a similar
act: localized in Buffy‟s body, contained in one vessel, this strength has been made innocuous through its
uniqueness. Buffy succeeds, not just narratively on the show but more importantly as a pop icon, because no one
else can do what she does. Society has nothing to fear from a proliferation of super-strong female slayers; there will
only ever be one. Hence, Buffy is a modern-day example of the way that anxieties in popular culture are still
imagined around fear of women‟s strength; we have simply found a different way to make this strength safe.
In comparing these two sets of popular images, we end on a similar note, though in an entirely different
mythological landscape: strength in women is alienating, something that causes or promotes fear. Bram Dijkstra
would have no problem with this connection, for he points out that while society has perhaps forgotten the “specific
content” of fin-de-siecle images of feminine evil, they continue to influence us today because they have had “a
fundamental influence on the development of our preconceptions regarding the nature of women; as anyone familiar
with the imagery of the popular arts of our own time can attest, their legacy still festers among us, kept alive by
Hollywood and the world of advertising.”22
One might argue that this season„s story arc, with its army of Slayerettes, works to counter this “One Girl in
all the world” image; there are a multitude of Potentials, and Faith, whose strength equals Buffy‟s, has returned. But
the text of the show in several episodes this season has made it clear that Slayers work alone, whether it is Buffy, or
Faith, or Nikki, Robin Wood„s mother.23 And, as Buffy herself notes, we pretty much use that girl up until she dies,
whereupon another takes her place, completely automatically, without fanfare, in secret. As the show has gotten
darker over the past seasons, far from thinking her a role model, I ask myself: who would want to be Buffy?
Don‟t get me wrong: I‟m a huge Buffy: the Vampire Slayer fan. I find the show satisfying on many levels,
and I love watching Buffy kick some demon ass, as she is fond of saying. But as a professor who uses popular
culture in the classroom, I have become a bit alarmed at my students‟ inability to see inherent contradictions in the
texts we use; the shows and movies that are most popular are so because of their ability to intrigue while remaining
at their core socially conservative. At best, such shows offer enough ambiguity to allow audience members space for
invention; but the mere proliferation of what one of my students called “woman empowering‟ shows” doesn‟t mean
we‟ve ushered in a new era. This student, in response to an article on how good characters like Buffy and Sabrina
(from Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch) were for girls‟ self-esteem, wrote in her reading log that “these types of shows
are ridiculously fake and have nothing to do with girls‟ everyday lives. Using magic [referring to Sabrina] to help
themselves out in their every day lives is just fine for them but every other girl in this world does not have magical
powers.” I would say, exactly.
I don‟t want to dismiss those aspects of the show that shed light on the rigidity of gender roles; Joss
Whedon, the show‟s creator, clearly wants it to be about turning the tables, and this season especially seems
concerned with the illuminating the failure of patriarchal models in society. 24 But to glibly talk about the ways Buffy
empowers girls by inspiring them to fight their own demons is to gloss over too quickly the inherent premise of the
show: Buffy is the Chosen One, the one girl in all the world. No one else can do what she does.
So while I‟m attempting to draw at least metaphorical parallels between 19th-century female vampires and
a vampire slayer, I do want to make clear that I‟m examining Buffy as a trope, an image that I think is important we
deconstruct to find the myth beneath. Critics need to continue to examine society‟s popular images to gain insight
into the paradoxes surrounding established female forms and the ways their popularity can be read. As a model for
female strength, I find the ultimate conclusion for Buffy slightly scary. Maybe I should argue that Buffy is an
accurate reflection of current status of women: they can only enjoy the freedom generated by their strength in genres
that have their basis in fiction, not in fact, and that very element that makes them stand out—their strength—is the
same element that forces them to stand alone.
NOTES
1. Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), Acknowledgements.
2. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, eds., Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary
Culture (Philadelphia: U of Penn P, 1997), 3.
Ibid, 3.
4. Rhonda Wilcox, for instance, mentions George magazine‟s nomination of Sarah Michelle Gellar, who
plays Buffy, as one of 1998‟s “20 Most Fascinating Women in Politics” for her portrayal of “healthy strength,”
compared to the girls described in Mary Piper‟s popular book Reviving Ophelia. To me, this lack of distinction
between a real person and a character from TV emphasizes the importance of examining popular culture and its
importance in image-making in our society. See “There Will Never Be a „Very Special‟ Buffy,” Journal of Popular
Film & Television 27, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 16+.
5. Lynn Pykett provides a full account of the rise of sensation fiction and women‟s paradoxical role in it, as
well as the ways this paradox continued into the New Woman writing of the 1890s. See The ‘Improper’ Feminine:
The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Women Writing (New York: Routledge, 1992).
6. Ibid, 34.
7. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, “’Go and Marry Your Doctor’: Fetishism and „Redundance‟ at the Fin de Siecle
and the Vampires of „Good Lady Ducayne,‟” in Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, edited by
Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 225.
8. Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” in Dracula by Bram Stoker, ed. John
Paul Riquelme, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Boston: Bedford/St.Martins, 2002), 587.
9. Bram Djiskerka, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1986), viii.
10. Ibid, 351.
11. More specifically, I am referring to the first seventeen stories that feature “human” vampires; thus I‟ve
not included the stories about man-eating trees and reconstituted ghostly fingers. See Richard Dalby, Dracula’s
Brood (New York: Dorset Press, 1987).
12. H. B. Marriott Watson, “The Stone Chamber,” in Dracula’s Brood, ed. Richard Dalby (New York:
Dorset Press, 1987), 211.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid, 212.
15. Djiskerka, 341.
16. Braddon in Dalby, 170.
17. Ibid, 226.
18. Frances H. Early, "Staking Her Claim: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Transgressive Woman Warrior,”
Journal of Popular Culture 35, no. 3 (2001): 12. For a similar type of argument see also Michael Ventura, “Warrior
Women: Why Are Shows Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, La Femme Nikita, and Xena: Warrior Princess So
Popular, Especially Among Teens?“ Psychology Today 31, no. 6 (1998): np. EbscoHost, Academic Search Premiere
(13 June 2002).
19. Sherrie A. Inness, Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture
(Philadelphia: U of Penn P, 1999), 27.
20. Ibid, 178.
21. The Buffy Dialogue Database, 8 May 2003, <http://www.vrya.net/bdb/clip.php?clip3150> (14
May 2003).
22. Djiskerka, viii-ix.
23. In the episode “Lies My Parents Told Me” (US air date 25 March), both Spike and Robin Wood, the
son of the New York Slayer whom Spike killed, realize ultimately that Slayers need to be alone, to fight alone.
While they are fighting, Wood accuses Spike of stealing his childhood by killing his mother:
Wood: She was all I had. She was my world!
Spike: And you weren‟t hers. Doesn‟t that piss you off?
Wood: Shut up! You didn‟t know her.
Spike: I know Slayers. No matter how many people they‟ve got around them, they fight alone.
Life of the Chosen One. The rest of us be damned. Your mother was no different.
After talking to Buffy, who reiterates that the Mission is what matters, and the Mission is ultimately solo, Wood
realizes that Spike (and Buffy) are right.
In last week‟s episode, “End of Days” (US air date 13 May), this theme of solitude was reiterated by Faith,
talking to Buffy after leading the Potentials into a trap:
Faith: My whole life I‟ve been alone . . . no ties, no buddies, no relationships that have lasted . . .
Faith: . . . the point: me, by myself, all the time. And I‟m lookin‟ at you, everything you have, and
I don‟t know, jealous. Then there I am, everyone‟s looking to me, trusting me to lead them, and
I‟ve never felt so alone in my life.
Buffy: Yeah.
Faith: And that‟s you, everyday, isn‟t it?
Buffy: I love my friends, I‟m very grateful, but that‟s the price, being a Slayer . . .
Buffy . . .I guess everyone‟s alone, but being a Slayer—there‟s a burden we can‟t share.
Faith: And no one else can feel it.
Authors note: This paper was delivered before the season finale of the show; obviously, the plot line giving all the
potential slayers their full slayer strength addresses my criticism in some way. Yet to dispense with the show's entire
slayer mythology in a few episodes seems too quick to fully counteract what seven seasons has set up. It would be
interesting to see how Whedon and the show's other writers would continue this storyline of "an army of Slayers"
into another season. My guess is that they couldn't, for the exact reasons this paper discusses.
24. Concerning the creation of the movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Whedon has remarked that it
was “my response to all the horror movies I have ever seen where some girl walks into a dark room and gets killed.
So I decided to make a movie where a blonde girl walks into a dark room and kicks butt instead.” See Elizabeth
Tracy, The Girl’s Got Bite: The Unofficial Guide to Buffy’s World (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1998), 6.
Frances Early comments that while Whedon sees the show supplying a role model for young women, he
also is attempting to teach young men to be comfortable with strong women figures. A recent interview with
Whedon about the ending of the series Buffy supports this. When Whedon was asked if he could believe the impact
the show has had on popular culture, he responded: “I always intended it to have the impact on popular culture that
it did. I wanted Buffy to be a pop icon. I wanted her to be remembered. I wanted her to be in people‟s interior lives. I
wanted her to be a hero to kids and she was designed very specifically for that . . . ” In “Joss Whedon Interview—
Ending Buffy,” Aaction.adventure.about.com, 21 April 2003, <http://www.buffy.nu/article.php3 ?id_article=728>
(15 May 2003).
As for the show‟s depiction of the failure of patriarchal institutions, I can document several examples this
season. One, though organized religion has never been a feature of the show, it is no coincidence the vessel for the
First Evil is a misogynistic and evil preacher-man named Caleb, a representative of an institution whose teachings
have often been mis-used to endorse the suppression of women. Two, not only did we see The Watcher‟s Council‟s
destruction (which is a powerful enough symbol), even more disturbingly, we saw its creation. The first Watchers,
the Shadow-Men, basically stole a teen-age girl, had a demon rape (impregnate?) her, and have used her ensuing
power ever since to fight their war against evil. Buffy, when presented with what they call a similar “gift” to
increase her power, angrily refuses, rips out the chains she‟s held down with, and uses them as weapons against
them instead. Even Giles, the one male figure in the show who has been Buffy‟s main support since she began as a
Slayer, has disappointed and betrayed her, not necessarily as her Watcher but more importantly as a father-figure.
Buffy told Giles several times after his complicity in Spike's attempted murder that she feels there is nothing left he
can teach her, that he has lost her trust.
Thanks to Klytaimnestra, from the Tabula Rasa Website, for her insights into this topic. She calls this a
season “dedicated to throwing off the chains of patriarchy.”
WORKS CITED
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York: Dorset Press, 1987.
The Buffy Dialogue Database. 8 May 2003. <http://www.vrya.net/bdb/clip.php?clip3150> (14 May 2003).
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21
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Warrior Princess So Popular, Especially Among Teens?“ Psychology Today 31, no. 6 (1998): np.
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Dorset Press, 1987.
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Popular Film & Television 27, no. 2 (1999): 16+. EbscoHost, Academic Search Premiere (13 June 2002).