Florence Marryat’ın The Blood of the Vampire Romanında Baş Döndürücü Bir Yüzyıl Sonu

Abstract

Florence Marryat’ın The Blood of the Vampire (1897) romanında on dokuz yaşındaki Harriet Brandt, vampir ve insan, İngiliz ve Jamaikalı, seven ve öldüren ve gizemli cinsel kimliğiyle on dokuzuncu yüzyıl sonu Avrupa’sındaki kültürel değişim ve türbülansı temsil etmektedir. Belçika’nın sahilinde Hotel Lion d’Or’da konaklayan zengin Avrupalılar Harriet’ın ataerkil düzeni, bilimin üstünlüğünü ve ırkçı söylemleri altüst eden çok kültürlü kimliği karşısında adeta hastalanır. Harriet’ın oteli kirlettiğine inandıkları melez kanı, doğa üstü güçleri ve cinsel özgürlüğü karşısında başları döner ve mideleri bulanır. Sevdiklerinin hayat enerjisini istemsiz bir şekilde içine çekmesi yüzünden otelde sevip okşadığı bir bebek ve kocası Anthony yavaş yavaş hastalanır ve ölür. Harriet’ın yakınları, on dokuzuncu yüzyıl sonunda tür, ırk ve cinsiyet kategorilerini sarsan çalkantıya uyum sağlayamadıkları için ölür. Kontrol edemediği ruhani güçleri yüzünden balayında kocasını öldürdükten sonra intihar eder çünkü tabuları kıran, değişken ve arada derede kimliğini kendi de kabul edememiştir. Bu makale, romanda hastalığın yüzyıl sonunun baş döndürücü etkisini vurgulayan bir metafor olduğunu ve Victoria İngiltere’sinin değişen sosyal ve politik atmosferine ayak uyduramayanları öldürdüğünü savunur.

Keywords

• Florence Marryat,The Blood of the Vampire,hastalık,kimlik,yüzyıl sonu

Fin-de-Siècle and Motion Sickness in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire

Abstract

In Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), the nineteen-year-old orphaned heiress, Harriet Brandt, embodies the social turbulence of the fin de siècle with her shifting identity as a human and vampire, British and Jamaican, a former convent girl with dubious sexual orientation, and nurturer and killer of her loved ones. The white upper-class guests of Hotel Lion d’Or, a seaside resort in Belgium, feel motion sickness due to her multiethnic and interspecies identity that shakes patriarchy, scientific authority, and Orientalist cultural distinctions. They feel nausea because they are disturbed with her “unrefined” blood, unexplainable psychic powers, and sexual decadence that contaminates the hotel. The people Harriet cares for at the hotel—a baby girl and her husband Anthony—die due to her uncontrollable ability to drain the life energy of those close to her. Harriet’s loved ones gradually die because they are not “fit” to survive in fin-de-siècle Europe, where racial and gender categories were becoming unstable. Her suicide after unwittingly killing her newlywed husband suggests that she herself cannot embrace her liminal identity. In the novel, sickness serves as a metaphor for the social disorientation of the fin de siècle that takes the lives of Victorians, who cannot adapt to changing sociopolitical conditions. 

Keywords

• Florence Marryat,The Blood of the Vampire,sickness,vampire,poscolonial theory

References

1. References:
2. Ardis, A. (1990). New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
3. Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
4. Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
5. Brody, J. D. (1998). Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.
6. Bulamur, A. N. (2016). Victorian Murderesses: The Politics of Female Violence. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
7. Cunningham, G. (1978). The New Woman and the Victorian Novel. London: The Macmillan Press.
8. Darwin, C. (2002). From ‘On the Origin of Species.’ In D. Mermin & H. Tucker (Eds.), Victorian Literature, 1830-1900 (pp. 493-501). Harcourt College Publishers.

9. Davis, O. (2007). Morbid Mothers: Gothic Heredity in Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire. In R. Anolik (Ed.), Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature (pp. 40-54). London: McFarland.
10. Depledge, G. (2010). Introduction. In The Blood of the Vampire (pp. iii-xxxv). Brighton: Victorian Secrets.
11. Gilroy, P. (2004). Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.
12. Hall, S. (1996). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In P. Mongia (Ed.), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (pp. 110-122). London: Arnold.
13. Hammack, B. M. (2008). Florence Marryat's Female Vampire and the Scientizing of Hybridity. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 48.4, 885-896.
14. Heilmann, A. (2000). New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism. London: Macmillan Press.
15. Hill, G. (2008). ‘Above The Breath of Suspicion’: Florence Marryat and the Shadow of the Fraudulent Trance Medium. Women's Writing 15.3, 333-347.
16. Hurley, K. (1996). The Gothic Body: sexuality, materialism, and degeneration at the fin de siècle. New York: Cambridge University Press.
17. Ledger, S. (1997). The New Woman: Fiction and feminism at the fin de siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
18. ---. (1995). The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism. In S. Ledger & S. McCracken (Eds.), Cultural Politics at the Fin De Siècle (pp. 22-45). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
19. Ledger, S., and R. Luckhurst eds (2000). Scientific Naturalism. In The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880-1900 (pp.221-223). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
20. Macfie, S. (1991). They Suck Us Dry: A Study of Late Nineteenth-Century Projections of Vampiric Women. In P. Shaw & P. Stockwell (Eds.), Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day (pp. 58-67). London: Pinter Publishers.
21. Marryat, F. (2010). The Blood of the Vampire. Edited by Greta Depledge. Brighton: Victorian Secrets.
22. Matthias, B. (2004). A Home Away from Home? The Hotel as Space of Emancipation in Early Twentieth-Century Austrian Bourgeois Literature. German Studies Review 27.2, 325-340.
23. Michie, H. (2001). Victorian Honeymoons: Sexual Reorientations and the ‘Sights’ of Europe. Victorian Studies, Winter, 229-250.
24. Noble, J. (1895). The Fiction of Sexuality. Contemporary Review, 6, 490-498.
25. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press.
26. Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.
27. Richardson, A. (2003). Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction & the New Woman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
28. Ruskin, J. (1916). Lilies. Of Queen’s Gardens. In Sesame and Lilies: Three Lectures (pp. 81-114). New York: American Book Company.
29. Ruskin, J. (1985). The Nature of Gothic. In C. Wilmer (Ed.), Unto this Last and Other Writings (pp. 77-111). London: Penguin.
30. Showalter, E. (1991). Sexual anarchy: gender and culture at the fin de siècle. New York: Penguin Books.
31. Stoker, B. (2007). Dracula. London: Vintage Books.
32. Warwick, A. (1995). Vampires and the empire: fears and fictions of the 1890s. In S. Ledger & S. McCracken (Eds.), Cultural Politics at the Fin De Siècle (pp. 202-221). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
33. Winston, E. (2001). Foibles of the New Woman [Forum 21 (April 1896): 186-92). In C. Nelson (Ed.), A New Woman Reader (pp.170-176). Ontario: Broadview Press.
34. Williams, R. (1963). Culture and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
35. Vuohelainen, M. (2013). ‘You know not of what you speak:’ Language, Identity, and Xenophobia in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle: A Mystery (1897). In M. Tromp, M. Bachman, and H. Kaufman (Eds.), Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia (pp. 312-331). Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
36. Zieger, S. (2008). Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.