Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors Before World War I 9781618110190

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BLOOD WILL TELL

BLOOD WILL TE L L

Vampires as Political Metaphors before World War I

Sara Libby Robinson

Boston 2011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robinson, Sara Libby. Blood will tell : vampires as political metaphors before World War I / Sara Libby Robinson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934843-61-1 (hardback) 1. Vampires--Political aspects. 2. Vampires in literature. 3. Antisemitism in literature. 4. Sex role in literature. 5. Communication and politics. I. Title. GR830.V3R64 2011 398.21--dc22 2011006277 Copyright © 2011 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-934843-61-1 (hardback) On the cover: “The Irish ‘Vampire’”. Taken from Punch, October 24th, 1885 Book design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2011 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv

1

Into the Light of Day The Vampire Legend and its Introduction to Western Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2

The Life of All Flesh Religious Discourse, Anti-Judaism, and Anti-Clericalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

3

Bred in the Bone Science, Blood, and Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

4

The Life-Blood of Commerce Vampires and Economic Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

5

Terrorists with Teeth Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

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6

Paying the Blood Tax National Identity, Blood, and Vampires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

7

Seductress and Murderess Vampires and Gender Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

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List of Illustrations

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

“A Sun of the Nineteenth Century” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The Chimes” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Formerly and Now” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “At the Center of the Storm” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35 36 39 39

3.1 “Back!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 3.2 “They Come Arm in Arm” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9

“The Capitalist Vampire” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Laborist vs. Capitalist” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The Demon Butcher, or the Real Rinderpest” . . . . . . . . . . . . “Death to Monopoly” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The Petroleum Monopoly” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The Rose Water Cure” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The Only One Left on Broadway” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The Commercial Vampire” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Fagin’s Political School” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77 78 80 81 83 87 90 91 101

5.1 “The Suckers of the Working-Man’s Sustenance”. . . . . . . . . . 107 5.2 “The Emancipator of Labor and the Honest Working People” 108 Blood Will Tell

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List of Illustrations

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5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8

“Home Sweet Home! There’s No Place Like Home!” . . . . . . . “Fire and Smoke” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Very Social” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The New ‘Queen of the May’” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “No Room on This Ship!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The Irish ‘Vampire’” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

109 110 113 115 121 128

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

“Juvenile Utilitarianism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “An ‘Ugly Rush’!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Suffragettes at the Zoo” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The Real Rouge Dragon; or, ‘Cherchez la Femme’” . . . . . . . “Get thee behind me Mrs. Satan” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

158 165 166 172 174

Sara Libby Robinson

FOREWORD

THIS ALL started my sophomore year at Barnard, with my friend Laura Ackerman and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Laura was one of my suitemates. She was — and is — a pop-culture aficionado. Over the course of the year, Laura introduced me to several of her favorite television shows and comic books. I resisted getting involved with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” I knew of its existence, but it held little appeal for me. A show about monsters? I had never been interested in monsters and didn’t like violent movies or television shows. I had even less interest in the vacuous romances of scantily-clad pseudo-high school students. I had only succeeded recently in weaning myself from the soap operas that consumed my television life in high school. I was sure that “Buffy” could have nothing to offer me. Boy, was I wrong. Every Tuesday night, Laura hunkered down in the living room in front of the television. The living room was in the same vicinity as the kitchen and the suite’s bathroom. Whatever my evening schedule, I was bound to visit one of those areas in the course of the Buffy hour. While passing Blood Will Tell

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Foreword

through the living room, I would usually take a few minutes to watch the on-screen action over Laura’s shoulder, then head back to my room. Then came the fateful night and episode: “Band Candy.”1 In which the chocolate bars that the entire school population are selling to their parents to raise money for new band uniforms turns said parents into hormonal, irresponsible teenagers once more. The villain of the week had probably put some sort of potion into the candy, but that was beside the point. Early in the episode, I walked into a scene in which Buffy and her best friend Willow are making arrangements to study for the SATs. Cordelia, another friend aware of Buffy’s secret identity, overhears the tail end of their conversation and asks “Oh God, are we killing something again?” Buffy replied “Only my carefree spirit.” I was hooked. The show was well-written, well-acted, smart, hysterically funny. Seeing a petite blond beat the snot out of a wide variety of monsters and villains was satisfying and empowering. Yes, it was a soap opera. But unlike the daytime dramas I wanted to part company with, it was a once a week soap opera, with arcs that actually ended. Around the same time, on a Friday afternoon, Laura was idly flipping channels when she came across another vampire show, airing on the Sci-Fi Channel. It was “Forever Knight,” a short lived series from Canada about a homicide detective in Toronto who was an 800-year-old vampire trying to atone for the sins of his past and find a way to reclaim his humanity and his mortality. It turned out Laura had the entire series on tape. Having gotten “into” vampires my sophomore year, I decided over the following summer that my next logical step would be to read Dracula. I discovered two surprising things when I did. The first surprise was how tedious and frankly awful the writing was.2 I was — and still am — a devotee of Victorian literature. One of my favorite authors is George Eliot. But Stoker’s novel was more Victorian gender melodrama than vampire novel, with men so obsessed over protecting their women that they ironically leave them vulnerable to Count Dracula’s attack. 1 2

x

“Band Candy,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, WB, Manhattan, November 10th, 1998. In the course of my research I have had to read the book an additional three times. It has never grown on me and has been as much of a chore to read each time.

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Foreword

One thing, however, struck me as intriguing. In the latter half of the novel, the heroes manage to corner Dracula. Someone lunges at him with a knife, which misses the count but tears his coat. Money which has been sewn into the coat’s lining comes pouring out, and Dracula tries to grab as much money as he can while trying to escape from four or five armed men trying to kill him. I knew in my bones that I was reading the manifestation of an anti-Semitic stereotype regarding Jews and their supposed obsession with money. That was a political subtext to Dracula that I had not been expecting. Possibly, that was an avenue worth researching. I started exploring this avenue my senior year, when I wrote my senior thesis on anti-Semitism and the vampire metaphor in Great Britain, between 1875 and 1914. Over the course of a year I came to realize, to my delight, that I was really on to something. I started to find vampires, their imagery, and their rhetoric, everywhere I looked. Everywhere I looked were vampires and blood, covering an immense range of political discourses that even transcended the issue of anti-Semitism. And with the exception of the burgeoning field of Dracula studies, I seemed to have the field almost to myself. For the rest of my life, I am probably going to be associated with vampires, both in the minds of my colleagues and in the minds of my friends. This is ironic, because, as interesting as I have found researching and writing this book, I also find that I am not really that interested in vampires. I loved “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” its spin-off “Angel,” and “Forever Knight.” But I hated Dracula and all of the other vampire novels I tried to read. I started but couldn’t finish Anne Rice’s Interview with the  Vampire. Ditto Andew Fox’s Fat White Vampire Blues. Ditto Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.3 I have no interest in vampire movies except in my capacity as a cultural historian. Still, for all that, I’m grateful for my vampires for keeping me intellectually stimulated for almost a decade. And I will always be grateful to Laura for helping me find them.

3

I did manage to finish Twilight, which is a compliment to Stephanie Meyers’ gift for storytelling. However, I was not interested enough in the saga of Bella and the Cullens to finish the series.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

WITH DEEP and profound gratitude to God for giving me the strength, patience, and perseverance necessary to formulate, research, and write this book, I would like to extend thanks to the following people: To my parents, Sandra and Ira Robinson, for their unfailing support, encouragement, and belief in such an unusual dissertation topic, and for expending so much of their time reading and critiquing this book in its numerous stages. To my brother, Yosef Dov, for his curiosity about the world and our many philosophic discussions. To my husband, Shaul Epstein, for all your love and comfort whenever I got depressed or frustrated, and to our beautiful son Aaron. To my graduate advisor, Professor Eugene Black, for shepherding me when this book was my doctoral dissertation. Thank you for your unflagging confidence in my ideas, your cogent criticisms, and for never failing to raise my spirits in the face of adversity. To Professors Anthony Polonsky, Paul Jankowski, and Govind Sreenivasan for their advice, their time, and their extra sets of critical eyes. xii

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Acknowledgements

To the administrative staff of the Brandeis University history department, Judy Brown and Donna DeLorenzo, for their help in navigating university bureaucracy, their friendly conversation, and for including me in their lunch breaks. To my undergraduate advisors at Barnard College, Professors Margaret Ellsberg and Lisa Tiersten for guiding me when this book began as my senior thesis. To the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis University for their grant, which enabled me to conduct research at the Library of Congress. To Evan Simpson, who helped to expedite so many inter library loan requests. To Karen Abramson, who helped to guide me through the labyrinths of securing reprinting permissions for my illustrations. To the University Press of America, with whom I published some of my earliest ideas on the subject of vampires and politics in the article “Novel Anti-Semitisms: Vampiric Reflections of the Jew in Britain,” as a part of the book Jewish Studies in Violence (2007). To Irina Ivanson, Joanna Braune, Erik Schneider, Andrea Franz, Joseph Weinstein, and Bill Templer, my German translators who helped me get through an impossible volume of journal articles. To the microfilm and reading room staff at the Brandeis Library, the Library of Congress, Harvard Library, and the New York Public Library. To Igor and Kira Nemirovsky, Sharona Vedol, Christa Kling, and all the rest of the staff at Academic Studies Press for giving me the opportunity to publish this book and for all your help along the way. To my friend and college roommate, Laura Ackerman, who first drew me into the world of vampires through “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Forever Knight,” which launched me on this journey, and without whom this book would never have been written. And finally, to Terry Pratchett, whose novel, Lords and Ladies, got me through a very bad weekend, and who helped me find a renewed sense of purpose and determination.

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INTRODUCTION

A MOONLIT night full of creeping shadows. A door creaking on rusty hinges. The swish of a  cloak trailing along the floor. The sudden clutch of fingers against the throat of a sleeping woman. A startled scream cut off as the vampire feeds on the blood of its latest victim . . . This is the horrormovie cliché that leaps to mind when most people think about vampires. Twenty-first century readers or movie-goers picture their vampires as pale, aristocratic, sophisticated, and erotic — images created by people such as Bela Lugosi and Anne Rice. Vampires are the focus of a huge entertainment industry catering to those seeking sexual fantasies, frissons of horror, dark comedy, or all of the above. Writing about vampire myths and metaphors is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s an attention-grabber. Whatever their interests, people’s faces light up when I mention my book’s subject. Their eyebrows quirk. They smile. On one memorable occasion, a woman I had met only five minutes before responded to my book’s subject with the words, “Marry me.” No one’s eyes glaze over with polite disinterest the way they probably would if I said that I was writing about, say . . . the economic development xiv

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of Uganda in the post-colonial period. On the other hand, people don’t take me as seriously as someone writing about . . . the economic development of Uganda in the post-colonial period. They crack jokes. They ask recurring questions. Do I believe that vampires are real? Am I writing a history of vampires? Is this about Dracula? The simplest answer is no on all counts. I do not believe vampires are real. I am not writing a history of vampires. And while I couldn’t leave Bram Stoker and Count Dracula out of this book any more than I could write a history of physics and leave out Einstein, Dracula is far from the whole story. Dracula is what people of the twenty-first century remember about the late nineteenth century’s culture of vampires. They have forgotten a lot more. In this book, I shall attempt to explore the ways in which people used metaphors related to vampires and blood in order to express their political and cultural anxieties. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, politicians, intellectuals, and popular entertainers alike used metaphors related to vampires in order to harness their understandings of a rapidly changing world. Vampire metaphors, rhetoric, and images appeared frequently in both political and popular culture. Scratch the surface of the major social and political preoccupations of Western Europe and America during this period, and before you have looked far, blood will come welling to the surface. Everyone in the late nineteenth century was familiar with vampires from their daily newspapers, their monthly periodicals, and their serialized novels. More importantly, as a political metaphor, vampires possessed endless flexibility. Vampires illustrated a wide range of issues simultaneously. The new political, cultural, and scientific movements, whatever seemed to be threatening to destabilize society, were considered “vampires.” With industry and the economy mushrooming out of recognition, capitalists were labeled vampires, as were the anarchists who used violence to fight the social inequities inherent in the capitalist system. Immigrants who transformed the economies and cultures of their new countries, while also confusing the definition of citizenship, were considered vampires. So were women in search of political and cultural emancipation from existing gender conventions. As a whole, vampires embodied most of the major anxieties attendant on modernity, as contemporaries understood it. The figure of the vampire was capable of embodying so many complex issues because the vampire is one of the classic figures of the menacing, Blood Will Tell

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foreign “Other” in Western culture. At its core, the classic myth of the undead returning from the grave to harm the living is about inhabiting the fringes of society. According to the folklore of Eastern Europe, people marked out for vampirism included those born with disabilities or disfigurements and those whose anti-social behavior put them outside the pale of their small societies.1 Indeed, the very act of dying pushes people onto the edges of a community of the living, in which knowledge and understanding of the human condition faces the unknown of death and the afterlife. This vampiric “otherness” dovetails with the marginal existence of many groups who likewise lived on the fringes of mainstream society during this period. Immigrants led precarious lives in the midst of the native born. Economically, sweated labor sprang up on the edges of established industries, pushing to make its mark. Despite the attention their actions garnered, anarchists comprised only a small number of the political left. The same was true for the radical feminists. For one reason or another these groups — simultaneously other and on the edge of society — found themselves depicted as vampires in the political and popular cultures of Western Europe and America. This is why anti-Semitism runs like a leitmotif throughout this book. It surfaces in nearly every subject. As such, it is far too important and unwieldy to encompass in any single chapter. In religious matters, the Christian majority feared the attitudes and actions the Jewish minority might be harboring. Jews found economic success on the unwatched margins of industry and banking ignored by gentiles, and then were demonized for their successes.2 Jews stood on the scientific edges of heredity and degeneration, while the scientific establishment feared that they would contaminate the racial majority.3 They comprised a significant percentage of the immigrants accused of invading host 1

2

3

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Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (Yale: Yale University Press, 1988), 24, 29–31, 37. Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1943), 188–90; Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society: 1876–1939, (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979), 83. Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 16, 89; Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace,” (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 110, 136, 143, 155–56.

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Introduction

countries.4 Jews, like vampires, have been playing the roles of outsiders for thousands of years. No wonder they share such a nexus of political metaphors and rhetoric. The one chapter of this book in which anti-Semitism does not play as significant a role is the one which relates to gender. In considering gender ideals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the otherness of the threatening outsider has much less significance. Hence Jews as outsiders play less significant. At the core of fears related to gender, blood, and vampires rests the inversion of female roles, from the ideal of the nurturing wife and mother to her demonic looking-glass twin: ravening monster and bloodthirsty vampire — selfish rather than selfless and life-taking rather than life-giving.5 Ultimately, vampires presented Western Europe and America with a symbolic figure of the Other well tailored to the culture of the time. The use of vampires transcended the popular entertainment of horror stories and music halls. Even politicians and intellectuals made use of vampiric rhetoric in the most serious of contexts. This was because the metaphor of the vampire spoke to one of the pervasive preoccupations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: blood. Blood is something everyone knows they have and that most healthy people take for granted. Few appreciate its versatility. Blood is a substance which remains hidden in the normal course of events, and something hidden takes on a mysterious, spiritual quality. When blood becomes visible, it signals danger and reminds us all of the fragility of life. Blood is one of our common denominators as human beings, but it is also one of the most frequently used metaphors for the myriad ways that humans separate themselves into opposing groups. It can stand for class, for nationality, or for race, to name only some of its most obvious uses.6 During our period, every major political or ideological movement in Western Europe and America used rhetoric linked to blood as a way of

4

5

6

Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origin of the Aliens Act of 1905, (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972), 20. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: the Life of a  Victorian Myth, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), 4, 13; Steven Hause & Anne Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 17. David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 4, 6.

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understanding the universe and of communicating effectively regarding their anxieties about the world around them. Blood formed the bedrock of religious doctrine and religious hatred. Blood was central to scientists’ understanding of identity, heredity, and degeneration. It served as a fundamental metaphor for both critics of the perceived faults of capitalist industry and for those who opposed the communists and anarchists seeking to overthrow capitalism with violence. Blood served to define citizenship, as a way of both assigning nationality and proving one’s loyalty through military combat. Finally, blood also supposedly influenced conventional gender norms. Thus, women who failed to conform and give of themselves in marriage and motherhood were viewed as unnatural, potential murderesses. This book covers Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States; four of the core countries representing Western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite regional differences, geographical distances, and occasional bitter rivalries, they all shared common cultural and social concerns with the changes of a world shifting beneath their feet. Germany’s fear of radical political groups, such as socialists or anarchists, was echoed with equal force in the United States, France, and Great Britain.7 Great Britain’s fear of social and physiological degeneration found their parallels in the United States, Germany, and France.8 Each of these countries experienced the anxiety of industrial and economic competition, of guaranteeing the loyalty and patriotism of its citizens, and of women agitating for new social roles. In each country, writers, politicians, and cartoonists used metaphors of blood and vampires to depict these agents of social chaos. I take a classical approach to this study, as I do to cultural history as a whole. I arrived at the serious study of history by way of studying literature. I came to realize that theories of literature in which texts were 7

8

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Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism, (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 204, 206; Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 240. Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 155, 157, 161; Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 1, 13, 16; Frans Coetzee, For Party or Country? Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 39; Matthew Fry Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917, (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 65.

Sara Libby Robinson

Introduction

examined in a vacuum for their internal structure, characterization, and imagery did not hold much intellectual interest for me. What I enjoyed far more was looking at what the text, speaking for itself, could reveal about the beliefs and prejudices of the time and place in which it was written, whether or not the author was conscious of this when writing. I recognized this thinking was more in tune with the study of history. I continue to rely heavily on literature for my primary sources, along with contemporary newspaper articles, journal essays, and political cartoons, following the evidence I glean wherever it may lead me. The actual statistics or facts that any of these nineteenth-century authors attempt to marshal in proving their points do not hold as much significance or meaning for me as the rhetoric with which they surround their facts, phrases and images taken automatically from their unconscious arsenal of clichés. In essence, this book is also a study in cultural clichés from Western Europe and America in the pre-World War One era, refracted through the prism of vampires and blood. With some notable exceptions, a large number of trend-setters and opinion-makers in the late nineteenth century shared certain ideas and prejudices about the nature and characteristics inherent in race, gender, and religion, as well as many other cultural and political issues. With varying degrees of intent, sophistication, and eloquence, they expounded on their worldviews, which now often appear naïve, outdated, or seriously mistaken to students in the twenty-first century. As I delineate and extrapolate these clichés and their related prejudices, I will attempt to demonstrate the ways these ideas impacted the intellectual, cultural, and social development of Western civilization. I focus on the years 1870 to 1914 for several crucial reasons. 1870 is a political and economic milestone in the history of Western civilization. Germany did not exist as a political and geographic entity until its Unification in 1870, in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War. This war marked a turning point for both France and Germany. For France, 1870 marked defeat by Germany and internal upheaval, with the collapse of the Second Empire and the creation of the Third Republic. Politically and psychically, France would bear the scars of defeat, with the trauma of this loss continuing to reverberate in both her domestic politics and her international relationships for years to come.9 9

Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: the Case of Alfred Dreyfus, (New York: George Braziller, 1986), 42.

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Another event of the 1870s affected the politics and culture of all four of these countries: the onset of the Great Depression of 1873. Unemployment did not rise significantly the way it would in the Depression of the 1930s, but the economic elites experienced a serious diminution of economic self-confidence.10 Management’s anxieties over falling prices, profits, and interest rates trickled down to their workers, who wondered if their jobs were also at risk. Many workers felt certain that the new waves of immigrants willing to work for less would put them out of work even if their bosses managed to stay afloat.11 Competition between countries loomed larger. Governments felt compelled to take steps to protect their domestic markets, with the introduction of tariffs. With the exception of Great Britain, most countries abandoned free trade during this period. The 1870s witnessed sea changes in other areas of Western society. The ascension of science as the overarching social authority was well under way, spurred considerably by the publications of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, and Cesare Lombroso’s theories of criminal anthropology.12 This decade also marked the beginnings of serious class- and gender-based agitation. Karl Marx had published his seminal Das Kapital only a few years earlier, and in it he outlined the wrongs endured by the proletariat and predicted class warfare in order to bring about a more equitable future.13 In Europe and America, there emerged a concerted effort by women to secure rights of suffrage, property, and social equity. These seminal issues and many others would come into full flower over the course of a generation, but they took root during the 1870s. My book ends in 1914, with the onset of the First World War. This date does not mark the death of any of the social and political issues with which this study concerns itself. Nor does it mark the end of the vampire and its use as a political and social metaphor. This date does, however, signal a profound and irrevocable change in the society and culture of the West. 10

11

12

13

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R. K. Webb, Modern England: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1968), 374; Walter Licht, Industrializing America, the Nineteenth Century, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 181; W.O. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power, 1834–1914, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 176. David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 211. Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology, (Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2002), 2. Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 186, 194.

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Introduction

Many of the pre-war anxieties survived in the post-war world, but the nature of these anxieties altered with the times, begetting new layers, new complexities, and spawning further anxieties as well. These will ultimately require further research and another volume. This book pursues the issues of blood, vampires, and political metaphors through seven thematic chapters. The first chapter introduces the reader to the origins of the vampire myth and its impact on the folklore of Eastern Europe. It then chronicles the spread of vampire folklore from Eastern to Western Europe, where philosophers and literati incorporated vampires and vampiric themes into one of the significant literary phenomena of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second chapter turns to the realm of religion. It begins by examining the metaphors and images of Christ’s blood underpinning Christian doctrine and the church’s campaign of anti-Judaism from ancient times through the turn of the twentieth century. The blood libel, a false accusation that Jews murdered Christian children in order to use their blood in specific rites, garners particular attention. The chapter then shows how, as anti-Clericalism grew in the nineteenth century, the critics of the Catholic Church compared it to the vampire myth in order to discredit it as an outdated superstition. Chapter three explores how — before the discovery of DNA — people viewed blood as the locus of all inherited traits. According to a number of scientists, this included moral as well as physical attributes. Moreover, because such traits lay in the blood, one’s biological identity was inescapable.14 People with negative traits in their blood were doomed to the downward spiral of degeneration.15 These theories of biological heredity helped to shape movements such as Social Darwinism, Criminal Anthropology, and Eugenics. The fourth chapter goes into detail regarding the metaphors of blood and vampires applied to the economy and the capitalist system. Critics charged capitalists with indifference regarding the welfare of their workers, 14

15

Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 36–7, 95–6, 109, 137, 140; Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1989), 18. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66–8; Richard Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 47.

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as well as greed, dishonesty, and corruption in the worlds of both business and politics. The label ‘vampire’ seemed an appropriate epithet to describe the callous behavior attributed frequently to businessmen at all levels of commerce, from sweatshop owners to influential bankers. Businessmen and other members of the bourgeoisie turned the label of vampire back around to their critics, as chapter five investigates. The political counterculture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — communists, socialists, and anarchists — found themselves associated with the violence, bloodshed, and terrorism used by some of their supporters in their attempts to destroy the capitalist system and its abuses. Thus members of the radical left found themselves labeled vampires as well. The sixth chapter concentrates on blood applied as both a qualifying agent and a metaphor for nationalism. Many people thought of national identity as a type of racial identity, something based on blood that one inherited but could not achieve through immigration.16 Others focused on the importance of military service and sacrificing one’s blood as the means by which men proved their national loyalty.17 In this context, some used the vampire to represent immigrants or other citizens of suspect national loyalty who enjoyed the benefits of citizenship without paying for them through military service and hence their blood. Finally, chapter seven describes the campaigns for female emancipation, equity, and the ways in which its opponents used the vampire metaphor to vilify women who did not conform to existing gender roles. While the ideal woman exhibited traits such as selflessness and asexuality, the critics of female emancipation used the vampire to depict their nightmare of the independent woman.18 To contemporaries, emancipated, vampire women embodied selfishness and out-of-control sexuality. Instead of nurturing their husbands or children, they devoured them. Astute readers will notice that, with the exception of passages in chapters Three and Six, I do not deal in depth with the issues of Empire 16

17

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Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 209. H. L. Wesseling, Soldier and Warrior: French Attitudes toward the Army and War on the Eve of the First World War. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 143, 166–7. James McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 1870–1940, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 2; Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 134.

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Introduction

and Imperialism. The pursuit of empire by Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States is a crucial aspect of nineteenth-century history and culture, with a large and still growing literature devoted to its study. However, the focus of my study, the blood, clichés, and vampires of Western Europe and America, reflect these countries’ domestic rather than foreign politics. The imperial holdings of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States were far-off places most people encountered only second hand. The exotic people and products of these lands were objects of fascination to many Europeans and Americans, but for the most part they had little direct contact with the people of India, Africa, or Asia beyond the pages of a book or the stage of a music hall. The vampire’s use as a political metaphor gravitated to each country’s internal Others, groups that people were more likely to encounter in their daily lives, who posed the deepest threat to their interests and engendered the sharpest anxieties regarding their future. In this study, I confine my discussion of nineteenth-century Imperialism to how each country’s imperial possessions affected their selfperception and prestige, and how their race to secure geographic holdings added to their overall rivalry. Despite local cultural and political differences between Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, these countries all shared similar social anxieties. Thus, the transcendence of blood and vampires as political metaphors goes beyond any one country, language, or historical moment. To understand the cultural and political importance of vampires for Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries requires the comparative examination of all four countries over a prolonged period. This is one of several weaknesses in existing scholarship on blood, vampires, and politics during this period. To begin with, many of the articles and monographs in publication examine vampires from a predominantly literary rather than historical angle. Furthermore, the bulk of the ink spilled on the subject focuses almost exclusively on one particular place, time, and text. The place and time are Great Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. The text, of course, is Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic, Dracula. Among these scholars and their works are Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves, Franco Moretti’s watershed essay “The Dialectic of Fear,” and Margaret Carter’s compendium Dracula: the Vampire and the Critics. Blood Will Tell

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The articles that comprise Carter’s book explore in depth different political subtexts found in Dracula.19 Moretti recognizes and explores the ways in which the vampire, that is, Count Dracula, embodies the cultural anxieties of 1890s Britain, most especially commerce and sexuality. He notes that given Dracula’s embodiment of the culture of monopoly capitalism, where else would he journey but to Britain, then the capitalist powerhouse of the world.20 Auerbach traces the evolution of the vampire in nineteenth-century British fiction, then in twentieth-century American film. Despite Auerbach’s concern with vampires in twentieth-century America, her nineteenth century scholarship remains focused primarily on Dracula, and most especially on gender politics in Dracula.21 Although fewer scholars look beyond Dracula’s gender politics, there are those who have made significant contributions looking at other interpretations of the text. These include Jules Zanger’s “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews,” and Stephen Arata’s “The Occidental Tourist.” Arata’s article explores British fears of reverse colonization by those it deemed backward and foreign, a threat Count Dracula embodies when he comes to England and attempts to turn its citizens into vampires.22 Zanger’s article continues to trace the themes explored by Arata, only Zanger identifies Britain’s potential colonizers as the Jewish immigrants of nineteenth-century Britain. Zanger argues compellingly that Dracula embodies Britain’s anti-Semitic anxieties.23 Timothy Beal’s Religion and its Monsters explores the religious motifs — both Christian and Jewish — that underlie the novel, depicting Count Dracula as a stand-in for Lucifer and the novel’s stalwart heroes as Christian knights errant.24 No one, including myself, would deny the importance of Dracula as an example of the vampire conveying political metaphors. Nor do I deny 19

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22

23

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For example, Christopher Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, Ed. Margaret Carter, (1988), 25–34 and Richard Wasson, “The Politics of Dracula,” Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, Ed. Margaret Carter, (1988) 19–24. Franco Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear,” New Left Review, Vol. 1, No. 136, 1982, 67–85, 68, 73–74. Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 83–4. Stephen Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies, (1990), 621–645, 623. Jules Zanger, “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews,” English literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 4, 1 (1991), 33–44, 36. Timothy K. Beal, Religion and its Monsters, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 123–140.

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the importance of Dracula’s influence on the way Western society has perceived and portrayed vampires over the course of the twentieth century. However, the role of the vampire as a political metaphor in Western Europe and America between 1870 and 1914 goes far beyond Count Dracula. He presents many compelling and useful examples of political metaphors that will be referenced throughout this book. But Count Dracula comprises only one of many characters within a much larger cultural web of blood and vampires. Dracula was woven within an existing political tapestry, commenting on rather than shaping it. This focus on Dracula leaves a genuine void in existing scholarship that I endeavor to fill. I cast a broader net, beyond Britain and Dracula — even beyond literary works about vampires. My book traces themes common throughout Western Europe and America, delving into the politics, the literature, and the caricatures of France, Germany, and the United States as well as Great Britain. As subtext-rich as Dracula may be, the real meat of my book lies in the casual references to vampires made by writers, artists, and politicians as they go about addressing larger issues. Undertaking a study of four countries over a forty-five year period is an ambitious project. My focus on the casual vampire-related rhetoric in texts not focused solely on vampires makes my work particularly challenging. During this period, publishers in Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States produced thousands upon thousands of novels and hundreds upon hundreds of newspapers and magazines. The potential primary sources for this book are infinite. It would be impossible, however, for anyone to sift through them all, and after a certain point, any useful information that could be derived from them would become repetitious and trivial. In searching for the most useful and effective sources, I have limited myself primarily to representative publications from each country — mainstream publications, aimed primarily at the burgeoning middle classes, and most likely to reflect accurately the views of the largest segment of any country’s readership. Whereas in the early eighteenth century both literacy and literature still belonged largely to the educated upper classes, during the nineteenth century both literacy and accompanying reading materials became increasingly widespread throughout the middle and even the working classes. Consultation with several scholars in these fields led me to the understanding that publications such as the Preussicher Jahrbucher and Révue des Deux Mondes met my criteria. In other cases, certain publications reappear frequently as Blood Will Tell

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representative publications in the scholarly literature related to my field, such as the Times of London. In examining my primary sources for rhetoric related to blood and vampires, I considered texts that fell into two broad categories. The first, smaller category consisted of texts dealing overtly with vampires, as either characters in fiction or the subject of folklore. The second group of texts was far larger and focused on the exploration of contemporary social or political subjects. This group focused only tangentially on vampires, usually as an accident of rhetoric. For each category I asked two questions: How did the explicitly vampire-related texts work political concerns into their subtexts? And how did political texts make use of sub-textual vampires to convey their overt messages? In conducting this research I used printed materials such as newspapers, intellectual journals, humor periodicals, and novels; materials both readily available and easily obtainable. I combed the pages of titles such as Great Britain’s Punch, Germany’s Kladderadatsch, the United States’ Harper’s Weekly, and France’s La Croix for political cartoons employing vampiric imagery. I likewise made an exhaustive search within the pages of intellectual journals such as Great Britain’s Nineteenth Century, the United States’ McClure’s, Germany’s Die Preussische Jahrbucher, and France’s Révue des Deux Mondes for articles dealing with any of the subjects addressed by my book, from religion to female emancipation. In choosing which novels to explore in depth, I have gravitated in some cases toward authors whose works enjoyed widespread popularity among their contemporaries as well as the status of revered classics today. Such authors include Émile Zola, George Eliot, and Gustav Freytag. In selecting other novels I have been guided in part by secondary sources dealing with literary interpretations related to the political subjects of my various chapters. This has led me to second- or even third-rate novels that enjoyed popularity upon publication, but have since fallen into deserved oblivion. Among these titles are Guy de Charnacé’s Le Baron Vampire, Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column, and Margaret Böhme’s The Department Store. I have not overlooked novels that deal overtly with vampires, such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Florence Marryat’s Blood of the Vampire, and — obviously — Bram Stoker’s Dracula. My concern, however, has focused more on finding novels that deal with the wider subjects of this study and that touched the pulse of public opinion. Given the relationship between cultural anxieties, blood, and vampires during this period, I find xxvi

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that vampiric rhetoric and imagery often accompany novels related to important political topics almost as a matter of course. I will admit that, despite my efforts to fill the gaps in existing scholarship, this study’s conclusions are not unexpected. Experienced scholars of Modern European history who have spent time exploring the vampire’s use as a cultural phenomenon may feel that they have heard many of these insights elsewhere. In this book, however, the student of Modern European history or those interested in vampire studies will find an informative, useful, and (I hope) enjoyable synthesis of a very wide range of subjects, countries, and cultures that all share vampires as their unifying symbol. Vampires and their role as political metaphors for the instabilities inherent in modernity are the best-kept non-secret of the culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although they are used so frequently in primary sources and keep catching the attention of historians and literary critics alike, scholars consistently dismiss them with a few sentences. Their recurrence in everything from respected journals to third-rate novels, however, indicates that vampiric imagery is not the sole province of gothic novelists. They form a complex and widespread culture of political discourse, transcending borders, governmental systems, and the Atlantic Ocean. Scholars have barely begun, however, to scratch the surface of this subject, looking at individual countries and individual texts, missing the forest for the trees. With my book, I believe I have begun mapping the forest.

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BLOOD WILL TELL

Vampires as Political Metaphors before World War I

1

INTO THE LIGHT OF DAY The Vampire Legend and its Introduction to Western Culture

IF ASKED to describe a vampire and explain its habits, most devotees of horror movies and novels would describe a person who appears unnaturally pale. This person would have exaggerated fangs, bite the necks of victims to drain their blood, and could be killed with a stake through his or her heart. The vampire known to the aficionados of horror, however, is only an echo of the folkloric vampire from which it derives. All works of vampire fiction draw, in fact, on a very real body of mythology. Before exploring the rhetorical life of the vampire in politics, we must first understand vampire mythology as it first became known to the thinkers of the West. In the West today, the myths surrounding the existence of vampires are most commonly associated with East European folklore. In these folktales, vampires are dead people who cannot rest quietly in their graves, but leave them in order to attack and kill the living members of their community, through either suffocation or sucking their blood. Although in Western culture the vampire is typically associated with Eastern Europe, the belief in vampires is universal, and some variant of the vampire legend can be Blood Will Tell

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1. Into the Light of Day

found in every quarter of the globe. It is also one of the oldest superstitions known to mankind. References to the fear of dead people who return from the grave intent on harming the living have been found in the ancient texts of Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, among others.1 Although young by comparison, the oldest textual reference to vampires in Eastern Europe goes back to the eleventh century.2 One of the factors that makes the folklore of vampires so important and compelling the world over is its use in explaining disease, death, and decomposition. In his seminal work, Vampires, Burial, and Death, Paul Barber noted that in ancient times, people’s instinct was to “blame death on the dead.”3 It was assumed that those who had passed on might either want to drag their families and neighbors into the abyss with them, or that they would do anything to regain their place among the living — even kill loved ones for their blood. The correlation of vampires with blood stems from the observation available to even the most primitive societies that blood — something that may be lost through accident or attack — is what keeps people alive. Lose too much blood and you die, so logically, if you are dead, drink blood, and you will live again.4 The Old Testament codifies this correlation between blood, blood-loss, and life with the statement that “the life of all flesh is the blood thereof,” and the subsequent prohibition against ingesting blood.5 While vampires are known the world over, it is nevertheless the folklore of Eastern Europe that has had the most influence on the imagination of Western Europe and America. This fascination with the culture of Eastern Europe began during the Enlightenment period. In his landmark book, Inventing Eastern Europe, historian Larry Wolff explores the ways in which some of the most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment period realigned the mental map of Europe. According to Wolff, many prominent 1

2

3

4

5

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Harry Senn, Werewolf and Vampire in Romania (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), vii-viii. Jan Perkowski, The Darkling: A  Treatise of Slavic Vampirism (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers Inc, 1989), 18. Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (Yale: Yale University Press, 1988), 2–3. Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and The Legend: A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece, (Northhamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1985), 18; Raymond McNally & Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994), 117. Leviticus, XVII, 14.

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The Vampire Legend and its Introduction to Western Culture

philosophers of the Renaissance had viewed the axis of civilization and culture as dividing Europe’s South from Europe’s North. Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance and the heir of Ancient Rome, lay at the center of the cultured South, while the North was thought of as the home of the barbaric, Germanic hordes who had invaded Italy over the course of centuries, toppling the Ancient Roman Empire and threatening the glories of the Renaissance.6 By the eighteenth century, the countries of Northern Europe had become increasingly prosperous, powerful, and cultured. Wishing to escape their former role as Europe’s archetypal barbarians, influential thinkers re-aligned Europe’s cultural axis, casting themselves as the civilized and cultured West, in contrast to the culturally and economically backward East.7 To most European thinkers and travelers, the dividing line between these two cultural spheres lay just beyond Prussia and Austria. To their east lay Poland, Russia, Bohemia, and a host of other countries and principalities all labeled as part of antiquated Eastern Europe.8 In fact, because of their proximity to the culturally backwards countries of Eastern Europe, the elite of Berlin and Vienna felt the greatest sensitivity towards enforcing the new axis of civilization and making sure that they fell on the Western, Enlightened half of Europe’s cultural border.9 They joined the French and English thinkers and opinion makers in characterizing the peoples of Eastern Europe as cruel and bloodthirsty savages, mired in superstition. This was precisely the time when the East European belief in vampires began being disseminated to the West. In 1718, the Peace of Passarowitz brought parts of Serbia and Wallachia, areas now part of modern Romania, under the administrative control of Austria. Bureaucrats who had been sent East to administer the new territories sent back reports about cases of suspected vampires and werewolves, and the steps taken by the local population in dealing with them.10 One of the best known of these cases concerned Peter Plogojowitz, who died in 1725. When nine other people died shortly thereafter, some of whom claimed to have been visited by Plogojowitz in a dream prior to 6

7 8 9 10

Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994), 4–5. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 6, 13, 17, 357 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 6. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 39. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 5.

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their deaths, his body was exhumed and examined for signs of vampirism. According to the report, the villagers found him in a much more preserved state than expected, and he exhibited traces of blood on his mouth. Declaring him a vampire, the villagers first staked him, then burned his body to ash.11 When reports regarding the East European’s belief in vampires and the steps that they would take to kill supposed vampires, West Europeans seized upon the vampire as the very personification of superstition and ignorance; a perfect example of just how inferior and credulous the people of Eastern Europe were in comparison with their Western brethren.12 According to the folklore of Eastern Europe, vampirism was as prevalent as sin itself and as easy to catch as the common cold. While the standard literary device for becoming a vampire is being bitten by one, in the folkloric tradition, any and every dead person was a potential vampire. Children born at the time of the new moon might become vampires.13 Peculiarities or deformities at birth, such as being born with a red caul (amniotic membrane), teeth, a tail-like appendage to the back, fur-like hair on their bodies, a harelip, or a cleft palate, could label a child as a future vampire. Other predisposing factors include being a couple’s seventh child or the illegitimate child of illegitimate parents. 14 Children breastfed after being weaned were also deemed at risk.15 For those not marked at birth or during childhood, bad habits while living were said to have predisposed individuals to vampirism. Alcoholics could likely become vampires. So could people who led immoral, promiscuous, and impious lives. Excommunication left one vulnerable to vampirism after death. Anti-social behavior, ranging from that exhibited by the average, cantankerous recluse to the outright sadist, might also result in vampirism. So could eating the flesh of a sheep killed by a wolf.16 11 12 13 14

15 16

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Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 6–7. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 9, 95, 162, 303, 321–322. Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, 72. Some of the above characteristics should be kept in mind when we are discussing criminal anthropology. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 30–1. Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and The Legend, 27. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 37. This is yet another way in which the vampire and werewolf myths are connected; more about werewolves later in this chapter. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 24, 29–30; Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and The Legend, 28; Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960), 77, 167; Florescu & McNally, The Complete Dracula, 94.

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The Vampire Legend and its Introduction to Western Culture

Finally, the cause of one’s death, particularly something sudden, such as a murder, suicide, or a fatal accident, could also cause vampirism.17 If the deceased had left behind unfinished business or an unresolved vendetta, they might return. They might also return if their funeral rites were performed improperly, or an animal passed over or under their corpse before burial.18 Finally, a person would likely become a vampire if he or she was killed by a vampire.19 All of these diverse causes of vampirism share the common theme of marginalization. Babies with birth defects, illegitimate children, and antisocial adults often found themselves on the edges of a community rather than safely woven within its protective web. The figure of the vampire thus acts as the embodiment of the social “other,” whose very presence may threaten its community with disorder. The theme of the vampire as a dangerous and foreign other looms large in the spectrum of politics to be explored in the coming chapters. It starts, however, among those members of the village who cannot quite integrate into the smooth fabric of their little society. Thanks to the records compiled by Austrian bureaucrats of people exhuming and identifying corpses as vampires, scholars have a general idea of the appearance of suspected vampires. Unlike the pale, gaunt vampire of fiction, vampires identified by these troubled villagers were usually heavy, with flushed or darkened faces.20 Suspected vampires were also found in a less decayed state than expected, with their hair and fingernails growing longer, and a new skin growing beneath the old one. They bled freely when cut or showed traces of fresh blood at their mouths.21 The folkloric vampire was a being returned from the dead who usually posed a serious danger to its community. Other supernatural figures — ghosts or ancestral spirits — were also reputed to return from their graves, but their intentions could be viewed as positive. In many instances, grieving families alleged that their relatives returned from the dead with beneficent intentions, exhibiting the desire to continue caring for their families. Many departed fathers supposedly provided food or 17 18 19

20 21

Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 13. Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, 54; Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, 84, 141. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 32; Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and The Legend, 31. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 4, 109. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 7, 114.

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chopped wood. Mothers were said to return from the grave if their children were being mistreated. Charlotte Bronte (1816–1855) references this aspect of folklore in her 1847 novel, Jane Eyre. As an unhappy and abused child, Jane fears witnessing a visit from her late Uncle Reed, recalling that “dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisit[ed] the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed.”22 Another supernatural figure whose motivation lay in something other than blood sucking and murder was the incubus. The incubus was thought of as a demon who was believed to invade a woman’s bedroom at night in order to have sexual intercourse with her. The female counterpart to the incubus was the succubus, which attacked men. Because they struck at night, both the incubus and succubus were closely associated with the vampire.23 In some cases, beliefs in the vampire and the incubus were conflated, with some documented vampires’ visitations apparently motivated by sex, purportedly returning from the grave in order to sleep with their spouses.24 In most instances of recorded vampire scares, however, the undead were bent on wreaking havoc in their communities; coming back, in the words of the eighteenth-century French priest and scholar Augustin Calmet (1672–1757), to “walk about, infest villages, torment men and cattle, suck the blood of their relations, throw them into disorders, and, at last, occasion their death.”25 According to Hermann Strack (1848–1922), a nineteenth-century German professor who wrote extensively on folklore related to blood, vampires were also accused of “producing drought by milking the clouds.”26 Water was a liquid as important to the preservation of life as blood, and consequently of interest to vampires. Like their fictional descendents, folkloric vampires also bite people and suck their blood. 22

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Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, 1847, (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 18–19; Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, 40, 51; Montague Summers, The Vampire in Europe (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books Inc, 1929), 310; Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 38. J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: the Encyclopedia of the Undead, (Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 1999), 360–361. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 9; T. P. Vukanovic, “The Vampire,” Jan Perkowski Ed. Vampires of the Slavs (Cambridge, MA: Slavica Publishers Inc, 1976), 201–234, 217. Dom Augustin Calmet, “Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia,” Trans. M. Cooper, Jan Perkowski Ed. Vampires of the Slavs (Cambridge, MA: Slavica Publishers Inc, 1976), 76–135, 80. Hermann Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice: An Historical and Sociological Inquiry, (London: Cope and Fenwick, 1898), 97; Perkowski, The Darkling, 22.

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The Vampire Legend and its Introduction to Western Culture

When they do drink blood, however, they more commonly attack the chest area rather than the neck. They strangle or suffocate their victims as often as they bite and drain them. Alleged vampire victims commonly died of sudden, brief illnesses, and complained of seeing the alleged vampire in a dream before their death.27 One area in which folklore and fiction coincide lies in the methods used to kill vampires. These include driving a wooden stake through its heart, cutting off its head — usually with a sexton’s spade — or cremation. Sometimes the inhabitants of the village in question used all available methods until they were satisfied that they had truly killed the vampire. There are, of course, many other purported ways to kill, deter, or slow down vampires. Sometimes, instead of a stake, a nail is driven into their heads.28 People placed coins or stones in a corpse’s mouth to prevent them from biting anything.29 Corpses suspected of incipient vampirism were buried face down, with their hands tied behind their backs, their leg tendons cut, and cuts or punctures in their bodies. Some were decapitated before burial and buried with their head at their feet.30 Fishing nets or poppy seeds were either buried with a possible vampire, or placed around one’s own home. Vampires were supposed to be neurotically meticulous and this way, if all other precautions failed, the vampire would be compelled to abandon its search for fresh prey and count all of the seeds or untie all of the knots. This would keep it busy until dawn and prevent it from fulfilling its mission of mischief and death.31 The most popular methods for killing vampires, such as staking, were influenced by the perceived connection between the vampire myth and Christianity. In those parts of the world where Christianity impacted culture significantly, such as Eastern Europe, vampire folklore altered so that Christian elements could be adopted.32 Vampires were associated with the Devil, who was supposedly responsible for reanimating them.33 They were also viewed as Antichrists, who drank blood, killed, and caused others to suffer eternal damnation like themselves. Vampires thus formed 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 4, 7, 32. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 61, 72. Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, 72. Kazimierz Moszynski, “Slavic Folk Culture,” Jan Perkowski Ed. Vampires of the Slavs (Cambridge, MA: Slavica Publishers Inc, 1976), 180–187, 182. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 49. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 37. Summers, The Vampire in Europe, 78.

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a perverted parody of Jesus’ offering of eternal salvation through the sacraments of the Eucharist, in which believers ingest not wine and wafer but Christ’s body and blood. The wooden stake served as an inverted Cross, with preferred types of wood chosen to correspond with the type of wood used to build the cross on which Jesus was crucified.34 Vampires provided their communities with scapegoats for the mysterious phenomena involved in the spread of infection and the decomposition of dead bodies. Although portrayed as supernatural, there are biological explanations for all aspects of the vampire myth. Corpses were presumed to be vampires if they did not appear to have decomposed sufficiently over a specific period, but most characteristics attributed to vampires simply reflect the first natural stages of decomposition in the human body. Bodies, in fact, decompose at variable rates. The length of decay can be affected by many variables, such as the depth at which the corpse is buried, the dryness of the soil, and the climate of the region. Furthermore, people who die suddenly, such as healthy people struck by sudden and quick-working illnesses, suicides, and murder or accident victims, all decompose at a slower rate than people who die of slow, lingering illnesses.35 The peasants described by the Austrian bureaucrats were correct in discerning a correlation between manner of death and rate of decomposition, but the cause was natural rather than supernatural. Bloatedness, new skin, nails, and hair are all part of decomposition. During decomposition, the body swells, sometimes almost doubling in size, due to the release of gasses. Noises the corpse seems to be making from the grave or groans the corpse appears to emit when staked are due to the release of these built up gases. Nails and hair appear to grow because the skin shrinks through dehydration, and patches of skin fall away. Lacking oxygen, blood darkens, giving the corpse’s face a darker color. Blood often remains liquid naturally, and blood near the mouth can be attributed to the work of maggots, whose bites can resemble stab wounds, or simply, again, to gas pressure.36 When villagers exhumed and “killed” suspected vampires, they did so because they believed that the corpse-turned-vampire was causing more deaths. Nosferatu, one of the synonyms for vampire, means plague34 35 36

8

Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and The Legend, 27. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 114. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 101, 105, 109, 115, 119, 127.

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The Vampire Legend and its Introduction to Western Culture

carrier.37 According to the peasant conception of disease, it seemed logical that the dead had the power to induce death in others.38 Unaware of the existence of germs and contagion, people needed to blame someone or something for the appearance of death in their midst. Blaming epidemics on vampires could devolve into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Decomposition occurs at a faster rate in corpses buried in shallow graves, which means that such corpses run a greater risk of attracting attention from concerned villagers. Among the people likely to receive shallow graves are those who died of plague, whom the community needed to put underground quickly. There is a strong link between plague and cases of suspected vampirism. As can be seen from records of vampire destruction, one was not suspected of being a vampire until other people began to die. Vampire hunts usually corresponded to unexplained illness in the community.39 Even without twentieth-century forensic science at their disposal, a number of early observers drew the same conclusions as contemporary scholars. One of the most famous of the early skeptics was the eighteenthcentury scholar Calmet, who claimed that one could “account . . . for all the wonders of vampirism by natural causes.”40 He goes on to posit ways in which a decomposing corpse may, for instance, retain liquid blood. Calmet does not use the contemporary jargon of a modern forensic scientist, but he does see something other than the supernatural at work.41 Although few peasants were as enlightened as Calmet or twenty-first century scientists, when they engaged in certain actions to prevent the spread of vampirism, such as burying or destroying the clothing, bathing implements, and toiletries of the deceased, they also employed common sense strategies for the prevention of infection.42 A creature of East European folklore closely related to the vampire as well as to superstitions involving blood is the werewolf: a human being who appears to be able to turn him or herself into a wolf and who displays a wolf’s characteristics.43 Harry Senn’s monograph, Werewolf and Vampire in Romania, shows that the folklore of vampires and werewolves serve 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and The Legend, 22. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 3. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 96, 112, 121, 124. Calmet, “Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia,” 94. Calmet, “Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia,” 98. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 35. Montague Summers, The Werewolf, (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1966), 2.

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as inverse reflections of each other: the vampire comes from the dead to feed on the living, while the werewolf is alive and feeds on the dead (and sometimes the living as well).44 Like that of the vampire, the werewolf myth is wide-spread and ancient.45 In Eastern Europe, the linguistic terms for both vampire and werewolf are frequently conflated. Although the Slavic word for werewolf was originally “volkolak,” this name is now used almost exclusively to refer to vampires.46 Some scholars have found that people use the related word “vudkolak” interchangeably, to designate either a werewolf or a vampire, or even both simultaneously, since some people believe that vampires must spend a certain amount of time transformed in the shape of a wolf.47 This folkloric overlap is especially noticeable when listing the causes of werewolfism. Some are unique to werewolves, such as eating wolf meat, especially if the wolf had rabies.48 The casting of a spell or a curse can turn someone into a werewolf.49 One of seven daughters is believed to become a werewolf automatically.50 A person who can control the actions of a real wolf falls into the category of werewolf as well, even if they themselves do not actually transform into a werewolf.51 The majority of folkloric signs used to identify a werewolf, however, are similar or even identical to the signs of vampirism: being born with a tail, a caul, or excessive hair.52 Being conceived on either Christmas Eve or Easter would result in becoming a werewolf, as would being the illegitimate child of illegitimate parents or breast-feeding again after being weaned. People estranged from the church who refuse reconciliation will become werewolves.53 Finally, demonstrating the strength of the tie between werewolves and vampires, those who were werewolves in life are supposedly destined to become vampires in death.54 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

51 52 53 54

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Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, vii. Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, viii. Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, vii. Senn, vii; Perkowski, The Darkling, 38. This point will come up again when discussing forensic explanations related to werewolves. Summers, The Werewolf, 46. Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, 56. Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an  Account of a  Terrible Superstition. 1865. (NY, NY: Causeway Books, 1973), 113. Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves, 61. Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, 2, 56, 61. Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, 2, 56, 74. Summers, The Werewolf, 15.

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The Vampire Legend and its Introduction to Western Culture

The werewolf’s actions are by and large supposed to be more personally motivated than those of vampires. Their most benign behavior often involves attacking their wives while in wolf form. They never cause serious harm, however, and such attacks seem, in the eyes of scholars, to have more to do with an expression of sexuality than a desire to hurt a loved one. Werewolves are said, however, to attack people with whom they have quarreled and to both steal milk and attack animals, particularly those belonging to their enemies.55 More generally, a special enmity was supposed to exist between werewolves and vampires; people often witnessed wolves digging up suspect graves and eating the corpses buried there.56 People were said to be cured of their werewolfism if they were wounded while in wolf form, in a way that drew blood.57 In many cases, after the death of a suspected werewolf, his corpse would be exhumed and treated to some of the same rites as that of the vampire, particularly decapitation. Interestingly, the classical folkloric literature related to werewolves makes no mention of killing werewolves with silver bullets. This was probably a later, literary addition.58 Causes and forensic explanations for the werewolf in folklore are somewhat less clear-cut than those relating to the vampire. Many scholars attribute the belief that a particular individual can transform him or herself at will into a werewolf to lycanthropy, a form of mental illness akin to schizophrenia in which the sufferer believes he is a wolf. In the Middle Ages, people thought that this was a form of possession by the devil. It is also possible, given the warning against eating wolf meat — especially of a rabid wolf — that some unfortunate individuals may have contracted rabies in this way, and their subsequent behavior was misclassified as a supernatural affliction rather than a deadly disease.59 Scholars can explain the supposed enmity between werewolves and vampires more easily. Supposed vampires had often been buried in shallow graves. Real wolves are attracted to the smell of rotting flesh and often dug up and ate the corpses buried there. As with vampire folklore, the evidence is real, but rests on natural rather than supernatural circumstances.60 55 56 57 58 59 60

Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, 1, 56, 65. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 134. Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, 2. Summers, The Werewolf, 236. Summers, The Werewolf, 23, 46. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 93.

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Modern conceptions of the vampire rest not only with the folklore of Eastern Europe, but with its history as well. Thanks to Bram Stoker (1847– 1912), no overview of vampiric folklore would be complete without the historic figure of Count Dracula. When most people today hear the name Dracula, they first think of Stoker’s aristocratic vampire, but the Dracula whom Stoker himself encountered during his research was a fifteenth century Wallachian prince, born around 1431 and ruling the area off and on from 1448 until his death by assassination in 1476. His real name was Vlad Tepes, but because of his reputation for exercising cunning stratagems in politics and his brutality towards his enemies, he was given the nickname Dracul, which means either devil or dragon.61 He is known equally well for his other nickname, “Vlad the Impaler,” which he received due to his penchant for torturing and murdering his enemies. Victims were impaled with blunt rather than sharp stakes to prolong life and agony, allowing Dracula the pleasure of observing their suffering. At times, the staked victims were even arranged in geometric patterns. In one famous instance, he had nearly 500 men trapped and burned alive in a barn, because he knew that among those men were the ones responsible for the murders of his father and grandfather.62 Part of this cruelty and paranoia may have stemmed from having spent several of his adolescent and teenage years as a prisoner of the Turks; long-time enemies of his native Wallachia. He died in battle, possibly assassinated by one of his own men.63 After his death, Dracula became a literary staple in Romania long before Stoker immortalized him in literature. From the sixteenth century on, Dracula’s story was featured in historical accounts of his reign, epic poems, and plays. After the panEuropean revolts of 1848, he became a romanticized figure in Romania’s struggle for national independence.64 The legends of Dracula’s cruelty may have prompted Bram Stoker to christen his literary vampire after the fifteenth century ruler. There is no evidence, however, that Vlad Tepes became a vampire after he died. Rumors to that effect did not begin to circulate until the 1930s, long after Stoker had 61

62 63 64

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Radu Florescu & Raymond T. McNally, The Complete Dracula: Combining Dracula, A  Biography of Vlad the Impaler and the Bestseller In Search of Dracula, (Acton, MA: Copley Publishing Group, 1992), 10, 187. Florescu & McNally, The Complete Dracula, 26, 33. Florescu & McNally, The Complete Dracula, 20, 86. Florescu & McNally, The Complete Dracula, 341.

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The Vampire Legend and its Introduction to Western Culture

published his horror classic. Speculation began when a tomb supposed to be Dracula’s was opened and found empty. Another tomb nearby, however, contained human remains as well as fancy clothes and a crown.65 Vlad Tepes’ body may have disintegrated naturally with the passage of over four hundred years, or perhaps his tomb location was switched secretly to deter grave robbers or Dracula’s political enemies. Vampire enthusiasts enjoy imagining that Stoker’s novel contained an element of truth in linking the two Draculas; the recent best-seller The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, drew on this idea as the premise of its plot. Another East European who moved from the realm of history to that of historical folklore is Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560–1614). This Hungarian countess from the sixteenth century was reputed to have tortured, bled, and murdered her young servant girls, bathing in their blood in order to remain young and beautiful. According to scholars Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, the surviving records from Bathory’s 1611 trial testify that in the course of ten years, before being caught and imprisoned, Bathory had killed and drained close to forty young women.66 Bureaucrats in the early eighteenth century transferred information regarding vampire legends and superstitions from East to Western Europe, where they set fire to the public’s imagination. From almost the moment that news of the alleged cases of vampirism in Eastern Europe became public, articles and treatises on vampires and vampirism exploded. Intellectuals and scholars from Germany, France, and England aired their views in fashionable journals such as the Bossische Zeitung, Mercure Historique et Politique, and The London Journal.67 The existence of vampires was debated by scholars at the Sorbonne, the Vatican, and other prestigious institutions of higher learning, and investigated at the behest of many reigning monarchs.68 Most of these men came to the conclusion that alleged cases of vampirism could be explained by the natural phenomena of decomposition, which have already been detailed earlier in this chapter, but some were convinced of the existence of vampires.69 65

66 67

68 69

J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, (London: Visible Ink Press, 1999), 764. Florescu & McNally, The Complete Dracula, 101. Milan Dimic, “Vampiromania in the Eighteenth Century,” Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth Century Study, (Edmonton, 1984), 1–22, 3. Dimic, “Vampiromania in the Eighteenth Century,” 5. Dimic, “Vampiromania in the Eighteenth Century,” 6.

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Though less concerned with whether or not vampires existed, the use of vampires as literary motifs came hard on the heels of the intellectual treatises of the early eighteenth century. The first literary references to vampires appeared in an erotic poem by poet Heinrich August Ossenfeld in 1753.70 The most famous of the early literary vampires, however, belongs to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and his epic 1797 poem, “The Bride of Corinth.” Set in Ancient Greece, it tells the story of a young man who marries a beautiful Corinthian maiden, who turns out to be a vampire and drains him of life. Among other sources, Goethe is known to have drawn inspiration from Dom Calmet’s dissertation on vampires already cited in this chapter.71 Vampires suited German literature’s late-eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang movement particularly well. The heightened emotion and antirationalism of the literary movement paired well with the themes of death, desire, and despair that vampires evoked. Although both the English and the French Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century created their own literary works inspired by vampires, the German influence remained. As of the mid-nineteenth century, people in Western Europe associated the vampire myth with Germany rather than the countries of Eastern Europe. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Jane, referring to her midnight encounter with Rochester’s mad wife Bertha, speaks of the “foul German spectre — the Vampyre.”72 What began as a primordial explanation for decomposition, the spread of disease, and the dangers posed by community outsiders evolved into one of the world’s best known and most malleable superstitions, even adapting itself to the ascendance of Christianity. In another sense, however, the seamless alteration of the vampire myth to coincide with the Christian religion says much more about the role of blood in religion and hence the potential roles for vampires to play in religion, as we will see in the next chapter.

70 71 72

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Dimic, “Vampiromania in the Eighteenth Century,” 9. Dimic, “Vampiromania in the Eighteenth Century,” 10–11. Bronte, Jane Eyre, 286; Senn, Werewolf and Vampire, ix.

Sara Libby Robinson

2

THE LIFE OF ALL FLESH Religious Discourse, Anti-Judaism, and Anti-Clericalism

SCHOLARS trace the belief in vampires to the dawn of civilization. The belief in vampires pre-dates Christianity, although elements of Christianity attached themselves seamlessly to elements of the vampire myth — especially the methods used to kill them. What made this degree of integration possible was the centrality of blood in religious practice and religious discourse. Blood cemented the bedrock of Christianity, the main religion to shape Western society, in the form of the Crucifixion and the Eucharist. Blood also provided Christian civilization with an important frame of reference for demonization. In this paradigm, as we have seen, vampires were transformed from pagan monsters into a type of devil or a minor Antichrist. A similar demonization through blood can be seen at work in Christianity’s anti-Judaism. Over the centuries, Jews have emerged as Christianity’s religious vampires, their supposed misdeeds tied to the misuse and consumption of Christian blood. This is not, however, the only way in which blood and vampires shaped religious discourse. In the late nineteenth century, an increasingly secular and anti-clerical society Blood Will Tell

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drew on vampiric imagery to demonize the Catholic Church. Vampires are nothing if not flexible monsters, and the anti-clericals accomplished their goals with the same effectiveness and aplomb as when the Church demonized Jews using vampiric imagery. Blood forms the foundation of Christianity. The idea of divine redemption though Jesus is steeped in blood, starting with the blood of the Crucifixion and its attendant wounds. According to the tenets of Christianity, redemption comes to man “through . . . [the] blood [of Jesus], the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace.”1 The communion wafer and wine were associated with the body and blood of Christ. In the Book of John, Christ tells his disciples that “Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.”2 Over the centuries, Christians’ emphasis on Christ’s Passion superseded other aspects of his life or teachings as portrayed in the New Testament. According to Catholic scholar James Carroll, when the Roman emperor Constantine (272–337) adopted Christianity as his official religion, the cross, with its emphasis on Christ’s death, became the dominant Christian icon. According to legend, the night before Constantine fought his rival, the Emperor Maxentius (278–312), Constantine dreamed that he saw a cross in the sky along with the phrase “In Hoc Signo Vinces” (In this Sign Conquer). Constantine beat Maxentius at the battle of Milvian Bridge, and thereafter adopted the Christian religion, making the cross its new, central symbol. The cross took theological and symbolic precedence over other popular symbols of the early Christian church, such as the dove, the fish, and the waters of baptism.3 The cross and the Crucifixion functioned as the fulcrum in the theological battles to come between Judaism and Christianity. It stood at the metaphorical crossroads of where Judaism and a nascent Christianity had parted ways and a symbol of what would separate them moving into the future.4 1 2 3

4

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Ephesians, I, 7. John, VI, 55–6. James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a  History, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 171, 174–5. Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 37.

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Religious Discourse, Anti-Judaism, and Anti-Clericalism

Constantine’s shift towards the cross as the Christian symbol also emphasized the Church’s association of Jews with blood and death. Although it was the Romans who crucified Jesus Christ, throughout the centuries the Jews have received the blame.5 As portrayed in the Gospels, it was “the chief priests and scribes [who] sought how they might kill” Jesus, engineering his capture and delivery into the hands of the Romans.6 Even when the Romans offered to release Jesus, the Jews refused, saying, “His blood be on us, and on our children.”7 Not only were the Jews held responsible for the physical death of Jesus Christ, but according to early Christian theologians, their stubborn disbelief in his divinity acted as a constant threat to the integrity of the Christian faith and supposedly kept the Second Coming from coming to pass.8 A point of considerable debate during the Middle Ages centered around whether or not the Jews living at the time of the Crucifixion realized Jesus Christ’s true identity and hence the true significance of engineering his death.9 Whatever their knowledge at the time, however, according to the New Testament, “many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.”10 The Jews had destroyed Jesus, and from their ranks would arise an Antichrist who would try to take over the world. As was pointed out in the previous chapter, vampires were also seen as an incarnation of the Antichrist, with their lust for death and damnation and their corresponding fear of all emblems of Christianity.11 Over the centuries, it became a wide-spread article of belief that, since Jews did not worship Christ and attempted constantly to undermine his authority, they were monsters who performed black magic and worshiped the devil. Connecting Jews with Satan built on the idea that the devil also shared responsibility for the crucifixion. The supposed connection between the devil and the Jews also contributed to the widespread belief that Jews were demons with horns, tails, and horrible bodily odors, all attributes of Satan. Linking the devil with the Jews helped to explain why they remained 5

6 7 8 9 10 11

Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1943), 20. Luke, XXII:2. Matthew, XXVII:25. Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 191, 201, 205 Cohen, Christ Killers, 78–81. John II, I, 7. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 34.

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so stubborn in refusing to acknowledge the divinity of Jesus, something so logical to Christians.12 Despite this linkage with demonic forces, the Jews played an important role in Christian theology: witnesses to the truth of the Old Testament. Their Old Testament and its Messianic prophecies functioned as proof of promises fulfilled through the advent of Christ — if only the Jews would open their eyes to that fact.13 For this reason, the Christians particularly excoriated the rabbinic writings of the Talmud as a betrayal by the Jews of the truths of the Old Testament. As Christian theologians saw it, if the Jews chose to move beyond the Old Testament, they should move forward and convert to Christianity rather than veer off into added depths of wicked stubbornness.14 Christians viewed the Talmud as a source of Jews’ demonic powers — the belief that Jews were magicians fueled by the fact that the languages they spoke, and that their holy books were written in languages that most non-Jews could not understand: Hebrew, Aramaic, and in later centuries, Yiddish. Anything secret, mysterious, and unknown was potentially dangerous and threatening. It was common for converts from Judaism to “divulge” the secrets of Judaism from their expert position of having been privy to, among other things, the secret language of Jews. In thirteenth-century France, the Talmud was ordered to be burned publicly, the idea being partially to deprive the Jews of their magical power by destroying their books.15 Charges linking Jews to sorcery and devil worship were further fed by events such as the supposed appearance of blood on communion wafers. After the Doctrine of Transubstantiation, formally adopted in 1215, what some had considered a metaphorical sacrament became literal and concrete. The new doctrine claimed that when the wafer and wine were blessed by a priest and then administered as sacrament, the wafer and 12 13

14 15

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Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 18, 46, 48, 60. Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), 156. Cohen, Christ Killers, 88–92. Elisheva Carlebach, “Attribution of Secrecy and Perceptions of Jewry,” Jewish Social Studies (1996), 115–136, 120, 122; Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century: A  Study of their Relations During the Years 1198–1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period (Philadelphia: The Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 1933), 30, 32; Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1986), 24, 60.

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Religious Discourse, Anti-Judaism, and Anti-Clericalism

wine became Christ’s real, physical, body and blood. In this light, the real, physical blood of Jesus Christ, both in the act of communion and in the image of the Crucifixion, equaled life, salvation, and proof of God’s descent into Jesus Christ, and thus of Jesus Christ’s divinity.16 This preoccupation with divine blood permeated Christian thought and society. In art, images of Christ’s bleeding body proliferated.17 According to scholar Uli Linke, some monastics, particularly women, would on rare occasions engage in self mutilation and blood-letting as a way of achieving a mystical oneness with Christ. Their experience of taking communion was also occasionally accompanied by visions of Jesus dripping blood, or the sensation of tasting blood, and of eating flesh.18 Others sometimes enjoyed mystical flights of fancy in which they saw the blood flowing from the body of Jesus Christ turning to wine and milk for the nourishment of true believers.19 In this cultural climate of the pre-eminence of Christ’s blood and of the role of Jews as the enemy of Christ, Christians accounted for the appearance of reddish spots on Communion wafers by accusing Jews of stabbing or otherwise desecrating the Host. In doing so, Jews supposedly re-enacted the Crucifixion, venting their hatred of Jesus Christ on what Christians believed to be both the representation of his body and his actual, concrete body.20 It was also commonly believed that Jews desecrated the Host as an integral part of performing black magic or devil worship. Some scholars also credit accusations of Host desecration for inspiring the design of the medieval “Jew Badge,” which they believe was meant to represent a communion wafer.21 Instances of misusing the Host cropped up among the Christian population as well, as a prime ingredient in love spells, to induce abortions, or even to drive away the influence of the evil eye. In many of these recorded cases, the Host was also said to bleed so as to give the sinner away.22 16

17 18 19

20

21 22

Uli Linke, Blood and Nation: the European Aesthetics of Race, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 98, 101. Linke, Blood and Nation, 98. Linke, Blood and Nation, 109, 111. David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 85. This occurred before, but particularly after, the doctrine of transubstantiation was established in 1215, petering out in the 16th century. Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 109,111,114. Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 116. Linke, Blood and Nation, 124, 165; A. Murgoci, “The Evil Eye in Roumania, and Its Antidotes,” 1923, The Evil Eye: A  Folklore Casebook, Ed. Alan Dundes, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 124–129, 125.

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Jews were, however, the most frequent victims of Host-tampering accusations. One particularly fanciful story from fifteenth-century Germany, explored by the historian R. Po-Chi Hsia, claimed that when the Jews stabbed their stolen communion wafer, it not only bled, but turned into a young boy. When they threw it into their oven to remove evidence of their crime, the Host turned into angels and doves, who flew out of the house and alerted the neighborhood. Death by fire was a frequent punishment for Host desecration, and the Jews who managed to escape death were often expelled from their communities.23 According to the nineteenthcentury German scholar, Hermann Strack, the real reason for the supposed bleeding of communion wafers was “explained by the appearance [under a microscope] of a species of bacteria . . . [which appeared reddish in color and which] develops [on grain products] with striking facility in warm air in covered vessels and plates.”24 Even more damaging and enduring than the belief in Host desecration, however, was the Christian association of Jews with blood and the Crucifixion that led to a belief in blood libel accusations. The first recorded blood libel took place in 1144, in Britain, upon the death of William of Norwich (c. 1132–1144).25 That spring, William, a twelve-year-old skinner’s apprentice, disappeared and was discovered dead in the woods about a month later.26 A monk named Theobald, a convert from Judaism, stated that Jews had murdered William for his blood. He claimed that the Jewish need for Christian blood was ancient and universal, with a council choosing the place of the next yearly murder.27 The accusation should have been dismissed as absurd, since ingesting blood is strictly prohibited under Jewish law. In Christianity, however, ingesting blood was an integral part of its theological law, through partaking 23

24

25

26

27

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R. Po-Chi Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 51. Hermann Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice: An Historical and Sociological Inquiry (London: Cope and Fenwick, 1898), 60. Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society: 1876–1939 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979), 7; Esther Panitz, Alien in their Midst: Images of Jews in English Literature (London: Associated University Press, 1981), 37. Gavin I. Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder,” The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) 3–40, 16. Joseph Jacobs, “Little St. Hugh of Lincoln: Researches in History, Archaeology, and Legend,” The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 41–71, 47.

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Religious Discourse, Anti-Judaism, and Anti-Clericalism

of the body and blood of Jesus in Communion.28 This helped to make the idea believable in the minds of many people, and over the next half-century, accusations spread throughout Britain, occurring in Gloucester (1168), Bury St. Edmunds (1181), Bristol (1183), and Winchester (1192).29 From England, the blood libel spread to the Continent, accusations peaking in the thirteenth and fourteenth century.30 Many different motivations were ascribed to Jews to explain why they would want to murder Christian children. Theobald, the instigator of the first blood libel, believed that the Jews murdered because, “without the shedding of human blood [they] could . . . [n]ever return to their fatherland.”31 Their exile began with the blood of the Crucifixion and they supposedly required more Christian blood to reverse their plight. His position as a convert, someone supposedly privy to all the secrets of Jewish ritual, gave his accusation a great deal of weight. As we have seen, Jews were perceived as magicians; they were also thought to have special talents as doctors, and both roles could conceivably require blood for various potions.32 Other people also claimed, variously, that Jews used blood as part of the marriage ceremony, for healing purposes in circumcisions, or to guarantee the fertility of their children.33 Misinterpreting passages of the Talmud regarding atonement sacrifices, other people thought that Jews killed Christian children in order to bring atonement sacrifices to God. Misinterpretations of the Talmud were a constant danger during the Middle Ages. The Talmud contains passages referring to non-Jews who, according to one translation, were thought of as animals rather than people. Furthermore, taken literally, non-Jews were also non-persons legally, without consideration under Jewish Law. Finally, in many places, it states that non-Jews who observe the Sabbath or learn 28

29 30 31

32 33

As will be argued later in the chapter, some Christians may have experienced guilt regarding this. Jacobs, “Little St. Hugh of Lincoln,” 47; Colin Holmes, “The Ritual Murder Accusation in Britain,” The Blood Libel Legend: A  Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 99–134, 116; Ernest Rappaport, “The Ritual Murder Accusation: The Persistence of Doubt and the Repetition Compulsion,” The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 304–335, 318. Holmes, “The Ritual Murder Accusation in Britain,” 101. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 135; Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 177. Cited in Holmes, “The Ritual Murder Accusation in Britain,” 101; Carlebach, “Attribution of Secrecy and Perceptions of Jewry,” 118. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 276. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 31,151.

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Torah “deserve death,” a phrase which really means that they should be harshly punished with something like excommunication. Strack goes on to note, however, that “if [the motivation behind blood libels] had been of that character [atonement sacrifices], they would have frequently been mentioned about the time of the Jewish Day of Atonement, i.e., the end of September or in October,” rather than in the spring.34 As Strack was well aware, the most well-known motivation ascribed to the blood libel was rooted in the seasons. Most blood libels occurred in the springtime, around Easter and Passover. Initially, the most common motivation ascribed to Jews in cases of blood libel was that of re-enacting the Crucifixion.35 The case of Hugh of Lincoln (1246–1255) in 1255 provides a case in point. A contemporary chronicler of the incident claimed that the Jews had “appointed a Jew of Lincoln . . . to take the place of Pilate . . . .[then] they scourged [Hugh] till the blood flowed, they crowned him with thorns . . . .and scoffed at him with blasphemous insults, . . . calling him Jesus, the false prophet.”36 Because of the proximity of Easter to Passover, however, the Jews’ supposed desire to re-enact the Passion gradually gave way to a belief that Jews required Christian blood for the rituals of Passover. These supposed Passover rituals ranged from drinking the blood as wine, to baking it into the Matzo bread eaten on Passover. Some even went so far as to accuse the Jews of “compound[ing] out of the heads and entrails of murdered Christian children a . . . food, which they eat every Passover in place of a sacrifice.”37 Taken together, all of these Christian associations of Jews with blood and its consumption correspond well with the vampire myth. In his book, Blood and Belief, scholar David Biale draws out the broader metaphor between vampires and Jews in Medieval Christian theology. He argues that at its most basic level, Christians view Judaism as a moribund or a dead religion, trapped in the Old Testament and unable to move forward. They view their own Christianity, by contrast, as a living religion. The Christian 34

35 36

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Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 18–20; Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 177. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 131. This case resulted in 18 deaths, massive imprisonments, and large fines. Cited in Jacobs, “Little St. Hugh of Lincoln,” 44; Holmes, “The Ritual Murder Accusation in Britain,” 102. Cited in Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 135.

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Religious Discourse, Anti-Judaism, and Anti-Clericalism

obsession with blood and the notion of Jews thirsting for Christian blood thus acts out the fundamental role of the vampire. The vampire takes blood from the living in order that it might find a way to rejoin them. Similarly, the dead religion of Judaism would, vampire-like, seek the blood of the living religion — Christianity — in order that Jews might somehow regain the power they enjoyed in a pre-Christian world.38 Leaving aside the broad theological metaphors, however, in all probability people believed that Jews could commit heinous crimes because they themselves sometimes practiced bloody and horrific rites. Strack records a number of superstitions practiced by Christians in Germany, Russia, and other areas of Europe, some as late as the nineteenth century. These included killing people as sacrificial offerings in order to halt epidemics or famine, drinking the blood of executed criminals to cure diseases, and killing pregnant women in order to make magical candles out of the fetuses. Fetus candles were said to allow its users to move about in the dark unseen by anyone else and were supposed to be very popular among thieves.39 The blood of virgins or children was said to cure skin diseases, menstrual blood was a frequent ingredient in love potions, and some women believed that tasting their husband’s blood would ease labor pains.40 As late as 1796, a community in Germany buried a bull alive in order to stop an epidemic of foot and mouth disease.41 Finally, in 1784, some Christian girls in Hamburg were put to death for killing a Jew and attempting to use his blood for black magic.42 The desire to blame disturbing or upsetting events on a scapegoat lay at the root of most accusations, a trend that did not go completely unnoticed, even by gentiles. In 1272, Pope Gregory X (1210–1276) commented that “it happens occasionally that Christians lose their children and that enemies of the Jews charge the latter with having kidnapped or killed them in order to use their hearts and blood for sacrifice.”43 The papacy regarded themselves as protectors of the Jews from the excesses of persecution during the 38 39 40 41

42 43

Biale, Blood and Belief, 2. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 41–2, 52–3, 71–2, 92. Linke, Blood and Nation, 163, 164, 171. David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 174. Linke, Blood and Nation, 163. Cited in Magdalene Schultz, “The Blood Libel: A Motif in the History of Childhood,” The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore, Ed. Alan Dundes (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 273–303, 282.

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Middle Ages. Jews sometimes appealed to the Pope for protection in cases of accusations. Another motivation attributed to blood libel accusers by the Pope was the desire to blackmail the Jewish community: money in exchange for not bringing charges and beginning a massacre.44 Modern historians see some ritual murder accusations as a way of covering up child abuse or neglect. Others see it as a displacement of Christian guilt for benefiting from the Crucifixion and for ingesting the body and blood of Jesus while taking Communion.45 Blood libels petered out in Western Europe during the sixteenth century. One of the most obvious explanations for this lull was the migration of Jews from Western to Eastern Europe. Expulsions from England as well as areas of France and Germany led to a resettling in Slavic territories, such as Poland and Russia. The dearth of Jews to accuse stopped blood libels in certain areas; their appearance elsewhere sparked new ones.46 The advent of the Reformation formed another reason for this shift in blood libel accusations. The schism between Catholics and Protestants triggered changes affecting the perception of Jews and of blood libels. One way in which Protestant theologians moved away from Catholicism was in systematically rejecting perceived superstitions and ties to the supernatural. Holy Communion was re-categorized as a symbolic act rather than the actual ingestion of Jesus’ blood and flesh. The more outlandish aspects of Host desecration accusations, as seen earlier in this chapter, were ignored as well. Scholars studied Hebrew and translated Jewish liturgy and scholarship, dissipating some of the mystery surrounding Jewish rituals. Moving away from the Doctrine of Transubstantiation also changed the nature of blood libel accusations. While people were fixated on the connection between the blood of Jesus, communion wafers, and re-enacting the Passion, blood libel victims were, with few exceptions, prepubescent boys. After the Reformation, supposed blood libel victims began ranging in age from young children to teenagers, and included girls. The inclusion of girls introduced another leitmotif — that of the Jew as sexual pervert. 44 45

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Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, 9, 12, 49. Linke, Blood and Nation, 148; Alan Dundes, “The Ritual Murder of Blood Libel Legend: A Study of anti-Semitic Victimization through Projective Inversion,” The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 336–378, 354–57. Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder, 3; Langmuir, History, Religion, and Anti-Semitism, 318.

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Furthermore, it was beginning to sink in that although “tell all” converts revealing the secret rituals of the Jewish community affirmed a host of vicious accusations, they denied accusations of ritual murder. All of this meant that although the general population continued to believe in Host desecration and ritual murder, it became more difficult to involve officials in opening investigations.47 The Reformation and the new era of skepticism and science that began after it, reaching its height during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, brought mixed blessings for the Jewish community. On the one hand, the new emphasis on empirical science and logic, with its corresponding deemphasis on religious dogma, allowed victims of blood libel accusations to pit rationalism and science against the dark forces of superstition when constructing their defense.48 On the other hand, it made Jews vulnerable to new accusations related to blood and death. Before, Christians had viewed Jews as stubbornly blind. Now they viewed Jews as superstitious. The Jews of the Old Testament, and the God they worshipped, were portrayed as vengeful, cruel, and bloodthirsty.49 The French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) went so far as to claim that the Jews of the Old Testament had engaged in human sacrifice.50 One of the Jews’ supposed superstitions which came under scrutiny during the Enlightenment involved their burial practices. According to Jewish law, burial takes place as quickly as possible, ideally on the same day as the death, avoiding leaving a corpse unburied overnight except in special circumstances. During the Enlightenment, concern arose that in rare cases of quick burial, some people were buried alive. In order to ascertain that a person was dead rather than in a coma, it became the law that the body be left unburied and watched for three days. Jews had to defend what appeared to non-Jews as a reckless, irresponsible haste in burial and a superstitious clinging to a dangerous custom.51 47

48

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Carlebach, “Attribution of Secrecy and Perceptions of Jewry,” 127; Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder, 136, 147, 149, 158; Helmut Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and AntiSemitism in a German Town, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 103–4. František Červinka, “The Hilsner Affair,” The Blood Libel Legend: A  Casebook in AntiSemitic Folklore, Ed. Alan Dundes (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 135–161, 141. Manuel, The Broken Staff, 186. Manuel, The Broken Staff, 195. While it is certainly possible that people were sometimes buried alive by accident, most cases of supposed live-burials were in fact the natural repositioning of the body

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Another practice viewed as a dangerous, superstitious custom was circumcision — the ritual removal of the foreskin from the penis of baby boys on the eighth day after their birth. According to Jewish law, at least two drops of blood must flow as a result of the procedure, and even in cases where a boy is born without a foreskin, the baby’s penis must still be cut slightly in order for some blood to flow. This practice dates back to Abraham, who was instructed to remove his foreskin as a sign of his covenant with God, and who circumcised his son Isaac eight days after birth. If a baby is not considered healthy enough for circumcision at eight days, then circumcision is delayed until he is healthy.52 The idea that people living in modern, civilized, Enlightened Europe should practice a ritual involving “mutilating, . . . slashing, . . . [and] lacerating . . . weak creatures as soon as they enter life,” revolted many. 53 What did it say about the Jewish capacity for bloodthirsty violence that they could supposedly inflict suffering of this nature on infants?54 Particularly revolting to non-Jews was the circumcision-related practice of mezizah, where the mohel — ritual circumciser — removes the initial flow of blood from the incision by sucking the blood directly from the baby’s penis and then spitting it out. This practice is the closest thing in Jewish ritual resembling the ingestion of blood and the practice of vampirism.55 During the Middle Ages, people had cited mezizah as proof that blood libel accusations were based on fact.56 From the Enlightenment onwards, critics associated this ritual related to circumcision with the spread of diseases such as syphilis and tuberculosis. These accusations were groundless for the most part, although historian Robin Judd cites one case from nineteenth-century Germany, where several cases of syphilis-like ulcers were discovered on the penises of babies who had been

52

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54 55 56

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as a result of the build up and release of gases. Noises heard from the grave, especially knocking, were also the result of gases, or of insect activity. Alexander Altman, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1973), 288– 89; Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 195. Robin Judd, Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 6. Jay Berkovitz, Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 154–55. Judd, Contested Rituals, 75. Berkovitz, Rites and Passages, 154–55. Biale, Blood and Belief, 99.

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treated by the same mohel. This was reported to the secular minister of health and the man was forbidden from performing future circumcisions. Later in the century, a Jewish man invented a glass tube that could allow a mohel to perform mezizah without his mouth coming into contact with the baby’s penis.57 Despite Europe’s conscious adoption of increasingly scientific points of view, the image of the bloodthirsty, vampire-like Jew remained. Blood libels underwent a Renaissance during the nineteenth century, becoming a cause célèbre once more. The new spate of blood libels occurred primarily in Central and Eastern Europe, where they began as early as 1763, although the real spike did not begin until 1882, in TiszaEszlar, Hungary.58 In the spring of 1882, a teenage servant girl, Eszter Solymosi (1868–1882), disappeared while running errands. She vanished on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. This particular Sabbath fell just before Passover, and was, moreover, the day that the Jewish community was auditioning applicants to fill the post of cantor. The same group of newcomers were also Kosher butchers — the same person was expected 57 58

Judd, Contested Rituals, 1, 96, 105. It should be borne in mind in later chapters that Eastern Europe is the primary site of most modern folklore related to vampires as well as the place from which most Jewish immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century originated. It was easy for the discourses to become intertwined. Interestingly, a blood libel in 1791 (where the defendants were pardoned by the emperor) took place in Transylvania. The first significant accusation to compel the attention of Western Europe originated in Damascus, Syria. Early in February of 1840, a Capuchin monk and his servant disappeared, last seen heading for the Jewish quarter. Acting under the suspicion of ritual murder, four Jewish men were arrested a few days later. Under severe torture, they confessed to ritual murder, implicating important members of the Jewish community in the process. All of the butchers and gravediggers of the Jewish community were called in for questioning and digging at the home of one suspect unearthed bones — although these turned out to belong to an animal. What began as a local blood libel became an international concern, with prominent Jews such as the Rothschild family and Sir Moses Montefiore, as well as non-Jewish statesmen from Britain and France, particularly Cremieux, doing their utmost to arrange pardons for the suspects. They were partially successful — securing the release of the suspects, but failing to convince the government or the population of the absurdity of the accusation or the innocence of the Jewish community. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 205–7; Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Muder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20, 22, 38, 39, 51; Charlotte Klein, “Damascus to Kiev: Civiltà Cattolica on Ritual Murder,” The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore, Ed. Alan Dundes (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 180–196, 187; Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 54.

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to fulfill both roles. No animal slaughtering would have taken place on the Sabbath, of course, since such actions were considered work and prohibited on the Sabbath day.59 In part because of the unusual crowd and activity at the local synagogue, suspicions of ritual murder were raised. The synagogue’s caretaker, Josef Scharf, and a butcher, Salomon Schwarcz, were both arrested.60 They and their families were interrogated, and Scharf’s teenage son Moric affirmed local suspicions of ritual murder after undergoing intense psychological pressure from his interrogators, which resulted in alienating him from his family and causing him to reject Judaism. Eszter’s body was found weeks later, washed ashore, her disappearance the likely result of either accidental drowning or of suicide.61 The case went to trial, but although the Jews were acquitted, their judicial victory did little to remove hatred and suspicion from the minds of the local masses. The defendants were forced to relocate to Budapest, and the case remained a rallying point for anti-Semitic politicians. Hermann Strack in fact served as a witness for the defense of the Jews at the TiszaEszlar trial. His siding with the Jews in trying to disprove the blood libel made him a number of enemies, who tried to discredit his scholarship, accuse him of being bribed by the Jewish community, or even of being Jewish himself. He was not, in fact, Jewish.62 Bloods libels form an underlying theme in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Aside from attacks on the heroines, Lucy and Mina, the type of victims Stoker chooses for his vampires recalls the traditional blood libel involving kidnapped Christian children. The first time the reader observes Count Dracula return from hunting, he carries “a half-smothered child” in a bag, which he proceeds to share with his three vampire wives.63 When Lucy becomes a vampire, her victims are also children. Before the protagonists manage to subdue and stake her, they surprise her drinking from “a fairhaired child.”64 59

60 61 62

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Andrew Handler, Blood Libel at Tiszaeszlar, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36–7, 41. Handler, Blood Libel at Tiszaeszlar, 49–50. Handler, Blood Libel at Tiszaeszlar, 52, 93–4. The trial was decided by a panel of judges, not a jury. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, vii; Handler, Blood Libel at Tiszaeszlar, 170, 173. Bram Stoker, The Essential Dracula: The Definitive Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel, Ed. Leonard Wolf, (New York: Penguin, 1993), 53. Stoker, Dracula, 256.

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Religious Discourse, Anti-Judaism, and Anti-Clericalism

Germany experienced a blood libel as well. Early in 1900, in the East German town of Konitz, a seventeen-year-old boy named Ernst Winter (1883–1900) disappeared. His dismembered body parts were discovered over the course of several months. Because of the nature of the cuts, either doctors or butchers were the most likely suspects.65 The townspeople suspected the Jewish butcher, Adolf Lewy, and his family of having committed ritual murder. The inspector sent from Berlin suspected Lewy’s neighbor, the Christian butcher, Gustav Hoffmann, whose daughter may have been romantically involved with the victim.66 The opinion of an expert, however, did not dissuade anybody from the idea that a ritual murder had taken place. Konitz, like Tisza-Eszlar, became the rallying point for political anti-Semites, who fanned the flames of public outrage, producing pamphlets and postcards with imagined sketches of the murder. They helped to create several local riots that required calling in the army in order to restore peace.67 In one of the pamphlets, the Christian butcher Hoffmann went on at length about the wounds on Winter’s body. He called the cut which had slit the boy’s throat, “a real kosher cut, as the Jewish slaughterer does it,” concluding that “Winter was slaughtered like a piece of cattle according to full Jewish ritual.”68 The Kaiser pardoned the prime suspect, Lewy’s son Moritz, but like the Tisza-Eszlar suspects, the Lewy family needed to relocate — to Berlin.69 The preoccupation with Jewish ritual slaughter and the predominance of suspect butchers form a leitmotif in the majority of blood libels during 65 66 67 68 69

Smith, The Butcher’s Tale, 26, 42. Smith, The Butcher’s Tale, 42, 45. Smith, The Butcher’s Tale, 33, 35. Cited in Smith, The Butcher’s Tale, 63, 64. The final major blood libel prior to the First World War was the Beilis Affair, which took place in Kiev, between 1911 and 1913. Now a city in Ukraine, at the time, Kiev was part of the Russian Empire. The suspect in this case was Menachem Mendel Beilis (1874–1934), who worked as a superintendent at a brick factory. The victim in this case was a thirteen-year-old boy named Andrei Yushchinsky whose mutilated body was discovered after he went missing for over a week. In the two years that passed between Beilis’ arrest and his trial, his case became a major flashpoint for anti-Semites, who marshaled experts claiming that Jews were prone to bloodthirstiness, cruelty, and violence. The case became notorious in Western Europe and America as well, where most observers viewed it as an example of the backwardness and rabid anti-Semitism of the Russian empire. The case is of particular interest and significance, because at the trial’s conclusion, Beilis was found not guilty by a jury of ordinary Russian citizens. Smith, The Butcher’s Tale, 210; Henrietta Mondry, Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture Since the 1880s, (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 31–32, 75.

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this time period.70 Those who work with sharp tools have easy access to the means with which to commit murder. The Konitz case and its two butchers, however, points to a further layer of the ways in which Jews were suspected of blood lust and cruelty. Blood libels and Kosher butchers were linked frequently: the 1880s and subsequent years witnessed the simultaneous burgeoning of both criticism of Kosher slaughtering practices and blood libels.71 The changing attitudes towards the treatment of animals changed the perception of Jewish ritual slaughter. During the Enlightenment, philosophers began advocating for improvements in the treatment of domesticated animals, lest the exercise of cruelty shape a person’s character and lead them to act with casual cruelty towards human beings. By the mid-nineteenth century, people were advocating changes in the general practice of animal slaughter. They reasoned that it was cruel to kill animals while they were conscious and aware of their imminent death. Better, in their view, to stun the animal by knocking it unconscious beforehand. The animal would die in oblivion and the butcher could kill it without torture, which would prevent butchers from developing callousness towards animals and by extension their fellow men. The dehumanizing effect of animal slaughter was demonstrated graphically in the American novelist Upton Sinclair’s (1878–1968) groundbreaking book, The Jungle. The novel’s protagonist, a Slavic immigrant named Jurgis Rudkus, works in the meat packing plants of Chicago. Over the course of several years, the nature of his work environment and his poverty turn the man into a bloodthirsty monster. When he discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him, he tracks down and attacks her lover with werewolf-like savagery and vampiric imagery: Things swam blood before him, and he screamed aloud in his fury, lifting his victim and smashing his head upon the floor . . . In a flash he had bent down and sunk his teeth into the man’s cheek; and when they tore him away he was dripping with blood, and little ribbons of skin were hanging in his mouth.72 70

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Other blood libel/butcher incidents took place in Skurz (1884) and Xanten (1891). Smith, The Butcher’s Tale, 122–3; Johannes T. Gross, Ritualmordbeschuldigungen gegen Juden in detschen Kaiserreich (1871–1914, (Berlin: Metropol, 2002), 9. Robin Judd, “The Politics of Beef: Animal Advocacy and the Kosher Butchering Debates in Germany,” Jewish Social Studies, 10 (1), 2003, 117–150, 123–4. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906, (Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2003), 141.

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Proponents also claimed that slaughter with stunning went more quickly and resulted in more wholesome beef. These early animal rights campaigns also dealt with animal sports such as cock fighting and bull baiting and with vivisection or the use of live animals to perform scientific experiments.73 In a related reform, abattoirs and all other slaughtering industries were removed from the mainstream marketplace. This distancing of the public from the practice of butchering had several objectives. One was to make the industry easier to regulate, inspect, and control. Another involved improving the health and cleanliness standards of the meat industry. Finally, this removed ordinary and impressionable people — especially women and children — from witnessing the daily carnage involved in slaughtering animals. Witnessing such practices, advocates reasoned, had as much potential to corrupt the populace as slaughtering without stunning had of corrupting the butchers.74 By the 1880s, these reforms were being enacted in Europe and America, and attention began to focus on the fact that Kosher slaughtering continued as it had before, since stunning an animal before killing it was contrary to Jewish law. Some advocates of stunning respected this religious difference, but others called for the banning of Kosher slaughter. In Germany especially, this campaign veered towards anti-Semitic slander. According to some advocates of stunning, Jews supposedly took pleasure in their method of slaughtering, which strengthened their insensitivity and brutality. Propaganda depicted them as a “‘blood drinking’ people,” erroneously positing that Jews drank the blood of their slaughtered animals.75 The discourses of slaughter reform and blood libel accusations began to overlap. People invested in stunning animals before slaughtering believed that this practice resulted in butchers uncorrupted by violence and callousness towards suffering. Jews refused to adopt the practice, opening them up to precisely these charges. If Jewish butchers were indeed prone to violence and lacked sympathy towards their fellow men, if their adherence to Kosher slaughter stemmed from the fact that they belonged to a blood-thirsty people, logic framed the Jewish butcher as the ultimate suspect in a case of ritual murder. He would have both the means and the 73 74 75

Judd, “The Politics of Beef,” 119–20. Judd, “The Politics of Beef,” 128. Judd, “The Politics of Beef,” 125–6; Judd, Contested Rituals, 112.

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psychological makeup. Furthermore, where slaughterhouse reforms were widely spread, and most evidence of butchering had been removed from the general view, the Kosher butcher would be the most publicly visible practitioner of death in the vicinity. In this context, giving the townspeople of Konitz their choice between Jewish and non-Jewish butchers as murder suspects, their choice of the Jewish butcher appears inevitable. *** The philosophical sea-change of the eighteenth century known as the Enlightenment altered religious discourse and its influence on society. It shifted the paradigms of anti-Judaism from criticism over the heretical religious beliefs of the Jews to criticism over their practice of religious “superstitions” contrary to the new culture of rationality. No sociological force, including the Enlightenment, could ever do away with either religious beliefs or its related prejudices. The re-emergence of blood libels, even in Western Europe, demonstrated the remarkable resilience of such attitudes towards Jews. But the Enlightenment period did witness significant changes of attitudes towards religion in large segments of the population, and its advocates found new uses for vampiric imagery as a vehicle of demonization, this time against the Catholic Church. Apart from theology, the Church had controlled all branches of learning and the sciences for many centuries. When scholars appeared to step beyond the boundaries of orthodox faith, the Church exerted its power to censure, condemn, or suppress new theories that contradicted Church teachings. One of the most famous of these instances is the case of Galileo Galilei (1564– 1642), an Italian scientist. His researches in the field of astronomy had led him to the belief that, contrary to accepted theories, the sun lay at the center of the universe and the earth revolved around it. The Church considered this heresy, denying the truths of the Holy Scripture, and, in 1633, tried Galileo before the Inquisition and forced him to recant his theory.76 In the decades after Galileo’s humiliation, the Enlightenment began gaining momentum as a philosophic movement. Also known as the Age of Reason, it consisted of a school of philosophers who promoted the ideal 76

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H. Daniel-Rops, The Church in the Eighteenth Century, Trans. John Warrington, (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, LTD., 1964), 5–6.

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of human perfectibility and man’s transcendent capacity to understand the secrets of the world around him through the application of logic and reason, uncensored and unfettered.77 Popular among the intellectual elite, although slow to catch on with the population at large, the new philosophies self-consciously distanced themselves from conventional belief in God and in miracles.78 Scholars began to read the bible, especially the Old Testament, as literature rather than sacred text.79 Explorers who traveled outside of Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia encountered indigenous religions — mostly labeled paganism — which prompted philosophers to re-evaluate their views on religion and superstition.80 This ascendance of science and reason heightened the willingness of Enlightenment philosophers to question beliefs that did not rest on empirical proofs, and the authorities who promulgated such beliefs.81 These new attitudes positioned devotees of the Enlightenment on a collision course with the Church and their perception of the Church as being devoted to the perpetuation of ignorance and superstition in order to maintain hegemony over Western society and its institutions. The French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire castigated the Catholic Church as an empty façade, devoid of reason or intelligence, and used primarily to keep the masses docile.82 In Protestant-dominated areas, pre-existing antiCatholic sentiments interacted with Enlightenment criticisms, resulting in outlandish accusations against Catholic institutions, such as tales of monks kidnapping children to swell their ranks, or of rape and torture occurring routinely behind the walls of convents and monasteries.83 Some of these stories were highly reminiscent of the Medieval accusations against Jews, and indeed, some critics drew explicit comparisons between the evils of Jewish and the evils of Catholic superstitions.84 Baron D’Holbach (1723–1789), a contemporary of Voltaire’s, complained that the God revered by both Catholicism and Judaism was in fact a “cruel, 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 8. Dupré, The Enlightenment, 14. Manuel, The Broken Staff, 167. Manuel, The Broken Staff, 168. Daniel-Rops, The Church in the Eighteenth Century, 2. Daniel-Rops, The Church in the Eighteenth Century, 47. Daniel-Rops, The Church in the Eighteenth Century, 151. S. J. Barnett, Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism, (London: MacMillan Press, 1999), 108.

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carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty [God]. We find, in all religions of the earth, a God of armies, a jealous God, an avenging God, a destroying God, a God who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshippers, as a duty, serve to his taste.”85 The nineteenth-century anarchist and atheist, Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), declared that All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice — that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity. In this bloody mystery man is always the victim, and the priest — a man also, but a man privileged by grace — is the divine executioner.86

As discussed in the previous chapter, the vampire was introduced to the intellectuals of Enlightenment Europe as a superstition practiced in a more backward Eastern Europe. As such, the image of the vampire presented itself as the ultimate symbol of ignorance, of a self-imposed darkness of the mind. Since the rationalists and the anti-clericals viewed religion as an increasingly outdated system of belief and the Church as clinging to inflexible dogma and blind superstition, the vampire became a symbol for closed-minded ignorance in general and for the Catholic Church in particular. Bemoaning the credulity and superstition of the masses, Voltaire complained that “the true vampires are churchmen.”87 The humor periodicals of Great Britain and the United States offer the best examples of the vampire as a symbol of ignorance and superstition. In a cartoon taken from the American publication Puck (2.1), we can see a sun, at whose center lies an image of the British naturalist Darwin, the apotheosis of nineteenth-century science and rationalism.88 The Darwinsun both illuminates the darkness and dispels the clouds of ignorance, which are depicted as hideous, tormented monsters, liberally interspersed 85

86

87

88

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D’Holbach’s name suggests he was German, and indeed, he was born in Germany. His mother, however, was French, and he is classed among the French philosophes of the eighteenth century. Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron d’Holbach, “The Priestly Religion,” The Enlightenment, Ed. Frank E. Manuel, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965), 57–62, 59. Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, 1882, (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1916), 25–26. Cited in Henry Erik Butler, “Writing and Vampires in the Works of Lautréamont, Bram Stoker, Daniel Paul Schreber, and Fritz Lang,” Dissertation, (Yale University, 2001), 12. Puck, May 1882, p 16.

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Religious Discourse, Anti-Judaism, and Anti-Clericalism

2.1 “A Sun of the Nineteenth Century” Taken from Puck, May 1882, n. 270, 16

with bats. In the British periodical Punch (2.2), the connection between ignorance and bats is even more obvious. It depicts a cherubic infant ringing in the New Year. The tolling bells disturb a colony of bats — and one owl — labeled “bigotry,” “stupidity,” “inebriety,” “ignorance,” “fanaticism,” and “humbug,” who fly away. To replace them, from out of the bells, arrive human figures labeled “peace,” “plenty,” “charity,” “hygiene,” “hope,” and “electricity” — the very latest in modern, scientific inventions for illuminating a dark age.89 Over time, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationalism and empiricism resulted in the increasing professionalization of all branches of science as well as the increasing secularization of society. In the wake of the French Revolution, these philosophic ideas hardened into attacks against 89

Punch, January 2, 1892, 2.

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2.2 “The Chimes” Taken from Punch, January 2nd, 1892

36

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the priests who represented the Catholic Church on a local level, as well as the Church as an institution, a movement known as anti-clericalism. During our period, anti-clericalism became particularly prevalent in both France and Germany, countries in which the Catholic Church enjoyed a strong political as well as religious presence — one that was often in conflict with the secular government. From the time of the French Revolution and onward, more and more French politicians and intellectual leaders became convinced that in order to build a strong country, citizens must cultivate a rational and socialoriented philosophy rather than a dogmatic and religious morality. With the inception of their Third Republic, these ideas strengthened.90 During the first decade of the Third Republic, in the wake of their defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, France’s leaders wished to remodel their nation. The countries to which they looked as successful models were all Protestant, and they felt that Catholicism and a government dominated by priests would hamper their efforts.91 Led by men such as Jules Ferry (1832–1893), they advocated that the French clergy be edged out of fields in which they had played dominant roles — most notably in education. Ferry established secular education in France, which left thousands of clergy members without an occupation.92 His supporters saw this as a means to wean children — the future leaders of the nation — away from Catholic superstition. In the eyes of his detractors, this meant a generation of children set adrift in the world without a proper grounding in Christian morality. The conflict between the Church and the anti-clericals was even more controversial in Germany. Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), chancellor of the newly-unified state, wished to make over the country — which now included a substantial Catholic minority — in the image of his native, Protestant province of Prussia. He, and other likeminded politicians, looked at the Catholic Church as a remnant of superstition and fanaticism, and like his French counterparts wished to wrest control of education and marriage laws from the province of the clergy. Insofar as the Church wielded influence beyond its theological purview and meddled in culture or politics, Bismarck viewed it as interfering with the secular, scientific progress of 90

91 92

Phyllis Stock-Morton, Moral Education for a Secular Society: The Development of Morale Laïque in Nineteenth Century France, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 18. Stock-Morton, Moral Education for a Secular Society, 87. Stock-Morton, Moral Education for a Secular Society, 97.

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a fledgling state.93 Wanting to control Catholicism in Germany, although certainly not to abolish the Catholic religion, Bismarck instituted a series of laws known as the Kulturkampf, which remained in effect from 1871 until 1887, peaking in influence in 1878.94 A Congregations Law instituted in 1875 closed contemplative monastic orders in the Prussian province, while across the country, the clergy were jailed for involving themselves in politics, Catholic men lost their jobs or were denied promotions, and newspapers devoted to the political views of Catholics were harassed. Ultimately, these laws had the ironic role of involving more members of the clergy in politics than there had been before the Unification.95 Due to these anti-clerical conflicts between the Church and the state, cartoons from Germany and France focus more on the association between the ignorance and superstition of the Catholic Church and vampires, rather than the connection between superstition and vampires alone. By contrast, the United States and Great Britain did not have to contend with the Catholic Church as an official state presence, and could equate superstition and vampires without adding explicit attacks on the Catholic Church. One cartoon from the German humor periodical Kladderadatsch (2.3) depicts a palace formerly owned by the papacy. In the far-left panel we see the palace while under papal ownership — a deserted, dilapidated roost of owls and bats. After passing from papal to secular hands, in the far-right panel, the tower appears rebuilt, repaired, and offering the world a shining beacon of light that repels both owls and bats.96 A similar cartoon goes further (2.4), showing a Catholic fortress inhabited by five priests. The tower, which flies the papal flag, is in a forlorn state of repair, inhabited by all manner of vermin and pests, from rats to snakes, foxes and owls, while bats and crows fill the sky overhead.97 France’s journals offered equally clear and embittered connections between the Catholic Church and vampires, as shown in the cover 93

94

95

96 97

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Michael B. Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth Century Germany, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 296. Ronald J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871–1887, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 5, 28. Gross, The War Against Catholicism, 129; Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, 7. Kladderadatsch, October 8th, 1893, 4. Kladderadatsch, March 25th, 1906, 9.

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2.3 “Formerly and Now” Taken from Kladderadatsch, October 8th, 1893, 4.

2.4 “At the Center of the Storm” Taken from Kladderadatsch, March 26th, 1906, 9.

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of an anti-clerical magazine. The magazine’s very title, La Lanterne, indicates that it offered itself as a beacon of light and a source of rational knowledge in a world dominated by a superstitious church and its priest minions. Perched on top of a model of the Vatican rests a priest, whose cloak billows about him so that it appears as though the lean, menacing face of the priest fits seamlessly onto the body of a bat, wings unfurled, his hands gnarled and with sharp nails that appear more like talons.98 An article in London’s Times referred to the Pope as “‘the great vampire’ at Rome.”99 “The Fate of Madame Cabanel,” a horror story written by Englishwoman Eliza Lynn Linton (1822–1898) in 1880 explores the connection between vampires, ignorance, superstition, and Catholicism. The eponymous heroine finds herself newly married and living in a tiny hamlet which progress had not invaded, [and] science had not enlightened . . . They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as little as its learning . . . They went regularly to mass in the little rock-set chapel on Sundays and saints’ days; believed implicitly all that monsieur le curé said to them, and many things which he did not say; and they took all the unknown, not as magnificent, but as diabolical.100

This hamlet is awash in both Pagan and Catholic superstition, centered on their priest, as well as whatever folklore has passed down through the generations. Monsieur Cabanel constitutes the one figure of enlightened understanding, comprising the “maire, juge de paix, and all the public functionaries rolled into one” — all the secular, governmental posts are his responsibility.101 Madame Cabanel, a fair Englishwoman transported to the French hinterlands, is immediately distrusted by everyone in the village, and labeled evil by Martin, who

98

99 100

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Taken from Histoire Generale de la Press Française: Tome III, 1871–1940, Eds. Claude Bellanges, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, & Fernand Terrou, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 64a. Times, April 21st, 1879, 4. Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Fate of Madame Cabanel,” 1880, Dracula’s Brood: Rare Vampire Stories by Friends and Contemporaries of Bram Stoker, Ed. Richard Dalby, (London: Crucible, 1987), 43–54, 43. Linton, “The Fate of Madame Cabanel,” 43.

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was reputed the wisest man of the district; not even excepting Monsieur le curé . . . nor Monsieur Cabanel . . . He knew all about the weather and the stars, . . . and he had the power of divination and could find where the hidden springs of water lay far down in the earth when he held the baguette in his hand. He knew too, where treasures could be had on Christmas Eve if only you were quick and brave enough to enter the cleft in the rock at the right moment and come out again before too late; and he had seen with his own eyes the White Ladies dancing in the moonlight; and the little imps, the Infins, playing their prankish gambols by the pit at the edge of the wood. And he had a shrewd suspicion as to who, among those black-hearted men of La Crèche-en-bois — the rival hamlet — was a loup-garou [werewolf].102

The level of superstition demonstrated by Martin and the other villagers is of such obscurity that even most anti-clericals of the nineteenth century might have welcomed a stronger infusion of Catholicism into their worldview. In fact, the hamlet’s priest is never seen; Martin is the only real authority figure dispensing wisdom in the village. When the weather grows warmer and disease spreads throughout the poorly drained hamlet, a classic vampire scare, as described in Chapter One, begins to develop. The villagers are unaware of the relationship between poor drainage, sanitation, and the spread of disease, and Madame Cabanel, the outsider, becomes the target of fear in the village. Martin pronounces that “with those red lips of hers, her rose cheeks and her plump shoulders, she looks like a vampire and as if she lived on blood.”103 Martin’s declaration is confirmed as the health of everyone in the hamlet worsens except for Madame Cabanel. Finally circumstances conspire that a child dies in Madame Cabanel’s care, having first suffered an epileptic fit that cut its lips, which she kisses, so that the villagers discover Madame Cabanel with not only a dead child, but blood on her lips. Outraged, the villagers tie up Madame Cabanel and transport her to a pit out in the woods to destroy the supposed vampire. She dies of terror en route, and before the villagers can do anything else, they are overtaken by six horsemen. The men on horseback turn out to be “Jules Cabanel . . . , followed by the doctor and four gardes champêtres” — secular, scientific, and legal authorities — all of the forces of Enlightenment embodied 102 103

Linton, “The Fate of Madame Cabanel,” 45. Linton, “The Fate of Madame Cabanel,” 46.

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in one group of men.104 Their meager influence over the ignorance and superstitious beliefs of the villagers did not save Madame Cabanel, but the story ends with the hope for the future that perhaps they will kill the villagers’ belief in vampires and bring the hamlet into the age of secularism and reason. There is an almost poignant irony in the post-Enlightenment depiction of the Church as vampire. When the Catholic Church needed an effective medium with which to attack Jews, it drew from images of the Crucifixion, resulting in a portrait of murderous, blood-swilling demons — vampires. But these demons turned out to be a double-edged sword, used by the Church’s enemies to demonize them in turn. The Church became the vampire of the new, enlightened, scientific age — its face turned towards the past, feeding off of the superstitions surrounding blood. As a religious tool and a religious symbol, blood lies at the bedrock of Western civilization and Christianity. Even as its metaphorical consumption formed an integral part of Christianity, however, it also served as the ultimate accusation against the Jews. Like vampires, Church hatred of Judaism is long-lived, and as with vampires, people have long believed that Jews thirsted for the blood of Christians. Despite the changes undergone by Western society since both the Crucifixion and the first blood libels, this fundamental prejudice and bloody accusation refused to die, even in the era of strident anticlericalism. The decades before the First World War witnessed numerous blood libel accusations, even in countries that prided themselves on their modernity and rationalism. As we shall see, their scientific views relied just as heavily on blood as had their views on religion. Science constituted a new and equally blood-tinged way of looking at the world — but still came to the same conclusions. 104

42

“The Fate of Madame Cabanel,” 53.

Sara Libby Robinson

3

BRED IN THE BONE Science, Blood, and Identity

RELIGION had been the intellectual cornerstone of the Middle Ages. It accounted for communion wafers looking bloodied, explained man’s origins and propensity towards sin, and served as a logical reason for hating Jews. Beginning with the Enlightenment, however, the supremacy of religion began to wane, and people turned increasingly to science to recreate their world-views. By 1870, science had replaced religion as the new intellectual paradigm for many people. It supported new perceptions of how to define one’s character, propensity towards crime, and even anti-Semitism. Yet, even as people moved from faith dominated by religion to faith dominated by science, the foundation of the new ideology remained the same: blood. The active agent of heredity, disease, and degeneration, it became the nexus of identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century cultures of Western Europe and America. The centrality of blood in medicine — as key elements in diagnosing and treating illness — went back to the Middle Ages and even further. In the Medieval and Early Modern periods, scientists believed that people Blood Will Tell

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were made up of four bodily humors whose balance meant a healthy body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A predominance of one of these humors was supposed to influence personality and temperament, and any significant imbalance of humors resulted in different types of disease.1 The predominance of blood in a person’s physical makeup allegedly resulted in a “sanguine” temperament — whose traits include courage and a quick temper. According to scholars of Medieval and Early Modern medicine, the contemporary understanding of the mechanics of conception held that babies were germinated through the meeting of the blood of both parents during sexual intercourse. Semen was considered a pale type of blood.2 Blood-letting played an important role in medicine, as a way of removing impurities from the blood, restoring the balance of humors, and effecting a cure.3 These ideas and practices still prevailed at the dawn of the nineteenth century. By the beginning of our period, however, scientific progress had metamorphosed into something twenty-first century scholars might recognize. Nevertheless, blood still remained central to scientific thought. The theory of the four humors had faded, but blood as the carrier of all inherited traits remained a key feature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century science.4 In his influential 1853 Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines, Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) used invented blood types to categorize people according to race and to assign each race its characteristic traits. Before World War One, many people used the word “race” as an umbrella term; depending on context, it could support various meanings, including mankind or the human race as a whole, groups of nations, individual nations, or individual ethnic or religious groups. Gobineau used the term to designate groups of nations, dividing mankind into three races: black, yellow, and white.5 Gobineau’s apportioning of racial character traits was Eurocentric, privileging the 1 2

3 4

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Linke, Blood and Nation, 181–2. Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England, (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1982), 30, 34–5. Linke, Blood and Nation, 176. Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4; Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 140. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 184; Linda Clark, Social Darwinism in France, (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 100.

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Science, Blood, and Identity

white race as the most organized, intelligent, and moral. In comparison, he characterized the yellow races (Asians) as law-abiding, but apathetic and obstinate, and the black races (Africans) as highly creative, but unstable and with limited intelligence.6 According to Gobineau, all human traits derived from the same source: from height and skin color, to “their conscience, and their whole nature, in a word, their blood.”7 Through their blood these various races passed their traits down through the generations as well as across racial lines through intermarriage. A convenient fusion of myth and science, these theories of blood as the agent of all human traits were widespread and echoed by, among others, the English scientist Thomas Huxley (1825–1895) who stated that “physical, mental, and moral peculiarities go with blood.”8 The work popularly credited with initiating the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century was Origin of Species, published in 1859 by the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). In this and his later work, The Descent of Man, Darwin introduced the public to theories on natural selection and survival of the fittest, and radically altered the concept of man in relation to the rest of the universe, particularly to animals.9 He studied the adaptation strategies of plants and animals over time to create ecological niches and defend themselves from competition over resources. Darwin’s influence on nineteenth-century science, however, rested on the reinterpretation and subsequent application of his theories.10 Darwin’s readers extrapolated his formulas, applying them to “moral as to physical conditions, to history as well as to botany and zoology, to genius and character, as well as to plants and animals.”11 The resulting ideology, known as Social Darwinism, postulated that just as children inherited physical characteristics like strength and agility from their parents, they inherited 6

7

8

9

10 11

Michael Biddis, Father of Racist Ideology: the Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau, (New York: Weybright & Talley, Inc., 1970), 119–120. Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, Gobineau: Selected Political Writings, Ed. Michael Biddis, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 130. Thomas Huxley, “The Forefathers and Forerunners of the English People,” Images of Race, Ed. Michael Biddis, (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979), 157–170, 160 Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 4; Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 14. Cited in Clark, Social Darwinism in France, 22.

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moral or behavioral characteristics as well.12 This implied that people were biologically hard-wired to belong to their race or class; destined for poverty or wealth irrespective of their upbringing, personal decisions, and education — the nature versus nurture debate retooled for the nineteenth century. On this principle, a number of well-meaning people refused to support welfare assistance to the poor, believing that charity would only serve to further weaken their moral fiber.13 Blood and the characteristics it carried determined destiny with no recourse to free will and no possibility of change, even with education.14 Turn-of-the-century doctors such as Robert Rentoul believed that “environment, so called, is in the vast majority of cases only heredity transplanted to another locality.”15 Although these theories of Social Darwinism bore Darwin’s name, they were almost complete inversions of his theories. Darwin believed that when animals competed for limited resources, they developed strategies for getting what they needed. The better they adapted to their environment, the better their chances of survival. Weak or poorly adapted animals would not survive. Translated into human terms, the strong humans with the best survival traits would be the ones to reproduce and maintain dominance. Their strength lay in their ability to adapt to their environment. Weak or degenerate humans who could not adapt would not survive. The Social Darwinists did not believe in the ability of people to adapt and evolve. They felt that what people were born with was what they would always be. Blood carried character flaws as well as physical flaws, and these were passed down from parent to child.16 With the strengthening of these ideas, doctors gained increasing authority over the mental and moral, as well as physical, well-being of their patients, displacing authorities such as the church and co-opting issues of health associated with morality, such as alcoholism or prostitution.17 12

13 14 15

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Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1989), 18; Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 36–7. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 95–6. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 109, 137, 140. Robert Rentoul, Race Culture or Race Suicide? (A Plea for the Unborn) (New York: The Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1906), xii. Matthew Fry Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917, (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 159. Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 39, 45; Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, 1, 7, 71.

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Science, Blood, and Identity

Social Darwinists took the fatalistic view that if people were genetically programmed to be poor or immoral, then nothing that education or environment could do would change their lot in life.18 Emile Zola (1840– 1902) spent a large part of his literary career exploring the idea of inescapable hereditary in his Rougon-Maquart series of twenty novels. In the opening book, The Fortune of the Rougons, children taunt a young girl whose father is a convicted criminal, telling her, “Blood always shows itself. You’ll end at the galleys like your father.”19 In essence, Social Darwinism gave scientific respectability to existing prejudices regarding race and class, confirming the hierarchies articulated by Gobineau.20 Gobineau’s invented racial hierarchies, with their weighting of positive attributes in favor of white as opposed to colored races, reflected the racial prejudices that existed in the United States during this period. Unlike France, Germany, or Great Britain during this period, America had to contend with groups of racial minorities radically different from the perceived majority of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The legacies of institutionalized slavery had resulted in large communities of African Americans in the South, while Chinese immigrant communities were growing, particularly on the Pacific coast. Adding to this heady mixture, America was also home to a number of Mexicans in the South-West and to American Indian tribes, mostly living in the West during this period. Most American opinion-makers as well as ordinary citizens believed firmly in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, the people descended from the original British and Dutch settlers of the New World. Teutons, or those descended from German immigrants of the early nineteenth-century, followed closely behind. Both races were considered intelligent, hard-working, responsible, and capable of enlightened self-government — all outstanding Social Darwinist attributes.21 Colored races — as African Americans and other racial minorities were known — supposedly possessed the opposite attributes. They were considered lazy, amoral, and incapable of self-discipline. As articulated by one contemporary Southerner, William Benjamin Smith (1850–1934), 18

19

20 21

Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848- c. 1918, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 109. Emile Zola, The Fortune of the Rougons, 1871, (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1985), 188. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 81, 139. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 192; Paul T. McCartney, Power and Progress: American National Identity, the War of 1898, and the Rise of American Imperialism, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 57–8.

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There is scarcely any conceivable educational or scientific or governmental or social or religious polity under which the pure strain of Caucasian blood might not live and thrive and achieve great things for History and Humanity; on the other hand, there is not reason to believe that any kind or degree of institutional excellence could permanently stay the race decadence that would follow surely in the wake of any considerable contamination of that blood by the blood of Africa.22

As with the larger nature vs. nurture debates of this time, there were some who believed that non-Anglo-Saxon races were capable of selfimprovement, but even this minority thought that racial changes of this nature were bound to be very gradual.23 A number of opinion makers considered that “Race-improvement is organic; education is extra-organic. Any change or amelioration that affects the race, the stock, the blood, must be inherited; but education is not inherited, it is not inheritable.”24 Social Darwinists did not believe in positive change through education, but they certainly believed in negative change through blood. One of the greatest fears of Western society at this time was that man could fall from the evolutionary heights that he had reached. This potential fall would be the result of degeneration, a phenomenon whereby people passed down physical, mental, or moral defects to their descendants. In transmission, the deformities magnified, until, according to most theorists of degeneration, the fourth or fifth generation was rendered weak, useless, and hopefully sterile. Emile Zola’s Rougon/Macquart novels are a textbook illustration of these principles. In them, Zola follows the extended members of one family and the successive degeneration of each generation. By the time his characters reach the fourth generation, they are too vitiated to produce healthy children when they manage to have any at all.25 One grandson of the sprawling Rougon-Maquart clan, Maxime, is a confused and somehow incoherent mixture of his father’s frenetic appetites and his mother’s . . . weaknesses, a defective product in whom the faults of the parents complemented and exacerbated one another. This family was all too quickly using up what life it had in it; in this frail 22

23 24 25

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William Benjamin Smith, “The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn,” 1905, Racial Determinism and the Fear of Miscegenation Post 1900, Ed. John David Smith, (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), 45–315, 49. McCartney, Power and Progress, 62. Smith, “The Color Line,” 214. Hurley, The Gothic Body, 66–8; Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal, 47.

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Science, Blood, and Identity

creature, whose sex must have remained in doubt at birth and who was no longer, like Saccard, a will grasping profit and pleasure but a feebleness devouring fortunes already made, a strange hermaphrodite opportunely born into a society gone rotten, it was already dying out.26

Maxime marries a young woman tainted equally by the hereditary vices of her parents, Carried in [a] diseased womb, Louise emerged with anemic blood, misshapen limbs, and a diseased brain, her memory already steeped in filth. At times she was persuaded that she possessed vague memories of another existence and imagined bizarre, shadowy scenes of men and women embracing, a whole carnal drama that titillated her childish curiosity. It was her mother speaking in her.27

Although it is never stated explicitly, it is probable that both Louise and her mother suffered from syphilis. Louise dies young; she and Maxime have no children. Scientists traced physical and intellectual deformities to several possible sources. German intellectual Max Nordau (1849–1923) believed degeneration came about through poisons in the environment; specifically the contemporary urban landscape. Nordau noted that cities offered “unfavorable influences which diminish [a person’s] vital powers . . . .such as fermented alcoholic drinks, tobacco, opium, hashish, arsenic, . . . tainted foods, . . . [or diseases such as] marsh fever, syphilis, [and] tuberculosis.”28 For Nordau, these urban environments had produced an “increase in the number of degenerates of all kinds.”29 Once a disease or a trait became part of someone’s blood, it would be passed on through their blood, the site of all physical characteristics and behavioral traits. Gobineau’s definition of degeneration was the mixing of defective ‘black’ blood with anyone else’s.30 As a result, the degenerative peoples “no longer [have] the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of the blood.”31 Popularly known as miscegenation, this problem was that of different 26 27 28 29 30 31

Emile Zola, The Kill, 1872, (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 112–13. Emile Zola, The Kill, 122. Max Nordau, Degeneration, 1893 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895), 34–5. Nordau, Degeneration, 36. Biddis, Father of Racist Ideology, 123. Biddis, Father of Racist Ideology, 114.

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races producing children. Contemporaries described miscegenation as the mixing of bloods, rendering blood tainted or impure.32 Crossing blood types in this way always carried negative results, giving primacy to the traits located in the blood of the inferior parent.33 In the United States, many people believed in the so-called “one drop rule,” which stated that no matter how faint the traces of non-Anglo-Saxon blood in a person’s veins, that person could never be considered a racial Anglo-Saxon. As the American thinker Madison Grant (1865–1937) phrased it, “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”34 All races, Gobineau had claimed, shared an inborn “repulsion from the crossing of blood,” which results in a desire to reproduce among our own racial groups.35 The centrality of blood in notions of degeneration contributed to the fascination for vampires shared by contemporaries of Western Europe and America. Their ideas of vampires dovetailed well with ideas of degeneration. Vampires killed some of their victims by draining away their blood, energy, and vitality; this was degeneration on an individual level. But vampires also contaminated the blood of other victims, making them vampires as well. In doing so, they created another member of their race, another being who shared their blood; this can be viewed as miscegenation. Francis Galton drew upon vampiric imagery in describing degeneration, contrasting the healthy members of society with the degenerate, likening them to “animals that have to work hard for their food and the sedentary parasites that cling to their bodies and suck their blood.”36 Florence Marryat’s (1833–1899) novel, The Blood of the Vampire, explored extensively the link between vampirism and heredity. Her heroine, Harriet Brandt, is a psychic vampire who drains a person’s vitality simply by befriending and spending time in close proximity with them. Over the course of the novel, she inadvertently and unconsciously kills 32

33 34

35

36

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Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1937), 12. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 187, 192. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: or, The Racial Basis of European History, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918), 18. Michael Biddiss, Gobineau: Selected Political Writings, (New York City: Harper & Row Publishers, 1970), 64. Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 198.

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several people in this way and endangers the health of others. Harriet’s unique condition is attributed to heredity, to the physical and moral failings of both her parents. An eminent doctor familiar with Harriet’s family history describes her father as a mad scientist who conducted cruel experiments on the natives of a remote island in Jamaica. Harriet’s mother, meanwhile, was A fat, flabby half-caste, who hardly ever moved out of her chair but sat eating all day long, until the power to move had almost left her! I can see her now, with her sensual mouth, her greedy eyes, her low forehead and half-formed brain, and her lust for blood. It was said that the only thing which made her laugh, was to watch the dying agonies of the poor creatures her brutal protector slaughtered. But she thirsted for blood, she loved the sight and smell of it, she would taste it on the tip of her finger when it came in her way. Her servants had some story amongst themselves to account for this lust. They declared that when her slave mother was pregnant with her, she was bitten by a Vampire bat.37

Despite Harriet’s many good qualities — including generosity and an affectionate heart — she remains trapped within the biological constructs of heredity and degeneration. Her parents’ cruelty, greed, and blood lust have resulted in her vampiric nature. Nor does a society based on Social Darwinism believe Harriet could ever evolve beyond what her parents have made her. The same doctor proclaims We medical men know the consequences of heredity, better than outsiders can do. A woman born in such circumstances — bred of sensuality, cruelty, and heartlessness — cannot in the order of things, be modest, kind, or sympathetic. And she probably carries unknown dangers in her train . . . . As her mother craved for food and blood; as her father craved for inflicting needless agony on innocent creatures, and sneered meanwhile at their sufferings . . . . I am afraid I should have little faith in Miss Brandt craving for anything, except the gratification of her own senses!”38

In a similar vein, a woman in the short story “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire,” inherits classical vampiric traits that the family traces to a female 37

38

Florence Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauschnitz, 1897), 115. Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 118.

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ancestor who lived over two hundred years ago. She is reluctant to marry, telling her fiancé, “I’m afraid [of] the evil is in my blood . . . although I am unconscious of it now.”39 Indeed, her vampiric tendencies manifest themselves after marriage when she, in a trance-like state, sucks her husband’s blood while he sleeps.40 Coupled with ideologies of degeneration, miscegenation, and their attendant fears came the perception among the opinion makers of Western Europe and America of a dropping birthrate within the upper and middle classes. The best way to build a strong nation was through the birth of healthy children to healthy parents. To most Social Darwinists, the term “healthy” implied people who were educated, cultured, and moral as well as physically fit. During this period, however, the birthrate among “the trustworthy, energetic element of the population,” was dropping.41 According to authorities such as Dr. Rentoul, however, the birthrate among the poor, immoral, and diseased was quite high.42 Hence, the one group who could least afford to let its numbers drop off dwindled while the poorer, less moral classes increased.43 Interestingly, Nordau, who focused more on intellectual and moral degeneration than on purely physical degeneration, differed from a number of his colleagues. He was of the opinion that the working classes were fairly sound biologically, but that the aristocratic classes were the most degenerate and the greatest danger to the national health.44 For observers and intellectuals in all of these countries, a falling birthrate was of particular concern, in light of their rivalries with each other, and the way in which Social Darwinists viewed war. In his other major work, The Descent of Man, Darwin discussed formerly virile native tribes in the Americas, Africa, and Australia and their extinction upon

39

40

41

42 43 44

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Alice and Claude Askew, “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire,” 1914, Dracula’s Brood: Rare Vampire Stories by Friends and Contemporaries of Bram Stoker, Ed. Richard Dalby, (London: Crucible, 1987), 276–292, 282. Although contrary to Social Darwinist views of heredity as inescapable, in this story, the woman’s inherited vampirism is exorcised by the eponymous hero, and she goes on to have a happy, peaceful marriage. Arnold White, The Problems of a Great City, (London: Remington, 1886), 30; Geoffrey Alderman, Modern Britain: 1700–1983, A  Domestic History, (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 161. Rentoul, Race Culture, 42. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 218. Nordau, Degeneration, 2.

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their contact and competition with Europeans.45 Darwin’s readers were therefore aware of the danger groups of “superior” strength and blood posed to inferior groups, a concept known as survival of the fittest. In this context, war between nations acted as the ultimate test of Social Darwinist superiority for any society. Winning proved the strength of the winning nation while the losing nation deserved their fate through having demonstrated their weakness.46 Good citizens were willing to fight for their country and were successful in doing so.47 The necessity of training children to be athletic, strong, and healthy in preparation for being soldiers was emphasized.48 Pacifism, on the other hand, meant treasonous subversion of both a nation’s superiority and the scientific principles of survival of the fittest.49 To varying degrees, these principles of war and superiority led to an almost obsessive adherence to theories of degeneration in the countries of Western Europe and America. Due to its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, France was one of the most concerned with the future health of its citizens. Its thinkers and scientists, searching for agents of France’s downfall, fastened on the physical, mental, moral, and militarily degenerative effects of alcohol and syphilis in particular.50 The children of alcoholics would be “unstable or feeble individuals, idiots, epileptics, and the tubercular,” all ending up as parasites of the state — national vampires.51 Throughout the Third Republic, the French concentrated on rebuilding and demonstrating the superiority of their nation. Germany, the nation that had bested France, needed to maintain its superior position. The Germans had achieved national unification only recently, and remained vulnerable to internal instability. Rapid industrialization accompanied unification, leading to the mushrooming problem of urban poverty and disease and all of the degenerative elements this entailed. Controlling poverty-related suffering through science also 45

46 47

48 49 50 51

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1859 & 1871 (New York: Random House, 1990), 542–4. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 209–10. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel: 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 183. Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 185, 189, 191. Clark, Social Darwinism in France, 166. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics, 155, 157, 161. Cited in Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics, 235.

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allowed the Second Reich to combat the nascent Socialist movement, which threatened political stability even as it sought to correct injustices.52 Great Britain had spent most of the nineteenth century leading the world in industrial wealth and imperial power. This confidence and complacency, however, began changing with Germany’s ascendancy. Overnight, Germany became a serious economic and military rival and the British feared that they were in danger of slipping into inferiority. The watershed of British concern over degeneration, however, came with the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century. An alarming number of recruits in the Boer War had been rejected — undernourished and physically weak men of the working class — and the war itself had been more difficult to win than originally predicted.53 Doctor Rentoul was not alone in proclaiming that “breeding an imperial race from degenerates must fail.”54 Responding to these fears, emphasis was placed on the idea that “the greatest asset which [the] nation has is physical health, not wealth.”55 Discourses regarding degeneration, like all racial issues, took on greater complexity as well as greater urgency in the United States. In the wake of the Civil War, former black slaves became free men and free agents, with no formal constraints on their behavior or movements. Many people, particularly Southerners, became anxious, almost paranoid, that in the absence of social constraints, blacks and whites would intermarry, thus weakening and degrading the national population. This required the creation of new social paradigms to ensure that the races remained segregated — the so-called “Jim Crow” laws.56 Southern racists swore that their “blood today is absolutely pure; and it is the inflexible resolution of the South to preserve that purity, no matter how dear the cost.”57 Ideas regarding degeneration and the international survival of the fittest fed the discourse on aliens and immigration. Britain and the United States in particular had to contend with a tide of immigrants surging across their shores during this period. To the native inhabitants of these countries, 52

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54 55 56

57

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Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 1, 13, 16. Frans Coetzee, For Party or Country? Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 39. Rentoul, Race Culture, 7. Rentoul, Race Culture, 23. Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 221. Smith, “The Color Line,” 69.

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the majority of the new arrivals appeared poor, dirty, and uneducated.58 Immigrants, mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe, mostly working class, also had high birthrates.59 Joseph Banister, a rabidly anti-Semitic journalist, asserted that “the aliens multiply like the insect parasites.”60 If, adhering to the ideas of Social Darwinists, immigrants remained in the racial state in which they arrived, their inferiority would contaminate and weaken the collective strength of the nation. It was only a matter of time before racially inferior immigrants became the majority of the population.61 Viewed in this light, immigrants acted as biological vampires, spreading their weaknesses as the vampire spread his to his victims. If they damaged the metaphorical body of the state, Britain or America could lose their battle for survival of the fittest among their rivals.62 The majority of native Britons and Americans believed that they were, as a race, superior to other nations. Of course, they did not believe that all of their citizens were of equally superior racial stock. The working classes were often viewed as biologically predestined to poverty, immorality, and crime, American blacks were especially reviled in the Southern United States, and the Irish were a by-word in England for savages.63 But the poor, the Irish, and blacks were a pre-existing problem, which could not be extricated easily from the fabric of the national life, while immigrants posed problems that could be prevented from reaching Britain and America’s shores. A casual observer might have thought that with their long history of receiving immigrants, the United States already knew how to deal with them. However, the racial makeup of immigrants during our period differed markedly from that of immigrants in the first half of the nineteenth century. Previous waves of immigrants consisted of people from the West and North of Europe — Anglo-Saxons or other groups near the favored end of the racial spectrum. The new waves of immigrants included large numbers of people from Southern and Eastern Europe — Italians, Slavs, and Jews.64 Racial lines 58

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60 61 62

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Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace,” (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 145. David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 171. Joseph Banister, England Under the Jews, (London, 1907), 7. Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 199. John Garrard, The English and Immigration: 1880–1910 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 18. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 74. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 65.

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between these people and those with more Anglo-Saxon backgrounds were less visible than between whites and blacks, which only served to increase the anxiety of contemporaries over new racial paradigms regarding the new immigrants. American scientists and thinkers actually spilled more ink over defining the racial attributes of the new immigrants and how best to control them than they did over Southern blacks.65 Of more immediate concern, however, immigrants themselves were viewed as vectors of infectious diseases, their ships and neighborhoods the breeding grounds of potential epidemics that could devastate the inhabitants of their adopted country. Of the many emigrating nationalities, the two largest groups consisted of Italians and East European Jews, and these two groups were connected with the spread of diseases associated with poverty and immigration — typhus fever and cholera.66 Both groups of immigrants were also considered prone to their own particular diseases: the Italians to polio and the Jews to tuberculosis.67 The government became increasingly involved in regulating immigration, attempting to screen all incoming refugees at their ports of origin as well as their ports of arrival. For most travelers, these were Hamburg and New York City; respectively the first and second busiest ports in the world at that time. Immigration facilities in New York City alone processed 75% of all new arrivals to the United States; as the decades passed, new arrivals were increasingly screened for a variety of diseases and deported if any were detected.68 Reasonable as this sounds in theory, in practice scientific concerns shielded the enactment of other prejudices. One of these had to do with class. For several decades, first and second class passengers had received more cursory medical examinations and fewer detentions for medical reasons than the immigrants in steerage. This oversight was potentially disastrous. The proximity of classes aboard ship for an extended period of time and the sharing of all water supplies meant that despite different Social Darwinian backgrounds, illness aboard ship could strike on 65 66

67 68

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Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 155–56. Kraut, Silent Travelers, 136, 143; Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 16, 89. Kraut, Silent Travelers, 110, 155–56. Despite the tightening of these health measures, the number of people forced to return to their port of origin due to disease never exceeded 3% of those processed. Kraut, Silent Travelers, 66; Markel, Quarantine!, 9.

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an equal-opportunity basis. Health officials, obsessed with preventing the unwashed masses from infecting the public, overlooked the potential danger from the higher class passengers. This began to change at the turn of the twentieth century, due in part to the ascendancy of germ theory and a better understanding of how infectious diseases spread. Officials also became aware that immigrants sometimes traveled by cabin in an attempt to evade medical examinations.69 Another prejudice given new sanction through medical science was anti-Semitism. Of the many emigrating nationalities, one of the largest groups consisted of East European Jews.70 As such, immigrant Jews became synonymous with carriers of infectious diseases, such as cholera, which, according to contemporaries, “originate[d] in the homes of this human riff-raff.”71 The Russian Jew was portrayed as “a man who probably has never washed in his life; . . . who certainly has worn the rags upon him as many years as these rags would hold together.”72 One English nurse claimed that she had never encountered such squalidness even among the Irish, another ethnic group viewed by many Anglo-Saxon opinion-makers as dirty, poor, and disease-ridden. Many Englishmen viewed the Irish as the epitome of ignorance, superstition, and barbarity; for anyone to say that the Jews were worse was making an extremely serious accusation.73 These beliefs fueled movements that sought to restrict immigration. Jews were considered by them “offensive enough at best; [but] under the present circumstances [of a potential cholera epidemic], they are a positive menace to the health of the country.”74 After several epidemics in New York City in the early 1890s, it became standard practice to quarantine ships whose ports of origin had experienced recent outbreaks of infectious diseases. Ships carrying East European Jews, however, were routinely quarantined irrespective of their port of origin.75 These general health concerns coupled with the cholera epidemics of the early 1890s produced nearly identical political caricatures in both Great Britain and America. The first image, taken from the British humor 69 70 71 72 73

74 75

Markel, Quarantine!, 92. Kraut, Silent Travelers, 136, 143; Markel, Quarantine!, 16, 89. Markel, Quarantine!, 88. Markel, Quarantine!, 157. Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origin of the Aliens Act of 1905, (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972), 47. Markel, Quarantine!, 88, 145. Markel, Quarantine!, 74.

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magazine Punch (3.1), depicts a crowded immigrant ship with its passengers waiting to disembark. The first figure in line is a shrouded skeleton with the label “Cholera” hanging above his head. Blocking Cholera’s path is the figure of Britannia, sternly ordering it “Back!”76 Significantly, second in line behind Cholera — the only immigrant figure with a clearly visible and recognizable face — is an immigrant with a stereotypically Jewish nose. The message is clear. Not only do immigrants carry disease, but more particularly Jewish immigrants carry disease to their host countries.

3.1 “Back!” Taken from Punch, September 10th, 1892.

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Punch, September 10th, 1892.

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These sentiments are echoed in the American magazine The Judge (3.2). This time, the cartoonist presents the viewer with a pair of immigrants approaching American ports, arms linked with a skeletal figure wearing the hooded robe associated with death, and the words “Asiatic Cholera” emblazoned across his chest.77 The figure on Cholera’s left probably represents a Slavic peasant. The figure on Cholera’s right is clearly an East European Jew with hooked nose, curly beard, and ragged clothes — the perfect vector for spreading disease among healthy, unsuspecting American citizens. All three figures arrive at the gates of America to find the doors barred, bearing the sign “Closed to Immigrants from Cholera Stricken Countries.” In the background perches the figure of Uncle Sam, leaning over the walls of the American fortress and supervising the barring of dangerous, disease-ridden immigrants.

3.2 “They come arm in arm: American seaports must close their gates to them all.” Taken from The Judge, September 17th, 1892

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These two images were published a week apart. It is impossible to say whether or not the American caricaturist was directly influenced by the British caricaturist, or whether he had even seen the earlier cartoon. Despite the improvements in sea travel by this time, communication was not instantaneous as it is today. The Judge, September 17th, 1892.

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Ultimately, many American thinkers and politicians feared that the Anglo-Saxon majority, with all of their positive attributes, would be overrun by the new immigrants of dubious racial stock. Already in the large port city of New York, observers commented that “one may find for the asking an Italian, a German, a French, African, Spanish, Bohemian, Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese colony . . . The one thing you shall vainly ask for in the chief city of America is a distinctively American community.”78 Chinese immigration to the Pacific coast had already resulted in a number of protests and even riots led by the white population. The United States finally took legislative action against these unwanted racial infusions, passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which severely curtailed Chinese immigration.79 After World War One, similar legislation cut down on immigration from racially problematic areas of Europe.80 In 1905, Great Britain passed the Alien Act, which restricted immigration, bringing their flow of incoming foreigners down to a trickle within a few years.81 Another area in which Social Darwinism had a strong impact was the legal system. Before the nineteenth century, Western jurisprudence was based in large part on the concept of morality, of the criminal’s free will in choosing to commit his crime and of deserving his consequent punishment. This worked well as a moral philosophy, although in practice, it often failed to take into account mitigating factors, such as socio-economic status or mental health.82 As science continued to gain influence and legitimacy, people questioned whether crime was indeed tied to free will, or perhaps rooted in the physical rather than the spiritual realm — something people could not necessarily control or for which they might not be held accountable.83 One of the first significant attempts to find scientific roots for human behavior was the work of Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) in the early nineteenth century. Gall studied phrenology, the idea that character 78

79 80 81 82

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Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, 1890, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1970), 18. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 75; Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, 115. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 201. Gainer, Alien Invasion, 191. Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology, (Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2002), 10. Martin Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830– 1914, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 236.

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traits — such as honesty or courage — manifested themselves in the shape of the human skull. Someone who knew how to read the placement and size of bumps or dents on a person’s head could form accurate and impartial assessments of their propensity for certain crimes.84 The science of phrenology, though popular, was short-lived. The idea that personality, habits, and morals manifested themselves physically, however, remained a serious and legitimate theory throughout the century.85 It matched the Social Darwinist theory that criminal tendencies were inherited and incorrigible, and that criminals had little control over their anti-social behavior.86 Rentoul opined that criminals should never be educated beyond the rudiments of learning a trade, as this would only “give [society] a large crop of clever, able, and cunning criminals.”87 All of this created one of the most significant offshoots of Social Darwinism: Criminal Anthropology. Scientists involved in Criminal Anthropology built on Gall’s earlier efforts with phrenology, studying the bodies of criminals, searching for physical characteristics that could identify them, allowing the public to recognize perpetrators more easily and to prevent crimes.88 Among the most famous and influential of its proponents was the Italian scientist, Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909). In the early 1870s, Lombroso began by measuring the skulls and facial features of members of the Italian army, later expanding his research to asylum inmates and prisoners.89 He claimed to have found shared abnormal physical traits which set criminals apart from the morally healthy, law-abiding population. In 1876, he published L’Uomo Delinquente, where he explained that his research had led him to conclude that a criminal was “an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals” — a person degenerating towards his ancestor the caveman.90 The criminal, moreover, displayed bestial features, Lombroso drawing a clear connection between “the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, size of the

84

85 86 87 88 89 90

Richard Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 17–19. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 74. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics, 65, 129. Rentoul, Race Culture, xii. Harris, Murders and Madness, 61. Gibson, Born to Crime, 20, 22; Barzun, Race, 116–7. Cited in Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics, 99.

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orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages and apes.”91 Lombroso dissected criminals after they had been executed and concluded that physical markings of the criminal went beyond the facial to “cranial anomalies . . . [as well as anomalies of the] brain . . . skeleton, heart, genital organs, and stomach.”92 He further noted the tendency of criminals to have degenerate relatives such as alcoholics, prostitutes, and the mentally or physically disabled.93 These were Lombroso’s “Born Criminals,” who could not help their propensity towards crime, and who threatened to destabilize society through their actions.94 Lombroso had a great impact on the way most people mentally classified the criminal. Rentoul echoes Lombroso’s list of bestial features by describing a criminal as a “strongly built, bandylegged, stout man, with a low retreating forehead and the expression of a gorilla . . . a dangerous animal.”95 Most interesting of all, Lombroso concluded his list of criminal characteristics with descriptions that call to mind the vampire. He ascribed to the criminal an “irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.”96 This diagnosis was a pronouncement on the regressive barbarity of the criminal. The image of drinking blood calls to mind the vampire, who now appeared as a serial killer as well as a supernatural monster. And Lombroso’s words also linked criminal behavior and the criminal’s racial makeup with that of Jews. The German 91 92

93

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95 96

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Cited in Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics, 99. Cesare Lombroso, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, Trans. Henry Horton (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1918), xvii-xviii. As popular and authoritative as Criminal Anthropology and Cesare Lombroso were, it is important to note that no absolute consensus regarding the causes of crime ever existed among contemporary scientists. One study correlated the price of food with the prevalence of crime. Another claimed that whatever inherited propensities one possesses, it requires the correct social environment to bring them out. A careful study of Lombroso’s work indicates his own ambivalence; he believed in both theories simultaneously. Lombroso, Crime, 155; Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal, 23; Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics, 104; Gibson, Born to Crime, 3, 24. The destabilizing of society by born criminals was of particular worry to Lombroso’s contemporaries, since Italy had undergone unification so recently and stability had only recently been restored. Concerns of this nature were also particularly significant in Germany, although as I have already commented in the section regarding Social Darwinism and the national rivalries of all the major Western countries, this sort of concern registered all over the Western world. Gibson, Born to Crime, 2. Rentoul, Race Culture, 35. Cited in Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics, 100.

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composer and notorious anti-Semite, Richard Wagner, would have agreed with the implications of Lombroso’s statement, since he believed that Jews were congenitally attracted to “blood and corpses.”97 The concept of drinking blood recalled the blood libel, still prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, and even seemed to lend scientific credence to a suspicion that originated in religion. Nor was this the only anti-Semitic strain in Lombroso’s theories. One important feature of Lombroso’s born criminal was a “nose . . . [that is] aquiline, like the beak of a bird of prey.”98 Lombroso himself may not have meant to link Jews and criminality, but later readers, like those of Darwin, drew their own conclusions. Criminals featured stereotypical Jewish noses; Jews were likely to be criminals. The discourse of both criminal anthropology and its anti-Semitic offshoots appear in Dracula. Stoker’s characters are great believers in the equation of physiognomy with character. Upon first meeting van Helsing, Harker remarks that no one “with eyebrows like” the professor’s could experience serious doubt or hesitation.99 Stoker’s heroes do not hesitate to use science to explain and solve their perplexities. After Mina Harker declares that Count Dracula is a “criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind,” the protagonists are able to vanquish him.100 Physical descriptions of Dracula mirror descriptions of Jews in both contemporary newspapers and fiction.101 Harker describes the Count as having “a very strong . . . aquiline [nose], with [a] high bridge and peculiarly arched nostrils; [a] lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily about the temples but profusely elsewhere.”102 Other descriptions later in the book always emphasize his “beaky nose.”103 Dracula’s physical attributes are stereotypically Jewish features, as well as a perfect match for most 97

98

99 100 101

102

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Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 204. Cited in Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and The Legend: A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece ( Northhamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1985), 211. Stoker, Dracula, 232. Stoker, Dracula, 403. Judith Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Cultural Politics at the Fin-de-Siècle, Ed. Sally Ledger & Scott McCracken, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 248–266, 252. Bram Stoker, The Essential Dracula: The Definitive Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel, 1897, Ed. Leonard Wolf, (New York: Penguin, 1993), 25. Stoker, Dracula, 215.

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of Lombroso’s outward signs of the criminal. That Dracula has all of the physical signs of both Jew and criminal leads the reader to speculate that Stoker took his description word for word out of Lombroso’s Criminal Man. Dracula’s nose is hooked, he has bushy eyebrows, pointed ears, sharp teeth, and ugly fingers. Images of bestiality are also associated with Lombroso’s criminals, and Dracula is portrayed as a very bestial character. Aside from his ability to turn himself into animals such as bats and dogs, Dracula can control wolves and rats.104 Moreover, Dracula exhibits Nordau’s signs of mental degeneration — he is fixated on death.105 As mentioned throughout this chapter, anti-Jewish prejudices manifested themselves in a wide range of scientific discourses. Accusing Jews of threatening society was not new, although now the paradigms had shifted. In the atmosphere of science and anticlericalism, the discourse of anti-Semitism changed as well.106 In the past, Christians had vilified Jews for their religious practices, which posed a threat to their religious identity.107 Most assaults on the community were religious in origin and Jews were accepted into Christian society if they converted.108 Now, however, anti-Jewish biases had become reconfigured as something worthy of scientific logic. The new classification of man’s identity rested in blood and race rather than religious affiliation. Jews had remained a distinct group for centuries, and observers speculated that the basis of the Jews’ group identity was not only in their religious affiliation, but in their blood.109 Scientists classified Jews as a race, their attributes a matter of scientific heredity.110 Changing religious affiliation no longer effected a real change in one’s identity; as the explorer, travel writer, and diplomat Richard Burton wrote about Disraeli: “even the waters of baptism [cannot] wash away blood.”111 Opinion makers such as Arnold White (1848–1925) and Goldwin Smith (1823– 104

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109 110 111

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Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and The Legend, 211; Earnest Fontana, “Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Stoker’s Dracula,” Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, ed. Margaret Carter, (London: UMI Research Press, 1988), 159–165, 161; Stoker, Dracula, 287. Nordau, Degeneration, 296. Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 39. Gavin Langmuir, History, Religion, and Anti-Semitism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 292–3. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1986), 211. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Anti-Semitism, 341. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 236. Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 55.

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Science, Blood, and Identity

1910) concluded that “the peculiar characteristics usually associated with the Hebrew community are not religious, but racial,” and that Jews were “not merely people holding a different creed, but aliens in the blood.”112 Reflecting the superiority of the new, intellectual paradigms of science rather than the superstition of religion, the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) wrote, “what the peoples of the middle ages hated by instinct, I hate upon reflection and irrevocably.”113 These intellectual changes led to the creation of the term ‘anti-Semitism,’ which strove to convey a scientific rather than religious animosity. While the new term ‘anti-Semisism’ should have indicated a prejudice towards all people of Middle Eastern or Arab descent, in practice it referred only to Jews.114 Scientific anti-Semitism manifested itself in numerous ways. In addition to those already mentioned, such as immigration and criminal anthropology, Jews played a prominent role in debates regarding both degeneration and miscegenation. Anti-Semites considered Jews racially inferior as well as racially distinct.115 Now aware of microbes, instead of claiming that Jews of poisoned wells, people accused the Jews of carrying germs and poisoning the body politic as “ten grains of arsenic in . . . one loaf would kill the whole family that partook of it.”116 Joseph Banister painted the Jews as crawling with “trachoma, spotted fever, cancer, lupus, leprosy, and favus,” not to mention “loathsome eye, skin, and blood diseases,” which they were happy to pass along to the gentiles.117 Jews could contaminate the national health by spreading diseases, just as vampires could contaminate blood and pass along their condition. Social Darwinists considered Jewish heredity particularly sinister and degenerative. In the German novel The Department Store, the Jewish department store magnate marries a Christian woman. His eldest son and his daughter Took after their mother . . . But in Hermann [the youngest] the paternal descent was very strongly marked. His nose stuck out from his long, pale face like a gargoyle. In his short-sighted, ambiguous eyes there was 112

113 114 115 116 117

Cited in Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 91; Arnold White, The Modern Jew (London: William Heinemann, 1899), 4. Cited in Pick, Svengali’s Web, 208. Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, 58. Gainer, The Alien Invasion, 113. Cited in Gainer, The Alien Invasion, 128. Gainer, The Alien Invasion, 128; Banister, England Under the Jews, iii, 9.

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a restless, cunning glitter, and under the thick dark moustache the mouth betrayed a curious mixture of brutality and false sweetness.118

While his elder brother is a model of economic and social probity, Hermann is weak and dishonest, attributes linked with his Jewish heredity, along with his nose and eyes. Similarly, in Henry Seton Merriman’s (1862–1903) novel From One Generation to Another, the description of the Jewish villain Seymour Michael lists nearly every physical attribute associated with Jews. Michael’s forehead . . . [is] high and strangely rounded . . .[ he has] black eyes . . .[,] dark hair with a sallow complexion and a long drooping nose — the nose of Semitic ancestors . . .subtle eyes . . .[, and] slightly bowed legs — . . . [also] a racial defect handed down like the nasal brand from remote progenitors.119

These physical attributes dovetail with similarly unsavory moral characteristics, from “that racial love of an expletive which makes a Jew a profane man,” to his “racial terror of physical ailment.”120 Jewish blood was clearly regarded as a dangerous, degenerative element which could corrupt anyone. In his best-selling novel Trilby, George du Maurier (1834–1896) describes his villain Svengali, a fullblooded Eastern European Jew, as “well-featured but sinister . . .very shabby and dirty, . . . [with] thick, heavy, languid, lustreless black hair . . .bold, brilliant black eyes, with long heavy lids, [and] a thin, sallow face.”121 As if this description was not enough to signal that Svengali is an unsavory character, du Maurier supplements this physical description with others comparing Svengali’s looks to “a sticky, haunting, long, lean, uncanny, black spider-cat” and his voice to a “hoarse, rasping, nasal, throaty rook’s caw, [with] his big yellow teeth baring themselves in a mongrel canine snarl.”122 Du Maurier lavished Svengali with negative Social Darwinist attributes. Like other East European immigrants, Svengali is portrayed as filthy and unkempt. His meager attempt at washing involves “pour[ing] a little water out of a little jug into a little basin, and twisting the corner of 118

119

120

121 122

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Margarete Böhme, The Department Store: A Novel of Today, Trans. Ethel Coburn Mayne, (New York: D Appleton & Company, 1912), 38. Henry Seton Merriman, From One Generation to Another, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1892), 1–2. Given this belief, one has to wonder why Merriman chose to make Michael a professional soldier. Merriman, From One Generation to Another, 15, 30. George du Maurier, Trilby, 1894, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11. Du Maurier, Trilby, 73, 92.

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his pocket-handkerchief round his dirty forefinger, . . . delicately dipp[ing] it and remov[ing] the offending stains.”123 Svengali later doubles over laughing upon finding two of the three English heroes bathing. Moreover, Svengali is an intellectual degenerate according to Nordau’s description. He displays Nordau’s definition of egomania, by being “violent, especially to those who are weaker than themselves, humble and submissive towards those they feel to be stronger.”124 Svengali has a ghoulish imagination, which Nordau would describe as a “predilection for disease, death and putrefaction,” and imagines looking at the heroine Trilby’s skeleton in a “nice little mahogany glass case . . . in the museum of the École de Médecine.”125 As a Jew, he is also portrayed as a vampire figure, a parasite, and a figure obsessed with the grotesque and with death. His Jewish ancestry acts as an agent of his degeneration, and as a degenerative figure, it is not surprising that he dies in his fifties “from heart disease.”126 In the past, religious leaders had written discourses either attacking or defending the Jews. Now this task fell to scientists. Lombroso, known for his work in criminal anthropology and himself a Jew, wrote a book about anti-Semitism. In it he attempted to examine and explain the phenomenon scientifically.127 His book defended Jews against anti-Semitism, which he likened to a social disease. French scientist Vachez de Lapouge (1854– 1936) considered the Jews an ethnological rather than a biological race.128 Likewise, Lombroso, contrary to the tenets of biological Social Darwinism, saw the Jews as products of their environment, taking on the characteristics of their host societies — simultaneously Semitic and Aryan.129 He posited that the cure would be the assimilation of the Jews, blaming them for encouraging stereotypes by clinging to superstitious customs — especially circumcision, which he likened to regressive cannibalism.130 123 124 125 126

127

128 129 130

Du Maurier, Trilby, 47. Nordau, Degeneration, 244. Nordau, Degeneration, 296; du Maurier, Trilby, 92. Brian Cheyette, Constructions of the Jew in English Literature and Social Racial Representations, 1875–1945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 63; du Maurier, Trilby, 265. Lombroso was himself a Jew, which is interesting to consider in light of the anti-Semitic strains present in his works. Nancy Harrowitz, Anti-Semitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 41. Clark, Social Darwinism in France, 150. Gibson, Born to Crime, 106–7. Harrowitz, Anti-Semitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference, 51, 53.

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Religious Jews probably did not think much of Lombroso’s advocacy of assimilation, but the inherent tension between their opinions and Lombroso’s underscores the antagonism of science and religion towards each other during this period. Those who had not abandoned their religious faith regarded the new scientific creed as a shift towards amorality.131 A number of French novels of this period depicted their characters, misled by reading Darwin, as cut adrift from their moral moorings, committing murder, adultery, and suicide without remorse.132 In the eyes of the devout, Social Darwinism rejected the tenets of both work and faith, denying the possibility of change and transcendence and trapping its believers in a cage of blood and heredity.133 Anti-clerical scientists, on the other hand, saw religion as irrational, superstitious, and backwards, with old-fashioned notions of morality interfering with the best scientific methods of improving human reproduction.134 French scientist Clemance Royer (1830–1902) dismissed religion as a “sickness of exhaustion and apathy” among its adherents.135 For those concerned with racial degeneration of the nation, improving human reproduction through science topped the list of important projects. Whether as a result of unwelcome immigrants, hereditary criminals, or diseased Jews, their solution, aside from anti-immigration legislation, was eugenics. Eugenics represented an attempt on the part of Western society at engaging in scientific social engineering. Its proponents divided mankind into the ‘fit’ and the ‘unfit,’ or those who were physically and mentally healthy and those who were not. They believed that science could allow them to objectively gauge and control reproduction, ensuring that the growing population consisted of healthy, productive members of society.136 This was essential, because the unfit were viewed as parasites. They fed off of the efforts of the healthy population without contributing anything in return. Eugenicists such as Karl Pearson (1857–1936) viewed the unfit as dangerous, like that classical parasite, the vampire, because if they became the majority of the population, “the parasite [would] kill its host, and so end the tale for both [groups] alike.”137 Eugenics offered two ways of preventing 131 132 133 134 135 136 137

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Clark, Social Darwinism in France, 2. Clark, Social Darwinism in France, 2. Biddis, Father of Racist Ideology, 137. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 143, 195. Cited in Clark, Social Darwinism in France, 14. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 217–18. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 228.

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this potential disaster. The fit population needed to ensure that they married healthy partners and had healthy children. The racially inferior and biologically unfit needed to be kept from further breeding, preferably through sterilization.138 Dr. Rentoul, commenting that people paid more attention to breeding animals than citizens, recommended “an operation consist[ing] in excising . . . in the male, the . . . spermatic cords, and in the female, the fallopian tubes” for those deemed unfit for reproduction.139 Anti-alien politician Arnold White went so far as to suggest that “the propagation of diseased or infected constitutions shall be condemned, or even regarded as criminal.”140 Du Maurier’s heroes agreed with such pronouncements. Upon hearing that a friend intends to marry an heiress who is “deformed — [who] squints — [who]’s a dwarf, and looks like an idiot,” the heroes of Trilby denounce their friend as someone who “dishonors himself, insults his ancestry, and inflicts upon his descendents a wrong that nothing will redeem.”141 Marryat’s Harriet Brandt comes to share this opinion once she learns the truth of her tainted ancestry and its present effect on both herself and those around her. When she realizes the full extent of her vampiric characteristics, she castigates her parents, not only as people of tainted attributes, but as eugenically irresponsible beings who committed the ultimate sin of having dared to bring her into the world, an innocent yet hapless child of sin — the inheritor of their evil propensities — of their lust, their cruelty, their sensuality, their gluttony — and worst of all, the fatal heritage that made her a terror and a curse to her fellow-creatures? How dared they? How dared they? Why had God’s vengeance not fallen upon them before they had completed their cruel work, or having accomplished it, why did He not let her perish with them — so that the awful power with which they had imbued her, might have been prevented from harming others?142

At the end of the novel, her vampirism having caused the death of her husband, Harriet commits suicide. In her farewell letter, she explains that due to her hereditary circumstances, “My parents have made me unfit to 138 139 140 141 142

Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 22. Rentoul, Race Culture, 144. White, The Problems of a Great City, 30. du Maurier, Trilby, 233. Italics are taken from the text. Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 298.

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live. Let me go to a world where the curse of heredity which they laid upon me may be mercifully wiped out.”143 Ultimately, the new science of eugenics rather than any ancient vampire lore defeats Count Dracula. Stoker’s characters deal with Dracula in the same way that Social Darwinists attempted to deal with hereditary criminals, which was to sterilize them through applied eugenics. Like the immigrants, Dracula presents a threat to Britain’s racial makeup; he is racially degenerate and very fertile compared to the native British population.144 The solution is to physically remove the contaminants from society in order that society may remain healthy and pure. The language used by Stoker is very suggestive. Van Helsing and his helpers “sterilize” Count Dracula’s coffins of native soil with communion wafers so that he cannot find refuge during the day.145 Next, the heroes travel back to Transylvania to sterilize the source of the vampire infestation, Dracula’s castle.146 In the words of a reviewer, Count Dracula is “exterminated.”147 Although eugenics would be heinously misapplied later in the twentieth century, at its inception in the late nineteenth century, it was espoused by liberals. Its founders viewed it idealistically as a way to alleviate and over time eliminate the suffering caused by such ills as alcoholism, venereal disease, and hereditary criminality. All four of our subject countries possessed eugenic societies in the decade before World War One.148 Blood formed the key to scientific progress. One of the necessary biological components shared by all mankind, it served simultaneously as the source of all differences. It contained each person’s physical, mental, and moral makeup, defining their station in life and their future, controlling the hereditary legacy parents bequeathed to their children for good or for ill. Like a vampire’s victims, society could be most effectively weakened by attacking its blood. Blood determined all forms of identity, rationalized racial or religious prejudice, and codified criminal acts or class-related issues under a different name. In science, blood meant everything — literally. As we shall see in the next chapter, it meant nearly everything to the economy as well — metaphorically. 143 144 145 146 147

148

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Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 318. Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and The Legend, 191; Arata, “The Occidental Tourist,” 631. Stoker, Dracula, 354. Friedrich Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” Stanford Humanities Review, (1), 143–73, 165. “Review of Dracula,” Spectator, July 31, 1897, 150–1, Cited in Carol Senf, Ed. The Critical Response to Bram Stoker, (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), 60–1. Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, 9.

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4

THE LIFE-BLOOD OF COMMERCE Vampires and Economic Discourse

SCIENTIFIC discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries centered on blood as the agent of identity and wellbeing. Economic and political discourse focused on the metaphorical bodies of the state, its industries, and its governance. These institutions underwent frequent anthropomorphic personification, both rhetorically and visually, lending themselves easily to metaphors of blood and vampirism. A corrupt politician or power-hungry businessman might be likened to a vampire attacking the life-blood of the economy or the body politic; capitalists could be charged with draining and killing both their workers and their competition. Although metaphorical rather than actual, blood played as central a role in economics and politics as in science. The last quarter of the nineteenth century was an economic period that witnessed considerable changes in the economic power structures of our four countries. Depending on the financial position of any particular country or industry, this could be a time fraught with anxiety or abounding in growth and dynamism. One cause for anxiety was an economic and agricultural depression that hit Western Europe and America in Blood Will Tell

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1873, lasting until 1896. Not to be confused with the worldwide “Great Depression” of the 1930s, the depression of the late nineteenth century involved the decrease of prices, profits, and interest rates, while industrial production and trade increased overall.1 The circumstances of the depression era and its accompanying anxieties for the economic elite varied from country to country. Great Britain had enjoyed an early start in transitioning from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy around the turn of the nineteenth century, particularly in manufacturing cloth, which it then shipped all over the world.2 By the 1870s, however, Britain’s formerly cutting-edge factories no longer enjoyed an indisputable lead against their competition. Countries such as Germany and the United States were now industrializing as well, with more up-to-date machinery in new industrial fields, such as chemicals and electricity.3 Great Britain remained a powerful economic force despite the dual challenges of depression and aggressive competition, due in large part to her unsurpassed role in shipping goods all over the world. But the British would never again enjoy an economic or industrial monopoly.4 Many British economic leaders feared that manufactured goods, from Germany in particular, were overrunning the market.5 In 1896, journalist E. E. Williams published Made in Germany, a jeremiad warning the British public that they themselves promoted “the strides which Germany has made at England’s expense.”6 Williams regarded the situation as little short of an invasion, and told his readers to “roam the house over and the fateful mark [identifying the origin of goods] will greet you at every

1

2

3 4 5

6

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R. K. Webb, Modern England: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1968), 374; Walter Licht, Industrializing America, the Nineteenth Century, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 181; W.O. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power, 1834–1914, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 176. Although even in the heyday of British manufacturing in the first half of the nineteenth century, factory workers remained in a minority compared to agricultural and domestic labor. J.D. Chambers, The Workshop of the World: British Economic History from 1820– 1880, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 2, 12, 15. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power, 189–90. Chambers, The Workshop of the World, 1, 30, 61. Webb, Modern England, 368; Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origin of the Aliens Act of 1905, (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972), 142. E. E. Williams, Made in Germany (London: William Heinemann, 1896), 156.

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Vampires and Economic Discourse

turn.”7 In agriculture, cheap wheat arrived via Russia and America. New technologies of canning and refrigeration also meant that preserved fruits as well as beef from Australia or Argentina now became available in Great Britain and elsewhere.8 Some observers worried that this dependence on imported agriculture meant that in the event of war and a naval blockade, Britain would be inadequately prepared to feed itself.9 Germany experienced a mini-boom immediately before the onset of the depression, due partly to its victory in the Franco-Prussian war, and to the French indemnity pumping extra money into the economy. In fact, this surge of cash set off inflation before triggering a depression.10 The British viewed German industries as threatening their hegemony, but in Germany itself, public perception exaggerated the precariousness of Germany’s economic position; they were the ones attempting to catch up with Britain and join the ranks of the international industrial powers. The Depression hit the agricultural sector hardest. German industries were modernizing, but not their farms. The American and Russian grain that worried Britain arrived in Germany too.11 America’s agricultural boom did not translate automatically into economic security or complacency. Economic growth was divided unevenly throughout. The industrial centers in the Northeast and Midwest enjoyed a steady rate of expansion that made America the rival of Great Britain and Germany by the turn of the twentieth century.12 The South and the West, however, did not fare so well. Losing the Civil War had heavy consequences for the South: the war had disrupted its thriving cotton production, and the breakup of the plantation economy with its reliance on slave labor inhibited efforts to revive it after the war.13 Especially compared with its antebellum prosperity, the South was plunged into poverty. The Western farmers producing the wheat appearing in global markets did not see most of the profits from their grain production: their farms were often heavily 7 8 9

10 11

12

13

Williams, Made in Germany, 11. Chambers, The Workshop of the World, 44. Frans Coetzee, For Party or Country? Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 22. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power, 162, 169–70. Volker R. Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871–1914: Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1994), 15. Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877– 1900, (Cornell: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 19. Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 93.

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in debt, and high transportation costs ate into whatever profits they might have managed to accrue.14 The depression hit France worst of all. Only a few years earlier, it had lost the Franco-Prussian war, a heavy psychological blow by itself. Peace terms included the loss of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, the home of some of France’s most important mines and industrial centers, plus an indemnity of five billion francs.15 They paid it back two years early through the incursion of heavy debts.16 Disease, furthermore, attacked two of France’s most important industries: silk and wine. Competition from the Far East exacerbated the blow to the silk industry, which never recovered. Phylloxera crippled the wine industry, while agriculture as a whole found itself competing with American and Russian wheat imports like everyone else.17 Except for Great Britain, all of the subject countries instituted protective tariffs to protect their domestic agriculture and industries from foreign imports.18 All of the countries, without exception, used vampiric imagery to portray whatever economic sectors worried them the most. Almost the first recorded use of the word “vampire” in Western Europe came in an economic context. Referring to Dutch financiers, a British pamphlet published in 1741 complained that, Our Merchants indeed, bring money into their country, but it is said, there is another Set of Men amongst us who have as great an Address in sending out again to foreign Countries without any returns for it, which defeats the Industry of the Merchant. These are the Vampires of the Publick and Riflers of the Kingdom.19

A few decades later, Voltaire commented that, We never heard a word of vampires in London, nor even Paris. I confess that in both these cities there are stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of 14 15 16 17 18

19

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Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 224. Robert Tombs, France 1814–1914, (New York: Longman, 1996), 49. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power, 162. Tombs, France 1814–1914, 297. Toni Pierenkemper and Richard Tilly, The German Economy During the Nineteenth Century, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), 81; Tombs, France 1814–1914, 152. Cited in J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, (London: Visible Ink Press, 1999), 538; H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain (Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA, 1996), 159.

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business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted.20

One of the most influential people to use vampire metaphors in an economic context, however, came from Germany nearly a century later: Karl Marx (1818–1883). Marx was highly critical of the economic and industrial systems that had begun developing in Western Europe and America during the second half of the eighteenth century. This shift, which first manifested itself in Great Britain, combined the invention of machines allowing greater speed and efficiency in turning raw materials into finished products with a change in the venue of production from families in their homes to individually hired workers in factories.21 Unfortunately, the industries that mushroomed around the beginning of the nineteenth century developed faster than protective legislation could be enacted to shield the workers that sustained it. Despite protective legislation enacted by Great Britain in the 1840s, many factories came to embody monstrous abuses perpetrated on factory workers by factory owners.22 These included dangerous machinery with few or no safeguards to avoid the serious injury or death of workers, exposure to chemicals or toxins that gave workers serious illnesses leading to their incapacitation and death, the employment of young children, and exhausting shifts lasting well over ten hours.23 Added to these abuses were the low wages employees earned for such dangerous and back-breaking work, and the perceived callousness of the factory system, which replaced spent workers with fresh ones easily. The perception went further, noting that unlike factory workers, the factory owners grew rich, profiting from the sweat and blood of their laborers, and giving no thought to their welfare except to calculate how much work could be squeezed from them before they had to be replaced.24 Marx spoke out against the industrial abuse of the working class, using rhetoric that likened capitalists to vampires. In his seminal work, 20 21

22 23

24

Cited in Melton, The Vampire Book, 538–9. Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, LTD., 1988), 1. Chambers, The Workshop of the World, 137–38. Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace,” (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 168–178; Arthur J. McIvor, A  History of Work in Britain, 1880– 1950, (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 115–130; Kenneth Morgan, The Birth of Industrial Britain: Economic Change, 1750–1850, (New York: Longman, 1999), 43–44. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race, 74–5.

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Kapital, Marx equated the insatiable need of employers for workers to ensure a constant rate of production as a “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour.”25 Likewise, he portrayed the maltreated workers as the vampire’s victims, “stunted in growth, ill-shaped, . . . .prematurely old, . . . . they are phlegmatic and bloodless.”26 A political cartoon drawn in 1885 by Englishman Walter Crane (1845–1915) in support of the Socialist cause (4.1) illustrates Marx’s imagery.27 Crane depicts a recumbent man labeled “Labor,” with three classic tools of industrial work — a spade, a pickax, and a mallet — lying beside him. An enormous vampire labeled “Capitalism” perches on his chest, sucking his blood with gusto. Its wings are labeled “Religious Hypocrisy” and “Party Politics,” two aspects of society Crane clearly believes support the suppression of workers by the vampire Capitalism. In the background stands an angel figure labeled “Socialism” blowing a horn, summoning help in saving the working man and all of the suffering workers he represents. Attempts by workers or people acting on the workers’ behalf were often met with harsh refusal and an obstinate clinging to the status quo, as shown in the American humor periodical, The Judge (4.2).28 A laborer politely but tactlessly asks for “living wages.”29 In response, the factory owner, bloated and monstrous in appearance, drapes himself protectively over his sacks of gold — many bursting at the seams — screaming hysterically for police protection from labor agitators. Marx commented sarcastically that factory owners fought the introduction of government oversights on factory work as though “any legal restriction of the hours of labour must sound the death knell of British industry, which, vampire like, could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood, too.”30 It would be an exaggeration to claim that Marx alone found that vampires made useful metaphorical stand-ins for the capitalist system of industry, for many writers echoed his rhetoric. In Middlemarch, a book 25

26 27

28 29 30

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Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867, Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 256. Marx, Das Kapital, 245. Walter Crane, “The Capitalist Vampire” Justice Journal (1885). Online. Available at: www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jcrane.htm. Tombs, France 1814–1914, 289. The Judge, July 29th, 1882, 5. Karl Marx, “The Inaugural Address of Karl Marx” to the International Workingmen’s Association, 1869, Trans. Wilhelm Eichhoff. Online. Available at: www.marxists.org/ history/international/iwma/archive/eichhoff/iwma-history/ch03.htm

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4.1 “The Capitalist Vampire” Justice Journal, 1885 Online. Available at: www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jcrane.htm

not focused on labor issues, George Eliot (1819–1880) casually describes Vincy, a prosperous cloth manufacturer, as “one of those who suck the life out of the wretched handloom weavers.”31 Zola’s Germinal, however, a novel about the coal-mining industry and its labor disputes, embodies Marx’s imagery to the letter in an excellent study of blood and vampire imagery applied to cruel economic practices. Zola’s mine and its environs appear awash in blood, from the “bloodred reflection” of the stove in the miner’s locker room to the “long trails of bloody rust on the surface of dull grey shale and sandstone” outside.32 Like 31 32

George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871, (New York: Knopf, 1991), 287. Emile Zola, Germinal, 1885, Trans. Leonard Tancock, (New York: Knopf, 1991), 72, 79.

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4.2 “Laborist vs. Capitalist” Laborist: Say Cap, I can’t support a family on this. Won’t you just give me a living wage? Capitalist: Hi! Help! Socialists! Communists! Disorganizers! Hi! Police! Call out the militia! Shoot them down! Taken from The Judge, July 29th, 1882, 5

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the workers Marx described in Kapital, Zola’s miners share the “anaemic pallor” of a vampire’s victims.33 The mine is portrayed as a vampire, devouring workers. Over the years, more than one miner has died when tunnels caved in, and “the rocks had drunk [their] blood and swallowed [their] bones;” the mine owners are castigated as “suck[ing] the blood of the poor starving devils [they] lived on.”34 Sucking blood, sweat, and work from oppressed laborers, however, was only one aspect of the vampiric tendencies inherent in industry. Another had to do with the behavior of a company towards its competition. When industrialization took hold, dozens of companies came into existence in order to carve themselves shares in the railroad, metal, or textile industries. Over time, according to economists, this jumble of companies would simplify itself gradually; the most efficient and innovative of these companies strengthening their presence in the market while weaker companies went bankrupt or found themselves bought out. A company’s growth vis-à-vis its competition, however, was initially little more regulated than a company’s behavior towards its employees. Some industrial leaders used underhanded means to cripple their competitors, put them out of business, and buy them out, leaving themselves the sole provider of their goods or services to the public. This resulted in industrial monopolies, or trusts, economic vampires exercising control over an otherwise unstable market, killing their competition slowly. Without competition, trusts could set prices as they chose, either raising or lowering prices above the market value. Raising prices made them vampires of the public, sucking up their customer’s money. This abuse is satirized in Punch (4.3), in which a rotund butcher with vampire wings and tubs of money proclaims his inflated prices imperiously to a shocked shopper. Public outrage against monopolies grew alongside the trust’s growing power; Harper’s Weekly (4.4) portrayed the “Telegraph Monopoly” as an enormously fat monster, half pot-bellied lizard with scales and tail, half quasi-human, with fangs. One hand clutches several bags of money, the other threatens the stalwart but smaller human hero, labeled “Commerce” and armed only with a club labeled “Competition.”35 Towards the turn of the twentieth century, an article in the New York Times demanded that the 33 34 35

Zola, Germinal, 30. Zola, Germinal, 26, 279–80. Harper’s Weekly, February 12, 1881, 1.

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4.3 “The Demon Butcher, or the Real Rinderpest” Taken from Punch, November 18th, 1865

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4.4 “Death to Monopoly” Taken from Harper’s Weekly, February 12th, 1881

government “protect the people against the brood of vampires in the shape of monopolies, trusts, and combines which have grown up under vicious laws badly administered.”36 The Standard Oil Company, one of the most notorious monopolies in American economic history, belonged to the Rockefeller family. At the apex of his career, John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), the founder of Standard Oil, cornered a staggering 90% of the national market.37 He muscled out his competition using every ploy available to him. Some were legitimate, such 36 37

“The South Carolina Platform,” New York Times, 22 May, 1896, 5. Louis Galambos, “The Triumph of Oligopoly,” American Economic Development in Historical Perspective, Ed. Thomas Weiss & Donald Schaefer, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 241–256, 243.

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as buying out rival companies. Others were decidedly underhanded, such as striking secret deals with railroad companies, getting reduced bulk rates for himself while preventing anyone else from transporting their products to market. Rockefeller took control of every aspect of the oil business, from refining, to storage, to transportation, giving him unparalleled power over the industry, the competition, and the consumers.38 In her scathing exposé of Standard Oil’s business practices, Ida Tarbell (1857–1944) likened Rockefeller’s ascent at the expense of his competitors to “the gentle fanning of the vampire’s wings, and it had the same end in view — the undisturbed abstraction of the victim’s blood.”39 The German periodical Kladderadatsch echoes this sentiment in a caricature (4.5) depicting both Rockefeller and a member of the Rothschild family as vampires, battened on the planet earth and between them draining the world of oil.40 Marx’s ideas and the rhetoric he used to express them acquired additional and sometimes unintended layers of meaning when used by people with agendas of their own, a problem he shared with other prominent intellectuals, such as Charles Darwin and Cesare Lombroso, as already discussed in Chapter Three. Marx wrote about industrial capitalists, mill owners and factory owners, all vampires feeding on the proletariat. In the hands of other people, these vampiric images lent themselves readily to anti-Semitic slurs. As discussed in Chapter Two, Christians had associated Jews with the blood of Jesus and with blood libels for centuries. Since the Middle Ages, Jews had also been associated with usury, lending to Christians at high interest rates, bleeding them of their money. During the Middle Ages, Jews had gravitated to money-lending as an occupation for several reasons. The Church regarded loaning money and charging interest as a disgraceful, contaminating business, and forbade Christians from practicing it for some time. Moreover, Jews were prohibited from owning and farming land, forcing them to find an occupation in some form of trade. They were also barred from most guilds, so money-lending became an obvious career move. It had the additional advantage of being a portable profession in the inevitable event of expulsion. Usury became 38 39

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Licht, Industrializing America, 140–142. Ida Tarbell, “The History of the Standard Oil Company, Part IV: The Defeat of the Pennsylvania,” McClure’s, April 1903, Vol 20, 606–610, 610. There will be much more about the Rothschilds later in this chapter. Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: The World’s Banker, 1849–1999, (New York: Viking, 1999), 261; Kladderadatsch, July 1st, 1894, 4.

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4.5 “The Petroleum Monopoly” Taken from Kladderadatsch, July 1st, 1894, 4.

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associated exclusively with Jews, and they were hated and censured for their supposedly innate greed and pitiless dispositions.41 The associations of Jews with money and usury had carried over into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. In the late 1870s a German rabbi cautioned Gershon Bleichröder (1822–1893), a high-profile and influential banker, to always act with the utmost honesty and modesty, in order to counter how “often and heartlessly men of other faiths . . . speak of Israelite bloodsuckers and usurers.”42 Over thirty years later, a letter to the editor of the Canadian Jewish Times complained that The arch Jew baiter fabricates for the eyes and minds of his gentile readers . . . [an image] that conveys to them the impression that a Jewish Kehilla [Hebrew term for the Jewish community and its organizations] is a sort of secret association, composed of so many cruel Jew vampires, thirsty of Christian gold and blood.43

The image of the Jew as economic vampire appeared in several interrelated ways. One of these was immigration and its effect on labor markets. As noted in the previous chapter, both Great Britain and the United States experienced a heavy influx of immigrants during this period. In the United States, Jewish immigrants were one of several large groups of immigrants, while in Great Britain they comprised the majority of all aliens. Immigrant Jews, depicted by the press as paupers, were viewed as robbing Britons of their jobs by agreeing to work for lower wages.44 Journalist Robert Sherard 41

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Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origin of the Aliens Act of 1905, (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972), 25; Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century: A Study of their Relations During the Years 1198–1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period (Philadelphia: The Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 1933), 44; Anne Naman, The Jew in the Victorian Novel: Some Relationships Between Prejudice and Art, (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1980), 32; Panitz, Alien in their Midst, 25–6; Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1943), 188–90. Cited in Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder, and the Building of the German Empire, (New York: Knopf, 1977), 509 fn. Although Canada is not one of the countries undergoing formal examination, its shared cultural heritage with its neighbor the United States and with the rest of the British Commonwealth gives it relevance for inclusion in a discussion of Western European and American culture. L. Ackerman, “Letter to the Editor,” The Canadian Jewish Times (Montreal) (September 20th, 1912, Volume XV, No. 41), 17. Gainer, Alien Invasion, 20.

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(1861–1943) spoke for many when he claimed that, “the English workers have been entirely crowded out of the [tailoring] trade [especially] by the foreigners, and the few [Britons] that remain are literally on the verge of starvation.”45 By taking jobs, money, and food away from the native Britons, the Jews were more than new competitors. They were viewed as parasites, metaphorical vampires who lived by draining away economic opportunities rather than blood. They sucked British sustenance in order to strengthen themselves while starving and weakening the British. The rhetoric of the parasitic immigrant and the rhetoric of the vampire capitalist came together in the issue of sweated labor. In the past, manufactured items had been made by skilled laborers who had made an entire product from beginning to end. Now, the organization of the work had been changed, so that work was broken down. Instead of making an entire boot, one worker would now only cut out the leather, while another would stitch pieces together. This allowed increased speed, productivity, and efficiency in manufacturing items. It also meant that instead of skilled workers doing the job, factories could hire unskilled workers who had only to learn a simple task, and who worked for cheaper wages. According to observers such as the writer and social worker Beatrice Potter (1858–1943), the innovation of new working methods created a dichotomy among workers.46 On the one hand was the Jewish contractor with his highly organised staff of fixers, basters, fellers, machinists, button-hole hands, and pressers, turning out coats by the score . . . ; whilst on the other side . . . we see an army of skilled English tradesmen . . . working on the old traditional lines of one man one garment.47

British tailors prided themselves on their skill at producing an entire garment, taking the subdivision of factory work as a personal insult. One complained that such methods diminished quality, producing “cheap and nasty stuff that destroys the market.”48 45 46

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Robert H. Sherard, The White Slaves of England (London: James Bowden, 1897), 114. W. Evans Gordon, “The Economic Side of Alien Immigration,” Nineteenth Century (LVII, 1905), 294–306, 298; David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 211. Beatrice Potter, “East London Labor,” Nineteenth Century (XXIV, 1888), 161–183, 161. Cited in John Garrard, The English and Immigration: 1880–1910 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 163.

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The Jews’ legendary greed and drive to make money was blamed for the sweating system, whereby workers toiled over piecework for long hours in crowded, ill-ventilated rooms for little pay. Punch’s embodiment of the sweating system displays the twin characteristics of Jew and vampire (4.6). The image is titled “The Rose Water Cure.” The pot-bellied Sweating Monster in top hat and fur coat crouches over the figure of the Sweated Worker, a spindly looking child. One of the monster’s feet is a bag of money; the other an iron, something likely used by the sweated workers. The monster is placing the iron squarely on the worker’s chest, presumably in order to kill him. In addition to the monster’s other characteristics, he has claws, a tail, and — most tellingly — both vampire fangs and a Jewish nose. Standing behind the Sweating Monster is a figure representing the British government and British justice, spraying something from a jar labeled “Sweating Committee Report.” This caricature coincided with Parliamentary hearings on the Sweating System, and whatever the figure is spraying, it probably has disinfecting or hygienic properties.49 Moving up the economic ladder, the same discourse and imagery applied to the institution of the department store. The department store was to shopping what the sweating system was to more skilled methods of manufacturing: it took small, decentralized stores specializing in a limited number of consumer goods and brought them together into enormous, efficient conglomerates, where the widest variety of goods could be found under a single roof. The trend towards department stores began in the 1850s, particularly in France and the United States.50 By the 1870s, department stores were mushrooming all over Europe and North America.51 Aside from their scale and assortment of goods, other important innovations included fixed price tickets. These precluded bargaining. Department stores also insisted on payment in cash, and marked their prices lower in order to generate a higher volume of turnover.52 Moreover, these stores offered a break from old-fashioned shopping etiquette. Before 49 50

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Punch, May 24th, 1890, 242. Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, (Princeton University Press, 1981), 27. Miller, The Bon Marché, 30; Tim Coles, “Department Stores as Retail Innovation in Germany: A Historical-Geographical Perspective on the Period 1870–1914,” Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939, Ed. Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, (Brookfield, USA: Ashgate, 1999), 72–96, 73. Coles, “Department Stores as Retail Innovation in Germany,” 73.

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4.6 “The Rose Water Cure” Taken from Punch, May 24th, 1890, 242

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department stores, entering a boutique implied an obligation on the part of the customer to make a purchase, which might have held back customers with no real goal in mind. Department stores encouraged browsing, and once confronted with attractive, cheap merchandise, many people found themselves buying unexpected items.53 Observers viewed department stores as vampires sucking the blood of their competitors in the same way that factories and the sweating system devoured the individual craftsman. Zola’s novel exploring the ascendancy of the department store, Au Bonheur des Dames, makes these ideas abundantly clear. Like the miners in Germinal, the small shop keepers losing business to the titular department store are “eaten up with anaemia, quite white — white hair, white eyes, white lips . . .[with] the debilitated, colourless appearance of a plant reared in the shade.”54 The physical health of the characters deteriorates over the course of the book in correspondence with the growth of the rival department store; “As The Ladies’ Paradise became larger, The Old Elbeuf seemed to get smaller,” and along with the family store of the Old Elbeuf, the owner’s daughter Genevieve wastes away, her “bosom . . . as hollow as that of a child.”55 Her mother, powerless over her daughter’s inevitable demise, can only sit, “with the white face of a wounded person, whose blood was running away drop by drop.”56 All of the bankrupted small shopkeepers attend Genevieve’s funeral, venting their hatred of the burgeoning department store, Whom they accused of causing Genevieve’s slow agony. All the victims of the monster were there — Bedore and sister from the hosier’s shop in the Rue Gaillon, the furriers, Vanpouille Brothers, and Deslignieres the toyman, and Piot and Rivoire the furniture dealers; even Mademoiselle Tatin from the underclothing shop.57

In Zola’s novel, the department store is a vampire both metaphorically and in actuality. Like the mine with an appetite for the blood and bones of miners crushed in its tunnels, the department store has claimed real blood. During its initial construction, the wife of the owner, Mouret, dies 53 54

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Miller, The Bon Marché, 24. Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 11. Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, 185, 191. Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, 331. Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, 326.

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in a freak accident while visiting the site; local legend claims that “there’s some of her blood in the foundation . . . which [people] fancied [they] could see in the red mortar of the basement.”58 The legend mushrooms to the point that on occasion “people accused [Mouret] of having killed [his wife], in order to found the house with the blood of her body.”59 In the opinions of observers, the department store also acted as a vampire towards its customers outside of fiction. The department store embodied conspicuous consumption and self-indulgence, seducing women with pretty things they did not need and luring them from home and its duties.60 One character in Au Bonheur des Dames warns Mouret that someday a female Nemesis will “draw more blood and money from you than you have ever sucked from them.”61 Finally, strong connections existed between the department store, vampires, and Jews. Jews gravitated towards the retail sector as they had gravitated towards other economic niches over the centuries. In Germany and the United States in particular, a high proportion of department stores belonged to Jews.62 The American periodical Puck (4.7) illustrates this comically. A showman with a telescope charges 10¢ per view to see the lone non-Jewish store on Broadway, barely visible to the casual observer.63 Less amusing, but far more telling, is the image titled “The Commercial Vampire” (4.8). A vampire bat, labeled “Greed,” perches on a nest labeled “Department Store,” lined with the skulls of small merchant competitors.64 This visual image echoes Zola’s rhetoric. The vampire’s human head, however, is unmistakably a Jewish caricature as well, emphasizing the idea that Jews are the ones responsible for the economic innovation of the department store and its danger to the small, non-Jewish business owners. Mouret, Zola’s non-Jewish department store owner, boasts several times 58 59 60 61 62

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Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, 22. Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, 108. Miller, The Bon Marché, 4, 192–3. Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, 280. Geoffrey Crossick & Serge Jaumain, “The World of the Department Store: Distribution, Culture, and Social Change,” Cathedrals of Consumption: the European Department Store, 1850–1939, (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1999), 1–45, 13; Kathleen James, “From Messel to Mendelsohn: German Department Store Architecture in Defence of Urban and Economic Change,” Cathedrals of Consumption: the European Department Store, 1850–1939, (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1999), 252–278, 258. Puck, April 1899 (n. 1153), 16. Taken from Vincent Virga, Eyes of the Nation: a Visual History of the United States, (New York: Knopf, 1997), 237.

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4.7 “The Only One Left on Broadway!” Taken from Puck, April 1899, 16

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4.8 “The Commercial Vampire” Taken from Vincent Virga, Eyes of the Nation: a Visual History of the United States, (New York: Knopf, 1997), 237

during the course of the book that “he was at heart a bigger Jew than all the Jews in the world.”65 Zola’s choice of words for Mouret is particularly emblematic of Marx’s own ideas regarding the relationship between Jews and capitalists. In Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” he proclaims that “the real God of the Jews is money. Their God is only an illusory bill of exchange.” The essence of Judaism, according to Marx, had nothing to do with any of its stated religious tenets but with the insatiable desire to make money. Any so-called Jew who eschewed capitalism would cease to be Jewish in Marx’s eyes, and any so-called Christian who engaged in capitalism was in essence Jewish.66 The Department Store, a German novel written by Margaret Böhme (1867–1939) and published over twenty years after Au Bonheur des Dames, 65 66

Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, 33. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 1844, Trans. Helen Lederer, (Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1958), 39.

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echoes these themes of department stores, vampires, and Jews with even more explicit rhetoric. Like Zola’s, part of Böhme’s plot lies in the slow death of the small shops by competition from the department stores. The owner of a shoe store complains bitterly to Joshua Müllenmeister, the owner of the eponymous department store and his childhood friend, that “the big emporiums are a sort of vampires, it’s a system of plunder; you fall upon us small tradesmen and garrote us, until we turn blue and strangle.”67 After finally losing his shop, the shoemaker looks across the street at the department store, and sees “in the façade . . . the huge open mouth of a revengeful monster, and himself under the fierce wicked teeth which were mangling him as they had mangled hundreds like him.”68 Despite the tragic fate of the small shops, Böhme’s department store owners remain sympathetic for both the reader and the characters that their department store cannot help but hurt. Even as they build their financial empire and accrue profits, the Müllenmeisters remain conscientious of their duties to their fellow men. They are aware of their power, the ease with which power is abused, and the temptation to play the role of commercial vampires. In a nightmare, Friedrich Müllenmeister finds himself at a medical demonstration where a lecturer explains that this patient, Herr Capitalismus, is suffering from blood-poisoning. When he was well, vigorous, and in the flower of his years, he twisted the neck of a hundred thousand men with the permission of the law; then tore open their veins and drank himself crazy with their blood . . . And at last he got blood madness, and now we have shut him up, and are going to tap him for the other men’s blood.69

He wakes up as the doctor cuts into the patient, drenching the onlookers with blood. This sensitivity of the owners towards the perception of their department store and themselves as vampires may stem from the fact that, unlike Mouret, the Müllenmeisters are Jewish. Joshua changed his surname from Manassa to Müllenmeister, the maiden name of his Christian 67

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Margarete Böhme, The Department Store: A Novel of Today, Trans. Ethel Coburn Mayne, (New York: D Appleton & Company, 1912), 33. Böhme, The Department Store, 243. Böhme, The Department Store, 90.

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wife, so that “the odium of overcharging and imposture which attaches to the Jewish bazaars in the estimation of the public, was not to be suffered to hinder the development of his firm.”70 Anti-Semitism plays little role in most of the novel, but when a ring of shoplifters is uncovered, the thieving was deprecated, but on the whole people were more inclined to pity the victims of a knowing hag than the actually injured owner of the emporium. An anti-Semitic broadsheet boldly and unctuously described ‘the very existence of the emporium’ as ‘a breeding-place for criminal impulses;’ indeed, according to this organ’s blazing diatribes, the shop itself should have been in the dock.71

Despite the honesty of the Müllenmeisters and the quality of their goods, they can never escape the aura of vampirism attached to both department stores and Jewish businessmen. At the apex of the financial world, in banking, high finance, and the stock exchange, the accusations of vampirism were as frequent as at any of the other levels, perhaps even more so. High finance was an occupation as unstable as it was devious. Financiers, like industrial capitalists, were parasites living off of other’s work without making equal contributions in return. During this period, the Rothschild family led the field in high finance, with banking houses in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples.72 Jews had always been portrayed as people who excelled at making money, and the journal Banker’s Magazine declared that “Jews excel on every Bourse in Europe; they have a pre-eminence out of all proportion to their numbers or even their wealth.”73 It took only a small step for paranoid observers to conclude that Jews controlled the stock market and the finances of the world. The two themes crop up frequently in contemporary literature, with authors often using the Rothschild family as models. In Anthony Trollope’s (1815–1882) The Way We Live Now, one of his main characters, the financier Melmotte, had a reputation throughout Europe as a gigantic swindler, — as one who in the dishonest . . . pursuit of wealth had stopped at nothing. People said 70 71 72 73

Böhme, The Department Store, 16. Böhme, The Department Store, 363–64. Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, xxiv. Cited in Holmes, Anti-Semitism, 82.

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of him that he had . . . ruin[ed] . . . those who had trusted him, that he had swallowed up the property of all who had come in contact with him, [and] that he was fed with the blood of widows and children.74

The last line in particular calls to mind the vampire who lives off of human blood and the medieval Jew accused of using children’s blood for secret rituals.75 In money matters, Melmotte is both a vampire and a Jew practicing ritual murder. French author Guy de Charnacé (1825–1909) makes these associations even more explicit in his suggestively titled Le Baron Vampire. In this virulently anti-Semitic novel, Charnacé traces the career of a young Jewish man from a Bohemian peddler to one of the richest, most powerful financiers in Paris. Rebb Schmoul, the protagonist, accomplishes this feat using every type of dishonesty and fraud he can imagine.76 His explicitly vampiric nature aids his career; Schmoul is “attracted by the smell of corpses” that emanates from financial panics in which stocks may be snatched up for a pittance, while their former owners face financial ruin.77 Charnacé perpetuates the stereotypes against which Bleichröder’s rabbi warned him, that Jews care for nothing but money and will spare no effort in order to accumulate more. Rebb Schmoul is clearly designed to be a villain, and the larger Jewish communities in Le Baron Vampire glory in his demonic accomplishments: All the iniquities, all the infamies committed by Rebb Schmoul . . . [were] elevated by the Judaic press of Europe, by the Tagblatt in Berlin, in Vienna by the supervisor of international Jewry, the Nouvelle Press Libre. Nothing stops them in their anti-Christian hatred or in their passion for gold. They march through blood in order to “pick up a cup.” It is practically their

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In all fairness, Trollope never explicitly labels Melmotte as Jewish. His origins, however, are certainly foreign — he has lived in both Vienna and Paris — and his wife, daughter, and closest acquaintances are all explicitly Jewish. The readers can draw their own conclusions. Naman, The Jew in the Victorian Novel, 130; Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 84; Anthony Trollope, 1875, The Way We Live Now, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1974), 61. Jules Zanger, “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews,” English Literature in Transition (1991), 33–44, 38. Charnacé does not seem to realize that “Rebb” would normally be an honorific, a derivation of the word “Rabbi,” but never a proper first name. Guy de Charnacé, Le Baron Vampire, (Paris, 1885), 66.

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element. The sight and smell of blood does not repulse them. They have sanctified human sacrifice.78

Prolific writer that he was, Zola also wrote a novel, L’Argent, about the world of high finance. In it, he deliberately portrayed the head of the French branch of the Rothschild family, whom he christened Gundermann. Ever adept at evoking symbolic blood in disparate environments, on the day of an enormous reversal of fortune at the Bourse, Zola describes one broker carrying “a handful of fiches, red ones, the hue of freshly shed blood.”79 The novel’s protagonist, the rabid anti-Semite Saccard, rails against his arch-rival Gundermann and by extension all Jews as “that race of traffickers and usurers for centuries on the march through the nations, sucking their blood,” and “establishing [themselves] among every people . . .to suck the blood of one and all, to fatten [themselves] by devouring others.”80 For all his vitriol against Jews, however, Saccard is the real vampire of the novel. Saccard builds fortunes at the bourse using every dishonest ploy in the book, and is himself accused of running a “great machine for sucking the blood of others.”81 Indeed, Saccard is far more devious and morally bankrupt than Gundermann. Gundermann, whatever faults he may have, is devoted to his large, close-knit family of children and grandchildren as well as his many charities.82 Saccard’s son lives estranged from his father, whom he neither respects nor trusts. Saccard, the epitome of the amoral man of finance, “rush[es] to the satisfaction of his appetites . . . he had sold his son, his wife, all who had fallen into his clutches;” it is “in his blood.”83 While vampires played prominent rhetorical roles in criticizing amoral economic practices, Dracula, the most prominent vampire novel of this period, evoked these economic debates through the titular vampire. Although defined by his supernatural abilities and bloodlust, Count Dracula displays a distinct affinity for commerce. His first action in the book is to mark the sites of buried treasure in order to dig them up at his leisure. He next goes over deeds of purchase and other business matters with the protagonist, Jonathan Harker, who has traveled to Transylvania as 78 79 80 81 82 83

Charnacé, Le Baron Vampire, 161. Emile Zola, L’Argent, 1891, (Alan Sutton Publishing, 2000), 321. Zola, L’Argent, 91, 193. Zola, L’Argent, 297. Zola, L’Argent, 89–90. Zola, L’Argent, 226, 228.

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a representative of Dracula’s law firm in Britain.84 When Harker explores the castle, he discovers a room filled with “a great heap of gold . . . of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek[,] and Turkish.”85 Like the modern financiers of both fact and fiction, Dracula does business and reaps profit from all over the world. One of the most significant connections between Dracula and his relationship with money, however, comes towards the end of the novel. When the heroes corner Dracula, Harker lunges at him with a knife. Dracula avoids a stab wound, but the [knife’s] point just cut the cloth of [Dracula’s] coat, making a wide gap whence a bundle of bank-notes and a stream of gold fell out . . . The next instant, with a sinuous dive he swept under Harker’s arm . . . , and, grasping a handful of the money from the floor, dashed across the room.86

Dracula’s behavior, attempting to save his money while also trying to escape with his life, calls to mind anti-Semitic caricatures in which money takes precedence over everything from one’s personal safety to one’s close family members.87 Stoker’s vampire fits in seamlessly with the economic vampires called forth by novelists and cartoonists; Dracula is a ruthless, inhuman commercial creature who stockpiles his enemies’ treasure, eats blood rather than food, and bleeds gold when cut.88 The mere accumulation of ill-gotten wealth was not the only criticism leveled at financiers and capitalists. When critics scrutinized the Rothschild family, they focused on the enormous power they wielded as well as their prodigious wealth. The British Labor Leader described the Rothschilds as “leeches [that] have for years hung on with distended suckers to the body politic of Europe,” draining the world of power as well as money.89 Power was as much a commodity as gold or blood, and could be purchased 84 85

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Zanger, “A Sympatheric Vibration,” 36. Bram Stoker, The Essential Dracula: The Definitive Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel, 1897, Ed. Leonard Wolf, 1897, (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 63. Stoker, Dracula, 364. Judith Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Cultural Politics at the Fin-de-Siècle, Ed. Sally Ledger & Scot McCracken, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 248–266, 248. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain, 159; Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity,” 262. Cited in Holmes, Anti-Semitism, 83.

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with either. The decline of Europe’s aristocracies in money, power, and prestige during this period made the issue of money and political power particularly troubling for observers.90 The landed wealth on which aristocrats had relied for centuries was dwindling and aristocrats were going bankrupt.91 They lacked the funds to maintain their styles of living and the privileges of power that came with them. Meanwhile, the parvenus of industry and commerce could ape the lifestyles of aristocrats, down to estates and country homes. Although hardly the only nouveaux riches going up in society, Jewish bankers, businessmen, and financiers were scrutinized especially closely. Each of our countries blamed the decline of its aristocracy on the Jews.92 With new money came new power. Successful financiers and plutocrats received aristocratic titles, rewards for loans from grateful governments and proofs of the legitimacy of their chosen careers.93 Contemporaries complained that the corridors of wealth and power were crowded “with brand-new service nobility, with plutocrats both ennobled and not-ennobled, [and] with garment district Jews, both baptized and nonbaptized.”94 The ennoblement of Jews rankled particularly with many people. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, wealthy Jews found it increasingly easy to achieve knighthood — even when they did not convert to Christianity.95 Nathaniel Rothschild (1840–1915), head of the London house, became a peer in 1885; the upper strata of Jewish society were prominent at the court of Edward VII (1841–1910).96 Explorer and diplomat Richard Burton (1821–1890) spoke to the concerns of more than one country when he claimed that this invasion contaminated the existing 90

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The only significant difference in the decline of the various European aristocracies is that Britain experienced relatively gradual changes, unaccompanied by the type of revolutions and violence that characterized the French, German, and Russian histories. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 698–700. Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871–1914, 6; David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, 16, 26–7, 91. Stern, Gold and Iron, 163; Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, 28; Webb, Modern England, 372. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power, 164. Cited in Stern, Gold and Iron, 163. Stern, Gold and Iron, xvi. The English were the last country to bestow this honor on the Rothschilds; by the 1880s the other branches of the family had been using aristocratic titles for decades. Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, 248; Holmes, Anti-Semitism, 109, 87.

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aristocracy, signaling a disintegration of British prestige, for now nearly all leading families were “leavened with Jewish blood.”97 The concession of titles, however, only codified a system already wellestablished. The Rothschilds had long since translated their reputations as bankers and financiers into prominent roles in the governments of their respective countries. They made loans at the highest levels of government, knew the ins and outs of political machinations, and were privy to highly sensitive information. They and others in their position made the loans to governments that made it possible to wage wars; on occasion the Rothschilds withheld money in their efforts to prevent wars from occurring.98 They were better informed on most diplomatic issues all over the world than ambassadors, and the regular information-sharing between the different houses meant that they often had information well ahead of government officials relying on regular communications channels.99 Gerson Bleichröder, Bismarck’s personal banker, shared a similar position of privilege. People continually sought him out for information on Bismarck’s plans, while Bismarck himself was “accustomed to receiv[ing] important political news from Paris or St. Petersburg [through Bleichröder], usually eight days earlier than through [his] ambassadors.”100 Both Bleichroder and the Rothschilds played prominent roles in the peace negotiations after the Franco-Prussian war.101 This hard-earned and well-deserved power had its dark side. The same detractors who accused the Rothschilds and other prominent Jews of economic vampirism claimed that they abused their positions, acting as political vampires as well. Bleichroder’s enemies accused him of controlling Bismarck, and of influencing his political decisions.102 Many people believed that the Rothschilds “own all governments. All ministers are in the pay of the Vienna or Frankfort house of the famous bankers. All posts are in their gift and patronage. They really run Europe.”103 One contemporary newspaper warned that “with the scepter of finance the Jew also dominates the politics of the world . . . guiding the religious and 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

98

Cited in Holmes, Anti-Semitism, 56. Stern, Gold and Iron, xvi; Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, 139. Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, 121, 145, 149, 166, 179, 181–82. Cited in Stern, Gold and Iron, 178, 305. Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, 207. Stern, Gold and Iron, 187. Emil Reich, “The Jew-Baiting on the Continent,” The Nineteenth Century, Vol 40, September 1896, 422–438, 427.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Economic Discourse

moral movements in society in our day, and . . . forging [our] chains.”104 Similarly, many people blamed Jewish financiers, with interests in South Africa’s diamond and gold mines, for involving Britain in the Boer War.105 Economist and social critic J. A. Hobson (1858–1940) argued that the war was being fought for “a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race.”106 A French caricature lends vampiric imagery to this concept, showing the head of the Rothschild’s Paris house embracing the globe possessively, his hands webbed claws, resting his chin just above France.107 Rebb Schmoul of Le Baron Vampire enjoys proclaiming to his fellow Jews that “In fifty years . . . we will be the rulers of the world and the Christians who are rich today will race along the streets with beggar’s pouches on their backs.”108 A literary demonstration of this belief in political corruption coupled with vampiric imagery can be found in Hillaire Belloc’s (1870–1953) novel Pongo and the Bull. Its plot revolves around the British government’s need to secure a gigantic loan. In desperation, the Prime Minister turns to the Duke of Battersea, a multi-millionaire otherwise known as the “Peabody Yid.”109 In a thick accent, the Duke lists the conditions under which he would give a loan, including placing his relatives in government positions: “There iss my brodher Chames . . . You know Chames? . . . And his sohn also?”110 At the end of the chapter, Belloc shows his readers “the Duke of Battersea . . . feeding internally and nourishing his soul upon” the loan and his position of power.111 The Duke of Battersea is a parasite of political power as Melmotte was a parasite of money. He feeds off of Britain’s vulnerability as enthusiastically as Melmotte feeds on the savings, the life’s blood, of his hapless investors. The Prime Minister of Pongo and the Bull, however, cannot stomach Britain being in debt to a Jew, a financial vampire, for “the lender of money must ever be master — even of a sovereign state.”112 104 105 106

107

108 109 110 111 112

Cited in Holmes, Anti-Semitism, 64. Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 266. J. A. Hobson, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, 1900 (New York: Honard Fertig, 1969), 189. “Rothschild,” 1898, Taken from Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte, (Muchen: Albert Langen Verlag, 1921), 208. Charnacé, Le Baron Vampire, 118. Hillaire Belloc, Pongo and the Bull, (London: Constable and Comp., 1910), 231. Belloc, Pongo and the Bull, 70. Belloc, Pongo and the Bull, 90. The Rothschilds were aware of the extent to which their power could be used. Maxims gleaned from correspondence between the founding Rothschild, Mayer Amschel, and his

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He spends the rest of the novel looking for a British millionaire willing to advance the loan. These ideas regarding the abuse of power extended beyond the Rothschilds to democratically elected officials. Although baptized at the age of thirteen, Benjamin Disraeli’s (1804–1881) peers regarded him as a Jew, and hence, someone who achieved his power dishonestly and exercised it the same way.113 A political cartoon (4.9) portrayed him as Fagin, the notorious Jewish villain from Charles Dickens’ (1812–1870) Oliver Twist, corrupting those around him.114 Moreover, observers drew on old, anti-Semitic accusations, and ascribed medieval, occult powers to Disraeli, explaining his success in politics through magic and satanic power.115 As Prime Minister he was accused of conducting his foreign policy solely to satisfy Jewish ambitions and to avenge Russia’s ill treatment of the Jews.116 Political corruption and vampiric imagery did not, however, limit itself to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. During this period, the United States was plagued with a series of scandals in local government. From city halls to state legislatures, men were accused of misusing their power to enrich themselves at their constituents’ expense.117 The most notorious of these cases involved Tammany Hall, New York City’s official headquarters for the Democratic Party. After the Civil War, the men running Tammany Hall, including the infamous William “Boss” Tweed (1823–1878) began a course to gain control of Manhattan’s City Hall, the Hall of Justice, and the state capitol, using these positions to line their pockets. They came to power through a variety of underhanded tactics, such as buying votes, voter intimidation, and the miscounting of ballots.118 When in power they

113 114 115

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117

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sons, includes: “If a high-placed person enters into a [financial] partnership with a Jew, he belongs to the Jew.” Cited in Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, xxii; Brian Cheyette, Constructions of the Jew in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875– 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 170; Belloc, Pongo and the Bull, 73. Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 78; Holmes, Anti-Semitism, 10. Punch, November 9th, 1867. Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 130–1. V.D. Lipman, A History of the Jews in Britain Since 1858, (London: Leicester University Press, 1990), 37. Ellen F. Fitzpatrick, Muckracking: Three Landmark Articles, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 30. Alexander B. Callow Jr., The Tweed Ring, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 8–9.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Economic Discourse

4.9 “Fagin’s Political School” Taken from Punch, November 9th, 1867

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rewarded the party faithful with jobs, creating dozens of spurious and unnecessary positions to accommodate them.119 The men of Tammany Hall then proceeded to embezzle fantastic sums of money from the city treasury, with roughly twelve out of every thirteen dollars from public funds paid to someone as graft. By 1871, Tweed and his associates had already stolen approximately sixty million dollars in city funds.120 Their downfall was hailed as “hurling from power those vampires who have so long been sucking the very life-blood of the body politic.”121 Tweed’s ousting did not, however, end the problem of political corruption, which recurred frequently over the next decades. Two decades later, the New York Times was complaining that municipal government continued to be “made of some of the political vampires whose sole aim in accepting public office is to loot the public Treasury and to throw public confidence to the winds.”122 Observers drew comparisons between economic monopolies and the corrupt political machines, conflating the rhetoric used against both entities, calling them “the vampire imperialistic politicians who, by their desire for power, have made the New York state Legislature the greatest of all trusts.”123 The metaphor of blood allowed any aspect of economic and political power to translate itself into charges of vampirism. Economic power meant power over workers, competitors, consumers, and even over the government, all positions too easy to abuse. The label ‘vampire’ made an appropriate epithet to describe the callous indifference of individuals who did not think, nor care, about the individuals they hurt in their relentless quest for maximum production, markets, and profits. Due to Marx’s influence, such thinking is familiar to us, even in the twenty-first century. What many fail to realize, however, is that the men of the capitalist establishment turned the insult ‘vampire’ back onto their accusers, giving the word a further layer of meaning. To those in power, ‘vampire’ meant the people who stirred up trouble, who fanned the flames of discontent, and who advocated the violent overthrow of the government. These were the political counter-cultures of the late nineteenth century: the communists, socialists, and anarchists. 119 120 121 122 123

102

Callow, The Tweed Ring, 32, 115–16. Callow, The Tweed Ring, 164, 183, 202. “The Voice of the People,” New York Times, July 31, 1871, p. 2. “Brooklyn’s Indicted Men,” New York Times, January 9, 1893, p. 9. “Mr. Coler Commended,” New York Times, October 3, 1900, p. 6.

Sara Libby Robinson

5

TERRORISTS WITH TEETH Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

CRITICS of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism frequently used vampiric imagery to illustrate the seemingly callous disregard that the owners of mines and factories showed for their workers’ well being. This rage at the economic and political establishment formed the cornerstone of the political counter-cultures of the nineteenth century: communism, socialism, and anarchism. The outrage over unsafe working conditions and inadequate pay may have been justified, but the methods they employed to transform the political and economic universe were not always appropriate. These movements became associated with violence, terrorism, and bloodshed. In the process, the communists, socialists, and anarchists found themselves labeled vampires. In the eyes of the political and economic establishment, they were unnaturally attracted to blood as the fertilizer of revolution. They were found guilty of such vampiric acts as inciting violence, advocating the overthrow of the government, and calling for the blood of the bourgeoisie. A word of explanation before proceeding: a potentially confusing aspect of nineteenth-century politics is the way in which communism, Blood Will Tell

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socialism, and anarchism are frequently conflated in contemporary newspapers and literature, with one label standing in for the whole spectrum of the radical left. Clearly, there are important differences among the movements, but most contemporary observers were uninterested in looking for them. Over the course of this chapter, anarchists will be the group named most frequently, but it must be understood that the majority of the public considered the term “anarchist” as being synonymous with both “communist” and “socialist.” All three movements were associated with each other and, in the opinion of many observers and opinion-makers, tarred with the same brush.1 Despite their many differences in ideology, the concerns of the radical left all originated in the same place: industrial conditions and the treatment of the workers. As discussed briefly in the previous chapter, the West’s shift from an agricultural economy exacerbated its problems. Legislation designed to protect workers could not keep pace with the industrial realities unfolding in mines and factories. Workers — men, women, and children — often labored in shifts twelve hours long or longer during peak seasons. There were inadequate safeguards around the machinery, which injured or killed some workers. Exposure to poisons such as lead and white phosphorous killed others. Lung problems frequently afflicted both miners and textile workers — breathing in lint proved as hazardous as coal dust.2 Working conditions comprised only half of the problem. Mushrooming industries meant the rapid urbanization of cities and towns in the manufacturing districts. In Great Britain, where industrialization and its attendant problems got a head start, the population of industrial centers grew by 40% or more each decade during the first half of the nineteenth century.3 The infrastructure of these cities was utterly inadequate to cope with this level of population influx. There was not enough housing or adequate sewage, and with the combination of overcrowding and exposure to waste, diseases killed many. The droves of men and women who came 1

2

3

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Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism, (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 20. Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace,” (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 168–178; Arthur J. McIvor, A  History of Work in Britain, 1880– 1950, (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 115–130. J.D. Chambers, The Workshop of the World: British Economic History from 1820–1880, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 119.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

seeking work by no means created the misery and squalor in which the urban poor already lived, but they did exacerbate it.4 Finally, in addition to the workers’ brutal working conditions and deplorable living conditions came the issue of their inequitable pay. Observers — with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) ranking among the most famous — compared the burgeoning wealth of the owners of factories or mines with the poverty of their workers. Owners appeared to grow wealthy on the backs of their workers, profiting on their sweat while living in idleness and dissipation. In return for sacrificing their blood, sweat, and health to perform these jobs, the working classes received less than living wages and usually a debilitating disease from which they ended up dying comparatively young.5 It was no wonder that social critics arose and formed political groups dedicated to righting these injustices. Left-leaning political groups comprised a wide spectrum of people, all with differing opinions as to how best to improve the conditions of the working classes. Moderate reformers worked within their respective governments in order to legislate better pay, better hours, and better work safety, even gaining seats in Parliament, the Reichstag, or Congress in order to do so.6 The most radical leftist politicians advocated class warfare and the destruction of bourgeois society in order to re-create a new world order controlled by the proletariat.7 Despite significant dissent and ambivalence within their own ranks over how to best help the Proletariat, in the eyes of the rest of the world, the left seemed to present a united front of agitation on behalf of the working classes. In the opinion of the lawmakers, factory owners, and other members of the bourgeoisie, the communists and their ilk created dissatisfaction among the workers where no dissatisfaction had existed before. They convinced simple, uneducated workers that going on strike, attacking nonstriking workers, destroying property, and casting their lot with the anarchists or socialists would cause their modest style of living to improve vastly overnight. A judge’s decision regarding strikers encapsulates this attitude: 4

5

6

7

Eric J. Hobsbawn, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 64; Chambers, The Workshop of the World, 121–22. Kenneth Morgan, The Birth of Industrial Britain: Economic Change, 1750–1850, (New York: Longman, 1999. Gary Steeson, After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914, (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1991), 61–62. Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 186, 194.

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While I recognize the right for all laborers to combine for the purpose of protecting all their lawful rights, I do not recognize the right of laborers to conspire together to compel employees, who are not dissatisfied with their work . . . , to . . . quit their work without a just or proper reason . . . merely to gratify a professional set of agitators, organizers, and walking delegates, who roam all over the country as agents for some combination, who are vampires that live and fatten on the honest labor . . . of the country, . . . . creating dissatisfaction among a class of people who are quiet, well disposed, and who do not want to be disturbed by the unceasing agitation of this class of people.8

Labor agitators were vampires, feeding on peace and contentment, leaving violence and bloodshed in their wake. A letter to the editor of the New York Times expands on the concept, stating that “the ranks of honest labor should be rid of the vampires that have sucked the life blood of the employer as well as of the employee, who have both so long been at their mercy.”9 Both this attitude and the theme of communists as vampires in addition to irresponsible agitators is neatly summarized in contemporary political cartoons. One, taken from Puck (5.1), shows a working man and his family gathered around their table for a meal. There is little food on the table, however, and most of the family looks thin and pinched with hunger. The reason for this can be seen on the wall and under the table. On the wall hang at least a half dozen papers, indicating that the worker contributes a significant chunk of his income towards supporting strikes that have nothing to do with his own industry, from “sugar refinery strikers” to “cloak makers” and “toothpick builders.”10 Furthermore, under the table are several recumbent figures sucking on tubes that lead to the empty bowl at the center of the family’s table. The two men closest to the viewer are labeled a “walking delegate” and “incendiary editor” respectively. They are the “suckers of the working-man’s sustenance,” as indicated by the cartoon’s caption. The men under the table are the reason why the worker has to spend so much of his meager salary on the strikes of others. These labor agitators have tricked a prosperous worker into discontent and want, even draining the bowl of his family’s meal. 8 9 10

106

“Judge Jackson Finds Strikers in Contempt,” New York Times, 25 July, 1902, 6. “About the ‘Sam’ Parkses,” New York Times, 30 August, 1903, 8. Puck, May 1886, n. 480, 8–9.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

5.1 “The Suckers of the Working-Man’s Sustenance” Taken from Puck, May 1886, 8–9

Two more cartoons, taken from Harper’s Weekly (5.2–3), emphasize the connection between labor agitators and the vampiric attributes of violence and death. Both feature a skeleton in a coat and top hat, wearing a sash that labels him a communist. Although not explicitly vampires, the skeleton figures are clearly animated in death and seeking the blood of others through violence, which would seem to justify their association with more traditional images of vampires. In figure 2, the communist cum skeleton is tempting a working man away from his family. Whatever enticements he may be offering, in the background to which he is pointing the viewer sees a mob being worked up into a violent frenzy rather than a world of peace and plenty. The man’s wife and child, meanwhile, are clinging to him in order to keep him from going astray.11 Figure 3 repeats this theme more forcefully, for now we see the interior of this working man’s home, which appears neat and snug, with food on the table and the luxury of a picture on the wall. Yet the skeleton, labeled the “Destroyer of All” is urging this 11

Harper’s Weekly, February 7th, 1874, 1.

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5.2 “The Emancipator of Labor and the Honest Working People” Taken from Harper’s Weekly, February 7th, 1874

108

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

5.3 “Home Sweet Home! There’s No Place Like Home!” Destroyer of All: Home ties are nothing. Family ties are nothing. Everything that is — is nothing. Taken from Harper’s Weekly, June 22nd, 1878, 496

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man that “Everything that is — is nothing,” that he should leave these modest comforts for violence and the unknown.12 Judging by the look of anguished indecision on the man’s face and the reactions of his family, the agitator is very persuasive. A cartoon from Punch (5.4) gives us a more positive treatment on the same theme.13 It shows the home of a successful workingman, about to sit down to a meal with his family. He and his family are well dressed and wellfed to the point of plumpness. At his elbow stands a French Communist

5.4 “Fire and Smoke” French Communist: Allons, mon ami, let us go burn our incense on the altar of equality. British Workman: Thanks, Mossoo, but I’d rather smoke my ‘baccy on the hearth of liberty. Taken from Punch, July 8th, 1871

12 13

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Harper’s Weekly, June 22nd, 1878, 9. Punch, July 8th, 1871.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

endeavoring to tear him away from this secure home and job. The Frenchman claims to offer the promise of social and economic equality, but his clothes are ragged and all that he can offer is the fire and destruction lying in potentia in his bottle of petrol. Most significantly, the Communist, already a threatening figure, sports fangs. The British workman of the cartoon, who has already achieved comfort and independence through his own hard work, rejects the politics of the Frenchman and the absurd argument that Communism would improve his life. The unshakable conviction shared by the bourgeoisie that the communists, socialists, and anarchists were rabid, bloodthirsty monsters is not without genuine foundation. Leftists of all stripes were fixated on how the capitalists had “wrung from the blood of our wives and children, and the champagne thus obtained ought to strangle them.”14 It took very little for this obsession with the blood of the proletariat to metamorphose into an obsession with finding revenge through the blood of capitalists. Many of the most vocal radicals called upon their followers to destroy bourgeois society in the most lurid terms. They gave speeches or published pamphlets urging their followers to “set fire to the houses [of the bourgeoisie], . . . dig mines and fill them with explosives, whet your daggers, lead your revolvers, . . . fill bombs and have them ready.”15 Others instructed their followers to “lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out.”16 The goal of this violence was class war, in which the workers would “cast [the bourgeoisie] down in mud and blood,” clearing the way for the complete reshaping of society.17 Nor did the calls for violence remain abstract. The anarchist doctrine relied heavily on the idea of spreading propaganda in order to attract recruits and radicalize the working classes. An integral part of the dissemination of propaganda was the concept of “Propaganda by the Deed.” This meant that individuals physically attacked people or institutions embodying the capitalist, bourgeois state. Anarchists regarded such actions as a way of raising awareness for their cause and spreading their message, while also taking the first steps towards making changes 14

15 16 17

Cited in Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 144. Cited in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 164. Cited in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 91. Cited in James Joll, The Anarchists, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980), 118.

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to society.18 In the name of Propaganda by the Deed, the last decades of the nineteenth century witnessed dozens of bombings, assassinations, and assassination attempts in all major European countries as well as the United States. Over the course of 1878 alone, anarchists or their sympathizers made unsuccessful attempts on the lives of the Chief of Police of St. Petersburg, Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany, King Alfonso XII of Spain, and King Umberto of Italy. Two attempts were made on the Kaiser’s life, only a month apart.19 Men of power and authority, they symbolized the pinnacle of the bourgeois state, and hence constituted ideal targets in the anarchists’ war with society. In 1882, the anarchists finally succeeded in executing a successful assassination, when they killed Czar Alexander II of Russia.20 In commenting on this rash of assassination attempts, the cartoonist at Harper’s Weekly once again made use of the communist skeletons (5.5).21 This time two skeletons appear wearing togas and standing in front of posters that say “King-Killing Association,” “We Hate Kings,” and “Freedom to Assassinate Those We Don’t Like.”22 One skeleton boasts, “after we have killed all Kings and Rulers, we shall be the Sovereigns.”23 The other skeleton gloats in reply, “And then we can kill each other. What sport!” Clearly, their pleasure, and hence the pleasure of the radical left, in violence, blood, and killing has become an end in itself, without reason or justification. No wonder that the New York Times declared that to the anarchists, “blood is the watchword and the knife the bible.”24 Heads of state were not the only targets for the men that the press labeled “blood-preaching anarchists.”25 In May of 1886, an Anarchist threw a bottle of caustic acid from a gallery onto the floor of the Bourse, France’s stock exchange, then began shooting into the crowd.26 That same month, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, someone threw a bomb at the police officers dispersing a protest meeting. The explosion and the 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

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Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 170. Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 204. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 171. The cartoonist responsible for all three of the Communist skeleton caricatures is none other than Thomas Nast, famous for his sketches of New York City’s Boss Tweed. Harper’s Weekly, February 1st, 1879, p 92. The italics are in the text. New York Times, October 6th, 1889, 5. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 240. No one was seriously injured. Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 206.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

5.5 “Very Social” First D.H. [Dead Head] Conspirator: After we have killed all kings and rulers, we shall be the sovereigns. Second D.H. Conspirator: And then we can kill each other. What sport! Taken from Harper’s Weekly, February 1st, 1892, 92

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police shootings that followed left both policemen and civilians dead. The bomb thrower was never identified, and the police arrested eight of the most prominent Anarchist activists in the city, trying them collectively for inciting the incident. Five were sentenced to death; three were given life sentences, then pardoned in 1893.27 In 1892, a year before that pardon was issued, the anarchist Alexander Berkman (1870–1936) made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the American steel mogul Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919).28 For France, worse was yet to come. Between 1892 and 1894, anarchists set off at least a half dozen bombs, their targets including France’s Chamber of Deputies, army barracks, private homes, and a café at the Saint-Lazare train station.29 This period of terror for France reached its apogee with the assassination of the French president Sadi Carnot (1837–1894), in June of 1894.30 Punch paid tribute to the violence in France with its cartoon, “The New ‘Queen of the May’” (5.6). The cartoon’s title refers to the May 1st celebrations that were part of the Communist tradition. May 1st had been designated a holiday dedicated to the celebration of workingclass solidarity only a few years earlier.31 The figure representing France wears a sash bearing the word, “International,” a name synonymous with the communists. Her hair is disheveled, and her eyes, which she has fixed on a bomb with a lit fuse, wild. At her feet are wreaths labeled “Eight Hours Day,” “Strikes,” “Agitation,” “Solidarity,” and “Dynamite,” referring to both the role of communists and socialists in labor agitation discussed earlier in this chapter and the acts of anarchist terror taking place in France at the time of the cartoon’s publication. The figure holds a lily in a clenched fist. The lily can be read as either a symbol of peace or a floral representation of France and her fleur-de-lis, but winding around this lily is a worm or snake labeled “Anarchy,” about to destroy this symbol of peaceful France, as surely as the figure in the cartoon is about to destroy France’s peace by throwing the bomb in her other hand. 27 28

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Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 206. Margaret Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870–1920, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 8. Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 206–07; Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Sciecle France, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 237. Joll, The Anarchists, 113. Leslie Derfler, Paul Lafargue and the Flowering of French Socialism, 1882–1911, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), 77; Punch, April 30th, 1892.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

5.6 “The New ‘Queen of the May’” Taken from Punch, April 30th, 1892

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Although anarchist terror died down significantly after Carnot’s death, the image of the violent, rapacious anarchist had been etched onto the imagination of Europeans and Americans alike. In an article on the subject, the scientist Cesare Lombroso characterized anarchists as “a typical wild criminal by nature, a bloodthirsty robber and murderer, a beast in manshape, who transferred his horrible instincts to his political fanaticism.”32 Perceived as bloodthirsty, anarchists blithely caused deaths in order to achieve their own ends: revolutions required bloodshed.33 One radical confirmed this idea, stating that, “in order to give birth to the new society of peace, joy and love, it is necessary that young people not be afraid to die.”34 According to the lyrics of a popular socialist song from Germany, the revolutionaries will “flow through blood and debris to reach their objectives.”35 Much like the terrorists of today, anarchists espoused the theme of martyrdom and the nobility of giving their own blood for their cause in addition to spilling the blood of others. In anarchist literature, recruits to the cause were encouraged to be “magnificent in your blood,” and to participate in the holy war against the bourgeoisie.36 It reached the point that anarchists praised any revolt against the bourgeois establishment, even when the perpetrator or motive had only a tenuous connection to anarchists or the anarchist agenda. In turn, the public associated any terrorism with anarchists, and any anarchists with terrorism.37 Anarchists who appear in literature during this period reflect this extreme image of the terrorist, martyr, and vampire, thirsting to spill bourgeois blood and their own into the bargain. One of Zola’s later novels, Paris, explores the repercussions of an unsuccessful anarchist plot. In it, an aspiring anarchist and terrorist imagines the avenging flare by which he would repair the evil and ensure what was right for all time . . . he glowed with a desire for death, a desire to give his own blood and set the blood of others flowing, in order that mankind, amidst its fright and horror, should decree the return of the golden age.38 32

33

34 35

36 37 38

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Cesare Lombroso, “Der Kampf gegen den Anarchismus,” Die Zukunft, (Vol. 10, February 9th, n. 19) 272–279, 273. Alexander Varias, Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives During the Fin de Sciecle, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 84. Cited in Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 171. Heinrich von Treitschke, “Der Socialismus und der Meuchelmord,” Preussiche Jahrbuche, 1878, Volume 41, 637–47, 639. Cited in Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 261. Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 173. Emile Zola, Paris, 1896, (Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993), 455.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

The anarchist Souvarine in Zola’s Germinal deliberately avoids forming friends or romantic attachments so that he might be “free to do what he liked with his own blood and the blood of others” and likewise contemplates “anarchy, the end of everything. The whole world bathed in blood and purified by fire.”39 To the bourgeois majority, the violence of the anarchists lacked restraint or conscience. In his dystopic novel, Caesar’s Column, American author Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) describes the anarchists preparing to destroy their enervated and corrupt society as “savage and desperate men who are hastening to the banquet of blood and destruction.”40 A spy who infiltrates the anarchist gang reports that “they have [no plan] . . . except to burn, rob, destroy and murder . . . They will kill all . . . of the aristocracy, except the young girls, and these will be reserved for a worse fate.”41 The overtly vampiric nature ascribed to anarchist terrorists comes through clearly in literature. Late in Germinal, a prolonged strike leads to a bread riot. The miners’ wives surround the company grocery store and the hated grocer dies from falling off his own roof while trying to escape. After a moment of disbelief “the women . . . rushed forward, seized with a thirst for blood” and tear apart his still warm body.42 The second in command of Donnelly’s anarchist triumvirate is an elderly man with “two fangs alone remain[ing] in his mouth.”43 Even anarchists embraced the vampiric aspects of their identity, as seen in a popular song where they contrast the “well-fed bourgeoisie” with “the desperate ones with hollow stomachs/ but with long teeth.”44 A number of these elements come together in “A Dead Finger,” a short story about an anarchist, vampire-like monster. A man of the upper classes finds an ambulatory finger crawling up his trouser leg. He does his best to get rid of it, but the finger follows him home and begins to drain him of his psychic energy while he sleeps. Soon, the finger materializes into a hand, then a nebulous body, while the narrator grows increasingly weak and ill. A scientist friend of his manages to trap this psychic vampire before 39 40

41 42 43 44

Zola, Germinal, 143, 146. Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century, 1889, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960), 97. Donnelly, Caesar’s Column, 130. Zola, Germinal, 351. Donnelly, Caesar’s Column, 150. Cited in Varias, Paris and the Anarchists, 85–6.

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it materializes fully and kills the protagonist. When captured, the vampiric creature rambles bitterly: I hate Society. I don’t like work neither, never did. But I like agitating against what’s established. I hate the Royal Family, the landed interest, the parsons, everything that is, except the people — that is, the unemployed . . . But we must have our share of happiness at some time. . . . We didn’t get it when we were alive, so we seek to procure it after we are dead. We can do it, if we can get out of our cheap and nasty coffins. . . . Then we grope about after the living. The well-to-do if we can get at them — the honest working poor if we can’t — we hate them too, because they are content and happy. If we reach any of these, and can touch them, then we can draw their vital force out of them into ourselves, and recuperate at their expense.45

When asked if he is an anarchist, the parasite replies, “we are all one, and own allegiance to but one monarch — Sovereign discontent. We are bred to have a distaste for manual work; and we grow up loafers, grumbling at everything and quarrelling with the Society that is around us and the Providence that is above us.”46 The love of agitation and violence for its own sake, the irrational hatred of government and other authority figures, and the desire for revenge against even the contented members of the working class are all typical of the bourgeois view of anarchists. The symbols with which the radical left surrounded themselves only enhanced their reputation for violence and bloodshed. Red flags were ubiquitous at any rally, protest, or demonstration involving the radical Left. So were the membership cards carried by socialists.47 At a mass meeting reported by the New York Times, in addition to the “four monster red flags” decorating the hall, “around the throats of probably half the people in the hall were flaming red neckties.”48 In Zola’s novel, Le Ventre de Paris, when the main character Florent naively plans for a great social revolution, he goes about stockpiling red armbands and flags. His sister-in-law, Lisa, suspicious of his activities, enters his bedroom to discover that, 45

46 47

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Sabine Baring-Gould, “A Dead Finger,” 1904, Dracula’s Brood: Rare Vampire Stories by Friends and Contemporaries of Bram Stoker, Ed. Richard Dalby, (London: Crucible, 1987), 249–263, 262–63. Baring-Gould, “A Dead Finger,” 263. Robert Stuart, Marxism at Work: Ideology, Class, and French Socialism During the Third Republic, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 24. “Most is at it Again,” New York Times, April 21st, 1892, 1.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

the bed, before now so spotless, was quite ensanguined by a bundle of long red scarves dangling down to the floor. On the mantelpiece, between the gilt cardboard boxes and the old pomade-pots, were several red armlets and clusters of red cockades, looking like pools of blood.49

When asked, Socialist spokesmen said that the red flags symbolized “the red blood of humanity which flowed alike through the veins of all.” Anarchists used both red and black flags; they claimed that black was the “emblem of starvation and misery.50 To outsiders, like Florent’s sister-in-law, rather than a declaration of the brotherhood of men, these red flags and paraphernalia announced the violent intentions of the communists and their allies. The bourgeoisie considered that the “blood-red banners of the Communists and Socialistic labor clubs” were “the emblem[s] of blood and destruction.”51 Whatever the meaning given to the red flag, its association with the radical left became so intrinsic that the adjective “red” was applied to any individuals or groups that espoused the cause of social revolution.52 France’s Revue des Deux Mondes described the communists as “the red specter, present everywhere and everywhere threatening,” while the German press complained of “outbreaks of red terrorism,” referring to the double attack on the Kaiser’s life.53 Each of our countries showed concern and anxiety about the radical left: labor agitation, the fear of anarchist terrorism, and discussions on how to best control both. Another issue that united these countries was the idea of the anarchist as a foreign outsider. This idea, like that of the constant threat of anarchist terrorism, held several grains of truth. Although Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States all had to contend with home-grown radicals, immigrant-rich nations such as Great Britain and the United States could legitimately claim that their most troublesome communists, socialists, and anarchists originated in other countries.

49

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Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris, 1873, Trans. Ernest Vizetelly, (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1996), 350. Cited in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 146. “The Communists in Mourning,” New York Times, March 20th, 1883, 8; Cited in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 220. Marsh, Anarchist Women, 14. Emile de Laveleye, “Grandeur et Decadence de L’Internationale,” Revue des Deux Mondes, March 15th, 1880 (Volume 38), 296–332, 296; Treitschke, “Der Socialismus und der Meuchelmord,” 641.

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Although the United States made efforts to weed out political radicals from its immigrants, its large numbers of immigrants at this time could not help but include communists or anarchists hoping to find greater political freedom. Moreover, many ordinary immigrants became radicalized due to their experiences in their host countries. Often unskilled and unable to speak English, recent immigrants constituted some of the most vulnerable of the working population. They were more likely to be taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers, landlords, and a variety of other human parasites, experiences which radicalized many people.54 To many contemporary observers, of course, it simply appeared that foreigners imported leftist agitation — passionate, prone to violence, and abusing America’s generous right to free speech and assembly. Some complained that “socialism in America is an anomaly . . . were it not for the dregs of foreign immigration which find lodgement here.”55 In Caesar’s Column, the leader of the anarchists, Caesar, is “a man of Italian descent,” described as possessing a swarthy complexion, with “a thick, close mat of curly black hair . . . [and] the eyes of a wild beast, deep-set, sullen and glaring.”56 A political cartoon appearing in Harper’s Weekly (5.7), addresses these issues. It depicts an immigrant ship crowded with passengers of various nationalities.57 In the foreground stands the stern figure of Uncle Sam, dangling the figure of an anarchist over the ship’s side. The man’s hair is disheveled, his eyes crazed, his hands clenched into claws, and a pair of fangs is plainly visible in his mouth. If his appearance were not enough confirmation that this man is a menace to society, the assortment of weapons Uncle Sam has managed to shake out of concealment are: a bloodied knife, a revolver, and a smoking bomb. Sternly stating, “No room on this ship,” Uncle Sam appears intent on dropping the Anarchist over the side and into the ocean.58 When one notices that the ship’s name is the “United States,” it becomes clear that the boat is simultaneously a symbol of an immigrant ship and a metaphor for the United States as a country. In both cases, the cartoon is a message regarding whom the United States 54 55

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Marsh, Anarchist Women, 14, 29–30. Cited in Bruce Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A  Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists, 1870–1900, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 7. Donnelly, Caesar’s Column, 149. Most of the figures’ faces are obscured, but an Asian immigrant is visible towards the rear of the ship, so the artist must have been striving for some show of diversity. Harper’s Weekly, October 5th, 1901.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

5.7 “No Room on this Ship” Taken from Harper’s Weekly, October 5th, 1901

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will or will not allow to enter the country. The cartoon was penned within a month of President McKinley’s (1843–1901) assassination in 1901. His assassin, Leon Czgolsz (1873–1901), claimed to have been inspired by the Anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940), although historians have concluded that Czgolsz was mentally disturbed and his connections to the Anarchist movement were tenuous at best. At the time, however, this was enough to whip the public into a frenzy of anti-Anarchist and antiimmigration agitation, which the cartoon illustrates perfectly. The artist demonstrates that Anarchist terrorism in the United States is considered a foreign import, and that America is going to crack down on allowing such terrorist vampires to immigrate.59 Despite the situation of Great Britain and the United States, immigration can only explain so much. The French, particularly after their defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, were acutely sensitive to the danger posed by outsiders. It takes some searching to find a French anarchist in any of the novels of this period. Germinal’s Souvarine is Russian.60 Another anarchist, from Zola’s novel Paris, lacks any definite nationality; “he was from over yonder, from some far away land — Russia, Poland, Austria or Germany, nobody exactly knew; and it mattered little, for he acknowledged no country, but wandered far and wide with his dream of blood-shedding fraternity.”61 Anatole France, one of the great satirical authors of this period, describes an anarchist den in Paris as filled with “Russian Nihilists, Italian Anarchists, refugees, conspirators, revolutionaries from every quarter of the globe.”62 To an even greater extent than novelists, however, French politicians conflated their fear of anarchists with their fears of both Germans and Jews.63 The dovetailing of anarchism with anti-Semitic feelings was shared by all four of these countries. Donnelly’s second in command of the anarchist triumvirate is an East European Jew, “driven out of his synagogue in Russia, . . . for some crimes he had committed.”64 He is the 59 60 61 62

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Marsh, Anarchist Women, 8. Zola, Germinal, 142. Zola, Paris, 172. Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels, The Six Greatest Novels of Anatole France, Trans. Mrs. Wilfrid Jackson, (New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1914), 386. Leslie Derfler, Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 1842–1882, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), 108. Yes, an anarchist organization with any kind of organized hierarchy is an oxymoron. All I can say is that Donnelly was not an anarchist and didn’t think like one. Donnelly, Caesar’s Column, 127.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

man left with only his fangs for teeth, underscoring the connection in the minds of the public between the anarchist, the Jew, and the vampire. In 1894, in the midst of the chauvinistic and anti-Semitic debate leading up to Great Britain’s Alien bill, proponents claimed that one quarter of all the anarchists in England were Russian Jews.65 Others asserted that “the vast majority of these foreign Jews are anarchists and nihilists of the very worst type.”66 Nor were these opinions the preserve of the fringe element. A contributor to Great Britain’s mainstream intellectual magazine, The Nineteenth Century, wrote of “the chief promoters of that Bright’s disease of modern nations, of Socialism, the two founders of which, Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, were Jews, as are its chief leaders at present.”67 Karl Marx presented an ambiguous, troubling figure for many. His father had converted from Judaism to Christianity before Karl was born, in order to improve his social and professional position and prospects. According to Jewish religious law, Karl Marx was technically born a Jew, because his mother had not yet converted herself. She converted to Christianity a year after Karl himself was christened, at the age of six.68 Marx was considered the founder of the Communist Party and one of the leading thinkers of the radical left. He lived the latter half of his life in Great Britain after the failed revolutions of 1848 made him a wanted man in Germany and France. Likewise, he lived most of his life unaffiliated with any religion, let alone choosing either Christianity or Judaism. Yet his opponents never let it be forgotten that he was both a German and a Jew. An article in France’s Révue des Deux Mondes referred to him as “Marx-Mordecai, the German Jew.”69 The fears that Marx inspired were exacerbated by the mistaken belief that he held ultimate control of all aspects of the radical left.70 65

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Matthew Thomas, Anarchist Ideas and Counter-Cultures in Britain, 188–1914: Revolutions in Everyday Life, (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2005), 37. Cited in Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism, and the British Left, 1881–1924, (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1998), 56. Emil Reich, “The Jew-Baiting on the Continent,” The Nineteenth Century, Volume 40, September 1896, 422–438, 426. Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 419. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, “Le Regne de L’Argent III: Le Capitalisme et la Feodalite Industrielle et Financiere,” Revue des Deux Mondes, June 1st, 1894 (Volume 123), 513– 550, 515. Leslie Derfler, Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 124.

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Apart from disputes over Karl Marx’s ancestry, anti-Semitism still played a significant role in who received the blame for the actions of the radical left. In Germany, socialists were considered Jewish agents, intent on destabilizing the nation and leaving it vulnerable to Jewish domination.71 Similarly, the French accused the Jews of financing anarchist activities, particularly the wealthy Rothschild family.72 The Rothschilds’ position as capitalists, of course, precluded any co-operation between them and anarchists, even Jewish ones. Despite the absurdity of the accusation, the connection remained in the minds of anti-Semites, since the power the Rothschilds had supposedly amassed to control the state might easily be utilized to destroy it. Anatole France (1844–1924) summarizes the situation neatly in his book, The Revolt of the Angels. In the aftermath of an anarchist attack, while wild rumors float around, “the more thoughtful people recognized the handiwork of the Jew and the German, and demanded the expulsion of all aliens.”73 Thus far in this chapter, relatively little has been said regarding anarchistic attacks within Great Britain. A capitalist power-house such as Great Britain could not hope, however, to be ignored completely by the radical Left, and the country witnessed several close calls in 1894. In one case, anarchists engaged in building a pipe bomb were caught before they could execute their plans. In another, an anarchist intent on setting off a bomb at the Greenwich Royal Observatory accidentally detonated it before he had reached his destination, killing himself alone. The later incident served as the inspiration of Joseph Conrad’s (1857–1924) novel, The Secret Agent.74 During this period, however, the British public was concerned less with anarchist-inspired terrorism than with the terrorist tactics of Irish nationals. The violent fringe of nineteenth-century Irish nationalists shared a great deal of common ground with the violent fringe of the radical left.75 Both characterized their ideological enemies as vampires. To most 71

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William Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914, (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1975), 231. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 46. France, The Revolt of the Angels, 492. Thomas, Anarchist Ideas and Counter-Cultures in Britain, 47. Most of this chapter has dealt with the dichotomy between capitalists and the radical Left that sought to overthrow them. Violent nationalists might appear at first better suited to the next chapter, which centers on nationalism. The terror tactics used by Irish nationalists, however, have more in common with those of the radical Left than

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

communists and anarchists, this meant the capitalists who exploited the workers. To Irish nationalists, this meant the English who had conquered their island, installed Englishmen in positions of power over the natives, and included Ireland in the 1800 Act of Union that made them part of Great Britain, along with England, Scotland, and Wales. Englishmen appeared to control most of Ireland, as landlords who charged their tenants rent to work the land while they lived idly off of the proceeds. Landlords also had the power to raise rents and to evict tenants who could not pay. Contemporary historians have disproved this blanket characterization of landlords and their relationships with their tenants. There were, however, documented exceptions, and the popular perception held by the Irish regarding English landlords during this period was largely colored by negative stereotypes.76 English landlords in Ireland were vilified as “vampires . . . sucking the life-blood of the population, and . . . their cruelties had in turn produced what had been called ‘the wild justice of revenge.’”77 In Captain Shannon, a spy and adventure novel that pits an English hero against the eponymous Irish terrorist, Captain Shannon’s manifesto draws comparisons between aristocratic English landlords and capitalists, stating that his “purpose is to rid mankind . . . of the whole vampire brood of Peers, Nobles, and Capitalists who, in order that they may live in idleness . . . , grind the face of the poor, and drain, drop by drop, the hearts’ blood of toiling millions.”78 By the late 1860s, violent Irish nationalists had come together under the auspices of a secret nationalist organization known as the Fenians. The Fenians were an umbrella group composed of the remnants of a nationalist organization from the 1840s known as the Young Irelanders as well as expatriate Irish nationals, mostly of the artisan and petit bourgeois levels of society.79 They derived their name from a medieval Gaelic saga about a warrior named Fiona MacCumhail and his followers, the Fianna.80 Inspired by Marx’s writings on class war, the Fenians were

76 77 78 79 80

with the other themes related to nationalism found in the next chapter, and so I discuss them here. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972, (New York: Penguin, 1990), 375. Times, May 19th, 1882, 8. Coulson Kernahan, Captain Shannon, (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1896), 12. Foster, Modern Ireland, 390–92. Foster, Modern Ireland, 390; Robert Kee, The Green Flag: The Turbulent History of the Irish National Movement, (New York: Delacorte Press, 1972), 310.

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determined to regain control of their country by force — a position that led most Englishmen to label the Fenians as dangerous troublemakers.81 This fear would be proven by events. A failed Fenian rebellion in 1867 had resulted in the capture of two leaders. While these men were being transferred to a jail near Manchester, England, a group of Fenian loyalists attacked the van in order to free the prisoners. In the ensuing struggle, a police sergeant was killed. Although the two Fenian leaders escaped as planned, three of their rescuers were captured and executed — becoming known to future Irish nationalists as the Manchester Martyrs.82 Within a month of the execution of the Manchester Martyrs, another group of Fenian supporters attempted to free another of their leaders from a prison in the Clerkenwell area of London. They did this by blowing up one of the walls of the prison, killing twelve people, injuring dozens more, and failing in their objective. The exact number of casualties is difficult to determine. Some sources place it as low as thirty, others as high as one hundred or more.83 In the wake of this wave of violence in the name of Irish Nationalism, Fenians joined the pantheon of bogeymen that haunted the imagination of the English public. Although the Fenian movement soon after morphed into the Irish Republican Brotherhood and lost most of its organizational power, the public maintained its associations of Irish violence with the label of Fenianism.84 Incidents of Irish terrorism peaked in 1882. In May, Lord Frederick Cavendish (1836–1882), the new Chief Secretary of Ireland, was found stabbed to death in Phoenix Park within a week of his arrival. The unknown assailants had also killed Thomas Burke (1829–1882), one of Cavendish’s undersecretaries.85 The murders in Phoenix Park would be the last serious act of terrorist violence perpetrated by Irish nationalists for decades, but the associations of Fenians, violence, and vampiric imagery continued for the remainder of our period. When Captain Shannon was published in the late 1890s, the reverberations of past Fenian violence remained strong in the public 81 82 83 84

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Foster, Modern Ireland, 391; Kee, The Green Flag, 334. Kee, The Green Flag, 341, 343. Kee, The Green Flag, 346. Kee, The Green Flag, 358; M. J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916, (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2006), 108. Kee, The Green Flag, 383; Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 16.

Sara Libby Robinson

Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

imagination. The book opens with a string of terrorist attacks perpetrated by the elusive Captain Shannon and his minions. They begin by bombing “the police headquarters at New Scotland Yard.”86 Parliament condemns the attack; the Chief Secretary of Ireland does so in particularly strong terms, declaring that “the purpose of the crime was to terrorise and to intimidate.”87 In punishment, Captain Shannon bombs the train on which the Chief Secretary makes his daily commute, killing not only his target but all the other Passengers, as well as the guard, driver, and stoker, not only of the train in which the explosion took place, but also of a train which was proceeding in the opposite direction and happened to be passing at the time, . . . . every soul in the station — ticket-collectors, porters, station-master, and the unfortunate people who were waiting on the platform . . . . Several columns of the papers next morning were filled with lists of the missing and the dead.88

Shortly thereafter, Captain Shannon publishes a manifesto in which he declares his spiritual kinship with the “Anarchistic, Nihilistic, Fenian, and similar movements,” as well as referencing “the destruction of Clerkenwell prison; the righteous punishment which befell those servants of tyrants and enemies of freedom, Burke and Cavendish.”89 This fear and these associations engendered by the violent extremists attached themselves to nationalist moderates. At the time of the Phoenix Park assassinations, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891) was the leader of the Irish movement for Home Rule — in which the Irish advocated for their own Parliament and the ability to control their own domestic affairs rather than complete independence from England. Parnell and his followers did not employ the violent tactics used by the Fenians, but most Englishmen associated any Irish nationalist with the violence of Manchester, Clerkenwell, and Phoenix Park, and viewed working with Parnell over Home Rule as tantamount to negotiating with terrorists.90 86 87 88

89 90

Kernahan, Captain Shannon, 2. Kernahan, Captain Shannon, 2. The description seems almost eerily prophetic of the terrorist attacks on the London transit system in the summer of 2005. Kernahan, Captain Shannon, 6–8. Kernahan, Captain Shannon, 9–11. D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 199.

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5.8 “The Irish ‘Vampire’” Taken from Punch, October 24th, 1885

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Vampires and Political Counter-Culture; Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism

This distrust of Parnell manifests itself most clearly in one of Punch’s most explicitly vampiric political cartoons. Titled “The Irish ‘Vampire’” (5.8), it depicts an enormous vampire bat with Parnell’s head, its wings labeled “National League.”91 The Parnell-like vampire hovers menacingly over a recumbent figure of Ireland — Hibernia with shamrocks in her hair. Hibernia appears restless and her face troubled, as though experiencing a nightmare. As a result of her restless sleep her neck is bared temptingly, offering easy access for the vampire closing in on her. The message is clear: in the eyes of the British public, Parnell and his cronies are no better than the violent, vampire Fenians. They have gulled the Irish people, lulled them into dreams of nationalist independence from Great Britain, and will attack at the first opportunity, spilling both English and Irish blood, and weakening the country.92 Members of the radical left enjoyed using blood-related rhetoric against the bourgeois establishment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The vampire metaphor lent itself well to greed and corruption among politicians and capitalists. These same images of vampires, blood, and violence, however, came back to haunt the communists, socialists, and anarchists in unexpected ways. They had cultivated a reputation for violence, for attempting to foment a cataclysmic class war, and for acts of terrorism. This rhetorical, even actual, search for the blood of their political enemies resulted in being labeled vampires by the very establishment they so hated. In the eyes of most contemporary observers, it was the communists, socialists, and anarchists who sought blood through labor agitation, mob violence, and assassination. They were the ones who surrounded themselves with blood-red flags and accessories. They were the blood-thirsty vampires. While the bourgeois establishment saw themselves as only seeking a life free of violence and fear, where men were free to work at their jobs and earn a living, “the revolutionary Socialists, Anarchists, Internationalists, or whatever you may call the ‘ignorant 91 92

Punch, October 24th, 1885. Bram Stoker was himself an Irishman, and several Dracula scholars have drawn links between Count Dracula’s “Otherness” and the “Otherness” of the Irish. In their opinion, Dracula and Transylvania serve as metaphorical stand-ins for the Irish countryside, Irish nationalism, and the superstitions associated with Ireland. Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 52–3, 55–7, 61; David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 40–1.

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foreigners’ . . . follow the red flag and proclaim that wage-slavery is the curse of this age.”93 The acts of terrorism perpetuated by the radical left not only helped to justify their reputation as blood-thirsty vampires, it introduced the world to a new type of political action. The Irish nationalists had used violence in order to achieve political gains in the same ways that the radical left tried to achieve social and economic change, believing that “martyrs to nationality can nourish and strengthen and save from disaster the nation for which they die.”94 This marriage of anarchist terror tactics to nationalist fervor would have dire consequences. When assassins killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863–1914) in 1914, precipitating the First World War, their goal was nationalist sovereignty, while their inspiration lay with the anarchist’s Propaganda by the Deed.95 Nor should this connection between nationalism and the blood-thirsty tactics of the anarchists come as a surprise to anyone. Nationalism relied just as heavily on the rhetoric and metaphor of blood, as we will see in the next chapter. 93 94

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Cited in Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 179. A. Newman [H.M. Pim], “What Emmet Means in 1915” in Tracts for the Times (Dublin, 1915) cited in Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 254. Joll, The Anarchists, 79.

Sara Libby Robinson

6

PAYING THE BLOOD TAX National Identity, Blood, and Vampires

NATIONALISM holds a special place among the subjects of this study. In nationalist discourse, blood could never remain a merely rhetorical abstract, and metaphors related to blood and vampires proved especially apt. Throughout the centuries people have constantly struggled to define citizenship. In the age of absolutist monarchs, citizens defined themselves through loyalty to their sovereign. This could accommodate the ethnic or language differences of various groups who could transcend their differences through shared loyalty to the royal family. Examples of this modus vivendi in the nineteenth century included the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, although by the dawn of the twentieth century, significant cracks had developed in both regimes, with certain regions increasingly impatient to become independent nations. The importance of blood in nineteenth-century thought, and an increasing awareness of the scientific discourses related to blood, colored nationalist discourse. In the minds of many thinkers and opinion makers, nationality evolved into something based on blood and on race. In the nineteenth century, “race” served as an umbrella term signifying more Blood Will Tell

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than skin color or ethnicity. Race could also mean nationality, whether of an individual nation, or of a group of nations that shared ethnic, linguistic, or cultural traits. People might sometimes speak of, for example, the French race, or the Nordic races, in the latter case, lumping together the inhabitants of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc.1 With the nation defined increasingly as a race, blood became the fundamental entrance ticket to citizenship rather than any particular language or fealty to any particular monarch. When people defined citizenship by race and by blood, they, like the Social Darwinists, required pure blood — those with impure blood, as the arbiters of nationality chose to define it, were excluded from citizenship.2 Nationalism — the feeling of love and pride for one’s country — also meant defense of that country. In times of war, national defense entailed endangering lives and spilling blood. Governments expected their citizens to prove national loyalty through a willingness to shed the blood of their enemies and an equal willingness to die in their country’s defense. Through military service, men paid in blood for their citizenship and all the rights it carried — an arrangement referred to popularly in France as “l’impôt du sang,” or the blood tax.3 Men who enjoyed the fruits of citizenship without paying this blood tax, however, were viewed as parasites that drained their country of its blessings, weakening it and making it vulnerable to outside attack. Observers regarded those who endangered their countries as vampires. Defining nations and nationalism is a complex problem that has exercised the minds of scholars for centuries, and which has changed over time. Elie Kedourie argues that during the eighteenth century, under the influence of the Enlightenment, the foremost philosophers of the day believed in mankind’s inherent reason and the common traits and rights that united them.4 Kant (1724–1804), Fichte (1762–1814), and Herder (1744–1803), among others, emphasized the individual’s selfdetermination and identification with his nation; the nation is the group 1

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Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 184. Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 209. Margaret Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front, (Oxford: Berg Publishing, 2000), 31. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1960), 10.

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National Identity, Blood, and Vampires

to which the individual chooses to pledge his allegiance.5 According to these philosophies, citizenship became the choice of the individual and his choice signified his commitment both to himself as an individual and to the nation as a whole. What bound these individuals together as a nation, however, was a common language.6 Language divided different nations even as it united individuals within nations. Enlightenment philosophers believed that Only one language is firmly implanted in an individual. Only to one does he belong entirely, no matter how many he learns subsequently . . . . For every language is a particular mode of thought and what is cogitated in one language can never be repeated in the same way in another.7

Strong national identity required fluency in the individual’s national language, and to avoid corrupting it by mixing in too many words from other languages.8 The end of the eighteenth century brought a sea-change. Philosophers of the dawning nineteenth century rejected what they viewed as the sterile, overly rational paradigms of the Enlightenment, embracing instead passionate feeling and action.9 During the nineteenth century, nationalism, like other important political and social issues, became increasingly an ideology based on blood. The idea of the nation was linked with the much older idea of the tribe, into which one could be born, but which one could not choose to join.10 Nationalism became an inherent quality that neither language nor cultural heritage could contain. Growing up speaking English, French, or German, sharing the social and political culture of a country from birth, could not guarantee anyone a national identity if their blood did not pass muster first. Like nineteenth century concepts of race, in which physical and social attributes were rooted in blood, so, too, national identity was thought to rest in the blood of its citizens.11 “I am French,” one French writer declared 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

Kedourie, Nationalism, 25. Oliver Zimmer, Nationalism in Europe, 1890–1940, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 6–7. Cited in Kedourie, Nationalism, 63. Kedourie, Nationalism, 59–60, 67. Kedourie, Nationalism, 102–03. Kedourie, Nationalism, 75. Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair, (London: Associated University Presses, 1982), 482.

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passionately, “I love France . . .; this is a feeling which cannot be explained; I have it in my blood.”12 Like inherited racial attributes, people thought of national loyalty as something passed naturally from parent to child. Eugen Thossau describes the patriotism of a typical German family in his novel, In the Army: Two Years of Popular Education, as an organic quality they all share: “In the family there generally was a strong, loud, bragging patriotism alive, which was not only produced on memorial days for the fatherland . . . [but] lay in the blood of these people.”13 Many believed that national identity formed an integral part of racial identity. In the United States, the destination of numerous immigrant nationalities, racial hierarchies asserted themselves into the discourse of nationalism. In Chapter Three, we already explored the positive attributes linked with the Anglo-Saxon race and the negative traits ascribed to African Americans and the waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Anglo-Saxons supposedly excelled in the intelligence and self-discipline necessary to appreciate and perpetuate enlightened self-government. NonAnglo-Saxons lacked these qualities, and were therefore biologically unable to be loyal nationalists without the supervision of Anglo-Saxon leaders.14 As one American politician commented from the floor of the Congress: You could shipwreck 10,000 illiterate white Americans or Englishmen or Scotchmen, of whom not one knew a letter in a book, on a desert island, and in three weeks they would have a fairly good government, conceived and administered upon fairly democratic lines . . . You could shipwreck an equal number of . . . Negroes, every one of whom was a graduate of Harvard University, and in less than three years they would have retrograded governmentally to the old tribal relations, half the men would have been killed and the other half would have two wives apiece.15 12

13 14

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Maurice Donnay, Des Souvenirs, (Paris: A. Fayard, 1933), 70, Cited in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 482. K. Ströbel, “Die Psychologie des Militarismus,” Die Neue Zeit, 12 May, 1897, 642–651. In an effort to offset the deplorable national capacities ascribed to new immigrants, many organizations put great effort into assimilating immigrants as quickly and as completely as possible, endeavoring to make them over in the image of proper AngloSaxon citizens. Remember that as influential as theories of Social Darwinism were, there always remained those who believed in the power of education, even in the face of biology. Paul T. McCartney, Power and Progress: American National Identity, the War of 1898, and the Rise of American Imperialism, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 63–4, 67. Congressional Record, 55th Congress, 3rd Session, 342, cited in McCartney, Power and Progress, 63.

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Nationalism, of course, meant much more than mere devotion to one’s system of government and maintaining law and order. Good citizens translated loyalty into solidarity, and solidarity into an effective, cohesive military, capable of defending a country in times of crisis. One character in Debit and Credit, a best-selling German novel from the year of its publication in 1858 and throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, declared that “human life is only valuable when one is ready to surrender it on a fitting opportunity.”16 Another German writer, Richard Vos (1851–1918), called national loyalty “the purest and most powerful feeling of a human being: Patriotism which is equal to the love of God.”17 If asked, most men of the nineteenth century would agree that national defense constituted one of the noblest opportunities for which to lay down one’s life. In his utopian novel, Looking Backwards, Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) takes it for granted that everyone agrees with “the idea that the obligation of every citizen, not physically disabled, to contribute his military services to the defense of the nation, was equal and absolute.”18 French intellectual Ernest Renan (1823–1892) declared that “a nation is . . . the expression of a great solidarity, constituted by a feeling for the common sacrifices that have been made and for those one is prepared to make again.”19 Some commentators even emphasized the elements of sacrifice to such an extent that they idealized war as well as national loyalty, claiming that, War is not murder . . . war is sacrifice. The fighting and killing are not of the essence of it, but are the accidents; and even these, in the wide modern fields where a soldier rarely in his own sight sheds any blood but his own, where he lies on the battle sward not to inflict death but to endure it — even these are mainly purged of savagery and transfigured into devotion.20

In this respect, the more energetic and able an army, the better this reflected on an individual country, the loyalty of her citizens, and their willingness to 16 17 18

19

20

Gustav Freytag, Debit and Credit, 1858 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1990), 463. Richard Vos, “Pro Patria,” Die Zukunft, (Volume 84), July 12th, 1913, 51–57, 53. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1946. 1888), 67. Cited in Timothy Baycroft & Mark Hewitson, “Introduction,” What is a Nation? Europe, 1789–1914, Eds. Timothy Baycroft & Mark Hewitson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–16, 1. Cited in Anne Summers, “Edwardian Militarism,” Patriotism: the Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Volume I: History and Politics, Raphael Samuel, Ed. (New York: Routledge, 1989), 236–256, 252.

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make sacrifices in her name. As one contributor to The Nineteenth Century noted, “Wars in our time are the expression of vast natural forces, having their roots far down in national character.”21 Politicians viewed warfare as the ultimate test of strength and survival. In their view, when a country engaged in war, it “compels effort, it demands the rapid rediscovery of male virtues which were on the point of falling into disuse. It forces a man to be a man; it puts nations to the test in a bath of blood.”22 Not going to war could be construed as signs of national weakness, cowardice and a failure of national manhood. In the Congressional debates leading up to the SpanishAmerican war, Representative William Sulzer (1863–1941) declared that “there are things more horrible than war. I would rather be dead upon the battlefield than live under the white flag of national disgrace, national cowardice, national decay, and national disintegration.”23 Maurice, the protagonist of Zola’s novel of the Franco-Prussian war, La Debacle, asks himself if life were not a sort of war, every second of the day? Wasn’t the order of nature itself one of unceasing combat, the survival of the fittest, the force of life kept strong and rejuvenated through constant action, new life always rising fresh from the ashes of death? And he recalled how his heart had leapt when the thought had come to him of atoning for his sins by becoming a soldier and marching off to battle at the front.”24

Nations that won more wars or conquered more territory proved their worth against their opponents. According to this logic, defeat in battle testified to the weakness of a country and the weakness of its citizens.25 In their eyes Victory in war is the method by which . . . the sound nation supercedes the unsound, because in our time victory is the direct offspring of a higher 21

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Cited in Steve Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Identity in Late Victorian Culture, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 9. Cited in H. L. Wesseling, Soldier and Warrior: French Attitudes toward the Army and War on the Eve of the First World War. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 105. Representative William Sulzer, Congressional Record 31, pt. 4, 7th April 1898, 3193, cited in Kristin L. Hoganson, “‘Honor Comes First’: The Imperatives of Manhood in the Congressional Debate over War,” Whose America? The War of 1898 and the Battles to Define the Nation, Ed. Virginia Bouvier, (London: Praeger, 2001), 123–148, 127. Emile Zola, La Debacle, 1892, Trans. Elinor Dorday, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 14. Wesseling, Soldier and Warrior, 189, 198.

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efficiency, and the higher efficiency is the logical outcome of the higher morale . . . victory is the crown of moral quality, and therefore while nations wage war upon one ano’ther the survival of the fittest means the survival of the physically best.26

In keeping with this philosophy of geo-political Social Darwinism, success in war was attributed more to the psychology of a nation’s citizens — their will, their moral fiber, their blood — than to any strategic or technological superiority.27 As such, each country went to great lengths to instruct its citizens in the importance of national loyalty and the willingness to shed blood in its defense. Aside from their other, academic goals, schools sought to inculcate in their students ideas of patriotism, turning them into, “men who have zeal for the service of the country in their hearts and blood to spill for it.”28 Both teachers and parents gave their children writing assignments in which they would contemplate and extol the great attributes of their country. The young Karl Marx recalled receiving such an assignment from his father, who encouraged him to write poetry that would “glorify Prussia and afford an opportunity of praising the genius of the Monarch.”29 Fighting for one’s country, children were taught, was a badge of manhood as well as a badge of citizenship.30 Military service and its voluntary exposure to danger and to blood proved that one possessed both the qualities of a good citizen — loyalty and self-sacrifice — and those of a manly man — bravery and endurance. This was the message both in the classroom and in popular fiction. Writing about a young man who

26

27 28

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30

Cited in Jeffrey Richards, “Popular Imperialism and the Image of the Army in Juvenile Literature,” Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850–1950, Ed. John MacKenzie, (New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 80–108, 86. Wesseling, Soldier and Warrior, 166–67. Cited in R. Claire Snyder, Citizen Soldiers and Manly Warriors; Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republic Tradition, (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 58; Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 108; Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 333. Cited in Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 189. Dave Russell, “‘We Carved our Way to Glory’: The British Soldier in Music Hall Song and Sketch, 1880–1900,” Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850–1950, Ed. John MacKenzie, (New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 50–79, 68; Wesseling, Soldier and Warrior, 143.

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volunteers to fight in the Boer War, Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) traces the flowering of his patriotism to his schooldays [when] he had felt himself a descendant . . . of Nelson and Wellington; and now that his brethren were being mowed down by a kopje-guarded foe, his whole soul rose in venomous sympathy. And, mixed with this genuine instinct of devotion to the great cause of country, were stirrings of anticipated adventure, gorgeous visions of charges, forlorn hopes, picked-up shells, redoubts stormed; heritages of ‘The Pirates of Pechili,’ and all the military romances.”31

Educators assured parents that their boys would “be better sons, better husbands, better brothers, and better fathers, by having given some part of their manhood to the service of their country.”32 In a similar light, people viewed the strong and successful soldier as an excellent foundation for strong and successful leaders and politicians. We know from history that this formula does not always work, but even in the twenty-first century, a positive military record usually augments the image of a campaigning politician.33 The dystopian novel When William Came imagines the defeat and occupation of Great Britain by Germany. In it, the Germans pass a law banning the British from participating in the military, a deprivation considered insulting and emasculating and obviously meant as such. The protagonist muses on the denial of opportunities for the next generation of boys to learn manly values, how The martial trappings, the swaggering joy of life, the comradeship of camp and barracks, the hard discipline of drill yard and fatigue duty, the long sentry watches, the trench digging, forced marches, wounds, cold, hunger, makeshift hospitals, and the blood-wet laurels — these were not for them. Such things they might only guess at, or see on a cinema film, darkly.34 31

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Israel Zangwill, “Anglicization,” Ghetto Comedies, 1907, (London: MacMillan & Co., 1929), 73–4. Cited in Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 41. Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 25. H. H. Munro, When William Came: a  Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, (New York: Viking Press, 1913), 144–45.

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For far more than the schools, the army served as the institution that invested men with these desirable qualities. As such, contemporaries considered the army the nation’s metaphorical heart, drawing towards it the best of the nation’s blood and loyalty, and then sending both back out into the world in ways that would do the most good for the nation. In Zola’s last novel, Truth, one character declares that “the army is the blood of France.”35 A generation earlier, The New York Times had commented that “the military activity of Germany seems to draw to itself the best life blood of the nation.”36 Eugen Weber describes nineteenth-century France as fractured into rural territories, each speaking its own particular patois, and ignorant beyond their own rural communities of the nation to which they belonged. Where schools failed to reach certain classes of potential students, Weber credits the army with functioning as the ultimate vehicle for the fostering of national unity and cohesion in disparate groups of men from varied social or linguistic backgrounds. It was through similar tactics and according to a similar principle that Germany had fused half a dozen semi-independent provinces into a centralized state.37 For this reason, a number of people in the United States looked on the Spanish-American war as a great national opportunity. It was a chance to heal the cultural breaches between North and South that still remained from the psychic trauma of the Civil War. Fighting side by side would recement national ties with each others’ blood. Representative Reese C. De Graffenreid (1859–1902) imagined The boys who wore the blue and the boys who wore the gray, reconciled and reunited in the great and grand bonds of true brotherhood and love, side by side, heart in heart, and hand in hand, will go marching on with the one purpose, the one intention, and one exclamation, that is, woe, irretrievable woe, shall betide that country, that nation, and that people against whom a brother American’s blood shall cry to us from the ground.38

This ability to achieve national cohesion also had an effective impact on naturalizing immigrants.39 Many American politicians looked on the 35 36 37 38

39

Emile Zola, Truth, 1903 (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1994), 347. “German Socialists Seem to be Increasing,” London Times, June 7, 1877, 11. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 298–99; Snyder, Citizen Soldiers and Manly Warriors, 35. Representative Reese C. De Graffenreid, Congressional Record 31, pt. 3, 7th March 1898, 2625, cited in Hoganson, “Honor Comes First,” 130. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, 108.

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Spanish-American war as an opportunity to build the positive attributes of manhood and citizenship in both immigrants and the descendants of freed slaves.40 Furthermore, these same groups seized the opportunity of supporting their country in a time of war in order to prove their worth as citizens.41 In all, more men volunteered to fight in the Spanish-American war than the army could accept.42 Our period witnessed a marked increase in the flow of immigrants to the United States, and to a lesser extent Great Britain, although both countries had already experienced previous waves of immigrants over the course of the nineteenth century. Indeed, one might say that the United States had consisted of an immigrant population from its earliest history. During our period, however, France and Germany were forced to contend with immigrants as well. In the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, France witnessed an influx of refugees from the areas of Alsace-Lorraine annexed by Germany.43 Other immigrants, from neighboring countries such as Italy and Belgium, came seeking work; foreign immigrants accounted for 2.6% of the population, or one million people.44 Germany’s population of resident foreigners in the last decades of the nineteenth century likewise tripled to well over a million people.45 How immigrants fit into their adopted country was one of the questions that bedeviled the nationalist discourse. The United States and Great Britain adopted policies that allowed immigrants to pursue a path towards naturalization and citizenship. When immigrants who had not yet received citizenship had children in their new countries, their children received citizenship automatically. This policy was known as jus solis, or citizenship based on where one lives.46 Germany followed a policy called jus sanguis, or citizenship based on blood. This meant that no matter where in the world a German national might move, he and his children remained German citizens, even if those children had never set foot in Germany.47 40 41 42 43

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Hoganson, “Honor Comes First,” 129–130. McCartney, Power and Progress, 154. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 6. Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: the Case of Alfred Dreyfus, (New York: George Braziller, 1986), 26. James Lehning, To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 113. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 118. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 81. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 81.

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It also meant that no matter how long immigrants lived in Germany, they remained immigrants. If female immigrants to Germany married German men, their children could become German citizens. The children of immigrants might also find a path to citizenship if they were fit for military service and joined the army, thus pledging their blood to their new country in the most compelling way.48 These were, however, the exceptions, not the rule. Most Germans maintained that “nationality must depend on blood, on descent, [not on] the accidental fact of birth in our territory.”49 France’s policies dated from the French Revolution, retaining Enlightenment ideas of citizenship that relied somewhat less on blood. The French incorporated elements of both jus solis and jus sanguis, with far greater flexibility for attaining naturalization. Children born in France of immigrant parents might not gain French citizenship at birth, but they did gain it automatically when they came of age, provided they met certain residency requirements and had no criminal record.50 Proponents of expanding jus solis declared that “foreigners who are born in France, who have learned our language from their birth, who frequently speak no other, who have been educated among us, who have learned to love France . . . [become] French at heart.”51 Certain keys helped to open the door of citizenship, and one of these was spilling blood for France. In reporting on an Irishman who had fought with France in the FrancoPrussian war, the New York Times commented that “this foreigner, who, having generously offered his blood to France, is more French than many Frenchmen.”52 Not everyone, however, shared these views. Immigrants could acquire citizenship legally, but many viewed this change in identity as cosmetic and deeply suspect.53 As with the scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses of Social Darwinism and Nature vs. Nurture explored in Chapter Three, the great question remained: was national identity imprinted immutably in one’s blood, or, by taking oaths of loyalty, paying ‘the blood tax’ and 48

49 50 51 52 53

Stefan Berger, “Germany,” What is a Nation? Europe, 1789–1914, Eds. Timothy Baycroft & Mark Hewitson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 42–60, 53–54; Eli Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility, and Nationalism, (New York: Berg, 2004), 148–49. Cited in Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 95. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 81. Cited in Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 107. “France,” London Times, March 1, 1883, 5. Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 291.

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serving in the army of a new country, could one earn nationality?54 “It is in vain that a foreigner, when he becomes naturalized, swears to think and to live like a Frenchman,” many believed, “It is in vain that he joins his interests with ours; for the blood obstinately continues to follow its natural course against such oaths, against the laws.”55 Immigration policies based on jus solis might help to build up a larger pool of citizens for the army, but could anyone count on the loyalty of such soldiers? Even in countries such as Great Britain, where the naturalization of immigrants was well established, fear of dual loyalty made itself strongly felt. Having recently abandoned their native countries, the countries of their blood, could immigrants really guarantee their loyalty to a new country with which they had no previous ties? In all four of our countries, this concern directed itself most strongly against their Jewish populations, both immigrant and established. Anti-Semites refused to believe that Jews could be loyal to anyone but their co-religionists, who inhabited all the major countries of the world, yet lacked a physical country to call their own. As far as they were concerned, “the Jews, whatever the country to which they belong, have retained too many ties, too much cosmopolitanism. They remain sincere blood brothers across all national limits.”56 This theme was taken up frequently by illustrators in the anti-Semitic Press. The upper half of one caricature, found in Edouard Drumont’s (1844–1917) La Libre Parole, shows four separate conversations taking place between Jews and non-Jews of France, the Middle East, Russia, and Great Britain. Each Jew attempts to assure his compatriot that while Jews remain separate from their countrymen in matters of religion, in matters of nationalist loyalty, nothing separates them. The lower half of the image, however, tells a very different story. It depicts all four Jews, gathered from their far-flung corners of the globe in a darkened room. They stand in a circle, arms outstretched as though taking an oath, over an open volume that reads, “Talmud: the Civil Code of the Jews, a Constituted People without a Country.”57 No matter where in the world they might be scattered, Jews would always be drawn together, their loyalties dedicated to each other. 54 55

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Snyder, Citizen Soldiers and Manly Warriors, 15, 67. Barrès, Scènes et Doctrines du Nationalisme, (Paris, 1925), 96, Cited in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 291. Cited in Michael Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A  Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 15. La Libre Parole Illustrée, June 15th, 1895, 4–5.

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A cartoon taken from the French Catholic newspaper, La Croix, explores the same theme in microcosm. It depicts a Jewish family with three children: two young boys and a baby. As the parents admire their latest offspring, the mother asks, “Shall we make him a Frenchman or a German?” Upon closer examination, we see that the two older boys off in a corner playing soldiers are dressed respectively in the uniforms of France and Germany. The father replies, “No, we still don’t have an Englishman.”58 Clearly these parents are raising their children with an eye toward gaining entry into the three most important European countries. Whatever nationality these parents may hold, it clearly has no special hold on them. When their boys have grown up, they may participate in the civic life of their respective countries, but their first loyalty will be to their family. This summed up the dilemma as many people saw it. How could the Jews of Germany feel more loyalty towards their country and her interests rather than those of their co-religionists in France or Russia? In a conflict between the interests of their professed nation and their co-religionists of another nation, which one would win out? [After all,] the Jews have no homeland, no nation in the sense in which we understand it. For us, the nation is the soil and our ancestors; it is the land of our dead. For them, it is simply the place where it is in their greatest interest, for the moment, to live. Their ‘intellectuals’ can thus arrive at their notorious definition: ‘The Nation is an idea.’ But what idea? That which is most useful to them, for example, the idea that all men are brothers, that nationality is a prejudice that must be destroyed, that military honor stinks of blood.59

Thus, in the novel When William Came, it is the Jews who come to the fore so prominently under the new regime. Lacking deep ties to Great Britain, they adapt most readily to German rule. At the first major theatrical production of the occupation, Jews make up the majority of the theatergoing public, easily adapting to the new nominal rulers while most Britons remain at home licking their wounded national feelings. The protagonist accounts for the Jews’ behavior, speculating that the lack of a fire burning on a national altar seemed to have drawn them by universal impulse to the congenial flare of the footlights, whether as 58 59

La Croix, November 14th, 1894, 1. Cited in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 380–81.

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artists, producers, impresarios, critics, agents, go-betweens, or merely as highly intelligent and fearsomely well-informed spectators.60

Similarly, in Ceasar’s Column, discussed in the last chapter, when the anarchist triumvirate disintegrates at the novel’s close, Donnelley informs us that, The vice-president — the Jew — fled . . . carrying away one hundred million dollars that had been left in his charge . . . . He took several of his trusted followers, of his own nation, with him. It is rumored that he has gone to Judea; that he proposes to make himself king in Jerusalem, and, with his vast wealth, re-establish the glories of Solomon, and revive the ancient splendors of the Jewish race, in the midst of the ruins of the world.61

This passage highlights not only the idea of the Jew’s dishonesty regarding money, already explored in Chapter Four, but also emphasizes that Jewish national loyalty remains fixed on their long-lost kingdom in the Middle East, to the exclusion of any other nation. Significantly, this Jew, who embodies so many stereotypes, is also a vampire-like figure, described as having lost all his teeth save his canines — his fangs. Even George Eliot’s self-consciously philo-Semitic novel Daniel Deronda questions the Jews’ ability to feel a national loyalty beyond their co-religionists. Mordecai, designed by Eliot to represent the ideal Jew, asks a group of friends and working-class philosophers, Can a fresh-made garment of citizenship weave itself straightway into the flesh and change the slow deposit of eighteen centuries? What is the citizenship of him who walks among a people he has no hearty kindred and fellowship with, and has lost the sense of brotherhood with his own race? It is a charter of selfish ambition and rivalry in low greed. He is an alien in spirit, whatever he may be in form; he sucks the blood of mankind, he is not a man.62

Mordecai thus legitimizes the ideas of the anti-Semites, equating the Jews’ lack of proper patriotism with vampirism. The inhabitant of any country must pledge his loyalty, his energy, and his blood, with the interests of his fellow citizens. Anything that distracts or detracts from these vows of 60 61

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Munro, When William Came, 93. Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century, 1889, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960), 283. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1876 (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 528.

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kinship cannot help but turn an individual into a parasite of their country’s resources and good will — in other words, a vampire. Many politicians and opinion-makers endorsed this idea. Those who enjoyed the privileges available to a citizen without offering their blood and participating in the nation’s defense or working toward its interests were national parasites — vampires — who did not deserve citizenship. It is with this sense of outrage that Henri Bourassa (1868–1932), a Canadian politician, complained that the Jews “do not adapt themselves to the customs of the people among whom they live, but on the contrary they conduct themselves in such a way that they are vampires on the community instead of being contributors to the general welfare of the people.”63 Jews constituted a distinct religious community that transcended any one country, making them targets for accusations of dual loyalty. Zola’s paranoid anti-Semite, Saccard, indicted the whole Hebrew race, the cursed race without a country, without a prince, which lives as a parasite upon the nations, pretending to recognize their laws, but in reality only obeying its Jehovah — its God of robbery, blood, and wrath; and he pointed to it fulfilling on all sides the mission of ferocious conquest which this God has assigned to it, establishing itself among every people, like a spider in the centre of its web, in order to watch its prey, to suck the blood of one and all, to fatten itself by devouring others.64

Rebb Schmoul, the villain of Le Baron Vampire, is just such a Jew. His country of origin is Bohemia, but over the course of his life he has lived all over Europe, finally settling in Paris. No country has any hold on his loyalties. The novel closes with the arrival of a war, in which the eponymous vampire with no national loyalties enriches himself by supplying both armies: What is the importance of a loss to one or a victory towards the other? The two armies are his. Isn’t he the one who feeds them, clothes them, arms them, for which they pay at great interest? And with so much blood spilled, with so many heroes lying in the dust, what remains? Little or nothing, a little country that you detest, or a large province that you 63

64

Cited in Paul Laverdure, Sunday in Canada: the Rise and Fall of the Lord’s Day, (Saskatchewan: Gravel Books, 2004), 34. Emile Zola, L’Argent, 1891 (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1994), 90–91.

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will lose again some day. Widows, sisters, fiancées, and mothers weep for their dead . . . .but the clash of the pieces of gold and silver keep him from hearing the groans of his victims. He is drunk on this metallic sound, and sleeps triumphant on the ruins of Christianity, his tributary! Judas is king!65

Interestingly, as Paul Laverdure notes in Sunday in Canada, similar anxieties of dual loyalty manifested themselves in the anti-clerical fears of France and Germany, already explored in Chapter Two. In the anticlerical factions of France, Germany, and even the United States, a number of people expressed concern that Catholics would give their loyalty to the Pope first, and the secular government second.66 Meanwhile, at the time of the Boer War, newspapers in Great Britain castigated immigrant Jews as the “foreigners to whom [Britain] had given shelter [and who were not] helping them to fight [Britain’s] battles at Spion Kop or Colenso.”67 Performing military service demonstrated a man’s qualities of national loyalty and bravery, but not performing them when physically capable of doing so was considered a mark of cowardice, treason, and a source of shame. Although no better proof of loyalty existed than giving one’s blood for one’s country, in the opinion of many Jews failed this test. As Mark Twain (1835–1910) commented, Jews were often “charged with an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.”68 In the minds of critics, such as the journalist and publisher Goldwin Smith, lurked the fixed idea that a Jew could never be “an Englishman . . . holding particular theological tenets: he is a Jew, with a special Deity for his own race. The rest of mankind are to him not merely people holding a different creed, but aliens in the blood.”69 These suspicions of dual loyalty clustered most strongly around those with money and power. Among these were Gerson Bleichröder, one of Bismarck’s and Germany’s main bankers and, more particularly, the Rothschild family.70 Located in most of the major centers of European 65 66

67 68

69 70

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Guy de Charnacé, Le Baron Vampire, (Paris, 1885), 164. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, 24, 130, 139; Susan M. Griffin, AntiCatholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4. Spion Kop and Colenso being battles fought in the Boer War. Gainer, Alien Invasion, 54. Mark Twain, “Concerning the Jews,” 1898, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1934), 8. Goldwyn Smith, “Can Jews Be Patriots?” Nineteenth Century, (May 1878, 875–87), 875. Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, 265; Stern, Gold and Iron, 448.

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commerce, including England, France, and Germany, the Rothschild family would have been well placed to put the interests of one country above another if they so desired. Sadly, these ideas continued to nourish antiSemitic conspiracy theories despite the proven loyalty of the Rothschilds themselves. During the Franco-Prussian war, the respective members of the French and the German Rothschild banks remained loyally committed to their respective countries, putting national loyalty even above the familial ties of brothers and first cousins.71 In the eyes of anti-Semites, even had they wanted to, Jews could not contribute their blood to the national cause. Putting aside fears of the Jews’ uncertain loyalties, many considered Jewish soldiers as biologically unfit.72 The Jewish body, long subject to caricature and stereotype, was portrayed as physically weak. According to popular opinion, Jews had flat feet and bowed legs, poor attributes for prospective soldiers.73 Even Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the journalist and founder of the Zionist movement, endorsed this stereotype. In his utopian-Zionist novel Altneuland, a retired German military officer reminisces about training recruits to ride horses. He recalls in particular a man named Cohn, “such a puny little fellow, but with bowlegs just right for horses,” who eventually breaks his arm in attempting to learn how to make his horse jump.74 The officer admits that the effort on the part of the Jewish man to overcome his physical shortcomings in order to serve his country was impressive, proving that Cohn “had a strong will inside that puny little body!”75 Despite impressing his superior officer, however, Cohn’s army career does not appear promising. No matter how one argued the matter, in the opinions of some, Jews did nothing but weaken the blood of their countries. This was one of the reasons why, when Herzl founded the Zionist movement, he and his followers laid such emphasis on physical fitness and training.76 In addition to a safe space where Jews could live free from 71 72 73 74

75 76

Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, 189. Bredin, The Affair, 30. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (Routeledge: London, 1991), 40. Theodor Herzl, Altneuland, 1902, Trans. Paula Arnold, (Israel: Haifa Publishing Company, 1960), 30. Herzl, Altneuland, 30. Michael Berkowitz, “Mind, Muscle, and Men: The Imagination of a Zionist Nation Culture for the Jews of Central and Western Europe, 1897–1914,” (Diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989), 186–87; David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 275.

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the pervasive anti-Semitism throughout Europe and America, Herzl and his colleagues wished to confer upon the Jews of the world a nation and a national identity like everyone else.77 This meant, significantly, the opportunity to develop the masculine attributes of strength and physical prowess that Jews were so often satirized as lacking. Herzl illustrates this transformation in Altneuland several times, showing how, once removed from the cities of Europe and given the freedom to work for and govern themselves, the Jews of Palestine become ideal physical soldier-specimens. When the main character journeys to Palestine to observe some of the earliest Jewish farming settlements, the young men of the community give him a riding demonstration: “The youths galloped out into the fields, turned their horses swiftly, then returned with loud halloos, threw their caps and guns into the air, catching them at full gallop, and finally rode in formation singing a Hebrew song.”78 Ten years later, the narrator returns to Palestine, now a sovereign Jewish state, and re-encounters a family he had helped to emigrate from Vienna to Palestine at the beginning of the book. Formerly miserable and destitute, the family is now prosperous, and their eldest son has grown from a “little beggar Jew boy” to a man who is “Grave and free, healthy and cultured, a man who could stand up for himself.”79 Herzl’s utopian visions remained, however, in the far future. In the meantime, the stereotypes that remained in force were those of Jewish weakness and potential disloyalty to the nations in which they lived. These themes of dubious nationality and dual loyalty also appear in Dracula, reinforcing the links between immigrants, disloyal citizens, and vampires. In 1897, at the time of Dracula’s publication, Britons were intensely concerned by the number of immigrants, mostly Jewish, pouring in from Eastern Europe.80 Like many immigrants, Dracula has made great efforts to acculturate himself to his new country and to blend in with the rest of the population through studying its language and customs.81 On first meeting Jonathan Harker, Dracula’s greatest concern is to discover 77

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Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 277. Herzl, Altneuland, 37. Herzl, Altneuland, 55. Jules Zanger, “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews,” English literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 34, 1 (1991), 33–44, 36. H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 138; Arata, “The Occidental Tourist,” 634.

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whether his mastery of English and his pronunciation would brand him a foreigner in England.82 But these surface changes of nationality mask both his evil nature and his lack of any real ties to his new country. Dracula threatens the wellbeing of the British nation, attempting to turn its citizens into vampires. Significantly, his one real victim is named Lucy Westenra, or “Light of the West.”83 Dracula places his loyalty where it suits his convenience; he speaks German and English as fluently as he speaks his native tongue.84 Germany was Britain’s chief rival during this period, making Dracula uniquely situated to transfer loyalty to Britain’s greatest national enemy according to expedience. Count Vardalek, the vampire villain of a story written only a few years earlier, displays a similar, disquieting knowledge of languages. Although according to the narrator his name indicates Hungarian ancestry, he also spoke German well enough: not with the monotonous accentuation of Hungarians, but rather, if anything, with a slight Slavonic intonation . . . We soon afterwards found out he could talk Polish, and Mlle. Vonnaert vouched for his good French. Indeed he seemed to know all languages.85

Knowing all languages and fitting in anywhere might be merely impressive accomplishments, but it also signals the potential danger vampires pose. With no ties to any particular country, their movements are harder to control and their loyalties harder to predict — something else linking vampires to the debates regarding Jewish immigrants and their suspect loyalties. Stoker taps into the theme of Jewish dual loyalty as well. The one identified person whose aid Dracula enlists in escaping Britain is a German Jew named Hildesheim, “a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep” who must be bribed in order to aid Stoker’s heroes.86 Throughout all of these diatribes, the Jewish communities of these respective countries attempted to fight their image of national vampires. 82 83

84 85

86

Stoker, Dracula, 28–9. Richard Wasson, “The Politics of Dracula,” Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, Ed. Margaret Carter (London: UMI Research Press, 1988), 19–24, 21. Stoker, Dracula, 16, 23. Eric, Count Stenbock, “A True Story of a Vampire,” The Undead, Ed. James Dickie, (London: Neville Spearman Ltd., 1971), 160–168, 163. Stoker, Dracula, 413.

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Prayers for the welfare of the government had been included in synagogue services for centuries. By the nineteenth century, these prayers were often made in the local language rather than the traditional Hebrew of the other prayers. The British author Israel Zangwill commented in one story that almost the first English words any immigrant rabbi learned were the public prayer for the health and well-being of “‘Our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, the Princess of Wales, and all the Royal Family’ — the indispensable atom of English in the service.”87 Writing about the Boer War, Zangwill described a character’s “favourite Jewish weekly, which was, if possible, still more chauvinist [than his favorite Christian weekly], and had a full-page portrait of Sir Asher Aaronsberg, M.P. for Middleton, who was equipping a local corps at his own expense.”88 Another character, knowing how many Jewish men are indeed fighting in the Boer War, hopes fervently that this will prove the Jews’ worth as British citizens. With the sacrifices Jews were making for their new country, “surely they were knit now, these races: their friendship sealed in blood!”89 In response to a magazine article declaring that hardly any Jews had served in the American military during the Civil War, Simon Wolf (1836–1923) published The American Jew: Patriot, Soldier, Citizen. In it, he combed meticulously through military records, compiling alphabetized lists of all the Jews who had provided military service in American wars, from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War, their “patriotism ha[ving] been attested with [their] blood in the defense” of their country.90 He also gave a brief survey of Jewish military service on the international stage, commenting that “the late Franco-German war afforded instances of distinguished heroism on the part of Jewish officers and soldiers in both armies.”91 The book was published just prior to the Spanish-American War, otherwise Wolf would doubtless have discussed Jewish participation in that war as well. The German Jewish industrialist and writer, Walter Rathenau (1867– 1922), expressed his patriotism in tropes already familiar to us from the beginning of this chapter. He stated with pride that “I have, and know 87 88 89 90

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Zangwill, “Anglicization,” 63. Zangwill, “Anglicization,” 67. Zangwill, “Anglicization,” 92. Simon Wolf, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier, and Citizen, (New York: Brentano’s, 1895), 440. Simon Wolf, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier, and Citizen, 7.

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no other, blood than German blood . . . no other tribe, not other people than the German. Expel me from my German soil, I still remain German, nothing changes.”92 Clearly, Rathenau had internalized Germany’s philosophy of jus sanguis. Finally, in France, the Jewish intellectual Joseph Reinach (1856–1921) declared that “all our efforts, all our intellectual activity, all our love, the last drop of our blood belongs to France, and to her alone.”93 The historian Leon Kahn wrote monographs in which he showed that from the time of the Revolution of 1789, French Jews could be found, “on the true field of honour and of military glory . . . shedding their blood in the legitimate defence of the frontiers.”94 Jewish leaders exhorted their listeners to “place the interests of France above all others, for it is to her that we owe what we are; we must therefore spare her neither our time, nor our property, nor our blood. The good Jew is a good Frenchman.”95 Both this effort and its ambivalent response are reflected in Zola’s last novel, Truth. Based loosely on the scandal of the Dreyfus Affair, it features a Jewish schoolteacher, named Simon, accused of murdering his Christian nephew and convicted on flimsy evidence.96 Long before the murder, Simon had had to struggle against the suspicion and anti-Semitism of his pupils, their parents, and his community, and when at last he achieved their respect, it was only by dint of correctitude and particularly of ardent patriotism among his pupils, such as the glorification of France as a military power, the foretelling of national glory and a supreme position among the nations, that Simon obtained forgiveness for being a Jew.97

Evidence of the eagerness with which Jewish communities embraced patriotism and the blood that watered it can be found all over Europe, although it was particularly prominent in France.98 This makes it all the 92 93 94 95 96

97 98

Cited in Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 279. Cited in Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation, 276. Cited in Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation, 96. Cited in Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation, 232. Simon’s brother-in-law had married a Catholic, who baptized their son and raised him as a Catholic. Both parents had since died and their child was living with his relatives and continuing his Christian education. The Dreyfus Affair will be explored in full shortly. Zola, Truth, 8–9. Emile Zola, Truth, 17. Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 694.

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more ironic that the Dreyfus Affair should have occurred in France, where the Jewish community had cultivated its patriotism so assiduously. With the Dreyfus Affair, all of the concerns regarding the Jews’ suspect loyalty and their role as national vampires came to a head. In October of 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) was arrested for passing military secrets to the Germans. His handwriting bore a slight resemblance to that on a note French military intelligence had recovered secretly from the waste baskets at the German embassy. Within a few months, he was tried, convicted, publicly stripped of his military rank, and transported to Devil’s Island for incarceration.99 Since their defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, France had been concerned to the point of paranoia with the idea of spies and secret agents working to defeat France from within. The shock of their loss still reverberated; many still believed that some traitors or fifth columnists had brought about their defeat rather than any disorganization or ill-preparedness on the part of the French army.100 While there is no documentary evidence that suspicion fell on Dreyfus specifically because of his Jewish ancestry, it is impossible to discount anti-Semitism from any discussion of this case. In many circles, the French equated Jews with Alsatians, the inhabitants of the Eastern province of Alsace confiscated by Germany in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. In the aftermath of the war, Alsatians were equated with Germans, and hence with spies and traitors, no matter how long they had been established in France. Zola’s Saccard is suspicious of his Jewish banking rival, Gunderman, “a Prussian . . . , albeit born in France; for his sympathies were evidently with Prussia; he would willingly have supported her with his money, perhaps he was secretly supporting her even now!”101 A caricature taken from La Libre Parole imagines the same scenario: a Jewish banker or stockbroker skips nimbly from the French to the German stock exchange, a bulging sack of over five million francs under each arm.102 He is draining France of its wealth and handing all the money over to Germany. As a Jew, the figure in the cartoon has both the monetary talent and the foreign ties to betray France in this way, probably with the intent of furthering France’s destruction. In a similar vein, British author 99

100 101 102

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Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: the Case of Alfred Dreyfus, (New York: George Braziller, 1986), 46–7, 55–6, 93–97, 102. Bredin, The Affair, 42. Emile Zola, L’Argent, 1891 (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1994), 194. La Libre Parole Illustree, December 2nd, 1893, 16.

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Guy Thorne (1876–1923) endorsed the idea of German Jewish immigrants breeding national traitors and spies. Constantine Schaube, the Jewish villain of Guy Thorne’s best selling When it Was Dark, was born and raised in Manchester, but his grandfather emigrated from Germany. This is enough to brand him a foreigner, and one character refers to Schaube as “your German friend.”103 Interestingly, when Jews in Germany were viewed as suspect and foreign, their ascribed nationality was most often French. Germany, having won the Fraco-Prussian war, did not have the same paranoia with regard to the French. However, remembering the French Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic Wars that followed it, France was associated with cosmopolitanism and the negation of German nationalism.104 Well before Dreyfus’ arrest, La Libre Parole had railed against what it perceived as the Jewish invasion of the army. In the opinion of Drumont, and many others, true Frenchmen, “the old nobility which made France what it was, who over the centuries, claimed, as the first of its privileges, the right to shed its blood for the nation and did so to profusion,” were being pushed out by Jews motivated by greed for power rather than the good of the country.105 According to Drumont, Jews had barely placed a foot in the army when they searched, by every means, to gain influence. They understand the opportunity there for the spread of power; already lords of finance and administration, already dictating judgments to the courts, they will definitely be masters of France on the day they command the army. Rothschild will deliver the mobilization plans — and one can imagine toward what end!106

When news of Dreyfus’ treachery reached the public, the media branded him a blood traitor to his country. Not only had he been disloyal to his country, but he had masked his disloyalty with patriotism and used his position in the army to drain France at its heart. The Catholic newspaper La Croix made note of Dreyfus’ ancestry, proclaiming that “the Jews are vampires . . . leading France into slavery; . . . whether the order be to rob, corrupt, or betray our country, the Jew always leads the charge.”107 103 104 105 106

107

Guy Thorne, When it was Dark (London: Greening & Co., 1903), 66. Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 165. Cited in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 279. Cited in Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair; A  Documentary History, (New York: Bedford/St. Martins’s, 1999), 11. Cited in Bredin, The Affair, 79.

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Others described him as “the traitor Dreyfus, who sold the blood of your brothers.”108 Drumont commented sarcastically that in order to betray his country, he had to have one, and a country is not acquired by means of an act of naturalization. One’s country is the land of one’s forefathers, the land of one’s ancestors: Dreyfus’s ancestors were not of our land; they were everywhere wanderers and nomads, and their sons had no notion of what a fatherland meant.109

For many people, Dreyfus’ conviction proved that they had been correct all along in suspecting Jews of dual loyalty and collusion with their enemies. In their eyes, clearly, Dreyfus had disproved the idea that Jews could be loyal citizens willing to shed blood for the national good. The period under our scrutiny began with the Franco-Prussian war and ended with the cultural and physical bloodletting of the First World War. During the intervening years the world witnessed conflicts such as the Boer War, the Spanish-American War, and smaller colonial clashes. For over forty years, boys were raised to believe that no higher honor existed than that of defending their country with their blood, and no greater shame existed than in denying blood to their country when it was needed. When called by their countries to war in 1914, young men responded enthusiastically. Onlookers declared proudly that “those who are the soldiers of tomorrow do not count the cost when, with their blood, they offer up to [France] the years of their youth.”110 From the onset of the First World War, the nations lauded “the heroism of those who are pouring out their blood for liberty, for justice, [and] for human rights.”111 Scarcely a month into the conflict, the German periodical Die Zukunft published an outpouring of patriotic poetry under the heading “German Blood.” Representing the epitome of patriotism and national loyalty, these poems praised the flag, the Fatherland, and vowed to fight “man by man/ With iron made red with blood./ With the

108

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Cited in Pierre Birnbaum, The Anti-Semitic Moment: A  Tour of France in 1898, (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003), 288. Cited in Leslie Derfleur, The Dreyfus Affair, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 121. Cited in H. L. Wesseling, Soldier and Warrior: French Attitudes toward the Army and War on the Eve of the First World War. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 66. Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, “Children and the Primary Schools of France, 1914–1918,” State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, Ed. John Horne, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39–52, 41.

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blood of executioners, [and] the blood of Frenchmen.”112 When soldiers died for France, “their sacrifice, the gift of their blood [was considered] the supernatural source of the renewal of life which must be given to our country.”113 Although often portrayed in idealistic terms, the blood spilt in war remained the real blood of soldiers. In this, their metaphors of blood and vampirism took on a more serious and literal meaning. When men served their country as soldiers, their blood and their lives really were endangered. When men did not pay this blood tax and earn their citizenship, they really did put the lives of their fellow citizens at risk. Women of this period played their own roles in the nationalist arena by bearing and raising the men who would give military service to their country. And like the men who refused to serve, women who appeared to turn their back on their roles as mothers and the other ideals of womanhood were also labeled vampires.

112

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Ernst Moritz Arndt, “Vaterlandlied,” Die Zukunft, Vol. 88, (n.48, August 29th, 1914), 292. John Horne, “Soldiers, Civilians, and the Warfare of Attrition: Representations of Combat in France, 1914–1918,” Authority, Identity, and the Social History of the Great War, Eds. Frans Coetzee & Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), 223–250, 234.

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7

SEDUCTRESS AND MURDERESS Vampires and Gender Politics

COUNT Dracula casts a long shadow over our understanding of what vampires are and how we define them. His influence is inescapable, which is ironic, given what an atypical figure he strikes among his fictional contemporaries. He is male. Most of the vampires populating the fiction of our period are female. They consist primarily of two stock figures: the fatal seductress and the homicidal mother. These two archetypes embodied some of society’s greatest fears at the turn of the twentieth century — that of a world in which conventional gender roles are being turned upside down. Gender norms in nineteenth-century Western Europe and America were founded on the middle class ideal of separate spheres. Many opinionmakers of the period believed that men and women possessed different physical and moral attributes, and these attributes fitted them for two distinctly different spheres of life. Men were the stronger sex, endowed with reason, intelligence, courage and strength — both physical and moral. They inhabited the public sphere, in which they received their education, pursued careers, and engaged in politics. They were encouraged to face its 156

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dangers and explore its possibilities, then return to their homes to recover spiritually from the rigors of public life and prepare for their next foray.1 Women belonged to the domestic sphere — the home. Weaker than men physically, intellectually, and morally, women were vulnerable to the dangers and temptations of the public sphere. Women’s strengths were their capacity for devotion, their innocence, and their delicate sensibilities, but this purity was only influential within their homes, and might be vitiated by contact with the world outside.2 Their destiny and their vocation lay in tending their homes and caring for their families. Women were physically and mentally unsuited for the public sphere.3 The concept of separate spheres was a very middle-class-inspired ideology. Working class families could seldom afford to adhere to the idea of separate spheres. Working-class women were as integral to supporting their families as were men, and this need obliged them to enter the public sphere. Having a husband support his family by his wages alone and his wife remaining at home became a status for working-class families to aspire to. Throughout Western Europe and America, there was no shortage of intellectuals to reinforce the cultural dogma of separate spheres. Eliza Lynn Linton declared that In the normal division of labour the man has the outside work to do, from governing the country to tilling the soil; the woman takes the inside, managing the family and regulating society. The more highly civilized a community is the more completely differentiated are these two functions.4

Even prominent American journalist Ida Tarbell, whose life and work appeared to contradict the world of separate spheres, commented that Embroiled as man is in an eternal effort to conquer, understand, and reduce to order both nature and his fellows, it is imperative that he have some secure spot where his head is not in danger, his heart is not harassed. 1

2

3

4

James McMillan, France and Women, 1789–1914: Gender, Society, and Politics, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 154. McMillan, France and Women, 154; Carl & Dorothy Schneider, American Women in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920, (New York: Facts on File, 1993), 16. Steven Hause & Anne Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 17. E. Lynn Linton, “The Wild Women: As Politicians,” The Nineteenth Century, (1891), 79–88, 81.

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Woman, by virtue of the business nature assigns her, has always been theoretically the maker and keeper of this necessary place of peace.5

A cartoon from Punch (7.1) illustrates this gender dichotomy clearly. It depicts a family of five — father, mother, and three children. The father is standing, poised for motion, ready to leave home for work in “the city” and the public sphere.6 The mother and children are seated and static within the home and private sphere. The baby of the family sits on the floor, reminiscent of a miniature Buddha or sultan. Its mother fans it, bent over in a worshipful attitude, while also gazing adoringly at her husband. This family works along conventional, clearly demarcated gender lines, the wife dividing her attention between her husband and children, and maintaining the comfortable home in which they all live in.

7.1 “Juvenile Utilitarianism” Taken from Punch, February 14th, 1874

As we have already seen in Chapter Three, the physical and moral qualities attributed to different races, classes, and individuals supposedly rested in one’s blood. The perceived differences between men and 5 6

158

Ida Tarbell, The Business of Being a Woman, (New York: MacMillan, 1912), 3–4. Punch, February 14th, 1874, 66.

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women were thought to stem from the same source. French intellectual Jules Michelet (1798–1874) spoke for many when he ascribed women’s incapacity for hard work or intellectual achievements to the irregular and interrupted flow of women’s blood caused by menstruation.7 He declared that woman “does nothing like us [men]. She thinks, speaks, acts differently. Her tastes differ from ours. Her blood does not flow like ours . . . . She does not breathe as we do.”8 There was widespread fear that if a woman were to engage in any serious pursuits — mental or physical — that went beyond her sphere, she could do serious damage to her appearance, health, or even reproductive organs. Venturing beyond the domestic sphere would render women unsuitable for that sphere in the first place.9 Even if activities beyond conventional norms did not render women sterile, they would certainly result in physically or mentally deformed children.10 Ultimately, The raison d’être of a woman is maternity. For this and this alone nature has differentiated her from man, and built her up cell by cell and organ by organ. The continuance of the race in healthy reproduction, together with the fit nourishment and care of the young after birth, is the ultimate end of woman as such; and whatever tells against these functions, and reduces either her power or her perfectness, is an offence against nature and a wrong done to society.11

The ideal woman of the nineteenth century remained within the domestic sphere, and the ideal woman was the epitome of self-sacrifice, giving everything of herself — time, energy, emotion, identity — for the good of her husband and children. She lived to serve others so that her very identity became subsumed by her family.12 Often, in poorer families, this 7

8 9

10

11

12

Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984), 159–160. Jules Michelet, L’Amour, (Paris: Simon Racon et Comp., 1865), 50. Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870–1939, (London: University College London Press, 59. Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 18. E. Lynn Linton, “The Wild Women: As Politicians,” The Nineteenth Century, (1891), 79–88, 80. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: the Life of a  Victorian Myth, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), 4, 13.

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meant that women ate less food so that their husbands and children might eat more. The more children a woman bore, the more she might give up of her health and energy. Society, however, admired these sacrifices highly.13 In fact, observers often drew links between the sacrifices required of mothers and the sacrifices required of men through military service. Men repaid the privileges of citizenship with their blood in battle. Women might not be able to shed their own blood for their country, but they could sacrifice blood through their sons by providing soldiers for the state.14 Ida Tarbell took this idea one step further, declaring that women Owe society a return for their freedom, their means, and their education. Nature has made them the guardians of childhood. Can they decently shirk the obligation any more than a man can decently shirk his duty as a citizen? Indeed, the case of the woman unresponsive to her duty toward youth is parallel to that of the man unresponsive to his duty toward public affairs. One is as profitless and parasitical as the other.15

Women who deliberately avoided motherhood were considered national parasites — vampires — as were the men who avoided military service already discussed in chapter six. Even in the event that a woman’s children never went to war, her duties as a mother and a citizen still required that she inculcate national loyalty, morality, and responsibility in all of her children, ensuring a rising generation that would make positive contributions to society. No matter what else a mother did, Her great task is to prepare the citizen . . . The meaning of honor and of the sanctity of one’s word, the understanding of the principles of democracy and of the society in which we live, the love of humanity, and the desire to serve — these are what make a good citizen.16

As Edward Bellamy concludes in his utopian novel, Looking Backwards, “Can you think of any service constituting a stronger claim on the nation’s

13

14

15 16

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Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Richard Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933, (London: Sage Publications, 1976), 9. Tarbell, The Business of Being a Woman, 199. Tarbell, The Business of Being a Woman, 81–2.

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gratitude than bearing and nursing the nation’s children?”17 Many women agreed, and used this as an argument in their efforts to change their political and social positions. If women were expected to raise intelligent and responsible citizens, then surely they should be better educated for this task, and surely they could be trusted with voting in elections.18 Lack of educational opportunities and denial of suffrage were only two of a number of political and social disabilities against which women labored throughout the nineteenth century. With few exceptions, throughout Western Europe and America, married women fell under the laws of coverture. This meant that their legal identity fell under the aegis of their husbands, who were responsible for their welfare in all ways. In practice, this meant, among other things, that women could not control their own property or wages and could not sign contracts, retain custody of their children in the event of a separation, or have any control over the key events of their futures — such as choosing spouses or careers.19 Women could not file paternity suits, nor file for divorce, in the rare places where divorce was available.20 A woman who committed adultery could be divorced or even imprisoned, but men could commit adultery with impunity unless they brought their mistress into their homes. Even then the consequences were negligible.21 For women married to kind and responsible men, these restrictions may have seemed inconsequential, but women married to cruel and irresponsible men were left with little or no recourse in what could be a nightmarish situation. Feminist movements in all of these countries worked over the course of the nineteenth century to change these civil disabilities. By the beginning of our period, university, medical, and law degrees were becoming genuine opportunities for women, while jobs such as nursing, teaching, clerical jobs, and sales work were becoming mainstream.22 Women’s clothing, heavily corseted and layered with petticoats at mid-century, was becoming 17

18 19 20 21

22

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1946. 1888), 251. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 78. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 12. Hause & Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, 25. Patrick Kay Bidelman, Pariahs Stand Up! The Founding of the Liberal Feminist Movement in France, 1858–1889, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), 5. Jean V. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman: The Woman’s Movement in America, 1875–1930, (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), 39, 49; Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 27; McMillan, France and Women, 148–49.

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less restrictive of movement, and technological innovations such as the bicycle were enhancing women’s mobility and autonomy.23 The lobbying of each country’s legislature was slowly improving the control married women could exert over their property and their children, as well as ameliorating laws pertaining to divorce. But such lobbying was slow and piecemeal. What many women wanted, but did not get before the onset of World War One, was the ability to vote, and hence a voice of their own in the legislative process. Having the vote would, they believed, allow them to make the changes in society they believed were necessary, changes that would not only improve laws but elevate the moral tone of society.24 In their efforts to placate men anxious at the idea of women upsetting the gender conventions that had solidified earlier in the century, many women’s activists couched their desire for the vote as an extension of their motherly duties, undertaken on behalf of women and children. In addition to efforts at improving women’s civil position in society, many politically active women lobbied energetically on behalf of working-class women and children: seeking to improve the conditions of factories and slums, to purify food and milk, and to promote temperance.25 In pursuing politics, emphasizing their maternal motivations was essential. Critics viewed the “New Woman” of education, mobility, and achievement as sacrificing marriage and motherhood on the altar of autonomy. Many of the professional women who had fought so long and hard for their positions truly had to choose practicing their careers over raising a family, something conservatives had known would happen all along.26 In Die Zukunft, one writer lamented “the vehement nature of today’s women who elbow themselves” into the public sphere.27 Population growth was down in all four countries, as explored in previous chapters, and many blamed the feminists. Some of this blame was in a sense justified. The more radical feminists advocated birth control as a way to improve women’s health and allow them to increase the quality of their children’s lives by controlling the 23 24 25 26 27

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McMillan, France and Women, 143. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 2–3, 77. Schneider, American Women in the Progressive Era, 94, 168. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman, 95, 97. Lou Adreas-Salomé, “Ketzereien gegen die Moderne Frau,” Die Zukunft, (Volume 26), February 11th, 1898, 237–239, 239.

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quantity of children they bore.28 Each country, however, saw itself in danger due to depopulation. France feared that its declining population made it vulnerable to future German aggression.29 Germany looked to France as an object lesson in weakness and decadence and worried that its strength and power were ebbing along with its birthrate.30 Great Britain and the United States feared that a declining middle-class birthrate would see that middle class soon overtaken by the poor, immigrants, and — in the case of the United States — blacks and Asians.31 To those who saw their population drop as a matter of national security, it did not sit well that feminists were advocating that women refuse both their biological destiny and their patriotic duty.32 This was only one of the reasons that conservatives opposed the struggle for female suffrage. In countries with a strong Catholic presence, many anti-clericals believed that if women were given the vote, it would be their priest who directed what they would vote for. The proper woman of the domestic sphere was praised highly for her devotion and religiosity, but as demonstrated in Chapter Two, this was not something that the architects of Republican France or Bismarck’s Germany wanted influencing their government. In their minds, the priests’ control over their female parishioners was enormous, and if put in such a situation they could — vampire like — make women do their bidding.33 This view of priests with vampire-like control over their female parishioners ties in well with the anti-clerical view of priests as vampires perpetuating superstitions, already explored in Chapter Two. The equation of the clergy with power over women, however, was not limited to Catholics. Edith Sellers, writing for The Nineteenth Century, claimed that she did not want women to get the vote, because if they did, “every curate in the land [would] have a dozen votes and every popular rector at least a hundred.”34 Despite Edith Sellers, however, most religious Catholics regarded

28 29 30

31 32 33 34

Hause & Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, 25. McMillan, France and Women, 141. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 177. Schneider, American Women in the Progressive Era, 152. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman, 38. Hause & Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, 13, 16. Edith Sellers, “Cassandra on ‘Votes for Women,’” The Nineteenth Century, (1911), 487– 498, 487.

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female emancipation as a pernicious Protestant import.35 Much as the figure of the Anarchist was often portrayed as a foreigner newly arrived to bring chaos to society, the Suffragette’s detractors viewed her in a similar light.36 They both shared the vampiric quality of a foreign agent bent on infiltrating society and re-creating innocent idealists in their own corrupt image. There was, again, a grain of truth to this perception, since women’s rights movements were much older and stronger in Great Britain and America than they were on the Continent — particularly in France.37 The more militant suffragettes courted comparisons with anarchists through their own behavior. In the years leading up to the First World War, a minority of women’s rights activists grew frustrated with their fruitless lobbying for change. To gain public attention, and, hopefully, support, they deliberately stepped out of the paradigm of the meek and patient woman, and engaged in violent acts, such as smashing windows. The women were arrested, and to increase their notoriety, they went on hunger strikes requiring forced feeding.38 Contrary to the female ideal of passivity and peace, violence in women was always considered particularly shocking. For all the horror that male anarchists had aroused in the public, the handful of women who had participated in the violence of the anarchist movement were deemed doubly revolting, for such violence, many believed, should have been against a woman’s nature.39 These ideas of women, violence, and the female suffrage movement are visible in contemporary political cartoons. The first, taken from Punch (7.2), shows a group of women standing outside the entrance of a building. The women represent many of the worst traits attributed to the Suffragettes. They are thin — pinched-looking, in fact — and elderly, with spectacles perched on their noses. They look like “dried up old maids” who have never married or had children, and probably never had the opportunity to do so. They are brandishing rolled parchments labeled “Woman’s Rights,” “Voting,” and “Electoral Qualifications.”40 Clearly they 35 36

37 38

39 40

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Hause & Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, 86. Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 25. Hause & Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, 20. Christine Bolt, The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s, (Amhearst, Massachusetts: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 189. Marsh, Anarchist Women, 6, 108; Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 93. Punch, May 28th, 1870.

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7.2 “An ‘Ugly Rush’!” Taken from Punch, May 28th, 1870

are trying to force the British government, represented by John Bull, to change their voting and social status. Meanwhile, across the street, stand a small group of women who represent conventional, womanly women — the antithesis of the Suffragettes attacking John Bull’s barricaded door. These women have plumper faces and figures, no spectacles, and more stylishly dressed hair. They look like respectable, attractive women who adhere to the gender conventions of separate spheres — potential wives and mothers. One of these women may already be a mother. She is leading a little girl by the hand while the girl points at the violent Suffragettes, highlighting how bizarre their behavior must appear. The next image, taken from Kladderadatsch (7.3), takes the idea of the violent feminist one step further, by putting her in a cage to protect the public from her violent tendencies. The cartoon shows four women, labeled suffragettes, locked in a cage at the zoo. They all resemble the Blood Will Tell

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7.3 “Suffragettes at the Zoo” Taken from Kladderadatsch, March 31st, 1912, 13

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violent radicals in Punch, only more so: their clothes are unstylish and unkempt, and the women look skinny and unattractive. A human couple and half a dozen animals form the audience watching the suffragettes as they rattle the bars of their cages and snarl at the onlookers, barring their teeth. The animals include a tiger, an alligator, and a bear, none of whom show any signs of attacking either the people or a large bunny rabbit nearby. The man even has his arm around the shoulders of the bear. The caption reads: “When eternal peace arrives, friendliness and harmony will exist all over the world between Christian and Jew, Tiger and Lamb. Only a few suffragettes will be on display at the zoo.”41 Unnatural and miraculous as it may appear for such harmony to exist within the animal kingdom, between animals and humans, and even between Gentiles and Jews, it is still exceeded by the unnaturalness of violent suffragettes. Unlike our previous chapters, there will be much less of a discussion here regarding anti-Semitism, which has played an important role in our discussions of religion, science, the economy, and nationalism. As I mentioned in the Introduction, this is in part due to the fact that, in the realm of gender, the vampiric threat lies in the inversion of male and female roles rather than the invasion of an outsider. Despite this, there are ways in which the issues of blood and vampires that we have been exploring in this chapter tie into issues related to anti-Semitism during this period as well. One of the most interesting and bizarre myths related to Jews, blood, and gender goes back to the Middle Ages. In addition to the other bloodrelated powers or misdeeds ascribed to Jews was the idea that male as well as female Jews underwent menstruation each month. Various scholars, such as Daniel Boyarin, have linked this misconception with other mistaken ideas held by the Gentile community regarding the practice of circumcision, as already discussed in Chapter Two. The superstition of Jewish male menstruation lasted well into the nineteenth century, feeding into the idea of the Jewish man as a figure of emasculation and castration.42 Adding to this image of Jewish male emasculation was the rise of the culture of separate spheres, already discussed at the beginning of 41 42

Kladderadatsch, March 31st, 1912, 13. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 210–211.

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this chapter. In addition to being a construct of the middle classes, it was at odds with the gender dichotomy that had prevailed in Jewish circles during the previous centuries, which upheld the idea of a male scholar who spent most of his time engaged in studying sacred texts while his wife not only took care of the household, but supported the family through running a business as well. Many of Western Europe and America’s Jewish families, whether assimilated or adhering to more traditional Jewish practices, happily embraced the prevailing cultural ideal of separate gender spheres in which men left home to work and women remained in the home, but the stereotype of the strong Jewish woman and the weak Jewish man prevailed.43 We have already seen evidence of this perception in the previous chapter. A significant outgrowth of the perception of Jews as weak and ineffectual men was their characterization as weak and ineffectual material for soldiers. By contrast, their Gentile counterparts not only possessed a patriotic spirit willing to sacrifice for his country, but the hyper-masculine, unscholarly, able body of a good soldier.44 Finally, in the same way that anti-Semites perceived Jews as in control of the Communist and Anarchist movements discussed in Chapter Five, they believed that Jewish women played a predominant role in female suffrage. In the words of the rabidly anti-Semitic politician Georg von Schönerer, “it is unoccupied women who devote themselves to the idiocy of female suffrage, women who have failed in their calling as women or who have no wish to answer it — and Jewesses.”45 Ultimately, the critics of the woman’s movement most feared that the suffragettes were going to fundamentally alter the balance of gender conventions and what many viewed as the best aspects of woman’s nature. Critics were certain that in the process of pursuing university degrees, careers, and all of the political dangers that lurked in the public sphere, women would lose their femininity and take on the masculine qualities of men, leaving men emasculated and children with no one to care for them.46 Eliza Lynn Linton castigated emancipated women as monsters who 43

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Although the idea of a husband spending his time learning sacred texts would not have been a part of Gentile male roles in the Early Modern period, the idea of a strong wife participating in a family business would have been quite common. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, xxii, 63. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 4, 14. Cited in Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 355. Hause & Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, 17.

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Disdain[ed] . . . the duties and limitations imposed on them by nature, their desire as impossible as that of the moth for the star. Marriage, in its old-fashioned aspect as the union of two lives, they repudiate as a onesided tyranny; and maternity, for which, after all, women primarily exist, they regard as degradation. Their idea of freedom is their own preponderance, so that they shall do all they wish to do without let or hindrance from outside regulations or the restraints of self-discipline; their idea of morality, that men shall do nothing they choose to disallow.47

“The New Woman” in all of her independent glory also embodied a number of fears. These were fears of women who had become the mirror-opposites of what women ought to be. Whereas women were supposed to be unselfish, innocent, maternal creatures of self-sacrifice, society’s anxieties over what women might now become were best portrayed by the vampire — selfish, wanton, and homicidal. One of the most intriguing characters to embody this inversion of womanly virtues is Harriet Brandt, heroine of Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire. Although not a classical vampire who kills people by drinking their blood, Harriet has an uncanny, unconscious ability to sap the energy and vitality of those she loves. Over the course of the book she unwittingly kills several people before an eminent doctor acquaints her with her inadvertent monstrosity. As he explains to Harriet, There are some born into this world who nourish those with whom they are associated; they give out their magnetic power, and their families, their husbands and wives, children and friends, feel the better for it. There are those, on the other hand, who draw from their neighbours, sometimes making large demands upon their vitality — sapping their physical strength, and feeding upon them, as it were, until they are perfectly exhausted and unable to resist disease. This proclivity has been likened to that of the vampire bat who is said to suck the breath of its victims.48

The proper, ideal woman of the domestic sphere has the capacity to give of herself to others. Due to her unfortunate hereditary legacy, Harriet, for all her natural affection for those around her, cannot give. She can only take. The life of a conventional wife and mother is denied to her; the doctor warns her that 47 48

Linton, “The Wild Women: As Politicians,” 79. Florence Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauschnitz, 1897), 273.

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You are not likely to make those with whom you intimately associate, stronger either in mind or body. You will always exert a weakening and debilitating effect upon them, so that after a while, having sapped their brains, and lowered the tone of their bodies, you will find their affection, or friendship for you visibly decreases. You will have, in fact, sucked them dry. So, if I may venture to advise you I would say, if there is any one person in the world whom you most desire to benefit and retain the affection of, let that be the very person from whom you separate, as often as possible. You must never hope to keep anyone near you for long without injuring them. Make it your rule through life never to cleave to any one person altogether.49

Harriet, the vampire, can never be a normal woman, marrying and having children. Nor was the figure of the selfish woman-cum-vampire limited to overtly Gothic fiction. One of the best and subtlest portraits of the nonsacrificial, parasitic woman comes from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. When Eliot introduces the reader to Rosamund Vincy, she appears as an angel of the domestic sphere, interested only in proper, womanly accomplishments and pastimes. Her preoccupation with clothes, entertaining, and enjoying a high social status, however, quickly overwhelms her husband Lydgate with debts. Confronted with these problems, Rosamund offers no solutions or help, expecting her husband to put everything right. A less obliviously selfish woman would see it as her duty to exercise economy and live within her husband’s income. An unselfish wife would also see it as her duty to psychologically bolster her husband and give him support in advancing his career. Rosamund, on the contrary, despises Lydgate’s choice of profession, firmly declaring that she “often wish[ed he] had not been a medical man.”50 Between his debts and professional controversies, Lydgate is eventually forced to abandon his career as a research scientist for the more lucrative one of catering to the rich and the gouty. He complains bitterly later in life of Rosamund’s selfish parasitism, referring to her as a basil plant, which “flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.”51 Despite the ordinary setting of Middlemarch, such subtexts were not lost on Eliot’s 49 50 51

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Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 274. George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871, (New York: Knopf, 1991), 416. Eliot, Middlemarch, 763.

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readers, one reviewer commenting that Rosamund is “a kind of wellconducted domestic vampire.”52 A proper woman of the private sphere had to be unselfish and capable of self-sacrifice, but even more important was her respectability, a quality often portrayed as innocence and asexuality. Gender codes divided the nineteenth century world between the Public and the Private spheres. The women of this world consisted of the housewives at home and the harlots in the unprotected world beyond.53 One was an angel of the hearth. The other was a vampire. A British review of the domestic tragedy “A Fool There Was” illustrates this gender dichotomy and its accompanying color co-ordination, commenting that “actresses [in such plays are required] either to be tearfully domestic in spotless white or else to coil and hiss and be ‘vampires’ in flaming scarlet and a low décolletage.”54 White stands for innocence and purity, red for carnal sin. An American review of the same play echoes this rhetoric, describing the love triangle between the husband, his wife, and his vampiric mistress by describing “the man’s wife [as] the white rose of the story. He forsakes her for the Red Rose — the lady with the laugh and an insatiable desire for kisses and more kisses.”55 Although common sense and anecdotal evidence disproves the clichés of nineteenth-century sexuality, most mainstream opinionmakers would have ascribed to the idea that the ideal wife and mother did not, supposedly, have sexual drives or enjoy sex.56 According to these same clichés, prostitutes supposedly did. Above all else, vampires were characterized by their overt sexuality and their sexual power over others. Labeling women as vampires signaled that their sexuality went beyond the bounds of decency or normality. An image from Punch (7.4) links the figure of the vampire woman with all forms of vice. The woman, voluptuous in a décolleté gown, has bare arms, unbound hair, and vampire wings. On her right is a bottle, at her feet are cards and coins, while she holds a dice-cup above her head and casts a die.57 This vampire is simultaneously 52

53

54 55 56 57

H. Lawrenny, review of Middlemarch, The Acadamy, January 1, 1873. Cited in Carol Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature, (Bowling Green State Popular Press, 1988), 125. James McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 1870–1940, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 2. “A Fool There Was,” London Times, March 22nd, 1911, 10. “A Fool There Was; No Doubt of That,” New York Times, March 25th, 1909, 9. Frevert, Women in German History, 134. Punch, November 2nd, 1889, 215.

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7.4 “The Real Rouge Dragon; or, ‘Cherchez la Femme’” Taken from Punch, Novermber 2nd, 1889, 215

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the personification of sex, drinking, and gambling, vices that destroy those who indulge in them as well as their families. An article from the New York Times confirms this, referring to any woman who leads men into adulterous affairs as “a commercial vampire, who in cold blood enters the sanctuary of a happy home and drives out the wife to despair and death.”58 As demonstrated in an image from Harper’s Weekly (7.5), even death and despair were viewed as a better alternative for a proper woman than transgressing the sexual mores of society and becoming a sexual vampire. In the foreground stands a vampire-like woman with large leathery wings. She holds a sign that reads “Be Saved by FREE LOVE,” an invitation into a world advocated by some of the more radical feminists, in which women were free to express their sexuality, unfettered by the constraints of marriage, and untroubled by pregnancy through the use of birth control. Walking away is a care-worn woman, carrying on her back an alcoholic husband and several small children. Rather than abandoning her charges and transgressing her womanly duties of wife and mother, she tells the vampire, “I’d rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps.”59 In fiction, wanton vampire sexuality was far more likely to harm the consenting male than his betrayed wife. Harriet Brandt’s untamed sexuality is partly attributed to her orphaned, unguided upbringing rather than deliberate evil, but her vampirism makes intimate contact of any kind dangerous. When she gives one of her admirers “a long-drawn kiss, [it] seemed to sap his vitality . . . [and make him feel] faint and sick.”60 When she marries at the end of the novel, her husband dies within two months, leading her to take her own life. Harriet’s deadly kisses are echoed in vampire fictions throughout this era. Hume Nesbit’s (1849–1923) eponymous “The Vampire Maid,” visits the hero in what he thinks are merely sexually charged dreams of being “kiss[ed] with those red lips, while I shivered at the contact of her silky black tresses as they covered my throat . . . while I lay supine and helpless.”61 He wakes abruptly one night, however, to observe 58 59 60 61

“Priest Blames ‘Other Woman’,” New York Times, September 11th, 1911, 3. Harper’s Weekly, February 17th, 1872, 140. Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 105. Hume Nesbit, “The Vampire Maid,” 1900, Dracula’s Brood: Rare Vampire Stories by Friends and Contemporaries of Bram Stoker, Ed. Richard Dalby, (London: Crucible, 1987), 217–222, 220.

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7.5 “Get thee behind me Mrs. Satan” Wife (With Heavy Burden): I’d rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps. Taken from Harper’s Weekly, February 17th, 1872

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A monster bat, with the face and tresses of Ariadne [his lady love], fly into the open window and fasten its white teeth and scarlet lips on my arm. I tried to beat the horror away but could not, for I seemed chained down and thrilled also by a drowsy delight as the beast sucked my blood with a gruesome rapture.62

The sexual overtones of the attack are highlighted along with its horror. In Anne Crawford’s “A Mystery of the Campagna,” the friend of the narrator is last seen in the company of a woman who “slowly approached and laid her head upon his shoulder, [his] outstretched arms clasped themselves closely around her, so that her face was hidden upon his neck.”63 Upon the discovery of his bloodless corpse, the friend investigates and discovers an ancient vault, open, wherein lies The body of a woman, perfect as in life, with faintly rosy face, soft crimson lips, and a breast of living pearl, which seemed to heave as though stirred by some delicious dream . . . I could have sworn that the blue veins on that divinely perfect bosom held living blood! . . . As I looked the red lips seemed to grow redder. They were redder! The little pearly teeth showed between them. I had not seen them before, and now a clear ruby drop trickled down to her rounded chin and from there slipped sideways and fell upon her neck.64

The vampire’s ruddy complexion is not merely a sign of her sated thirst for blood, but her sated sexual appetite as well. In William Gilbert’s (1804–1890) “The Last Lords of the Gardonal,” we find one of the more violent scenes of vampire sexuality. It is the story of a cruel and rapacious count, who goes to any lengths to marry the object of his desire. These include a botched kidnapping that kills the object of his obsession and a subsequent pact with a wizard. On their wedding night, he is horrified to discover [That] the lamp above their heads showed him no longer the angelic features of Teresa, but the hideous face of a corpse that had remained some time in the tomb, and whose only sign of vitality was a horrible phosphoric light which shone in its eyes. Conrad now tried to rush from 62 63

64

Nesbit, “The Vampire Maid,” 221. Anne Crawford, “A Mystery of the Campagna,” 1887, Dracula’s Brood: Rare Vampire Stories by Friends and Contemporaries of Bram Stoker, Ed. Richard Dalby, (London: Crucible, 1987), 64–91, 76. Italics found in the text. Crawford, “A Mystery of the Campagna,” 88.

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the room, and to scream for assistance — but in vain. With one arm she clasped him tightly round the waist, and raising the other, she placed her clammy hand upon his mouth, and threw him with great force upon the floor. Then seizing the side of his neck with her lips, she deliberately and slowly sucked from him his life’s blood; while he, utterly incapable either of moving or crying, was yet perfectly conscious of the awful fate that was awaiting him.65

The scene is highly reminiscent of the rape their wedding night would have been had Conrad’s original kidnapping of Teresa gone as planned, except that now the roles are reversed. Instead of playing the victim, the deceased Teresa can punish Conrad for his role in her death. As a vampire, she can reverse the usual gender roles and exert power and control over a normally powerful man. Some of the most important and pivotal scenes in Bram Stoker’s Dracula draw their power from gendered role reversals of this type. The first occurs early on, while Jonathan Harker is staying in castle Dracula. He sets out to explore the castle and falls asleep in what appears to have been a woman’s boudoir. Harker awakes some time later to find himself being appraised by three vampire women, “ladies by their dress and manner,” with very unladylike sexual appetites.66 Feigning sleep, Harker hears one comment, “He is young and strong; there are kisses for us all,” before she “advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me . . . I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited — waited with beating heart.”67 In this scene, the agency to act — a male trait — belongs entirely to the women, while Harker exhibits the female trait of passivity. The vampirized Lucy and her fiancé Arthur enact a similar scene later in the novel. The heroes keep vigil overnight by Lucy’s tomb, waiting to encounter Lucy the vampire when she returns for the night. The date happens to be the one originally set for Lucy’s marriage to Arthur. When Lucy is confronted by the men, she immediately attempts to seduce her former fiancé: 65

66

67

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William Gilbert, “The Last Lords of Gardonal,” 1867, Dracula’s Brood: Rare Vampire Stories by Friends and Contemporaries of Bram Stoker, Ed. Richard Dalby, (London: Crucible, 1987), 13–42, 35. Bram Stoker, The Essential Dracula: The Definitive Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel, 1897, Ed. Leonard Wolf, (New York: Penguin, 1993), 51. Stoker, Dracula, 52.

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Her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile . . . She advanced to [Arthur] with outstretched arms and a wanton smile [but] he fell back and hid his face in his hands. She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said: “Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!68

In this scene, Lucy, as vampire, is the sexual initiator, not her almosthusband. Before turning into a vampire, Lucy is presented as the incarnation of the asexual ideal of the nineteenth century — liveliness and energy tempered with purity and light. Becoming a vampire unleashes inappropriate sexual appetites in Lucy and an unfeminine assertiveness in seeking to satiate them. Narrating their encounter with the vampire Lucy, Dr. Seward notes the changes conveyed by Lucy’s facial expressions and in her eyes: “The sweetness had turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.”69 The act of staking Lucy returns the gender reversals to their status quo. Numerous scholars note the phallic imagery of the stake and Arthur’s central role in killing the vampire Lucy. Likened to the deflowering of the virgin bride by some, and gang-rape by others, there is no question that the scene is suggestive of sexuality.70 More important, however, is the fact that the female is once again a passive figure while the male character is allowed to act: The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it . . . And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth ceased

68 69 70

Stoker, Dracula, 257. Stoker, Dracula, 256. Christopher Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, Ed. Margaret Carter, (1988), 25–34, 30; Ledger, The New Woman, 105.

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to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over.71

Because we see her both before and after her vampiric transformation, Lucy Westenra manages to embody both sides of the gender dichotomy. She goes from a sweet, docile fiancée to a ravening monster that makes overt sexual advances.72 Once she is seduced beyond the private sphere, Count Dracula turns a pure woman into the ultimate figure of sexuality and death. Their sexual drives beyond the normal paradigms of control, all of the vampire women are linked to the sexual women of the nineteenth century — prostitutes. A vampire’s kiss could be a prelude to death, leading many scholars to identify vampirism as a metaphor not only for prostitution but also for syphilis — one of the sexually transmitted scourges of the nineteenth century.73 Yet this was not the ultimate horror embodied by Lucy and her literary sister vampires: It was the fact that they devoured children. Motherhood was conventionally viewed as woman’s ultimate biological destiny. Children were the primary object of woman’s capacity for selfsacrifice. During pregnancy, women nourished their babies from within their own bodies. After birth, they fed their babies from the milk of their breasts. A good mother never stopped giving of herself to her children.74 In opening 71 72 73 74

Stoker, Dracula, 262. Ledger, The New Woman, 101. Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 107, 109. The ideal of woman’s self-sacrifice could, of course, be taken too far. In two very interesting instances, overindulgence in womanly duty leads women to be portrayed not as vampires, but as their victims. One of Mrs. Beeton’s phenomenally popular guides to household management warns mothers never to sleep in the same bed as their breast-feeding babies. If they do, she warns, the baby will take advantage of its mother’s proximity to gorge itself off and on all night, leading the mother to awake in “a state of clammy exhaustion, with giddiness, dimness of sight, nausea, loss of appetite, and a dull aching pain through the back and between the shoulders. In fact, she wakes languid and unrefreshed . . . caused by her baby vampire.” The other, taken from a letter to the editor of the Times, bemoans the wasted potential of grown children who remain at home, caring for their parents. In rhetoric that might have come from a suffragette pamphlet, the writer claims that Every day a host of human vampires drain the life-blood of those who are their nearest and should be their dearest. They have no seductive graces. Their limbs are not sinuous nor their lips scarlet . . . The most noxious specimens of the common house-vampire are old ladies, apparently incapable of hurting a fly . . . The most usual species is the widowed mother with a daughter of any age from 20 to 30 . . . Day and night she is at her beck and call. Her opinions, her gifts, her ambitions she must keep in the background till they atrophy

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education and careers for women, however, what kind of women were the suffragettes creating? Selfish ones, their critics feared — women who thought of themselves first, put their goals ahead of others, practicing birth control and avoiding motherhood. The vampire embodied the social anxieties aroused by the New Woman, and as such the female vampire was not only selfish and sexual, she was unmaternal. Instead of nourishing children with her body, she drank their blood and used them to nourish herself. This was a horrifying perversion of a sacred relationship and the most horrifying inversion of nineteenth-century womanhood that anyone could imagine. An article in the New York Times, describing Manhattan anthropomorphically, made the same distinctions between what constituted a maternal woman and what constituted a vampire. The city was not a nurturing presence that succored its citizens — let alone children — but a Modern huntress, gaunt, eager, intelligent, lustful of progress and power. With limbs of steel and heart of iron, she went on her imperious, pitiless way, feeding brains, nerves, emotions, all alike, to the flame of her insatiable ambition. A great vampire, a magnificent courtesan, an inspired gambler was this Manhattan. In her headlong, brilliant career there came no momentary pause to rock a cradle; small hands never clung to her militant skirts and checked her onward march; helpless heads never sought rest and shelter upon her turbulent bosom. She was the Metropolis; she was Society, and she was Bohemia; she was Art, Literature, Science, Philanthropy, Finance; she was Opportunity, and Reward, and — Oblivion; all things to all men she contrived in her infinite versatility to be. But she was not a Nursery.75 from want of use. She must . . . to speak generally, run the house for the vampire’s convenience from the vampire’s point of view, without any regard to her own inclinations, and, as often as not, on lines of which she does not approve. The vampire . . . Slowly but surely squeezes the life out of them and drains them of youth and joy and hope. In all the long catalogue of woman’s real and fancied woes, there is hardly one more infuriating and none more depressing to contemplate than the commonplace tragedies of these spoilt and wasted lives.

75

The letter prompted several irate respondents who denied that their lives were at all blighted and scorned as degenerates anyone who would fail to follow the fifth commandment to honor their parents and to care for them in their old age when that became necessary. Cited in Judith Flanders, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, (London: Harper Collins, 2003), 22; “The Vampire of the Hearth,” London Times, May 12th, 1914, 11. “New York Not Merely Lobster Palaces but a Nursery,” New York Times, May 15th, 1910, 7.

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The city was like the New Woman, with an education, with a career. She had opened numerous paths for herself, some of them even brilliant, but simultaneously she had stunted her maternal instincts. Marryat’s Harriet Brandt has maternal instincts, but no knowledge of the danger of her affections. Her first, unconscious victim is the baby of Margaret Pullen, a married woman she befriends while staying at a seaside hotel. She spends hours kissing and “cuddl[ing] the sleeping baby to her bosom.” When asked whether she minds playing nursemaid, Harriet exclaims that the baby “loves me and even Nurse cannot get her off to sleep as I can! And it is so beautiful to have someone to love you!”76 Her childhood acquaintance and traveling companion comments that “Harriet is very fond of children . . . She wants to kiss every one. Sometimes, I tell her, I think she would like to eat them.”77 Unfortunately, given Harriet’s ability to psychically drain those she loves, she does end up metaphorically eating her friend’s baby. After a week of being held constantly in Harriet’s arms, the baby slips into a coma and dies. A similar vampire-mother figure appears in Jean Lorrain’s (1855–1906) short story “The Glass of Blood.” In it, a famous singer, La Barnarina, forms an intense bond with her step-daughter, Rosario — in fact, La Barnarina marries precisely so that she can become Rosario’s mother. But like Harriet, La Barnarina is a psychic drain on those around her, and within months, Rosario’s “lips which were so red are now tinged with violet; dark shadowy circles like blurred splashes of kohl are visible beneath her eyes and they continue to deepen; . . . the girl’s complexion had taken on the pallor of wax.”78 Somehow, because La Barnarina has been a professional woman, living and striving for her own personal goals, she cannot give of herself to others, even when she deliberately renounces her career to devote her life to someone else. Told that Rosario’s strange decline is a result of her own love for the child, she tries to “cut the child off from her kisses and embraces” and on the advice of one doctor, sends Rosario to “go at dawn to the abattoirs to drink lukewarm blood freshly taken from the calves which are bled to make veal.”79 The eponymous villainess Carmilla is a more classic vampire than either Harriet or La Barnarina. Although most of the story’s action takes 76 77 78

79

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Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 58. Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 97. Jean Lorrain, “The Glass of Blood,” 1893, Blood and Roses: The Vampire in 19th Century Literature, Ed. Adele Olivia Gladwell, (Creation Books, 1999), 249–254, 253. Lorrain, “The Glass of Blood,” 253.

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place when the heroine, Laura, is eighteen, she first meets Carmilla at the age of six. Waking up in the middle of the night, bored and fractious, Laura Saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder, and ceased whimpering. She caressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and then slipped down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself under the bed.”80

Laura’s own mother had died in Laura’s infancy, and Carmilla’s appearance at the young Laura’s bedside is highly reminiscent of a mother soothing her child in the middle of the night. The motherly image, however, shatters, when Carmilla goes on to attack Laura. Although the encounter described above is more psychic than physical, it presages Carmilla’s future attempt on Laura’s life when she grows up. There were no shortages of overtly child-murdering vampires in contemporary literature. In F.G. Loring’s story, “The Tomb of Sarah,” church renovations require the opening and relocation of a tomb over two centuries old. It is supposed to contain the remains of Countess Sarah Kenyon, around whose life and death legends have grown: Her reputation was an evil one even for those days. She was a witch or were-woman, the only companion of her solitude being a familiar in the shape of a huge Asiatic wolf. This creature was reputed to seize upon children, or failing these, sheep and other small animals, and convey them to the castle, where the countess used to suck their blood. It was popularly supposed that she could never be killed. This, however, proved a fallacy, since she was strangled one day by a mad peasant woman who had lost two children, she declaring that they had both been seized and carried off by the countess’s familiar.81

80

81

Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla,” 1870, Blood and Roses: The Vampire in 19th Century Literature, Ed. Adele Olivia Gladwell, (Creation Books, 1999), 161–216, 163. F. G. Loring, “The Tomb of Sarah,” 1900, The Undead, Ed. James Dickie, (London: Neville Spearman Ltd., 1971), 90–103, 91.

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The legends, unfortunately, prove true. It is three nights before Sarah’s tomb can be resealed. On the first two nights, several sheep are killed. The hero stands watch on the third night and catches the vampire countess returning to her tomb towards day-break, when he is able to destroy her. This cannot come a moment too soon, either, since the attacks on the sheep have given Sarah the strength to go after her preferred target — children. After destroying the Countess, the hero hears that a “child of one of the villages strayed from home the night of the 11th inst., and was found asleep in a coppice near the church, very pale and quite exhausted. There were two small marks on her throat, which have since disappeared.”82 Not all fictional children escape with so little damage. After Count Dracula rescues Harker from his three sexually assertive vampire wives, he gives them a bag “which moved as though there were some living thing in it . . . . One of the women jumped forward and opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror.”83 Later, when Lucy becomes a vampire, she too takes her blood from children. Like the newly resurrected countess, she must begin with baby steps. For several days after Lucy’s internment, mysterious reports circulate in the newspapers of a “bloofer lady” who lures children away from their homes; the children are later found with bite marks on their necks.84 The night that Lucy the vampire is destroyed, the heroes surprise her carrying yet another child back to her crypt. Upon seeing the men, With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur.85

Lucy’s treatment of this child confirms the evil being she has become and the necessity of destroying her, no matter what the cost. There was one further way in which vampires represented fears regarding the transgressing of gender norms, and this was through depicting vampires as homosexuals. Part of this stemmed from the 82 83 84 85

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Loring, “The Tomb of Sarah,” 103. Stoker, Dracula, 53. Stoker, Dracula, 220–222. Stoker, Dracula, 257.

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belief that strong, powerful women not only took on male traits, but correspondingly emasculated men in the process. The passivity and powerlessness demonstrated by men in their sexual encounters with female vampires cited above, confirms this. In the gender debates taking place throughout Western Europe and America, it was considered a truism that “domineering women choose effeminate men whom they can rule at will [and] effeminate men fall back on resolute and energetic women.”86 Contemporary readers only required a small step to make the leap from powerful, assertive women to lesbians and from emasculated, effeminate men to homosexuals. Despite the fact that she does not actually suck anyone’s blood, Marryat’s Harriet Brandt embodies most completely all of the fears transposed from New Women onto the figure of the vampire. When we first meet her, her hunger for friendship and affection is so strong and indiscriminate that her initial relationship with Margaret Pullen verges on the homoerotic. Margaret’s first encounter with Harriet’s psychic vampirism has as much sexual undercurrent as the physical attacks explored earlier in this chapter: Some sensation which she could not define, nor account for — some feeling which she had never experienced before — had come over her and made her head reel. She felt as if something or someone, were drawing all her life away. She tried to disengage herself from the girl’s clasp, but Harriet Brandt seemed to come after her, like a coiling snake, till she could stand it no longer.87

Even Margaret herself recognizes the nature of Harriet’s intense friendship; she can read The look with which Harriet Brandt was regarding her — it was so full of yearning affection — almost of longing to approach her nearer, to hear her speak, to touch her hand! It amused her to observe it! She had heard of cases, in which young unsophisticated girls had taken unaccountable affections for members of their own sex, and trusted she was not going to form the subject for some such experience on Miss Brandt’s part.88

Harriet’s potential lesbianism, like all of her other social transgressions, is 86

87 88

Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Partisans of the Wild Women,” The Nineteenth Century, (1892), 455–464, 461. Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 30. Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, 38–39.

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inadvertent and unthinking. She is a vampire unaware of her nature and unable to control her powers. She forms a striking contrast to one of the most famous lesbians in nineteenth century literature: Sheridan Le Fanu’s (1814–1873) Carmilla. From the moment that Carmilla and Laura meet in person, when Laura is eighteen, they form an intense, sexually charged friendship, whose subtext leaves the innocent and naïve Laura somewhat confused. When Carmilla “gaze[s] passionately” at her, Laura registers an attraction “but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed.”89 Carmilla stays with Laura’s family for many weeks and in their time together, at intervals, Laura notes that Carmilla Would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses.90

Laura cannot account for these passionate outbursts, beyond wondering idly whether Carmilla is completely sane, or possibly a young man in disguise. When Carmilla finally begins to drink Laura’s blood while she sleeps, Laura’s description of these midnight visits are even more erotically charged than those recorded by male characters earlier in this chapter: Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me, and I became unconscious.91

Laura comprises only one of Carmilla’s female conquests. Over the course of the story we learn that she has killed the teenaged granddaughter of an acquaintance of Laura’s family, as well as the daughter of a local 89 90 91

184

Le Fanu, “Carmilla,” 173. Le Fanu, “Carmilla,” 176. Le Fanu, “Carmilla,” 189.

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forest ranger and the young wife of a swineherd. Carmilla never attacks men — presumably they simply fail to interest her. Compared to the explicit eroticism of “Carmilla,” the homosexual vampire encounters in literature are far more oblique. This is in keeping with the greater degree of social acceptance allowed for intense female as opposed to male friendships; male homosexual relationships were criminalized in England in 1885.92 The playwright Oscar Wilde (1854– 1900) was tried and imprisoned on these grounds in 1895.93 The writers of vampire fiction may have felt, under these conditions, that their homoeroticism, though clearly deviant, evil, and linked with death, required greater circumspection. The message remains nonetheless clear. The most obvious example of a male, homosexual vampire comes from the story “A True Story of a Vampire.” Narrated by the daughter of a family, the story recounts how one day, after a short absence from home, the father returns with a guest — a new acquaintance. This man is named Count Vardalek. He quickly ingratiates himself with the entire family and remains for some weeks. Vardalek forms an intense bond with the narrator’s shy, twelve-year-old brother, Gabriel. Whether Vardalek is a psychic vampire, like Harriet Brandt, or a more traditional one, like Carmilla, is never made clear. What is clear, however, is that Vardalek begins to drain Gabriel’s life. He remains with the family off and on for many months. When Vardalek is with the family, Gabriel is noticeably less healthy and energetic, but he returns to health during Vardalek’s absences. Vardalek always returns to the family “looking much older, wan, and weary. Gabriel would rush to meet him, and kiss him on the mouth. Then [Vardalek] gave a slight shiver: and after a little while began to look quite young again.”94 Then one night, Gabriel’s sister happens to be wandering the halls when “something white appeared on the dark staircase . . . What was my astonishment to see Gabriel walking slowly down the staircase, his eyes fixed as though in a trance!”95 She watches her brother enter Vardalek’s room and hears the count say to Gabriel, “My darling, I fain would spare thee; but thy life is my life, and I must live, I who would rather die . . . I am sure this is but a little that I demand of thee. Surely thy super-abundance of 92 93 94

95

Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 83. Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 84. Eric, Count Stenbock, “A True Story of a Vampire,” 1894, The Undead, Ed. James Dickie, (London: Neville Spearman Limited, 1971), 160–168, 166. Eric, Count Stenbock, “A True Story of a Vampire,” 167.

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life can spare a little to one who is already dead.”96 What precisely occurs in Vardalek’s room is never revealed in any detail, but Gabriel’s health goes into a steady decline and he dies soon after. What a much older man might do with an entranced twelve-year-old boy in the middle of the night, however, is easy to imagine, even for a nineteenth century audience. Social upheaval stemmed from many sources at the turn of the twentieth century. The vampiric images and figures people used to illustrate their anxieties came in many guises, as I have endeavored to demonstrate. Yet, almost a century after our period ends, it is the sexual aspect of the vampire that continues to truly live on in our imaginations. In one of the first literary uses of the vampire motif, taken from the eighteenth century, a young man suggestively tells his sweetheart that he will visit her while she is sleeping and give her vampire kisses.97 Over the course of the twentieth century we may have forgotten that vampires are also capitalists, anarchists, and a host of other political figures. But with authors such as Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer, the vampire as lover and sex object has never faded into oblivion.98 No matter what political entities may concern our society then, now, or in the far future, mapping and challenging the paradigms of our sexual mores remains at the nexus of many human wishes and fears. And so do vampires.

96 97 98

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Eric, Count Stenbock, “A True Story of a Vampire,” 167. Dimic, “Vampiromania in the Eighteenth Century,” 9. Anne Rice, who began publishing in the late 1970s, is best known for her series, “The Vampire Chronicles,” which include the titles Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), and The Queen of the Damned (1989). Stephanie Meyer began her own best-selling, supernatural series, “The Twilight Saga,” in 2005 with the publication of Twilight, followed by New Moon (2006), Eclipse (2007), and the final installment Breaking Dawn (2008). Internet. Available: Amazon.com

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CONCLUSION

UPON REACHING the end of this study of vampires, blood, and their roles in the political cultures of Western Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find ourselves confronted with some existential questions: What makes a better understanding of blood and vampires important? Why is their study significant? The figure of the vampire, after all, was not the only figure of the “Other” during this period, nor was it the sole metaphor upon which people drew to illustrate their cultural anxieties. Other nightmare figures from this period, such as the werewolf, the cannibal, or the spider at the center of its scheming web made appearances in political cartoons and newspaper rhetoric. Contemporaries applied their metaphors to some of the issues profiled in the preceding pages. Unlike its rivals, however, the vampire turns up in all of them. When faced with the wide array of social ills and cultural anxieties, the vampire metaphor shoulders the burden of illustrating all concerns simultaneously. Much ink has of course already been spilled on the subjects explored in this book: anti-Semitism, anti-clericalism, Social Darwinism and Blood Will Tell

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degeneration, the capitalist system of industry, the backlash of the radical left against that system, nationalism, immigration, and female emancipation. I believe, however, that these subjects have never been studied collectively with sensitivity to the blood-related rhetoric which contemporaries applied to them. The association of all these subjects with blood, and a sense of the importance of blood in shaping the mindset of Western Europe and America during this period, brings us a fresh insight into each topic. Studying the use of vampires as political metaphors provides us with a key to the historical sense of blood as a transcending political trope, not for one country or culture alone, but for Western society as a whole. Scientists and Social Darwinists identified blood as the vector of human heredity. The weakening or tainting of heredity through degeneration and the mixing of inferior bloods called to mind rhetoric regarding social parasites and vampires. Nationalism, viewed by many as another kind of hereditary legacy, supposedly lay in the blood of its citizens. Others thought of nationalism as something that one might purchase through spilling blood in military service. Nationalist philosophers labeled as vampires those seeking citizenship who either did not already possess a country’s blood or who would not give blood in their country’s service. In stepping out of the gender paradigms of nurture, self sacrifice, and asexuality, women seeking social and political equality became vampires in the eyes of their critics, ready to drink the blood of their children rather than giving them milk from their breasts. The inherent flexibility of the vampire metaphor even allowed it to represent opposite sides of certain issues. Thus, in the religious discourse of this period, when many Christians associated Jews with deicide and blood libels, Jews were referred to as vampires. However, as anti-clericalism grew and many sought an appropriate metaphor that would indict the Catholic Church as superstitious and backward, the vampire came to represent it as well. Similarly, the burgeoning capitalist economy came in for a great deal of criticism. Many believed that the new titans of industry treated their workers with callous disdain, rewarding back-breaking labor with a pittance while their own wallets grew fat on the blood and sweat of the working classes. Capitalists, in short, were vampires. But so were the Capitalists’ critics on the radical left, since some advocated and others performed acts of bloodshed and violence calculated to overthrow bourgeois capitalism. 188

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Beyond the vampire’s ubiquity and its flexibility as a political metaphor, however, lies the significance of the serious contexts in which it was used. Members of Parliament drew on vampiric imagery in their debates. So did judges in their summations, ministers in their sermons, and newspaper editors in their lead articles. Vampires served as more than mere fodder for horror stories or sexual fantasies. Vampires commented on the comfortable co-existence of political reality and popular culture in people’s minds during this period of history. This is significant, because this is no longer the case in Western society at the start of the twenty-first century. Neither vampires nor blood carry the political meanings they once conveyed to our ancestors. This paradigm shift did not, however, begin until well after the end of the period covered here. The political concerns that existed before the First World War did not disappear with the Armistice. Discourses on everything from degeneration and nationalism through female emancipation and anti-Semitism retained their importance, and so did the symbolism used to illustrate them. Indeed, all four of our countries continued to express their anxieties through vampire-related images and rhetoric throughout the interwar period. Vampires began losing their political importance after the Second World War. Yet, ironically, the cultural shift regarding blood, vampires, and politics took root in innovations of the interwar period. The motion picture industry, which came into its own during the 1920s and 1930s, also contained the elements that would come to destroy the vampire as a serious political metaphor. Early films complemented the themes already explored in this dissertation. In 1915, director Louis Feuillade (1873–1925) created a film serial entitled “Les Vampires.”1 The film’s self-styled vampires are a gang of jewel thieves who recall the bomb wielding anarchists and the national parasites who take from, rather than give back to, their country — two of the vampiric tropes discussed in earlier chapters. They draw upon a third with their villainess Irma Vep — her name an anagram of vampire. One of the many femmes fatales of the silent screen, she epitomizes the independent, murderous woman so often in the minds of authors during our time period.2 1

2

Sara Libby Robinson, “Blood in the Streets: ‘Les Vampires’ and the De-Stabilization of French Society During WWI,” Unpublished Paper Presented at the “American Historical Association, 121st Annual Meeting,” Atlanta, Georgia, January 2007. Vicki Callahan, Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 11.

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The first film adaptations of Dracula captured elements of its political subtexts. Both Friedrich Murnau’s (1888–1931) “Nosferatu,” from 1922, and Todd Browning’s (1880–1962) “Dracula,” from 1931, capture perfectly the Count’s foreign “otherness.” This pronounced foreignness is linked explicitly with the dangers the vampire poses to society — both counts clearly symbolize unwanted immigrants. The success of such films — especially Browning’s “Dracula,” which starred Bela Lugosi (1882–1956) — started a veritable cottage industry in the cinema of the United States. Lugosi played vampires in approximately a half-dozen movies from the early ‘30s to his death in 1956.3 Through the end of the Second World War, the Hollywood studios churned out dozens of B-movie horror films. The genre had been so overplayed that by the post-World War II period, they were creating comedies based on the horror genre, notably the 1948 feature “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” which included Lugosi reprising his iconic role as Count Dracula.4 With the horror genre overworked to the point of parody in the more popular media of film and comic books, the vampire retreated to the province of popular entertainment. Its role as political metaphor eroded. Moreover, blood has lost some of its centrality as the key to understanding the human condition. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with British and particularly American soldiers at risk in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can also note changed attitudes towards military service and the importance of blood in the paradigm of citizenship. While casualties can never be eliminated from the prosecution of war, technological innovations in both protective gear and in robots capable of scouting out hostile territory have allowed the military to exercise far greater caution in the deployment of its soldiers and greatly lessened the inevitable loss of blood and loss of life. Despite the controversy in the United States and elsewhere over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the casualty figures of nearly a decade of conflict do not begin to compare to the bloodbath Europe suffered during World War One. Rhetoric related to blood and vampires has not disappeared from the political arena by any means. In the wake of the 2008 economic recession, Rolling Stone magazine described the banking and investment group 3

4

190

J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, (London: Visible Ink Press, 1999), 436–37. Melton, The Vampire Book, 437.

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Conclusion

Goldman Sachs as a “giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”5 Politicians in Western Europe and America who want their ideas to be taken seriously, however, generally eschew such metaphors. A contemporary political cartoon taken from the Montreal Gazette offers a case in point.6 It depicts a campaign office run by Canada’s Liberal party. In the foreground, three prominent politicians complain about the mudslinging of the leading Conservative party. Featured prominently in the background, however, is a placard depicting Conservative Prime Minister Harper with fangs and an opera cape that evokes Lugosi’s Count Dracula. The text of the sign reads: “Harper’s a vampire. He eats babies!” The use of vampiric imagery in this political cartoon serves merely as a reductio ad absurdum in illustrating the vitriolic party attacks that are quite commonplace. The use of vampires in politics that had existed in the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has been transposed to the Middle East, where blood and vampire imagery have become ubiquitous in the last decades. In many Muslim countries, cartoonists and politicians frequently depict Israelis and Zionists as vampires who delight in drinking Arab blood. A typical example of this genre depicts former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon as “Sharoncula.”7 Dressed in Bela Lugosi’s trademark Count Dracula opera cape and with enormous fangs, the cartoon shows Sharon sucking the blood of a limp, emaciated young girl who presumably represents the Palestinians. The image of Sharon and the girl are projected onto a movie screen while below are audience members representing the major Western powers applauding Sharon as vampire while the world as a whole snores on in blissful ignorance. In a similar vein, Mohammed Fayed, father of the late Princess Diana’s lover Dodi Fayed, recently referred to the Royal Family as a “Dracula family,” and accused them of plotting the deaths of both Dodi and Princess Diana.8 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, vampires are still a popular source of entertainment. More importantly, they still carry political subtexts. These subtexts, however, have changed. Now, the vampires of many movies and television programs represent cultural anxieties such as 5 6 7

8

Cited in Metro, Wednesday, April 21, 2010. Montreal Gazette, October 16th, 2006, A18. Taken from Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 115. Montreal Gazette, February 19th, 2008, A16.

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drug addiction and delinquent youth. The Canadian television program “Forever Knight” (1992–96) treated vampirism as a supernatural addiction to blood; in one episode, the vampire protagonist Nick Knight enters a twelve-step program in an attempt to wean himself off of blood.9 On the series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1997–2003), city officials cover up one vampire attack on the local high school by attributing it to a “gang on PCPs.”10 Contemporary vampires are even more significant, however, for the things they no longer represent. Despite our preoccupation with the perceived foreignness of immigrants and terrorists in our contemporary society, vampires as the classic, foreign “other” no longer exist. The marginalized groups that vampires represent today share more with the classic folklore of Eastern Europe than with the bogeymen of nineteenthcentury politics. The vampires of contemporary society have come full circle, back to the anti-social behavior of the villager that sets him apart from his fellows in the social web of the community. This helps to account for the current trend of equating vampirism with the destructive, reckless behavior of addicts — of people whose substance abuse and consequent actions can turn ordinary people into unrecognizable monsters. Another apt analogy for the contemporary vampire might be to serial killers who appear very ordinary, even harmless, as they go about their everyday lives. Such dangers, however, are internal, often hidden from public view. Vampires reflect this. In contemporary television serials, films, and novels, vampires have morphed into WASPy, internal others. Vampires now pass easily among humans, indistinguishable from their white-bread American neighbors until they grow fangs and grab victims by their throats. Instead of displaying accents from Eastern Europe, most vampire accents — when they have noticeable accents at all — have shifted to those of Western Europe — British, Irish, and French. As Joseph Conrad once wrote: Fashions in monsters do change.11

9 10 11

192

“Feeding the Beast,” Forever Knight, December 1st, 1992. “School Hard,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, WB, September 29th, 1997. Cited in Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” 621.

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Index

Alexander II Alien Act “Angel” Antichrist Anti-Clericalism Anti-Semitism Arata, Stephen “The Occidental Tourist” Archduke Franz Ferdinand Auerbach, Nina Our Vampires, Ourselves Bakunin, Mikhail Banister, Joseph Barber, Paul Vampires, Burial, and Death Bathory, Elizabeth Beal, Timothy Religion and its Monsters Beilis, Menachem Mendel Bellamy, Edward Looking Backwards 208

112 60, 123 xi 7, 15, 17 xxi, 37, 187–188 xvi–xvii, 29, 43, 57, 64–65, 67, 93, 124, 148, 151–152, 167, 187, 189 xxiv 130 xxiv xxiii 34 55, 65 2 13 xxiv 29 135, 160 Sara Libby Robinson

Index Belloc, Hillaire Pongo and the Bull Berkman, Alexander Biale, David Blood and Belief Bismarck, Otto Blëichroder, Gershon Blood Libel Boer War Böhme, Margaret The Department Store Bourassa, Henri Boyarin, Daniel Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre Browning, Todd “Dracula” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Burke, Thomas Burton, Richard Calmet, Augustin Carnot, Sadi Carroll, James Carter, Margaret Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics Cavendish, Frederick Charnacé, Guy de Le Baron Vampire Chinese Exclusion Act Circumcision Citizenship Conrad, Joseph The Secret Agent Constantine Crane, Walter Crawford, Anne “A Mystery of the Campagna” Crémieux, Adolphe CriminalAnthropology Czgolsz, Leon Darwin, Charles The Descent of Man Origin of Species Blood Will Tell

99 114 22 37–38, 98, 146, 163 84, 94, 98, 146 xxi, 20–22, 24–32, 42, 63, 82, 188 54, 99, 138, 146, 150, 154 xxvi, 91–92 145 167 6, 14 190 192 126–127 64, 97 6, 9, 14 114, 116 16 xxiii–xxiv 126–127 xxvi, 94, 99, 145 60 21, 26–27, 67, 167 xv, xviii, xxii, 131–133, 137, 140–141, 145, 155, 160, 188, 190 192 124 16–17 76 175 27 xx–xxi, 4, 61–63, 65, 67 122 xx, 34, 46, 53, 63, 68, 82 45, 52 45 209

Index Degeneration D’Holbach, Paul Heinrich Dietrich Dickens, Charles Oliver Twist Disraeli, Benjamin Doctrine of Transubstantiation Donnelly, Ignatius Caesar’s Column Dreyfus, Alfred Drumont, Edouard La Libre Parole Du Maurier, George Trilby

xvi, xviii, xxi, 43, 48, 50–55, 64–65, 67–68, 188–189 33–34 100 64, 100 18–19, 24 xxvi, 117, 120, 122, 144 151–154 154 142, 153 66–67, 69

Edward VII Eliot, George Daniel Deronda Middlemarch Engels, Friedrich Eugenics

97 x, xxvi 144 76–77, 170 105 xxi, 68, 70

Fenians Ferry, Jules Feuillade, Louis “Les Vampires” Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Florescu, Radu “Forever Knight” France, Anatole The Revolt of the Angels Franco-Prussian War

125–127, 129 37

Freytag, Gustav Debit and Credit Frick, Henry Clay Fox, Andrew Fat, White, Vampire Blues Galileo Galilei Gall, Franz Joseph Galton, Francis Gilbert, William “The Last Lords of the Gardonal” Gobineau, Arthur Essai sur l’Inegalite des Races Humaines 210

189 132 13 192 122 124 xix, 37, 53, 73–74, 98, 122, 136, 140–141, 147, 150, 152, 154 xxvi 135 114 xi 32 60–61 50 175 45, 47, 49–50 44 Sara Libby Robinson

Index Goethe, Johann Wolfgang “The Bride of Corinth” Goldman, Emma Graffenreid, Reese C. Grant, Madison Great Depression, 1873 Gregory X

14 122 139 50 xx, 71–74 23

Haymarket Square Herder, Johann Gottfried Herzl, Theodor Altneuland Hobson, J.A. Hoffmann, Gustav Home Rule Homosexuality Host Desecration Hsia, R. Po-Chi Hugh of Lincoln Huxley, Thomas

112 132 147 148 99 29 127 182–185 19–20, 24–25 20 22 45

Immigration

Imperialism

xv–xvi, xviii, xx, xxii, xxiv, 27, 47, 54–60, 65–66, 68, 70, 84–85, 119–120, 122, 134, 139–142, 146, 148, 150, 153, 156, 188, 190, 192 xxii–xxiii

Jesus Christ Judd, Robin Jus Sanguis Jus Solis

xxi, 8, 16–19, 21, 24, 82 26 140–141, 151 140–142

Kahn, Leon Kant, Immanuel Kedourie, Elie Kostova, Elizabeth The Historian Kulturkampf

151 132 132

Lapouge, Vachez Laverdure, Paul Sunday in Canada Le Fanu, Sheridan Carmilla Lewy, Adolf Lewy, Moritz Linke, Uli

67

Blood Will Tell

xi, 13 38

146 xxvi, 180, 184–185 29 29 19 211

Index Linton, Eliza Lynn “The Fate of Madame Cabanel” Lombroso, Cesare L’UomoDeliquente Loring, F.G. “The Tomb of Sarah” Lorrain, Jean “The Glass of Blood” Lugosi, Bela

157, 168 40–42 xx, 62–64, 67–68, 82, 116 61

Manchester Martyrs Marryat, Florence Blood of the Vampire Marx, Karl Das Kapital “On the Jewish Question” Maxentius McKinley, William McNally, Raymond Merriman, Henry Seton From One Generation to Another Meyers, Stephanie Twilight Michelet, Jules Montefiore, Moses Moretti, Franco “The Dialectic of Fear” Murnau, Friedrich “Nosferatu”

126–127 69, 180, 183 xxvi, 50, 169 75, 77, 82, 102, 105, 123–125, 137 xx, 76, 79 91 16 122 13

Nationalism Nesbit, Hume “The Vampire Maid” New Woman Nordau, Max

xxii, 124–126, 129–135, 153, 167, 188–189

Ossenfeld, Heinrich August

14

Parnell, Charles Stewart Pearson, Karl Pheonix Park Plogojowitz, Peter Potter, Beatrice Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph

127, 129 68 126–127 3 85 65

Rathenau, Walter Reinach, Joseph

150–151 151

212

181 180 xiv, 190–191

66 xi, 186 159 27 xxiv xxiii 190

173 162, 169, 179–180 49, 52, 63–64, 67

Sara Libby Robinson

Index Renan, Ernest Rentoul, Robert Rice, Anne Interview with the Vampire Rockefeller, John D. Rothschild Family Rothschild, Nathaniel Royer, Clemance Scharf, Josef Scharf, Moric Schönerer, Georg Schwarcz, Salomon Sellers, Edith Senn, Harry Werewolf and Vampire in Romania Separate Spheres Sexuality Sherard, Robert Sinclair, Upton The Jungle Smith, Goldwin Smith, William Benjamin Social Darwinism Solymosi, Eszter Spanish-American War Standard Oil Stoker, Bram Dracula Strack, Hermann Sulzer, William Tammany Hall Tarbell, Ida Theobald Thorne, Guy When it Was Dark Thossau, Eugen In the Army Tisza-Eszlar Trollope, Anthony The Way We Live Now Twain, Mark Tweed, William “Boss” Blood Will Tell

135 46, 52, 54, 61–62, 69 xiv xi, 186 81–82 27, 82, 93, 95–96, 98–100, 124, 146–147, 153 97 68 28 28 168 28 163 9 156–157, 165, 167 xxii, xxiv, 11, 171, 173, 175, 177–178, 188 84 30 64, 146 47 xxi, 45–47, 51, 60–62, 67–68, 134, 137, 141, 187 27 136, 139–140, 150, 154 81–82 x, xv, 12–13, 63–64, 70, 96, 129, 149, 176 xxiii, xxvi, 28, 63, 95, 129, 148, 176, 190 6, 20, 22–23, 28 136 100, 102 82, 157, 160 20–21 153 134 27–29 94 93 146 100, 102, 112 213

Index Vampire Causes of Folklore As “Other” VladTepes Voltaire Vos, Richard

4–5 xvi, xxi, xxvi, 1–2, 4, 6–7, 9, 11–13, 27, 192 xvi, xvii, 5, 187, 192 12–13 25, 33–34, 74 135

Wagner, Richard 63 Weber, Eugen 139 Werewolf 4, 9–11, 30, 41, 187 Wilde, Oscar 185 William of Norwich 20 Williams, E.E. Made in Germany 72 Winter, Ernst 29 White, Arnold 64, 69 Wolf, Simon The American Jew: Patriot, Soldier, Citizen 150 Wolff, Larry Inventing Eastern Europe 2 Woman’s Suffrage xx, 161, 163–164, 168 World War I xix–xx, 29, 42, 44, 60, 70, 130, 154, 162, 164, 189–190 Yushchinsky, Andrei

29

Zanger, Jules “A Sympathetic Vibration” Zangwill, Israel Zola, Emile L’Argent Au Bonheur des Dames La Debacle The Fortune of the Rougons Germinal Paris Truth Le Ventre de Paris

xxiv 138, 150 xxvi, 48, 79, 92, 145, 152 95 88–89, 91 136 47 77, 88, 117, 122 116, 122 139, 151 118

214

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