The Irish Vampire: How the media's most beloved monster is rooted in Irish culture.
By Claire Watson (Features Editor)
Darkness is your kingdom. In the night, hidden in a ruined fortress, in a wood so dense, not even moonlight can penetrate it, you rise. You slink down a dusty staircase, your long cape trailing behind you, elegant as always. You pour yourself a glass, the red-syrup like licorice on your tongue. Or, perhaps you stalk the city streets, hunting your next victim. You find a dark alleyway and suddenly you’re a bat, flickering through the air. In your bestial form, no one suspects a thing. Or, you’re a 17-year-old glittering in the sunlight, with the refined etiquette of a bygone age. Chivalry may be dead, but what has death ever meant to you?
From the Twilight revival to the growing fandom of What We Do in the Shadows, it’s no secret that audiences love a good vampire story. Unlike other monsters, vampires are sexy, with rich, gothic aesthetics and lustful undertones as they spend eternity trapped in youthful beauty. This specific breed of vampire, the one that hides away in a mysterious castle, relishing in the luxuries of a forgotten age, is Irish in origin.
Versions of the vampire appear in folklore across the world. Anxieties of the undead coming back to life appear in nearly every culture. In Irish folklore, we see the undead returning, fuelled by a gluttonous desire for revenge. In Christian cultures, vampirism can result following an improper, or unChristian burial. Christian burials were refused to those who had committed suicide, were excommunicated, or were not baptised. The lack of baptism can simply be attributed to someone who is born into a different religion, such as pagans. Therefore, all outsiders to Christianity were susceptible to becoming vampires. The vampire as a monstrous entity embodies a societal fear of otherness.
While writing this spooky article, I decided to reach out to some of UCC’s horror-literature experts and asked them to write a few lines on the modern vampire’s Irish origins. “People are often surprised to learn that vampires have Irish roots. Vampires are often associated with Eastern Europe, as that’s where some of the most famous ones hail from.” Dr. Corcoran writes. “However, two of literature’s most iconic vampires were created by Irish authors: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Both of these decidedly continental vampires have been interpreted by critics as embodiments of nineteenth-century anxieties about imperialism, colonialism, and even Irishness.”
30 years before Stoker writes Dracula, Le Fanu brings us Carmilla, a novella that depicts the young Laura’s encounters with the haunting titular character. Laura is a young and lonely girl, who spends her childhood and adolescence in isolation. That is of course until Carmilla arrives. Her carriage crashes outside Laura’s home, and as she is sick, Laura’s father offers to take her in. As the novella progresses, she is revealed to be a vampire, feeding off Laura. Dr. Corcoran writes about Carmilla that “Le Fanu’s novel is set in Styria, a province that was, at the time, ruled by the Austro-Hungarian empire. The region’s status as an Austrian imperial possession has been read as a reflection of Ireland’s relationship with Britain. Likewise, the titular Carmilla, an ethnically ambiguous outsider who preys upon an Anglo-Styrian family, has been viewed as a monstrous version of the colonial subject rebelling against (or at least undermining) their imperial masters.” Le Fanu is a figurehead of psychological fiction, where characters are met with dangers that come from within. In vampire and Victorian literature, we can often read the family unit as a reflection of society. Laura’s father invites this outsider into his home, allowing her to dismantle the state from the inside out.
Dr. Corcoran continues, “This, of course, is just one set of interpretations of the vampire. As the critic Jack Halberstam points out, the vampire (like all gothic monsters) is a site of “overdetermined meaning”, drawing together distinct “fragments of otherness into one body”. At the same time that they embody fears of racial otherness, vampires also encompass anxieties about gender, sexuality, disease, family, and much more. All of these subjects are really interesting to think about in an Irish context.”
The role of Carmilla as a rebellious subject also functions in a feminist and queer reading of the text. By playing into her femininity, Carmilla develops a close bond with Laura. Unbeknownst to her father, Carmilla enters Laura’s bed-chamber nightly and drains her of her life force. The queer nature of these girls’ relationship is clear, as Laura describes Carmilla’s attack sensually. “[T]here 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 longer more lovingly as they reached my throat.” Not only does she use her own, but she weaponises Laura’s sexuality to disrupt an otherwise patriarchal space. From an Irish perspective, this use of feminine sexuality is incredibly powerful, but it’s also what makes Carmilla monstrous. The demonisation of women, and especially queer women’s sexuality by a secular state, is something we still see today. Things like birth control, divorce, abortion, and same-sex marriage are comparatively new to Ireland, a country that still teaches abstinence as birth control.
Dracula acts similarly to Carmilla, taking the oppressive state down from within. Dr. Corcoran writes, “Dracula’s invasion and corruption of Victorian British society is regularly understood as a reflection of late nineteenth-century fears about the decay of the British Empire (and related political uprisings in Ireland).” One reading of Dracula presents Johnathon Harker as the epitome of an English Victorian. He is masculine, Anglican, and a businessman. When he arrives at Transylvania and stays at Castle Dracula, he is surrounded by an otherness (that is Catholic, feminine, and distinctly not English) that begins to crumble his sophisticated lifestyle. While Dracula is Eastern-European and an antisemitic caricature, these values he represents are as Irish as Stoker himself. Like Carmilla, Dracula is rebellious. Harker attempts to dominate Dracula’s space by bringing his business to Castle Dracula, but he ultimately becomes the Count’s subject. Like a coloniser amid a rebellion, he is imprisoned in the very environment he strove to dominate.
A lack of reflections is a well-observed cliché of the vampire. In a colonialist reading of Dracula, the mirror plays an important role in conveying the tension between this standard Englishman, and this monstrous other. Perception is a common theme throughout Victorian literature. Sheridan Le Fanu represents the failings of human perception in both Carmila and his novel Uncle Silas. Both portray two young girls in an internal conflict with what they see and what they believe. The vampire Carmilla is obscured by shadow, and as a result, Laura is unable to give a coherent statement that aligns what she saw with what she felt. In Dracula, it’s revealed to Jonathan whilst he is shaving, that Dracula doesn’t have a reflection. His absence in the mirror represents the Count’s refusal to abide by and take part in Johnathon’s experience of reality. With no reflection, Dracula becomes something unreal, and sinister, that can sneak up on this Englishman and easily overpower him.
The vampire as a representation of the other can be read in a variety of different ways. I think it’s important to remind you that both Carmilla and Count Dracula were not Irish themselves, and were originally written to represent a political and racial other. But I think it’s the vampire’s status as an outsider, one that so many different headings can be applied to, that keeps this Victorian-born vampire in the mainstream. Twilight and its sexy vampires is a strange portrayal of religious and sexual repression, that can be attributed to Stephanie Meyer's conservative beliefs. The Cullen’s transformation scenes are sexually charged, representing pre-marital sex as both attractive and sinful. What We Do in the Shadows plays upon the vampire’s history as an outsider and celebrates it. Experiencing the repression of his Māori heritage, the show’s director, Jermain Clement understands the importance of representing marginalised cultures. The main cast of characters represents Iranian, Grecian, Latin American, and Jewish identities, with all the main characters being canonically queer.
The vampire has seemingly been reclaimed by the people it was created to mock. As someone who takes great pride in both my queerness and my Irishness, and as a lover of all things spooky, I couldn’t be happier to invite in this vampire and welcome it home.