UC Davis

This doctoral dissertation traces the socio-historical roots of the vampire in French culture and literature from the Reign of Terror through the Second Empire. I begin with an exploration of the fear of the undead (in fiction and in real life) by examining the anxiety about the life-death boundary that was brought on by the guillotine’s swift blade during the Terror––eyewitness accounts detail that the blade was so swift that some severed heads continued to exhibit signs of life. From here, in readings of La dame pâle [The Pale Lady] by Alexandre Dumas (1849), La vampire, ou la vierge de Hongrie [The Vampire Woman, or the Virgin from Hungary] by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1825), and Netflix’s 2020 series Les vampires I argue that the vampire characters are rendered through an imperialist lens with traces of racial and orientalist discourse under Napoléon Bonaparte during the First French Empire. I coin the term “vamperialism” to argue that the Empire is also a vampiric entity in its colonialist and expansionist values. In my third chapter, I argue that real-life acts of blood-drinking during the Second French Empire offer a glimpse of the lasting effects of Haussmannization when the slaughterhouses were pushed to the outer rims of Paris and the ways in which violence coincided with class stratification to breed the vampirism. Lastly, I examine Théophile Gautier’s La morte amoureuse [The Dead Woman in Love] (1836) which portrays a female vampire who can be read as a feminist liberator as she is hunted and demonized by the patriarchal powers of the Catholic Church. Ultimately, I argue that for a creature who shows no reflection in a mirror, the vampire becomes society’s mirror and casts a wide reflection by embodying anxieties about the life-death boundary, imperialism and the racial other, the dissolution of class boundaries, and the desire to control women and their sexual liberties.