Generations of the Female Vampire: Colonial Gothic Hybridity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire

Abstract

This chapter examines Florence Marryat’s psychic vampire novel The Blood of the Vampire (1897), and how issues of racial hybridity combine with the Colonial Gothic to influence Marryat’s characterization of the protagonist Harriet Brandt. Harriet’s mixed-race Afro-Caribbean and English ancestry put her at odds with the British society in which she desperately tries to find acceptance. Harriet is a victim of the vampirism that affected her black grandmother and biracial mother, women who were also victimized by the oppressive white colonial plantation system in Jamaica. Marryat’s portrayal of Harriet Brandt is compared to her earlier imagining of a biracial woman from the West Indies, Lola Arlington, the main character in Marryat’s A Daughter of the Tropics (1887). Both Harriet Brandt and Lola Arlington represent femme fatales who ultimately fall victim to the prejudice surrounding their racial pasts.