Shadow and Voice: The Vampire’s Debt to Secular Modernity by Luke R. J. Maynard B.A., Huron University College, 2003 M.A., University of Western Ontario, 2004 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English Luke R. J. Maynard, 2013 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. ii Supervisory Committee Shadow and Voice: the Vampire’s Debt to Secular Modernity by Luke R. J. Maynard B.A., Huron University College, 2003 M.A., University of Western Ontario, 2004 Supervisory Committee Dr. Robert Miles, Supervisor (Department of English) Dr. Eric Miller, Department Member (Department of English) Dr. G. Kim Blank, Department Member (Department of English) Dr. Hélène Cazes, Outside Member (Department of French) iii Abstract Supervisory Committee Dr. Robert Miles, Supervisor (Department of English) Dr. Eric Miller, Department Member (Department of English) Dr. G. Kim Blank, Department Member (Department of English) Dr. Hélène Cazes, Outside Member (Department of French) Abstract The past few years have seen a renewed critical interest in the vampires and vampirism of English literature, owing both to their growing influence in popular culture and a more inclusive reordering of the literary canon. Much of this recent work has typically approached vampirism through a psychoanalytic lens inherited from Gothic criticism, characterized by a dependence on Freud, Lacan, and Foucault, and often by a model of crisis in which these supernatural figures of terror are supposed to symbolize cultural anxieties with varying degrees of historicity. This dissertation builds upon the narrative of secularization set out in Charles Taylor’s recent work, A Secular Age, to answer the need for a new and alternative narrative of what function the vampire serves within English literature, and how it came to prominence there. The literary history of vampirism is reconsidered in light of the new sociological observations made by Taylor, hinging upon two key methodological principles: first, that Taylor’s new secularization narrative has the potential to reshape the way we think of literature in general and our literary relationship to the supernatural in particular; and second, that the fiction generated during this period of upheaval has much more to tell us about secularization, broadening our understanding of the ideological shifts and changing relationships to the supernatural that brought forth this uniquely modern monster in literature. iv Table of Contents Supervisory Committee ...................................................................................................... ii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v Dedication .......................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: A Secular Age and Supernatural Fiction ......................................................... 11 1.1 Talking Points from Charles Taylor ....................................................................... 11 1.2 “Sir Bertrand”: A Curious Case Study.................................................................... 30 1.3 Orders of Time in Early Modern Supernatural Fiction ........................................... 39 Chapter 2: Vampirism, the Gothics, and the Gothic Schism ............................................ 56 2.1 The Vampire, “That Genus of Gothic Monster” ..................................................... 56 2.2 The Gothics and Their Borders ............................................................................... 66 2.3 The Gothic Schism: Probability and the Supernatural ............................................ 80 Chapter 3: Vampires, Genre, and History ....................................................................... 100 3.1 Towards Vampiric Definition(s) ........................................................................... 100 3.2 “The Vampire of the Fens”: Grendel as Medieval Proto-Vampire ....................... 115 3.3 “True Histories”: Calmet as Historian and Spine-Tingling Theology .................. 124 Chapter 4: Modern Identities in “Christabel” ................................................................. 141 4.1 “Lean and Old and Foul of Hue”: The Transformations of Geraldine ................. 141 4.2 Bodies and Texts: Fragments, Transformation, and Secularization ..................... 166 Chapter 5: Vampires of a Porous East ............................................................................ 188 5.1 On The Borders of Re-Enchantment ..................................................................... 188 5.2 Re-Enchantment and the Oriental(ist) Vampire ................................................... 202 Chapter 6: Unfaith and the Byronic Vampire ................................................................. 230 6.1 Infidels and Infidelity in “The Giaour” ................................................................. 230 6.2 The Haunter Becomes the Haunted: The Afterlife of Leila and the Giaour ......... 249 Chapter 7: Victorian Vampires and the Nova Effect ...................................................... 277 7.1 Sacrament and Secularity in The Vampyre and Dracula ...................................... 277 7.2 Approaching a Vampiric Nova: Nodier, Planché, and their Ruthvens ................. 304 Chapter 8: The Modern Vampire .................................................................................... 335 8.1 The Amorous Dead: Self and Seduction in “La Morte Amoureuse”.................... 335 8.2 Beyond Anxiety: The Modernities of Dracula ..................................................... 358 8.3 The Personal Modernities of Count Dracula ........................................................ 383 Epilogue: After Dracula: Vampire “Culture” in a Secular Age ..................................... 399 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 421 v Acknowledgments My chiefest debt and first thanks are owed to my supervisor, Robert Miles, and to the other members of my supervisory committee—Eric Miller, Kim Blank, and Hélène Cazes, and to my external reader Jerrold E. Hogle, for their support, patience, and contributions at every stage of this project. My conversations with them on literature, vampirism, and everything else were invaluable; to delight and rejoice with others in our shared ideas and common stories is the highest aspiration of this thing we do. Among the extraordinary and collegial faculty at the University of Victoria, special thanks are also due to Gordon Fulton, whose generous knowledge was always freely given; to Gary Kuchar, Chris Douglas, Nick Bradley, and Lisa Surridge, whose mentorship and ready aid in various capacities made all the other demands of academic life manageable during this research; and to Stephen Ross, whose faith and unflagging support during a catastrophic illness may have saved my career entirely. I thank my earliest professors, and now my colleagues, at Huron University College, who inspired me to take this path: Neil Brooks for hooking me on the whole business of literary studies, Teresa Hubel for first introducing me to the criticism of terror, and Dermot McCarthy for introducing me to the terror of criticism. I thank Corinne Davies for my background in poetics; from Western University, I thank Richard F. Green, Russell Poole, and Brock Eayrs, for making a medievalist and philologist of me. That background runs beneath my use of language throughout this project; it has given me a voice even where the literature of other centuries is my concern. I am grateful to Charles Taylor, whose decades of study have provided the theoretical background for much of what I do here; a mention in the Bibliography is not enough to recognize the size and scope of his contribution to my work and to criticism at large. I am also grateful to my fellow philologist D.A. Carlton, speculative-fiction guru Paula Johanson, and loremasters Matthew Tooley and Megan Foden for your sage thoughts on vampires, on the nature of belief and the self, religion and the occult, the ancient and modern, and for your varied answers, spoken and lived, as to why we believe, and imagine, and tell stories. This work was informed and inflected by your depth and generosity of knowledge, even in conversations you may not now recall. Finally, special and personal thanks are due to Jennifer Peters, to Emily Holbert, to my mother Dorothy, and to the rest of my family (both by blood and by deed). Words cannot paint the full scope of your contribution to my life and my work; the success of both has come only through your encouragement, love, and support. vi Dedication For my father Introduction This study began as a fairly traditional narrative of the origins of the vampire in English literature, and has transformed, in the course