Sicker Ever After: The Invalid as Vampire in Fiction by Arabella Kenealy and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Document Type
Book
Publication Date
2022
Abstract
Throughout the nineteenth century, sociomedical discourses presented contradictory views on middle- and upper-class White women who suffered from prolonged illness. While fragility could be read as sensitivity and thereby as evidence of racial superiority, female patients were often suspected of affecting symptoms or else exposing themselves to lifestyles that precipitated disease and derangement. The willful consumptive of Arabella Kenealy’s “The Beautiful Vampire” and the helpless hysteric in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “Luella Miller” prey upon the energies and sympathies of successive caregivers. This essay examines such narratives as reflections of eugenic ideology, which demonized invalids as predatory parasites, as living vampires.
Recommended Citation
Hammack, Brenda Mann, "Sicker Ever After: The Invalid as Vampire in Fiction by Arabella Kenealy and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman" (2022). College of Humanities and Social Sciences. 1.
https://digitalcommons.uncfsu.edu/college_humanities_social_sciences/1