Writing the Female Vampire or Feminist Essay About Vampires

What exactly am I talking about when I mention a feminist perspective and the female vampire? Am I speaking of Kipling's "Vampire" and Fitzgerald's "Vampire['s]" outright statement that a female who is strong and ignores his neediness and whining is a lowdown grifting "vamp?" Whose voice are we hearing speak? Whose take on the world are we reading -- and is it authored by a male writer or a female writer? Are they reliable authoritative authors? Is there a relationship between their relationships between their life and their craft and how they write the vampire character? Yes. Yes to all of the above.

While I am aiming the following list at essay writers, and will then demonstrate how-to incorporate the critical methodology using Kipling and a few others, the same list works as easily when writing the character of the female vampire.

• Does the gender of the author create a different work? For instance, Take a look at the author whom is doing the writing, and what investment they have in displaying the female in that way. For instance, Kipling's "The Vampire" is written by a Victorian writer, who grew up in India (for his formative years), in a society rigidly stratified by both caste, and gender. His England offered ten prostitutes for every one male. He lived in an era in which a woman was either the virginal housewife who was strictly constrained into house-wifery, or a whore. Note that we rarely address the lower-class female who had no choice but to go out and earn her living. This is now becoming a blend of Biographical/historical/ Marxist/feminist criticism, but it is perfectly acceptable in a feminist critical essay.

  How does having a male author writing about a female whom he offers his all too, and who doesn't even notice he's done so, affect the reading of his creation? What does he have invested in his viewpoint? Would it read differently if written by a female?

• What is the exchange between the male protagonist and the female vampire? He gives her what? In Kipling’s poem note that a list of his “spending” are given in each stanza.

  1. Stanza one: “prayer”

  2. Stanza two: years, tears, and work of our heard and hands

  3. Stanza three: goods; honour and faith; and a sure intent

  4. Stanza four: toil, spoil(stuff), loss of planned actions,<

  5. Stanza five: He is stripped of all external stuff – having given this ungrateful female the shirt off his back.
And in exchange she gives him what? What does this male author tell us about the behavior of this lady? Remember that Kilpling actually wrote what would become the cliché for the term, “vamp.” This is a very important section to pay attention to.

1. Stanza one: We get a physical description: rag and a bone and a hank of hair (sound like a super-model?), and we are told that she doesn’t care that he is praying to her.

2. Stanza two: She not only doesn’t know that he has given her “prays, years, tears, and a lifetime’s work, she NEVER could know or understand.

3. Stanza three: He has offered her stuff, and more importantly “honour and faith and a sure intent, and this is NOT what the lady meant. He leaves this one important and loaded word undefined, which allows the reader to fill in the blank – evil.

4. Stanza four: repeats the refrain that the woman is incapable of knowing (understanding) why he is doing all this for her.
5. Stanza five: Here she “throws him aside” now that he is stripped of everything.

6. Stanza six: this stanza is really the kicker. It ends with the refrain that his recurred throughout, that she is not just unwilling, but unable to understand all that he has offered her, and given her – although apparently fully expecting a reciprocal giving.

A thoroughly feminist paper would ask why the woman is to blame for his unmet expectations. Nowhere does it here say that she has asked for any of those many actions he has undertaken. So she is simply in a location where he is in some contact with her, and he is making all these offers to her, and giving her stuff, taking care of her, but did she ever ask him to do it? Does she have to give him anything? Why? Is it simply our male dominated society that pushes the view that she is doing something wrong in taking his stuff and not coming across with something? Can we talk prostitution?

At least Kipling does keep repeating the man is a fool (just like you and I are) when he invests his all in someone who have not equally invested in him.