"La Femme Fatale and The Vampire Spell: from Le Fanu to Rossetti"

This article investigates the figure of the Fatal Woman as it developed throughout the nineteenth century in English literature and art. A chronicle of the surrender to the spell and uncanny charm of a beautiful young woman vampire, Carmilla, the prototpype of the eternal feminine, the emblem of a predatory, cannibalistic sexuality, a sexuality perceived as unrestrained and ultimately destructive, revived in the darkly sensuous portraits of Rossetti who dramatically changed the concept of feminine beauty in the Victorian period. The feminine beauty immortalised in best-known paintings, reveals Rossetti’s penchant for the sad and the cruel, the melancholy and the androgynous, a preference for fatal, evil creatures that destroys the man whose destiny lies in their power. This attraction towards a type of contaminated beauty is indeed the prerogative of the vampire. This essay is an exploration of the metaphor of vampirism underlying the figure of the Fatal Woman and the meaning that fantasies of female empowerment, unrepressed and monstruous sexuality entail: the fear of women, linked to castration anxiety, is represented by the figure of the all-powerful mother in which men project an oral-aggressive component outside of themselves. Vampirism, the expression of a kinship between Eros and Death, and especially of a desire for fusion and incorporation, typical of the oral phase, creates an omnipotent couple, a couple based on an identity of blood, where dependence is absolute and separation impossible.