The Relationship Between Blood And The Monstrous-Feminism

There is a clear connection between the monstrous-feminine and blood. The vampire figure in general is for obvious reasons connected to blood: It is what they drink and what ultimately keeps them alive. The female vampire figure's lust for blood was also, as myth would have it, connected to menstrual blood, arguably because the blood she lost during her menstruation needed to be reacquired through someone else's body (Dijkstra 334). Bram Dijkstra in her 1988 work Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture points out how
[f]or the men of the second half of the nineteenth century […] it seemed that the pleasures of the body were to be paid for with death. The womb of woman was the insatiable soil into whose bottomless
Thus, the existence of vampire women did not seem as outlandish anymore (Dijkstra 338). The connection between blood and the monstrous-feminine vampire was also not lost on Barbara Creed who mentions Dijkstra's theory in her work (The Monstrous-Feminine 63; The Monstrous-Feminine 66). She also notes other possible interpretations for the blood in monstrous-feminine vampire narratives such as it symbolising the "rite of passage" menstruation (Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine 63) or semen (Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine
It seems only apt then that this sacred figure of the nurturing and protecting mother is turned and mutilated into the figure of the child-eating vampire. Stoker's vampire mother is anything but a comely and caring presence in the narrative. Lucy turns into the "bloofer lady" (Stoker 195), eating children's blood (one of Creed's images connected to motherhood ("Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine" 51)) and handling children in a seemingly uncaring manner: "With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. There was a cold-bloodedness in the act" (Stoker 188). The deceived children are lead astray by an image that is supposed to be comforting – a female figure – a mother. Lucy, however, is not the only monstrous-feminine mother figure in the text. The three female vampires, for instance, can only be sated when the Count gives them a child to eat (Stoker