For nearly two centuries, the vampire has been a popular character in Gothic literature. Most of the vampire fiction produced during this time has been written by men, with Bram Stoker's Dracula emerging above all other vampire characters as the prototypical vampire for countless subsequent novels and films. However, within the last few decades, women writers such as Anne Rice, Susy McKee Charnas, and Jewelle Gomez have turned with increasing regularity toward the vampire as a protagonist, and their portrayals of vampire characters are often radically opposed to those of their male counterparts. Vampire characters in fiction by men tend to be portrayed as evil Others who threaten existing patriarchal standards of "normal" behavior and must therefore be destroyed. Vampire characters in fiction by women, while retaining their Otherness, tend to become sympathetic centers of the plot who merit survival. The shift in vampire fiction from an emphasis on characters who are victimized by and/or seeking to destroy the vampire to an emphasis on the vampire and/or characters who sympathize with the vampire may be understood as an important shift in narrative focalization.
The impact of this shift in focalization is explored at length using several thematic concerns which include: how concepts of the body are manipulated in women's vampire fiction; the degree to which vampires are used to problematize gender issues and the expression of sexuality, as well as the calibration of domestic space; how women's portrayals of vampire characters reflect their understanding of the experiences of birth and motherhood; how women describe the compulsion for and acquisition of blood; how both blood-drinking and vampire-killing serve as metaphors for rape and reflect individual as well as cultural politics of dominance and submission; and how the concepts of liminality and taboo function in vampire fiction by women. Donna Haraway's cyborg theory is used as the primary critical model for understanding vampire hybridity as women construct it.
Despite female authors' revisions of numerous tropes of vampire fiction, key questions remain: Have women writers "reincarnated" the vampire, so to speak, as an emblem of the subversion of the status quo? Or are they merely using the image to reinscribe the very forces of oppression for which the Gothic as a whole was supposedly so powerful an outlet? This study strongly suggests that they do both, producing vampire characters whose embodiment of contradictory impulses opens possibilities for the construction of individual subjectivity which merit further exploration.