Nara Women's University
Reimagining Female Vampires: Two Female
Serial Killers in Byzantium
メタデータ

言語: English
出版者: アジア・ジェンダー文化学研究センター
公開日: 2019-04-23
キーワード (Ja):
キーワード (En): criminology, Gothic, mother anddaughter, Vampires
作成者: 中川,千帆
メールアドレス:所属:

URL

http://hdl.handle.net/10935/5228

Reimagining Female Vampires: Two Female Serial Killers in Byzantium

Reimagining Female Vampires: Two Female Serial
Killers in Byzantium
Chiho Nakagawa
Abstract　　Neil Jordan’s Byzantium（2012）offers a fresh new look into the world of vampires.  
Centering on a vampire mother and daughter, who have been on the run from asecret society of vampires for two hundred years, the film questions and redefines
female vampires.   Clara and Eleanor look like the typical “good” and “bad” vampires
in recent TV dramas and novels, but their opposite characters illuminate how womenare monsterized and/or idealized in relation to their sexuality.   If we view these two
opposite women as two female serial killers, their patterns of aggression and the natureof their oppressions can be explained by feminist criminological studies.   The motherlooks like a sadistic sexual killer, but she is not.   She, and others like her, have been
portrayed as such since their rebellion against the ideological construction of femininity
results in their demonization.  The daughter, on the other hand, appears angelic, since
she embraces her feminine role as a caretaker.   Her lethal nurturing, however, marks
her as an angel of death.
　　These two female serial killers also represent the rebellion against the traditional
vampire fiction.   The main male characters are named Darvell and Ruthven, evoking
the literary beginning of vampires in English literature.   The vampire secret society,
the Brethren, which allows only male membership, represents the sexist values ofhomosocial vampire fiction.  The Gothic imagery in this film allows us to see Clara asa Gothic victim who rejects being a victim.   Eleanor, for her part, is a Gothic heroine
who saves herself in the end.  They are persecuted victims of and fighters against the
male homosocial society of vampires.  Byzantium departs from the traditional vampire
fiction, which reflect patriarchal values, to develop new female vampires that survive
the dangers and threats of a misogynic world.
――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
Key words: Vampires, Gothic, criminology, mother and daughter　　Critics often read vampire stories as metaphors for fears or problems we face
everyday.   In the play “A Vampire Story,” the playwright Moira Buffini makes one
character say:　　Frank: I mean once you get past the cape era you start wondering what they’re
metaphor for; you know, it might be AIDS, heroin, anorexia, it might be

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the whole spiraling chaos of western society; not knowing the difference
between good and evil—I mean not even being able to define the terms.  
And they’re sexy and heartbroken and mostly Californian and they keep
coming out with fantastic clichés like ‘it’s easier to succumb to the darkness
within you than to fight the darkness without’ and you get the feeling that
if it wasn’t for their nihilistic disregard for human life, they’d be the nearest
thing we’ve got these days to gods（Buffini 2016; 28）.
Today, vampires may be creatures that struggle with very human problems such as
diseases and addiction, or gods or heroes that we worship.  Neil Jordan’s Byzantium,
which is based on Buffini’s play, can be read as a metaphor, too.   The most obvious
reading is to see the story as one about a human mother-daughter relationship.   Theintense and complicated relationship between Clara/Claire and Eleanor/Ella, abiological mother and a daughter as well as a vampire sire and a child, makes us think
about the difficulty of separation, of dealing with the issues of sexuality, of maternal
protection from the outside world, and so forth.  In the beginning of the film, we see theduo disguised as sisters, a stripper/prostitute mother finding a shelter for her teenage
daughter in a beachside hotel, called Byzantium.  In that coastal town, Eleanor meetsa young boy, Frank, who is suffering from leukemia, and starts sharing her secret: sheand her mother are two-hundred-year-old vampires.  We learn gradually from a seriesof flashbacks that Clara is deceived into becoming a prostitute by a naval officer, bears
a child whom she gives up to an orphanage, then becomes a vampire herself and turns
her daughter into one as well in order to survive.   For over two hundred years theymust repeatedly escape from The Brethren, a secret society of vampires.  The climax ofthe film comes when the Brethren finally catches up with these two women, and when
Eleanor learns what danger she and her mother have been running from.  Conflicts andaffections between those two women are the center of the story in this vampire film.
　　Byzantium, however, is also a story of reimagined female vampires in the traditionof male vampires.  Gina Wisker maintains that the film “offers an intriguing new take on
what it might mean to be a woman vampire in the contemporary world”（Wisker 2016;161）.  As a metaphor, this film is about a mother and a daughter who escape abusivemen.   At the same time, this film offers two new distinct types of female vampires,
which deal with desires and aggressions differently.  My paper examines the opposing
characteristics of the mother and the daughter as female serial killers.   I will argue
how each character’s description illuminates the debates on female serial killers.  I will
also focus on the Gothic imagery in this film, which allows us to see the daughter as a
Gothic heroine, and the mother as a Gothic victim fighting back.  Their representation
helps us understand the connection between women’s aggression and the gendered
nature of oppression.   By using the Gothic tropes in the female tradition, Byzantium

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Reimagining Female Vampires: Two Female Serial Killers in Byzantium

reinvents the image of female vampires and rebels against the long tradition of malehomosocial vampire narratives.
　　TV dramas and popular novels often depict two opposite types of vampires in one
story.   Evil, hedonistic, sensual vampires, and conscientious, brooding, sad vampires
are the two common types that we see frequently in recent works—such as Spikeand Angel in earlier seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, James and Edward in
Twilight saga, Eric and Bill in The Southern Vampire Mysteries.   One can say that
this phenomenon is a result of the popularization of vampire fiction, since vampires
are no longer just mysterious unknowable monsters, but accessible, understandable
creatures.  In Byzantium, the mother and the daughter represent these two types; themother is a hedonistic sexual killer who sexually lures her victims, and the daughter
is an abstaining conscientious killer who kills those who want to die.   We have often
seen these different types divided into two different “male” vampire characters—
sympathetic “good” vampires who side with humans（sometimes becoming humanheroines’ objects of love）, and demonic villains who pose threats to humans.   Most
female vampire characters are hedonistic killers such as Drusilla in Buffy and Miriam in
The Hunger.  We rarely see the two opposite types of female vampires in either classic
or contemporary vampire fiction.
　　The depictions of female vampires can be traced back to Sheridan Le Fanu’s
Carmilla, which sets the model for predatory female vampires.  Starting with Carmilla,
as Paulina Palmer argues, the motif of the traditional female vampire is used as a“vehicle to delineate the woman who takes excessive pleasure in sex and to illustrate
the destructive effect her inordinate sexual demands have upon men”（Palmer 1999;
100）.   Le Fanu’s female vampire, probably the first depiction in English literature,
has a real life model, Elizabeth Báthory（1560-1614）.  Elizabeth Báthory was born in1560 in the Kingdom of Hungary in an aristocratic family.   After she married Ferenc
Nádasdy, she settled in Čachtice Castle in the Little Carpathians, and there she started
torturing and murdering women, mostly her servants.   It is said that she killed about
two hundred women—some say even six hundred—before she got arrested.  The mostnotorious episode is that she bathed in a young virgin’s blood to retain her youth.  Theaccount of this episode, however, is suspect.  It first appeared in Tragica Historia bya Jesuit scholar, László Turóczi, published in 1729, and there is no testimony to that
effect in her trial records.   Elizabeth Schechter and Harold Schechter point out that
this bloodbath story exemplifies a “stereotypically female trait”—“the lengths to which
women will go in the interests of personal beautification”（Schechter and Schechter
2010; 124）.  Tori Telfer similarly explains that the blood bath rumor persisted since it
served to dilute the threats posed by women like Báthory—“all the bloodshed simply
comes down to a misguided desire to look good for boys”（Telfer 2017; 9）.  In a sense,

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Báthory’s bloodbath story embodies how a “feminine” trait is used to monsterize andto enervate a female killer at the same time.  The popular image of Elizabeth Báthory
persists as a sadistic killer who had a lesbian lover.  She symbolizes women’s violence
equated with female sexuality.
　　Báthory’s legends and images have inspired many portrayals of female vampires.  
In the discussion of female vampirism, Wisker argues that the traditional depictions offemale vampires portray them to be “self-centered, duplicitous, voracious and desperate
for longevity and eternal youth, depicting stereotypically negative female traits”（Wisker
2016; 152）.   Clara seemingly fits this pattern.   She is a prostitute, a stripper, and abrothel madam.  Wearing provocative clothes, she lures men and propositions sex forfees.  Early in the film, a strip club owner describes her “morbidly sexy,” as if he knewthat she was a vampire.  Her sexiness is deadly.  She is repeatedly pictured with blood
splashed all over her face as if she were a sadistic spontaneous pleasure killer.   That
impression is shared by her daughter, who is worried that her mother may kill men
indiscriminately.   When Clara introduces the Byzantium owner Noel to Eleanor, shewarns her mother, “Don’t,” implying that her mother may kill the shy, good-natured,
unthreatening man just for pleasure.
　　Reading Clara, as well as Eleanor as female serial killers is not so much of a stretch,since Elizabeth Báthory is always listed both in “real” vampire books and female serial
killer books—such as Peter Vronsky’s Female Serial Killers and Telfer’s Lady Killers:
Deadly Women Throughout History.   Clara and Eleanor are therefore two opposite
types of vampires, as well as two different types of serial killers, so to speak.  The filmshows the mother and the daughter not just as two opposite types of women, but two
opposite types of killers.
　　Criminologists have proposed many typologies of serial murders, but they havenot found a satisfactory classification that cover every case.   The most well-knownclassification into two basic types was proposed by the FBI（Ressler, Burgess, andDouglas 1986）—“organized” and “disorganized.”  Based on the typology published by
Holmes and DeBurger in 1988, Holmes and Holmes（1998）proposes four types: 1）visionary2）mission 3）hedonistic（hedonist-lust, hedonist-comfort, hedonist-thrill）and 4）
power/control.   Similar but different typologies are suggested by Keppel and Walter（1999）, Jenkins（1988）, Diez（1986）, Fox and Levin（1998）, and so forth, but one
notable characteristic is that they focus largely on categorizing various “sexual killers.”  
Importantly, those typologies are mostly used to classify “male” killers.
　　Thus, there are attempts to create typologies of female serial killers, since those“male” serial killer classifications do not sufficiently explain female serial killers.  
Holmes, Hickey, Holmes（1991）proposed five types of female serial killers, and Peter
Vronsky introduces more detailed categories, based on the typologies developed by58

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Reimagining Female Vampires: Two Female Serial Killers in Byzantium

Kelleher and Kelleher, and Hickey: “black widows, angels of death, cult disciples,
accommodating partners, depraved sadistic partners, explosive avengers, profitpredators, missionaries, power-seekers, munchausen syndrome by proxy murders”（Vronsky 2007; 25-26）.  Another study（Moriarty and Freiberger 2000）concludes that
one in three cases of serial murders by women does not fit in any classification.  Simply
there are fewer reported cases of female serial killers, therefore, “so little is known” that
there are not enough theories developed to explain（Jensen 2001; 56）.  One thing clear
in these typologies—although the popular image of female serial killer is that of sadistic
sexual killer, it is not common to find one in real life.   No category is found in thosetypologies for a female serial killer who acts alone to kill for pleasure.  
　　Byzantium’s audience is shown from early on that the impression of Clara as asexual killer is incorrect, in spite of her daughter’s belief.   The film—giving away thesecret—feeds the audience little by little the knowledge that the daughter does nothave.   The first time the audience sees Eleanor and Clara together is when Eleanor
comes home to find her mother with a man whose throat is slashed in their apartment.  
Although Clara does not explain who that man is and why she killed him, we have seen
already how that man comes after her at the strip bar.  We also learn later that he is amember of the Brethren, a secret society of vampires, which are after Eleanor.  When
Eleanor comes home, she expresses her disagreement over her mother’s naughtiness,but the audience knows that Clara kills for a reason.
　　One scene especially explains the gap between Clara’s seeming motive and her
actual motive in killing.   When she attacks a pimp on the beach, the camera showsthem from afar on the boardwalk, Clara on top of him.   The pimp’s legs flap several
times under her, as if he were moaning with sexual pleasures and ecstasy.   Thecamera zooms up when she finishes him off, lifting herself up from him to swallow
satisfactorily to say, “the world would be more beautiful without you.”   The contrastof the impression that the visual image conveys and the message that she verbalizes
dramatizes the essence of depictions of Clara in this film.  Even though Clara seems to
enjoy her killing and takes sexual pleasure out of her aggressive actions, she kills those
who harm and take advantage of women.   When she kills, there is hardly any sexual
element on her part.  Clara uses her sexuality to support herself and her daughter.  Sheworks as a stripper to earn their living and seduces Noel to secure shelter at Byzantium.
　　Criminological typologies may not help us understand Clara’s killings, but thediscourse of feminist criminology explains the way Clara is depicted.  Despite her image
as a sexual killer, she kills to protect, care for, and support her daughter.   She kills tosurvive.   Many feminist psychologists and criminologists argue that the most likely
reason for women to kill is to defend themselves or their children from attacks.  Lenore
Walker, who coined “Battered Woman Syndrome,” insists that a battered woman

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perceives any “crisis situation” to be an “imminent danger,” since it is a “matter of life
or death”（Walker 1987; 26）.  Clara is always in a situation of life and death, because
every minor incident could lead to the discovery by the Brethren, which is an “imminent
danger” to her.  As Walker insists, the “struggle of the battered woman becomes, in theend, a struggle to stay alive”（Walker 1987; 26）.  Clara’s killing and repeated escapes
are simply a “struggle to stay alive.”　　The depiction of the Brethren further justifies defending Clara’s murders by using
this feminist criminology argument.  The Brotherhood or Brethren is comprised of only
men, and they are associated with knowledge and laws.   Clara first meets them in alibrary, and the Brethren men work as police detectives in the contemporary setting.  
In that flashback, we learn that the Brethren does not approve of Clara turning herself
into a vampire because she is a woman, and she is lowly born.  This secret society of“chosen” male vampires believe themselves to be the “pointed nails of justice,” as theleader, Savella, describes.   Contrary to their claim, however, their sense of justice isvery limited at most.  They recruit Captain Ruthven to join them, the man who forces
Clara into prostitution and beats her for fun.   Their decision makes us wonder whatkind of “justice” they believe.   If Captain Ruthven’s behavior is within the purview of
the Brethren, then, their “justice” is not for women.  The Brethren or law enforcement,  
which could be one and the same, will never protect Clara.   In fact, it is Clara whofights for justice, not the Brethren.   One member of the Brotherhood, Darvell, wholater betrays the Brethren to side with Clara, tells her that her “instinct is to hunt thepowerful and to protect the weak.”   As she kills the pimp who preys on vulnerable
women, she kills and fights for women.   Clara’s murder principle, therefore, can bejustified as a woman who fights for justice.
　　The two male characters’ names in particular clarifies the significances of Claraand Eleanor in relation to the tradition of vampire fiction.  The name Darvell is takenfrom “Fragment of a Novel”（1816）, a short writing by George Gordon Byron, fromwhich John William Polidori developed his story, “The Vampyre”（1819）, whose
vampire character is named Ruthven.  Byron’s writing is too short to elaborate Darvell’scharacter or his rebirth as a vampire, but developing his fragment, Polidori created Lord
Ruthven, the charismatic vampire, who became the archetype of vampires.   Polidori’s
vampire is more human and more villainous; he enjoys corrupting men and seducing
women.  Lord Ruthven is an aristocratic libertine, onto whom Polidori projected Byron’s
image.   One can easily see this image is developed into Dracula, which is the mostdefinitive vampire in the English language and probably, in the world.   Darvell andRuthven are the names that started the tradition of male charismatic vampires.
　　This male tradition of vampires is also a tradition of male homosocial bonds.  Nina
Auerbach points out that “intimacy and friendship” are the lures of Romantic vampirism

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Reimagining Female Vampires: Two Female Serial Killers in Byzantium（Auerbach 1995; 14）, and this “intimacy and friendship” is strictly between two men:
Darvell and the narrator, and Lord Ruthven and Aubrey.   Lord Ruthven even kills
Aubrey’s object of love to eliminate his rival, and marries Aubrey’s sister to secure histie with him, just to kill her and to torment him.   Their “intimacy and friendship” areintensified through their heterosexual relationships.   These male vampire stories tellus the stories of homosocial relationships in a patriarchal society, in which women
can only take the position of transferable possessions.   We may also think of thesignificance of these vampires in relation to the film’s director, Neil Jordan’s earlier
success in the vampire film, Interview with the Vampire（1994）, which is based on
the first novel of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles.  Auerbach views Anne Rice’s
creation as a “return to vampire beginnings,” the “homoerotic bond between Byron and
Polidori”（Auerbach 1995; 153）.  George E. Haggerty astutely points out the “slippage
between characters and writers”（Haggerty 2006; 186）in Auerbach’s argument.  Yet theslippage between them, as well as the slippage between homoeroticism and homosocial
bonding, are probably intentional in her argument.   Rice’s stories and Jordan’s film
popularized the productive cultural tropes of homoeroticism and vampirism, which
may be a natural transgression from its homosocial beginning.   The Brethren’s rule—
no women allowed—and the two major male characters’ names in this film suggest
this film is about female vampires who are persecuted and excluded in a patriarchal/homosocial society, which is also the traditional vampire society.
　　If female sexual killers can be seen as fighters in a patriarchal society in somefeminist arguments, Clara is most definitely a fighter.   She kills to survive in her
misogynic environments.   Peter Vronsky severely criticizes this line of argument,
insisting that feminists are disproportionately exaggerating the cases in which women
kill as self-defense: female killers are “invariably constructed in media, in law, or in
feminist discourse as victims”（Vronsky 2007; 18）.  Vronsky goes onto argue:　　We were counting on the feminists to explain it to us, for in all those women’sstudies departments at college they must have thought about it more than therest of us?   No?   Apparently not, for they appear to be failing badly.   One could
have expected something better than, “The story of women who kill is the story of
women.”（Vronsky 2007; 18）
Karlene Faith insists that “certainly much crime stems from victimization of every kind,but victimization cannot be named as ‘the’ cause of crime”（Faith 1993; 108）.   I will
not say that the story of Clara and Eleanor is the story of women, or that the story ofClara and Eleanor explains all the women’s crimes stemming from victimization, but itis the story of women who fight to survive in a violent misogynic world.
　　I have to admit, however, Vronsky’s criticism of the feminist defense of female
serial killers can be applied to Clara as well.   One of the severest criticisms Vronsky

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directs is to Phillis Chesler, who defends Aileen Wuornos’s serial killings of motorists
as self-defense.   Chesler implies that Wuornos is seen guilty of “being a man-hating
lesbian,” of “being a prostitute,” of “not having killed herself,” and of “daring to defend
herself in a violent struggle with a man and, by example, encouraging other prostitutes（and non-prostitutes）to do likewise”（Chesler 1994; 114-115）.   One can find many
parallels with Clara’s portrayal in Chesler’s argument of Wuornos.   Yet Vronsky
criticizes Chesler for overstating that serial killers are “mainly white male drifters” andthat most of them were “paternally abused children”（Chesler 1994; 95 emphasis
original）, when（according to Vronsky）35 percent of male serial killers are drifters,
and there are many “maternally” abused male serial killers（Vronsky 2007; 168）.  
Moreover, Vronsky finds it offensive that Chestler denigrates Wurnos’ victims, when she
claims that they all invariably assaulted or intended to assault Wuornos.  His criticism
in sum is about overstretching and oversimplifying the female victim/male victimizer
paradigm.   In that regard, justifying all of Clara’s killings can be overstretching andoversimplifying as well.  Clara is repeatedly in a situation that victimizes women, since
she always finds herself in a place where women are treated as sexual commodities,
just as Wuornos kept going to truck stops for her customers.  In the beginning, Ruthven
deceived the young Clara and took her to a brothel, and she did not have a choicethen.   But what about after she turns into a vampire?   She goes into those situations
with her own agency.  She fights with a strip bar customer, she kills a pimp so that she
can hire prostitutes at her own brothel, and then kills a schoolteacher because he learns
about their identities.  She even kills Noel who provides her a place to live.  Each caseis different; in one case, she kills accidentally, in another, she kills premeditatedly, andyet in another, she kills in desperation.   Clara does not fall into just one category offemale serial killers in criminological typology; she is part explosive avenger, part profitpredator, part power-seeker, and so forth.  She has to kill those people, because she isa sex worker, and she is on the run.  Clara claims that she is a woman without means—
without education and money—when she faces the Brethren.  In that regard, her “choice”
is not really a choice since underprivileged women have limited resources for survival.  
Yet when Clara introduces her daughter and herself to Noel as “damsels in distress” as
if to emphasize their victimhood, she comes close to using her victimization to justify
her killings.
　　Justification is also a tricky question in Eleanor’s case.   She lives “clean” as hermother intended when she was put into an orphanage.   Eleanor’s orphanage life,
especially when she walks in an orderly procession with its members clothed in robes
and hoods, evokes the image of a convent, where all women live in a strict discipline.  
Her “orderly” life is seemingly opposite to all the disorder and evil with which hermother is surrounded.   The rules and regulations that are meant to protect her make

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Eleanor a captive, and the situation has not changed in the contemporary world; she
is shown dropping pieces of her writing from a landing in an apartment building in
the beginning, as if she were a princess locked up in a tower, waiting to be rescued.  
Eleanor walks quietly with her head down, contrary to her mother, who is always
pictured running.   Even when she is sucking the blood, the blood is shown drippingfrom or onto her.   Eleanor seems a perfect “damsel in distress.”   Her life is quiet,
immobile, and passive—she is the ultimate feminine character.   Her incarceration is
not literal in a contemporary setting, but figurative—she is a secret existence that noone really knows about.  If her mother is spontaneous, active, and energetic, Eleanor isthoughtful, passive, and enervated.  Eleanor is locked up in a house of virtue as though
she were a Gothic heroine.  
　　Clara’s and Eleanor’s repetitive life itself is very Gothic.   Eugenia DeLamotteargues that “in Gothic romance, too, devices and images of repetition suggest adouble horror of boundedness and boundlessness in both spatial and temporal terms.  
The same events seem to recur again and again, trapping the protagonist in a single
instant of time yet simultaneously evoking the nightmare of eternity”（DeLamotte
1990; 95）. Their repeated escape and confinements suggest that they are trappedwhile they are continuously threatened to be invaded.  Michelle Massé also insists that“repetition in the Gothic functions as it does for certain other traumas: the reactivationof trauma is an attempt to recognize, not relish, the incredible and unspeakable thatnonetheless happened”（Massé 1992; 12）.  Since Clara and Eleanor both repeat theirown traumas—being a prostitute and being an incarcerated heroine—they have the“incredible” and “unspeakable” that have to be understood and resolved.  And one canargue that their killing styles reflect their traumas, or their desire to resolve them; Claratries to correct the injustice that has befallen her by killing male predators: Eleanor tries
to find someone who acknowledges her existence yet keeps her secret.
　　Unlike Clara, Eleanor’s killing falls into one neat type.   Eleanor is an angel ofmercy or an angel of death, who kills only people who are ready to die.  The angel ofdeath, or in a criminological term “healthcare serial killers,” is often associated withwomen, as the term in one definition refers to “a woman who systematically murders
individuals who are in her care and rely on her for some form of medical attention orsimilar support”（Kelleher and Kelleher 1998; 15）.  In Yorker et al’s study, however, thestatistical data suggest that healthcare serial killers are not, proportionally speaking,characteristically female（Yorker et al 2006; 1365）.   To think of the most notorious
HSK, Harold Shipman, would be enough to correct our wrong preconception.  Eleanor’s
killing, however, endorses the image of angel of death as an archetypal feminine
murderer.  If the image of female sexual killers reflects the view that excessive female
sexuality is evil, angel of death killers epitomize the essence of normally inoffensive

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femininity.   Clara overtly and visibly opposes ideological femininity, while Eleanor
perfectly embodies it.   Eleanor’s portrayal as a virtuous good girl corresponds to her
image as an angel of death, for she performs acts of charity and seeks out the elderly
and the sick to take care of them.  In one scene at the hospital, she sneaks into a roomin which an elderly woman is tied to a ventilator.  The patient calls Eleanor an “angel,”as if she recognized her as an angel of death.   Like healthcare serial killers, Eleanor
earns the trust of the elderly, makes her invite into his house, so that she can put an
end to his life.
　　As Clara’s apparent “sexual killing” is not sexual, Eleanor’s apparent merciful killingis not necessarily merciful.   Like many angel of death murderers, her act may not be
an expression of mercy.   As I have argued above, Eleanor’s killing fits her image asa virtuous woman, but Shechter and Shechter insist that we see a “dark, grotesquely
distorted version of traits that have been traditionally associated with women” in thefemale serial killer: “fatal care-taking, lethal nurturing, depraved romantic devotion”（Shechter and Shechter 2010; 124）.  Eleanor’s care-taking is lethal, and her nurturing
can only lead to deaths.   We do not know, in addition, if her killing is morally
justifiable.  The audience sees that the old man whom she kills first gives his consent.  
Yet it is to that extent that we can justify Eleanor’s murder of that man.  He explainsthat he lost his desire to live after the love of his life—his brother’s wife—passed
away, and probably it is hard to condone her killing on account of his depressed state.  
Moreover, we do not know whether another female victim of hers, who is only halfconscious in the hospital bed, really wants to die or simply does not have a possibility
to recover.
　　What Eleanor gains by killing those elderly people is very complex and subtle asis the case with many healthcare serial killers.  According to several studies（Yorker et
al 2006, and Yardley and Wilson 2016）, other than “claims of mercy or compassion”
by HSKs themselves, their motives could be practical, such as to eliminate “demanding
patients,” to free up beds and to benefit financially from a patient’s death（Yardley andWilson 2016; 41）.  Eleanor has to kill because she needs blood to survive, but she also
kills those who satisfy her other desire.  She shares her life story with her victims before
she kills.  Her victims learn who she is—giving her the recognition she craves in her lifeof repeated escape and hiding.  Eleanor’s secret life does not allow her to be seen andtalked to as herself, a two-hundred-year female vampire, except to her victims.  Sharing
the secret of who she is and killing the person who hears her story, however, is only atemporary solution, which makes her repeat the same action again and again.  
　　Eleanor’s compulsion to tell her secret is part of her “teenage” rebellion against
her mother whose secrecy bewilders and angers her.   The secrecy surrounding herlife creates a figurative prison; however, the audience is aware that Eleanor is kept

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safe from the knowledge of misogynic men who seek to murder her.   In that regard,
the mother-daughter story is a parable of an overprotective mother in a violent sexist
society, in which a young girl is constantly in danger of sexual assaults.   Eleanor is
ignorant of existing hostilities against her in this world.
　　Barring her from the truth and keeping her in a “safe” figurative fortress do not saveClara’s daughter, however.   Ruthven comes in to the orphanage to rape her with theblessing from a female orphanage warden, as though she were a madam in a brotheland he a male client.  This episode signifies the fundamental failure in Clara’s method
in protecting Eleanor.   On one hand, it reveals the limitation of Clara as a fighter/
protector, and on the other hand, it may simply mean that “protection” is not the rightway.  Women cannot be protected by living in a fortress, believing and wishing malepredators will not find a way in.   Ruthven is guided straight to Eleanor, showing that
her clean and virtuous life means nothing both to her male aggressor and the warden
whose job is to protect her.
　　Eleanor’s ignorance further strengthens the parallel between her and the Gothic
heroine.   Diane Long Hoeveler notes that the “gothic heroine’s goal throughout mostof the text is to ascertain the ‘secret’ that the patriarchy has managed to keep fromher, either through an elaborate system of walls and locked room（the prison and theasylum）or through the power of language to dissemble, to reveal and conceal at thesame time（missing marriage licenses or wills）（Hoeveler 1998; 21-22）.”   The Gothic
heroine has to learn the truth before the end of the story.   She has to know what
happens to her mother, and what could happen to her in a patriarchal society.  Eleanor
has to know she is targeted and wanted by the secret society of vampires simply
because she is a woman, the secret that her mother keeps.   If one sees Eleanor as a
Gothic heroine, Clara is a Gothic victim.  She is the mother or the aunt whose death theheroine has to explore in the course of a Radcliffean novel, except Clara is not dead or
resigned to being a victim.  She is “undead” and fighting back.  Like in a Gothic novel,
the nightmarish repetition of escape and confinement are over when Eleanor learns thetruth about the Brethren, and when they both find their partners.  Their repetition ends
when they find their knights in shining armor, so to speak.
　　The conclusion with heterosexual couplings brings closures in these women’s
struggle in two similar but different ways.   In the case of Clara, she is finally saved
by Darvell, who has failed her in the past at least two times.   Darvell, a historicallyimportant name in the tradition of male vampires, changes his course to bring peace
to a victim of the male secret society.  Unlike Ruthven, who embodies all the evil andharm that male dominance and privilege can bring, Darvell at the end reaches out
to Clara and Eleanor, and ends（temporarily）their persecution by men.   This ending
suggests a new direction and resolution of the male vampire tradition, but at theGender and Culture in Asia Vol.3, 201965

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same time gives us a suspicion that even a fighting female vampire needs a man to be
saved and find peace.  In the case of Eleanor, she is finally released from her figurative
prison of secrecy by turning Frank into a vampire so that he survives and stays with
her to share her secret.   She would not be a damsel in distress anymore, waiting tofind someone who recognizes and understands her.   Her salvation by saving anotherindicates Eleanor’s elevated virtue.   She now attains the ideal femininity in her act ofextending charity to one weaker than herself.  Eleanor’s nurturing finally finds a longlasting outlet in Frank, for he is given life in death, not just death.   The mother andthe daughter part ways to end their Gothic story, ending the repetition of escape andhiding.   When they find men, they find closures to the story of women who have tofight and flee male persecution.
　　Byzantium uses the Gothic images of women’s victimization to tell the story of
a mother and her daughter, who are struggling to survive in a violent patriarchal
society.   The vampire mother-daughter story is a variation of female Gothic in thesense that the heroine in order to grow up has to learn the horrible secret harbored byher mother.   By viewing these women as the metaphorical female serial killers, theirpatterns of aggression can be contextualized in relation to the dangers and teachings ina patriarchal society.  Clara’s reaction to her victimization makes her look like a female
sexual killer, while her aggression is the reaction（which sometimes goes overboard）
and defense against violence.  Eleanor’s feminine killing, however, is more complicatedand potentially problematic, since her “mercy” killing is the result of accepting the lifeof virtuous femininity.
　　Female Gothic imagery and motifs help to create a narrative that counters themale Gothic tradition of vampires in Byzantium.  The film reminds us with the use ofliterary vampire names that the traditional vampire stories are patriarchal in nature;
men reign the world with friends and colleagues in their secret society.  Women are notwelcome.   When women are tolerated, they are monstrous predators, representativesof “distorted” femininity that is terrifying and ineffectual at the same time.   This film,
however, explains the “distorted” feminine characteristics of female vampires; they
may be killers, but they have few options in their struggle to protect themselves andfind their identities.   The film’s ending is very heterosexist; the mother and daughter
get out of the endless cycle of persecution when Darvell chooses Clara over the malehomosocial bond, and Frank saves Eleanor from her solitude.  But it is not “happy everafter.”  There are still the privileged male secret society “out there,” so they are not safe
yet.  The mother and the daughter still have to be killers and fighters.

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