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Abstract:

The article examines the specific construction of femininity in Baron Olshevry’s novel “The Vampires” (1912) within the context of ideas of infernal feminism and patriarchal model in the Modernist literature of the “turn of the century”. Based on recent research, Baron Olshevry is a literary pseudonym / mystification of the Russian writer Ekaterina Nikolaevna Khomze (1861–1916). At the heart of the novel’s paradoxical construction of female characters lies the potential impossibility for the heroines to transcend their given form (human and infernal existence as male projections): Maria Dracula and her son’s fiancée, Rita, cannot exist outside the framework of the conservative (patriarchal) model in any guise. The two women, in their vampiric form, do not so much embody the freedom, corporeality, and pleasure characteristic of infernal feminization as they find themselves trapped in a predatory body and dependence on the big Other, symbolizing the transition from one patriarchal (familial) model to another (infernal-patriarchal). In the two heroines, infernal femininity meets patriarchal femininity and conventionally merges with it, without the possibility of choice.

Keywords: Baron Olshevry, Ekaterina Khomze, “The Vampires”, femininity, female characters, Modernism, fantasy novel.