The Vampiric Mother in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”

Abstract

The current paper intends to discuss the figure of the ‘vampiric’ mother in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, in which a young woman is suspected and accused of sucking the blood of her young infant. When Holmes is sent to investigate, he discovers that the mother is innocent of the charge and was, in fact, only trying to protect her baby, but the horror and abjection of the mother figure devouring her child supersedes the horror of the vampire. The paper argues that motherhood equals, multiplies and even replaces the monstrosity of the vampire. In spite of the mother’s ultimate innocence, her status as foreigner and Other (both female and Peruvian) marks her as an indeterminate threat. In order to explain the marginality and peril of the foreign mother, the paper will also turn to postcolonial theories, relating them to theories of gender, race and motherhood.