| In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western culture frequently expressed its political ideologies through blood-related metaphors. Blood formed the intellectual bedrock of religion, science, and all aspects of human agency and interaction. Due to this emphasis on blood, vampires served as important rhetorical devices, depicting agents of social chaos. This dissertation explores the ways in which politicians, cartoonists, and novelists used rhetoric related to blood and vampires to express their anxieties.;The metaphorical ingestion of blood lies at the center of Christian doctrine. In order to demonize Jews, the Church had associated them with vampire-like acts such as the blood libel accusation. Later, anti-clericals depicted the Church itself as a vampire in order to characterize it as ignorant, backwards, and superstitious.;In science, blood was viewed as the locus of identity. In it, scientists believed they could find all of a person's physical and behavioral attributes. Many believed that when someone with negative social attributes had children, these characteristics would contaminate the blood and cause degeneration.;Critics of nineteenth century industrial capitalism frequently used vampiric imagery to illustrate the seemingly callous disregard that the owners of mines and factories showed for their workers' well being. Capitalists, in their turn, labeled anarchists and other members of the radical left as vampires due to their use of bombs, violence, and assassination in order to achieve the betterment of the working classes through class war.;With immigration on the rise, nationalist discourse made blood a basis for citizenship. Men were expected to offer their blood and their lives in military service in exchange for the rights and privileges of citizens. Men who shirked this duty were labeled vampires.;Finally, the paradigm of the nineteenth century gender ideal called for unselfish women who gave of themselves to their husbands and children. In response to the female emancipation movement, journalists and novelists frequently invoked the selfish, vampiric woman who killed men and children instead of nurturing them. |
