Day 13 of ‘A Scare a Day’ – ‘Manor’ by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Today’s story is one of my favourite vampire tales, ‘Manor’ by sexologist and gay rights activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who wrote the story in 1884 while living in Italy. You can read it here. Many people know Ulrichs more for his work on sexuality. He wrote a number of pamphlets on ‘the riddle of male-male love’ and coined terms which referred to identities, rather than (as was the dominant model) specific sexual practices. It has often been noted that the 19th century saw a change in the way same-sex attraction was understood. In the work of Ulrichs, among others, and in early sexology, the idea of a sexual identity (rather than a set of practices or actions) starts to emerge. Ulrichs coined the term ‘Uranian’ for men who love men.

In ‘Manor’, Ulrichs offers us a queer vampire story which is fundamentally different to other early queer vampire tales. His is decidedly not the first tale to feature a queer vampire. ‘The Vampyre’ by John Stagg (1810) features a bisexual vampiric dilemma. More famously, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and, of course, Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1872) feature sapphic vampires (or, in the case of Christabel, vampiric figures). However, in each of these tales vampirism forms a sort of allegory of a monstrous queerness, imagined as a form of predation and destruction. ‘Carmilla’ has been reimagined many times and has become a sapphic classic. Close readings elicits the revelation that the sapphic desires of the novel are not quite eradicated with the death of Carmilla herself. Her beloved victim Laura ends her letters on Carmilla, years after her death, by revealing that

To this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.

Carmilla and all the sapphic longing she represents hasn’t been completely erased from either the text or Laura’s memory.

We are, however, with ‘Carmilla’, to a certain extent, searching for crumbs. The main narrative is that of a predatory lesbian vampire whose love is death, whose affection is corruption and whose adoration is deadly. With ‘Manor’ we don’t really have to read between the lines. Har openly declares his love for Manor, calling him his beloved, pining for him and longing to be with him in both life and death. Moreover, Manor’s vampirism isn’t a metaphorical queerness imagined as monstrosity. Manor dies when his ship goes down and, like many before him, comes back to visit the one he loves for ‘the dead are often driven by an uncontrollable yearning to visit some of their beloved survivors.’

This return of the dead is a source of tragedy though:

The drive can be so powerful that they leave their graves at night to visit them. For, it is an ancient belief that Urda, who possesses strange demonic powers, is responsible for the short span of life bestowed upon the living dead. Urda is especially concerned with people whose life has been snatched away by a bitter death at an early age. It is said that an overwhelming need for life and warmth fills the hearts of those who return. They thrive on the blood of the living and, like a beloved, long for their embrace. But their yearning causes everyone nothing but grief.

Driven by love and yearning, the dead unable to rest are drawn to the living, needing their blood and warmth to feed and continue their own unnatural existence.

Har sickens and the villagers try to keep the vampire in his grave but nothing can keep the two lovers apart. Manor shimmies up a pole, leaving a gaping wound in his chest, to return to Har. When a larger stake is used, Har is devastated that he will not see Manor again. Again, vampirism isn’t queerness here. Their love for each other remains un-condemned throughout the book. Poor burial practices are blamed and a love which survives the grave and does harm to all. In the end, Har, dies, his last request to be buried with Manor and for the stake to be removed from his chest. His mother, nothing loathe, fills the request and they lie in their grave quiet together.

It’s certainly not a happy tale but there’s a beauty to the tragedy of a love that will not die and a meeting in death which brings peace to bitter spirits separated by death and the powerful sea. It’s still to early for a happy tale of queer vampirism but ‘Manor’ is a really wonderful reminder that queer literary history isn’t always scrabbling for crumbs amid narratorial condemnation and accusations of monstrosity.