In the decade or so following the publication of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005)—a novel, as Meyer has widely acknowledged, inspired by Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Kinney and Kinney 20)—Austen’s novels have frequently been transformed into a Gothic playground and, especially, a fantasy space for vampire romance.  While Meyer’s vampire lover, Edward Cullen, is modeled on Austen’s Mr. Darcy, he in turn serves as a template for the reimagining of Mr. Darcy as a Byronic vampire.  On the one hand, both Edward Cullen and vampire Darcy promise a new and enticing masculine ideal:  handsome, virile, protective, noble, affluent, forever young yet wise with experience, and, most notably, immortal.  Edward also has the distinctive appeal of skin that sparkles like diamonds in the sun, as well as toned and frequently exposed abdominal muscles, perfectly designed for the heteronormative female gaze.  But while some Austen-vampire adaptations revel in the erotic pleasures that a vampire Darcy promises, the monstrous roots of the literary vampire all too frequently threaten to derail the couple’s happiness in vampiric retellings of Pride and Prejudice, such as Amanda Grange’s Mr. Darcy, Vampyre (2009), Regina Jeffers’s Vampire Darcy’s Desire (2009), and Colette L. Saucier’s Pulse and Prejudice (2012) and Dearest Bloodiest Elizabeth (2016).  Unlike Meyer’s Twilight saga, whose paranormal plot seems to fulfil every romantic wish of the protagonist Bella Swan—and of the teenage readers who wish to emulate her—the heady fantasy of a vampire Darcy typically proves an impossible one, and one that undermines Austen’s feminist values and endangers Elizabeth Bennet’s life.

In this context, vampire slaying—that is, choosing to kill rather than kiss the vampire—emerges as a distinctly feminist practice.  As Megen De Bruin-Molé observes (121), the figure of the female vampire slayer in modern paranormal adaptations of classic literature owes a great deal to Joss Whedon’s cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003).  Whedon’s protagonist, Buffy Summers—a nubile, athletic, and courageous young woman blessed with lethal martial skill—is an archetype for reimagined literary heroines in mashups like Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), Sherri Browning Erwin’s Jane Slayre (2010), and Gena Showalter’s Alice in Zombieland (2012), and indeed for the vampire-slaying heroines in Austen-vampire mashups.  In Colleen Gleason’s “Northanger Castle” (2010) and Tara O’Donnell’s Fanny Price, Slayer of Vampires (2014), Austen’s Catherine Morland and Fanny Price are respectively reimagined as vampire slayers, learning to fend off monstrous and manipulative beings in pursuit of a very human love.  Unlike Grahame-Smith’s zombie-slaying Elizabeth Bennet, whose sword is “quieted” by love (Austen and Grahame-Smith 317), Gleason’s Catherine and O’Donnell’s Fanny learn how to combatively assert the right to make their own choices about love, domesticity, and their future.

Amy Elizabeth Davis brings the practice of slaying to the fore as a physical form of female empowerment in her adaptation, Darcy Bites: Pride and Prejudice with Fangs (2015).  Davis’s little-known and self-published adaptation is neither acclaimed nor commercially significant.  It is safe to presume that relatively few have read it, so claims of its cultural import cannot rest on its popularity.  The claim I will make for its cultural significance is that Davis’s Darcy Bites is a more overt and complicated example of what a number of Austen-vampire mashups have done:  invoking the promised pleasures of vampire romance to interrogate their regressive sexual politics and reaffirming Austen’s incipiently feminist values through the act of vampire slaying.  Davis broadens her creative experiment beyond the central romance to explore the feminine variety offered by Austen’s original novel.  In Pride and Prejudice, these women can be read, at least in part, as a spectrum of attitudes to love and marriage (Makin; Hall).  In Davis’s reimagining, this feminine variety is reinterpreted as a diverse range of relationships with vampirism, for better, and—as is more often the case—for worse.  The result is a complex adaptation that arguably disavows the regressive paranormal politics of the very Austen-vampire trend to which it belongs.

Vampirism and the women of Darcy Bites

Davis’s Darcy Bites largely rehearses the original plot of Pride and Prejudice, told via a third-person narrator interchangeably focalized through Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s perspectives.  Both Darcy and Elizabeth are “dhampires” in this romance—that is, half-human, half-vampire—with Darcy the second son of a vampiric mother, Lady Anne Darcy, and Elizabeth the daughter of a dhampire father, Mr. Bennet.  They are ostensibly human in appearance and manner but both also—as the novel slowly reveals—the inheritors of latent monstrosity that threatens their dreams of future happiness.  This is an artistic choice designed to enhance dramatic possibilities; knowing Austen’s original plot as we do, the dramatic tension driving the plot is not whether Elizabeth and Darcy unite, but whether they can find a way to raise a family safe from monstrous violence and tragedy.

In this parallel Georgian world of intermingled humans and vampires, the most susceptible to vampire attack are—as is standard in vampire lore—young maidens, who consequently need to take great pains to ensure their personal safety.  In this matter, Davis mimics Austen by invoking the dubitable authority of the Reverend James Fordyce, author of popular eighteenth-century conduct books such as Sermons to Young Women (1766) and The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex (1776).  As Susan Allen Ford discusses, Austen often subverts Fordyce’s impositions upon the female character and mind.  In Pride and Prejudice, it is Mr. Collins, acting as Fordyce’s mouthpiece, who is comically censured for his strictures on female conduct.  Ford observes that “Fordyce’s caution against female wit impinges directly on Austen’s construction of Elizabeth Bennet, who diverges from both the conduct-book pattern and Fordyce’s criteria of bashful modesty and graceful reticence” (91).  In Darcy Bites, Fordyce is the author of Edicts on Foul Fiends, which suggests that “it should not be thought improper for a lady to defend herself by use of a silver dagger” when confronted by a vampire; however, this weapon will incapacitate the creature only long enough “for help to arrive in the form of a gentleman who will then perform the service of driving a wooden stake though the vampire’s heart” (Davis 3).  In this paranormal world, it isn’t a woman’s rapier wit that is scrutinized and impugned by Fordyce but her ability to defend herself with a blade or, better still, to kill vampires.  The feminine meekness and reserve prescribed by the historical Fordyce are translated here into a physical, martial analogue, where young women are expected to demurely submit to the presumed physical prowess and superior combat skills of a gentleman rather than protect themselves from a ravenous vampire’s bite.

Elizabeth’s first encounter with feral vampires illustrates her physically combative independence.  Faced with two hissing attackers, she sinks her silver dagger into the heart of one but is vulnerable to the other as she struggles to remove her weapon.  Darcy the dhampire is—again, in accordance with vampire lore (Melton 196)—skilled in hunting vampires, and he comes to her aid with preternatural speed, tellingly staking his romantic and sexual claim over Elizabeth by growling, “Mine!” (Davis 24).  In this encounter, Elizabeth and Darcy observe Fordyce’s Edicts to a T.  But as the novel continues, Elizabeth rails against such prescribed behavior, proposing that Darcy is not as liberal-minded as he would believe until he is ready to trust women like her (and his sister, Georgiana) with the ultimate phallic weapon:  a wooden stake (Davis 42–43).  Darcy’s perceived prejudices are put to the test when the pair must face the ultimate obstacle to their romance:  the vampire Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

During Darcy Bites, we learn that Lady Catherine and Lady Anne Darcy had in their youth “become dissatisfied with what they considered extremely limited opportunities for women of their class,” so they decided to become vampires at the hands of a noblewoman (139).1  Lady Catherine and Lady Anne’s drastic choice and motivation also speak to one of the most appealing aspects of vampire romance:  beyond its romantic and erotic potential, the vicarious prospect of emancipation from the constraints of patriarchy, and indeed the limits of human existence, holds much escapist appeal.  Lady Catherine is a vampire hungry for power.  In her scheming, she not only seeks to reserve Darcy for her own daughter, Anne, but wants to use Darcy to sire “a master race” of dhampires who “will have the gifts of their vampire blood but none of the disadvantages. . . . [N]othing will stop them!” (Davis 253).  Elizabeth’s love for Darcy, then, disrupts Lady Catherine’s eugenicist plans, so Elizabeth must be forcibly removed.

It is at this point—on the cusp of Elizabeth’s battle with Lady Catherine—that we need to recall Darcy and Elizabeth’s dispute about a woman’s right to carry a wooden stake.  Davis exploits the potential for sexual innuendo when referring to Darcy’s phallic wooden stake throughout the novel.  For instance, in a ballroom scene of rising sexual tension, Elizabeth inquires whether Darcy has something in his pocket; with a wry smile, he withdraws his wooden stake to offer Elizabeth a glimpse, declaring that “Even in a ballroom, Miss Bennet, I am never without wood” (Davis 87).  During Elizabeth’s fight with Lady Catherine, Darcy’s appearance “without wood” bears symbolic import—pointing perhaps to an underlying sexual frisson in his work of slaying vampires, but one that is understandably absent when fighting his own aunt.  It presents Elizabeth with an opportunity to claim the wooden stake, seize phallic control, and with it take independent control over her destiny.  She runs back to Darcy’s horse, wrenches his wooden stake from his saddle bag—another symbolic gesture, perhaps?—and uses it to impale Lady Catherine.  In this moment, Elizabeth Bennet’s and Lady Catherine’s divergent experiences of vampirism are writ large.  Elizabeth the slayer emerges as Austen’s ideal heroine, displaying the same inherently feminist capacity to rise above Fordyce’s behavioral prescriptions for young ladies as Austen’s original heroine does.  Lady Catherine transforms herself into a vampire in her youth to escape the oppressive limitations placed on women, but her desire for power and her challenge to the dictates of patriarchal rule render her monstrously abject (Creed 60).  Lady Catherine isn’t quite vanquished at this point—but more on this point later.

Unlike her sister, Lady Anne Darcy comes to regret her decision to transform herself into a vampire.  She marries a human and gives birth to two boys—George and Fitzwilliam, both dhampires—but the family is torn apart when a twelve-year-old George succumbs to his latent monstrosity, attacking servants and the family and forcing his father to destroy him.  Lady Anne, grief-stricken, loses control of her vampiric nature too and suffers the same fate as her son—killed in self-defense by her human husband.  This tragic family history is the key reason behind Darcy’s initial romantic apprehension and his later reluctance to raise a family with Elizabeth.  It also serves as a warning to vampire women seeking the seemingly impossible dream of supernatural agency combined with domestic bliss, directly contradicting the idyllic fantasy of vampiric domesticity embodied by, most prominently, Bella Swan in Meyer’s Twilight saga.

Lady Catherine and Lady Anne, as women of an older generation, fail to reconcile vampirism with their personal aspirations.  Lady Catherine becomes a monster to be vanquished.  Lady Anne is unable to escape her early choices as she aspires to domestic fulfillment.  In embracing vampirism, they learn that it is not the liberating supernatural force they have hoped it to be.  Their daughters—or daughter-in-law, in the case of Lady Anne and Elizabeth Bennet—are the ones who plot different paths to what one might call feminine agency through the act of vampire slaying.

Elizabeth’s skills in combat, and Darcy’s respect for her martial prowess, reveal their compatibility as ideal romantic partners.  Elizabeth’s epiphany in Darcy Bites, that theirs was “a union that must have been to the advantage of both,” almost precisely mirrors that found in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, except Davis adds that “she thought it must be a rare man indeed who would respect her skill and allow her to fight by his side the way Mr. Darcy had done” (Davis 247; cf. PP 344).  Darcy’s respect for Elizabeth’s martial skill and his allowing her to fight by his side, as we have established, signal his admiration of her fierce independence.  Here we have the Austenian romantic ideal:  a confluent love guided by mutual improvement.  Elizabeth’s proposal, notably at her initiative, is also explicitly framed in these martial terms:  “Mr. Darcy, I would like to join you in your work. . . . Travel with you, help you kill feral vampires and dhampires or save them if I can” (264).  To be clear, Elizabeth’s sword is not “quieted” by love and marriage, as it is in Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and as is desired by Mr. Collins—functioning again in Davis’s novel as Fordyce’s mouthpiece—when he proposes to Elizabeth (Davis 96).

Elizabeth’s enduring and combative self-determination is emphasized further still when she makes her vow to Darcy, as both a devoted wife and independent woman, to slay her husband if he succumbs to his latent monstrosity:  “Fitzwilliam Darcy, I do not believe that you will go feral but if you do I will do everything in my power to bring you back to me, and if I fail, if you are so lost that it proves to be impossible, then I will put you down myself” (265).  Elizabeth’s declaration, as a wife and a vampire slayer, is a conjugal vow of feminine resilience: to be brave enough to face the consequences of their loving union.  But it is also a stern warning to her—for now—benignant husband:  she will not hesitate to end their union should he capitulate to vampiric hypermasculinity.  Her stake and blade are thus potent symbols of feminine self-determination.

Davis’s Darcy Bites continues beyond Austen’s ending, portraying life for Darcy and Elizabeth after marriage.  This extension is partly a vehicle to allow the gothic return of Lady Catherine, but it also—in a significant divergence from Austen’s novel—furnishes Anne de Bourgh’s life with feminist purpose.  Having been vanquished once before, Lady Catherine has been locked away in an undead stupor in Darcy’s cellar at Pemberley, at Anne’s behest.  In the years away from the shadow of her domineering vampiric mother, Anne has seized the opportunity to put her newfound independence to good use, turning Rosings into a school for girls, where they are “trained not only to defend themselves from feral vampires but to stake the fiends themselves” (361).  (Anne de Bourgh’s school is reminiscent of the sorority of slayers inaugurated by Buffy at the end of Joss Whedon’s TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1997–2003].)  In her attempt to supplant Fordyce’s patronizing wisdom with a new form of female education that values independence of body and mind—akin to the recommendations of the historical Mary Wollstonecraft—Anne institutes what A. Rose Johnson calls “collectivist, actionable feminism” (12).2  Anne’s decisive leadership also implicitly honors Elizabeth Bennet as a new feminine ideal, as a figure who is able to reconfigure the implicit tension between slaying as “a distinctly and assertive feminist action” and the conservative values of heteronormative romance—or the competing desires to kiss or kill—into complementary and interdependent aspects of the feminist romantic heroine (Parisot 45).  What’s more, as Anne’s life as an unmarried woman attests, marriage is not the only institution within which such feminine agency can be achieved.  By the novel’s end, Lady Catherine is defeated once and for all, allowing Elizabeth, Darcy, and Anne to live happily ever after.

Vanquishing vampire romance

In her paranormal rendition of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Davis de-legitimizes vampirism as a romantic form of feminine emancipation—the kind of fantastical liberation celebrated by Meyer’s Twilight, where vampirism is arguably portrayed as a “wish-fulfilment fantasy” rather than a regressive obstacle to feminine sovereignty (Crawford 116).  Darcy Bites overtly and comically critiques Meyer’s Twilight as its own creative progenitor.  Davis’s Darcy bristles at the suggestion that vampires sparkle—a pointed reference to Edward Cullen’s angelic allure (44).  More pointedly, Davis’s omniscient narrator denounces the domineering behavior of Meyer’s hero, Edward Cullen, in the novel’s conclusion.  Davis connects her alternate and paranormal Georgian world to that of Meyer’s Twilight through the descendants of Elizabeth and Darcy, whose tireless work in succeeding years is the reason “vampires and dhampires have gained so much acceptance today”; the narrator, however, also concedes that “there are those who feel this has been taken a bit far, especially in America where certain behaviours, which if performed by a human would be grounds for a restraining order, are considered romantic when carried out by a vampire” (Davis 360).  This rebuke is most certainly an allusion to what many have described as Edward Cullen’s overbearing and clandestine courting of Bella Swan in Meyer’s romance, and the problematic politics of her receiving such attention as flattery.

In discussing the “gothification” of Austen’s novels, Hanne Birk describes the ways adaptations and mashups “bite back” at their hypotexts to reveal and criticize their ideological frameworks (247).  I am suggesting a slightly different dynamic here.  As a production ostensibly spurred by Meyer’s Twilight as much as it is inspired by Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Davis’s mashup is not writing back to Austen’s original novel but instead seeking to redress the questionable sexual politics of Meyer’s novel (and the Austen-vampire romances it spawned) to correct what might be seen as an erroneous interpretation of the incipiently feminist values at the heart of Austen’s romance.  In doing so, Davis’s mashup can be said to self-reflexively renounce the very Austen-vampire trend of which it is part.

Instead, Davis’s Darcy Bites strives to restore Austen’s feminist values by reappropriating a key trope of vampire romance:  the practice of vampire slaying.  Elizabeth’s sharp and combative wit in Pride and Prejudice, portrayed in Austen’s novel as a rebellion against Fordyce’s prescriptive standards of demure femininity, is refashioned here as a physical, martial revolt against all who challenge her right to self-determination.  By corollary, Elizabeth’s continuing struggle for independence, before and during marriage, is reframed as an ongoing battle with the vampiric beings in her life who, literally and figuratively, would look to bleed Elizabeth of her autonomous vitality.  Further still, through the figure of Anne de Bourgh, Davis’s novel embellishes Austen’s progressive feminist values, where the promise of “happily ever after”—with or without vampires—is secondary to and contingent upon feminine independence.  Anne de Bourgh’s school of vampire slayers at Rosings is a complex analogue for the kind of educational reforms for young women urged by the historical Mary Wollstonecraft, where independence of mind is portrayed as, and complemented by, physical sovereignty.  Central to these individual and collective forms of action is the novel’s assertion of the right for Austen’s young women to carry a stake or blade, as powerful symbols of feminine self-determination.  More than just another Austen-vampire mashup looking to parasitize Austen’s creative labor, Davis’s refashioning of Pride and Prejudice as vampire romance, then, is a surprising testimony to the enduring feminist values of Austen’s original novel and their continuing currency in new and proliferating forms.  Darcy Bites is a novel that “slays” the Austen-vampire romance—in the conventional sense of killing and in the slang sense of doing exceptionally well—in more ways than one.

NOTES

1Lady Catherine and Lady Anne’s joint decision mirrors an episode in Emily McGovern’s Regency-inspired graphic novel Bloodlust and Bonnets (2019), in which Lucy, a young woman looking to escape the strictures of conventional femininity, seeks Lady Violet Travesty to transform her into a vampire (158).

2See A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:  “Dr. Fordyce’s sermons have long made part of a young woman’s library; nay, girls at school are allowed to read them; but I should instantly dismiss them from my pupil’s, if I wished to strengthen her understanding” (173–74).  Instead, Wollstonecraft would sooner cultivate “some kind of independence of mind” over Fordyce’s prescribed “female meekness and artificial grace” (174).