The Vamp and the Power of her Gaze, by Emer Ní Fhoghlú

Bara. Musidora. Glaum. Wong. Naldi to Negri.

She drew the pencil over a brow line plucked to obscurity, the black line she drew into creation arching past her brow bone, hovering above her ghoulish, kohled eyes. They were all sharp, these finishing touches. Her hands moved fluidly, conducting the vanity table’s silent orchestra, quickly replacing one brush for another. Each evening she sat and composed herself a symphony of black and red. A dash and her lips were bloodied, though it was the Cupid’s bow that ate those pain-staking seconds of painting. Sharp again, as the Devil’s prongs. She tilted her head, inspecting; her jade earrings dangled against her shoulder. A nod for yes. Done.

*

Her darling days are done, and she rises out of their decay.

A string of pearls become crown of thorns

Queen of those dubbed transgressors and whores

Becomes otherworldly by her own hand

Becomes both touch of and touched by death

Completely lonely and completely lovely

Until the teeth crunch down on jade, on glass, on opera gloves and she finds herself in pieces, in blood, and weaves tapestry with thread drawn out from the veins of men. Mystique, until these vampire eyes reveal her ferocity. Framed by red, her teeth look all the sharper.

She tastes a new world dissolving in her mouth. Red riding hood become some night creature howling at the moon. Speak with her, like talking to a woman who appears to be channelling several ghosts at once. You invent histories for her, give her a mythology on sight.

Darling, she says, my eyes are calm but I was born storm-blooded.

These women who do not care

To be or not to be a vampire

*

The gendering of the phrase ‘vamp’ was a couple of decades in the making before Theda Bara graced the silver screens of the 1910s. The origin of silent film’s vamp archetype stems from the success of Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, and Dracula by Bram Stoker. Rudyard Kipling’s poem, A Fool There Was led to the 1915 film of the same name.

Theda Bara went from finding her vamp roles liberating to feeling constrained by them later in her career, vamps written as one-dimensional as the good mother they opposed. Still, Bara maintained that there’s a little bit of a vampire in all women, thus why the characters she played and the persona she assumed resonated so widely.

Vamp subculture is tied to early film and the makeup that went along with it. This level of makeup was new, and it was expensive. The eyes of the woman in question were accused of having a bewitching effect that bordered the supernatural, whether their subject was attracted, repulsed, or both. All had armour-piercing stares. On-screen, exploits of vamps were a fascination to many. Off-screen, many pedestrian women who emulated the archetype were derided and even harassed by police in America who on occasion was tasked with hunting them down and forcibly removing their makeup.

Vamp style predates flapper style; it is bolder, darker and its wearers were known to engage in the same brand of work as their on-screen counterparts; that is, becoming mistresses to powerful men, only to swiftly disappear, often taking his finances with them. In this instance, money becomes his lifeblood. She is a vampire in the capitalistic sense – she becomes a near-mythological fear for the successful entrepreneur that persists today in the ‘demystified’ form of the sugar baby, the power of the underdog to turn powerful men about their little fingers, only to destroy them by way of sex appeal. Instead of literal death and literal blood loss through magic, a vamp caused her harm through finance. Vamps of the 1910s would then spend their pickings on fur coats, jade earrings, and other luxuries. While the storylines of the films they appeared in warned audiences that these women would destroy the traditional family and drive men to suicide, the style instantly became a subculture.

“After Theda Bara appeared in ‘A Fool There Was,’ a vampire wave surged over the country. Women appeared in vampire gowns, pendant earrings, and even young girls were attempting to change from frank, open-eyed ingenues to the almond-eyed, carmine-lipped woman of subtlety and mystery.” (To Be Or Not To Be a Vampire, The Day, 16 May 1916, p. 11)

It’s unlikely that all aspiring vamps were so daring as the ‘professionals’. As ever, the style was easier to copy than the behavior that went along with it. As more women sought access to makeup, the industry made products more affordable for the mass market. The popularity of the vamp bowed out for the more playful, sympathetic flapper to take her spotlight, but she never disappeared, true to nature – biding time in the shadows, on-screen and off, morphing into the femme fatale of the 1930s.

“It is within the last decade that a group of young women of Wall Street, with brains, ambition, and energy, have risen to points of authority and influence and proved that women are quite well fitted to make money as to spend it,” runs an article parallel to Zoe Beckley’s satirical article detailing the “four types of vamps” as matching the four suits of cards. The two articles seem spiritually aligned as Beckley remarks, “It isn’t her face that is guilty. It is her heart, her ambition. Can you photograph them?” Beckley concludes with, “After all, does anyone really want the vamp suppressed? Can vamps, of whatever sort, BE suppressed?” (The Evening World, March 1919.)

The association of the vamp with dark, smokey eyes hasn’t gone away. I remember the first time I got told I had ‘vampire eyes’. I suppose even before I knew who Theda Bara was, I was deeply into ‘amateur vamp’ territory and hope by now that I’m at least a semi-pro. Vamps of any sort, after all, cannot be suppressed.