Can the bird sing only the song it knows?

Gender as imposed performativity in Angela Carter’s Vampirella

Abstract

Written in 1976, Angela Carter’s radio play Vampirella narrates the encounter between a vampire countess and a hero. The objective of this article is to demonstrate how Carter works in her text with the idea of gender as an imposed performativity which is based off of an oppressive system. In order to do so, we will use the author’s theories expressed in her essay The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978), Butler’s concepts of gender as a performative system (2019), and ideas derived from Marxist feminism.  In analyzing Marquis de Sade’s works, Carter unfolds two possibilities for women: the virgin Justine to whom every relation is an abuse and the profane Juliette who transforms her own sexuality into torture, but is never able to satisfy herself. We will come to the conclusion that Carter consolidates an idea that the sex-gender system establishes sexual paradigms fundamentally based off of an oppressive relation which prevents the reciprocal development of desire and that the best way to subvert this system is through true love. Vampirella’s Countess is an heir of existentialist paradigms created by her male ancestors, but the affection she receives for the first time from the hero finally allows the end of her existence as such, in a way that she may, at last, be free.