Terror as White Female in Mudrooroo’s Vampire Trilogy

Mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy, The Undying, Underground and The Promised Land was published at the end of the last century amid an unrelenting public questioning of the author’s claim to Aboriginal heritage through a matrilineal link. The Gothic narratives feature a white female vampire named Amelia (an anagram of Lamiae), whose violent acts of penetration and (dis)possession act as metaphors for the colonial invasion of Australia by the British. The article reads the trilogy mainly through Barbara Creed’s theorization of the monstrous feminine and examines the ways in which Mudrooroo presents his post-conquest female vampire as castrating and all-consuming. It also argues that it is possible to see Mudrooroo’s female monster as a textual representation of the legendary soulless mother who would devour her own son to feed her sense of self and reality - with all the connotations of the author’s discredited claim to Aboriginal identity this implies

Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Creed · Literature · Monster · Narrative · Political science · Possession (linguistics · Trilogy · Vampire · White (mutation · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Modern American Literature Studies · Philosophy

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