The purpose of this study is to discover how the female vampire in Delmira Agustini's poem "El vampiro" differs in comparison to her literary predecessors found in the works of Poe, Baudelaire, DarÃo, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Charlotte Brontë. Chapter 1 is a study of the atmosphere, setting, plot, character, structure, theme, symbolism, voice, and overall emotional impact of the poem. In addition, visual references to the paintings Vampire and The Vampire by Edvard Munch and Philip Burne-Jones, respectively, and literary references to Bram Stoker's Dracula are made as well. For example, Munch's Vampire and Agustini's "El vampiro" exemplify the New Woman-change that was taking hold of the domestic, public, and art spheres in societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to these changing societal circumstances, both works illustrate the resulting sense of a curious unease by setting their subjects in a position of unfamiliar power and within an atmosphere infused with a distinctive, new kind of fear, where Munch's Vampire expresses man's fear of the female and Agustini's "El vampiro" expresses a female's fear of the female â that is, the female's fear of self. Chapter 2 surveys the portrait if the female vampire drawn in Poe's short stories "Berenice", "Morella," and "Ligeia" and DarÃo's "ThanatopÃa" alongside the poems "Le Vampire" and "Les Metamorphoses de Vampire" by Baudelaire and Rossetti's Body's Beauty, a work consisting of both a painting and a poem. Within these works, I believe it is the male narrator's identity â not that of the female â which concerns the author. In contrast, through this fantastical creature, Agustini expresses her anxiety about a cultural reality that she would otherwise be unable to communicate if writing in a realistic fashion. Finally, Chapter 3 is a study of Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market and Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre in comparison to Agustini's "El vampiro". The changes presented within these works in regards to the female vampire demonstrate the various levels of progression toward emancipation in the role of women from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Having rewritten the image of the female vampire through a female point of view, Agustini created a transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This transitional characterization of Agustini's vampire marks the evolution of woman from powerless to powerful and rewrites the inhuman character of the female vampire into a human character more representative of the turn of the twentieth century and today.
