Classic Literature: A Fool There Was

I have, of course, looked at the 1915 film A Fool There Was and decided the female vampire, played by Theda Bara, was indeed a vampire in the energy vampire sense of the word as well as a Vamp. I was aware that the film’s origins were based on the Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name published in 1897 and, in its turn, the poem was based on a painting by Philip Burne-Jones, titled The Vampire, itself unveiled in 1897. What I was unaware of was that the film itself was based on a play by Porter Emerson Browne, who also created a novella of the same name – both dated to 1909. It is the novel I am touching on here and my thanks to David Annwn Jones and his book Vampires on the Silent Screen, from where I garnered this information.

The book is certainly deeper than the film, we actually meet main character John (who becomes the Fool), his (to be) wife Kate and best friend Jack as children. This, of course, adds more depth to the characters. We also observe, in Europe, the vampire as a baby. She has a name in this, Rien (which is French for nothing, offering her a spectral identity), and we see her unmarried mother die. This seems to be just after childbirth and at that point the father appears in her life for a very short moment. He is clearly an immoral man of, we discover, aristocratic blood and he gives her a name and nothing else. This birth out of wedlock and conception through (implied) immorality would seem to be the source of her ‘evil’. She is brought up by her grandmother, who is drawn very much as the crone.

As she grows older (not given an age, but still young) we see a stranger meeting her as she sits in the woods, naked (and described as a nymph) as she watches the stand off between squirrel and snake, with the former mesmerised. The stranger’s horse snorts and the squirrel escapes. She turns her attention to him and as well as being described as having dead black hair, she is clearly tied to the snake we have just seen (which could tie to the lamia). His horse bolting takes him away but it is mentioned twice that he crosses himself.

The father returns later, having taken a tour to see his families (indicating he fathered several illegitimate children) and, it is suggested, he was also the stranger so it is actually the third time he meets her. Now an adult she walks with a breast exposed. When he sees her, her gaze holds his and her walk towards him – described as sinuous – causes him to back away until he steps backwards off a cliff. The book then follows the film, though we don’t see other Fools, prior to John, bar Parmalee – the young man who commits suicide before her. He is called young Parmalee but described as having, “unnatural forced age”. The book gives her a sense of the uncanny, she seems to have a power through her gaze and her Fools age unnaturally (and I read that as her eating their energy). Although she is likened to a snake at times at another point she is described as having “long, lithe limbs in the easy relaxation that is of the panther, or the leopard.” This, of course, ties her to felines also.

We see John hit her at one point, “full upon the vivid crimson lips—and a little of their crimson seemed to leave its lair. It trickled down upon the dead whiteness of her skin…” which is a very vampiric description. Equally John is left, after her extended ministrations, as “a palsied, pallid, shrunken caricature of something that had once been human… John Schuyler had hands—not nerveless, shaking talons… This sunken-eyed, sunken-cheeked, wrinkled thing was not John Schuyler…” and this description shows a much more marked effect than the film could.

The film, of course, quoted the Kipling poem in intertitles but this actually has the characters quoting the poem - and using it to describe Rien - which was wonderfully meta. I decided that the film was actually a vampire film, though the film was also that which popularised the cinematic Vamp. This, more so, builds a vision of a mythic creature. Whilst different, her ‘sinful’ heritage (the unmarried mother and libertine father) brought the parentage of energy vampire Harriet Brandt, from Blood of the Vampire to mind. Like Harriet she has travelled to feed, though whilst Harriet came to Europe from the Caribbean, Rien travels to the USA from old Europe and corrupts her good men.

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