To Kiss or Kill? Austen’s Vampire-Slaying Heroines

This chapter examines a common trope of Austen-vampire mashups: the Austenian heroine as vampire slayer. Invoking Joss Whedon’s cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Seth Grahame Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), it argues that vampire slaying in the twenty-first century is a distinctly feminine and feminist experience. For the Austenian slaying heroine, however, it engenders a critical tension between slaying as a feminist calling and the conservative gender dynamics of traditional romance. In short, the Austenian vampire-slaying heroine must decide to kiss or kill. This tension is explored in Colleen Gleason’s “Northanger Castle” (2010) and Tara O’Donnell’s Fanny Price, Slayer of Vampires (2014), two Austen-vampire mashups that illustrate how the fashioning of conservative romantic choices through the paradigm of slaying as a form of physically expressed female empowerment rehearses what feminist critic Angela McRobbie calls “double entanglement,” the postfeminist coexistence of neo-conservative values with processes of female liberalisation.