In the novel, sickness serves as a metaphor for the social disorientationof the fin de siècle that takes the lives of Victorians, who cannot adapt to changing sociopolitical conditions. Her suicide after unwittingly killing her newlywed husband suggests that she herselfcannot embrace her liminal identity. Harriet’s lovedones gradually die because they are not “fit” to survive in fin-de-siècle Europe, where racial and gender categorieswere becoming unstable. The people Harriet cares for at the hotel-a baby girl and her husbandAnthony-die due to her uncontrollable ability to drain the life energy of those close to her. Thewhite upper-class guests of Hotel Lion d’Or, a seaside resort in Belgium, feel motion sickness due to her multiethnicand interspecies identity that shakes patriarchy, scientific authority, and Orientalist cultural distinctions.They feel nausea because they are disturbed with her “unrefined” blood, unexplainable psychic powers, andsexual decadence that contaminates the hotel. In Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), the nineteen-year-old orphaned heiress, Harriet Brandt,embodies the social turbulence of the fin de siècle with her shifting identity as a human and vampire, British andJamaican, a former convent girl with dubious sexual orientation, and nurturer and killer of her loved ones.
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