‘Dreadful Women’: Vampires and Storytellers in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's ‘Luella Miller’

Abstract

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's ‘Luella Miller’ is the most critically acclaimed and puzzling story in her 1903 The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural. As described by the tale's storyteller, Lydia Anderson, Luella Miller is a parasitic creature who drains those closest to her of their life force, leading many scholars to label Luella ‘vampire’ despite the many ways Lydia Anderson's storytelling runs counter to literary vampire conventions. Even so, Freeman's haunting tale of death and community paranoia strikingly mirrors the claustrophobic small-town New England that Freeman knew intimately and depicted unflinchingly. Tapping into pervasive rural folklore, Lydia Anderson casts Luella as a ‘New England Vampire,’ a figure that served important social and psychological functions throughout backwoods New England. Ultimately, Freeman's ‘vampires’ expose how easily – and disastrously – unconventional women are transformed into ‘dreadful women’ in this closed, cannibalistic world.