Blood seeps through the fabric of society. It trickles down through time, leaving its persistent, indissoluble stain on everything it touches. Blood and its cryptic meaning has enthralled me—it has invaded my thoughts and my scholarly pursuits as I have sought to dissect its multifarious significations. In short, blood has become my passion project.
When I’m at the dentist’s office or I’m chatting with a fellow mom on a field trip, and the inevitable question of careers comes up, I share that I’m an English professor. This divulgence is typically followed with questions about what exactly I teach. When I respond with something about Shakespeare or Milton or Marlowe, eyes glaze over and polite, tightlipped nods follow. But, when I’m feeling bold or perhaps a little chatty, I dare to profess where my real fascination lies: blood. This sticky detail immediately makes the conversant perk up: “Blood, you say? Well, that’s interesting.” Yes, yes, it is. We as a culture might not get too excited about 16th century sonnets, but we are undeniably captivated by blood.
Blood studies are not limited to the medical fields. In fact, the study of blood’s meaning is a thriving field in the world of literature as well as the medical/health humanities (the medical/health humanities are an interdisciplinary field of study dedicated to understanding the lived, social experience of health and medicine). As an English professor who has centered her scholarship around blood studies, I have found the examination of blood to be one teeming with life and substance.
So, what can literature tell us about blood, and why does it matter? When we look beyond the physical and medical significance of blood, we discover an entity that hemorrhages social meaning across time and place. While blood is obviously vital to our physical wellbeing, it is also essential to our cultural livelihood—it flows right to the heart of our existence. Although the interpretations of blood abound, a similar vein runs through them all: the presence of blood, either literal or metaphorical, coats whatever it touches with a stratum of gravity. Blood can signify various facets of one’s identity: sex, race, lineage, class, and nationality, just to name a few. Blood can also embody a number of paradoxes as an entity which simultaneously represents both life and death, violence and connection, or the individual and the community. Despite its wide-ranging relevance, the copious cultural beliefs about blood all have one thing in common—they are each a reflection, in some way, of social thought about what it means to be human and, in turn, how we place value on different types of bodies.
Blood’s essentiality to our cultural definitions of humanity is evidenced by its repeated centrality in art. Think for a moment on the centuries of religious iconography dedicated to images of Christ on the cross, or Christ displaying his wounded hands and feet to the viewer. How many gallons of paint, how many frescos, have been devoted to the depiction of Christ’s blood? How many heated religious debates have been centered around communion? Think in turn of perhaps a somewhat sacrilegious example of the cultural devotion to blood and contemplate our obsession with vampires. Why are we drawn to them? Why do we depict vampires as sexy and mysterious? We typically don’t view other mythical monsters, like ogres and werewolves, in the same fashion. But, for some reason, vampires scare us and excite us all at the same time. Perhaps the vampire’s lure comes from its attraction to the very thing that makes us human, that makes us alive. Vampires, in their monstrous, inhuman forms seek sustenance from our blood; their lust for our blood threatens our livelihood, while sustaining theirs. Yet, this threat to our safety doesn’t deter us; in fact, it acts as a siren’s call for we are just as beguiled by blood as the vampire we fear.
My own fascination with blood isn’t quite as sexy or mysterious as a teenage vampire filled with eternal hormones and bloodlust, but it pulses through my veins nonetheless. My absorption with blood began at the end of my master’s degree program. As a graduate student who was studying representations of violence in literature as well as issues with embodiment, blood became a perfect intersection of my two scholarly intrigues. Once I began my doctoral program, I knew that I wanted to center my dissertation around depictions of blood in medieval and Renaissance literature.
My research as an English scholar examines numerous literary texts to demonstrate that blood rhetoric is used to further marginalize certain groups of already ostracized people. At the cusp of the Scientific Revolution, the premodern world was grappling with competing epistemologies of selfhood—namely religion and medicine. My research argues that blood rhetoric negotiates the (dis)similarities between the two schools, largely because blood rhetoric seemingly legitimizes preestablished social biases through the jargon of science and medicine. Each chapter of my doctoral dissertation examined a particular marginalized group to demonstrate the commingling of these two worlds. By exploring the use of blood symbolism in various medieval and Renaissance literary works, I argue that these examples reflect a larger social and medical movement in which blood is used as an (un)stable rhetorical tool to bolster pre-established social biases through the guise of scientific language. In other words, blood becomes a tool to use medical practice to justify cultural prejudice and vice versa.
A particular personal interest in my scholarship is blood’s relation to gender and gender biases. In fact, one of the chapters in my dissertation was dedicated to the various forms of women’s bleeding. In the premodern world, culture was fascinated with female-specific bleeding, and the same is largely true today. For example, a woman could go to the emergency room with a severed arm, and the nurse would calmly sit at her computer and ask, “And when was your last menstrual cycle, dear?” as blood pulsates from the poor woman’s stub. Okay, I admit, that might be a tad hyperbolic, but you get the point.
My research probes discussions of all forms of women’s bleeding in literature. These types of bleeding include menarche (i.e., a woman’s first menstrual cycle), menstruation, and menopause (which is more about an increasing absence of blood), among other types of women’s blood. As women, much of our physical—and social—phases of life are mapped around our blood. Think about the rite of passage that menarche marks; it’s often met with equal parts celebration and trepidation by its recipient. In a similar way, just as menarche denotes a physical and metaphorical entrance into womanhood, menopause often represents a new phase of transition in a woman’s life. By examining instances of women’s bleeding in literature, I am able to survey all of the ways that society uses blood to monitor, and oftentimes label, women. For instance, plays like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet centralize the tension between physical readiness (i.e., menarche and puberty) for sex and romance versus mental maturity. In other words, although culture uses blood to physically define Juliet as a nubile woman ready for marriage and even motherhood, she isn’t mature enough mentally and emotionally to handle the complexities that love and sex introduce. This is just one example among many in literature where blood is used in an attempt to label, understand, and often ostracize various groups of people. This assertion about women’s blood is also applicable to other forms of identity, several of which I also research, namely social labels attached to race, religion, and disability. My research has shown me that the scope of blood studies is vast and deep.
As I began to work on my dissertation in graduate school, I soon learned that the field of blood studies has many enticing insights to offer across centuries of literature and social thought, not just within the dusty tomes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. In fact, during my time as a graduate student, I was able to teach an undergraduate literature course about blood symbolism. This class became my chance to investigate blood symbolism in a number of other literary time periods as well as a way to gauge students’ interest in my topic of passion. The course reading list explored blood symbolism across genres and time and included titles such as Shakepeare’s infamously bloody play, Macbeth; the vampire novella, Carmilla, which many scholars believe was Bram Stoker’s influence for Dracula; a young adult dystopian novel entitled Red Queen, which explores complex issues, such as race and class, when it imagines a world where society is placed into a hierarchy based upon the color of one’s blood (i.e., red or silver); and science fiction short stories such as Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” which examines child-bearing, lineage, and love in intriguing and complicated ways. In addition to the course readings, students were asked to find their own examples of blood symbolism in pop culture. A few student examples included the Dexter series which features a protagonist who is a blood-splatter expert by day and serial killer by night as well as the iconic Carrie novel along its film adaptation where the protagonist is doused in pig’s blood shortly after being crowned prom queen. As students presented these pop culture examples, the variety abounded and the class’s fascination, as well as my own, deepened. Blood, it seemed, wasn’t just spellbinding to me—it had seeped its way into my students’ psyches as well.
My first experimental course in blood studies proved successful and affirmed my hypothesis that students and scholars alike are not immune to blood’s thrall. Years later, my dissertation has been written and defended, grad school has come and gone, but my obsession remains unsatiated. My passion for blood studies has only grown since leaving grad school and joining the academic work force. In fact, some of my research will soon be featured in a chapter of an interdisciplinary scholarly book about blood studies. Each new semester that passes and each book that I pick up further underscores blood’s centrality in my mind. New veins of discovery continue to burst open before my searching eyes. Perhaps, you can consider me an academic vampire whose thirst for blood cannot be quenched.
Guiding Questions
Consider the following after reading the essay:
- How can engaging with narrative impact how we understand and interpret illness? What do healthcare providers have to gain from engaging with literature and/or work from blood studies scholars outside of medicine?
- What might our fascination with vampires reveal about illness, mortality, and/or embodiment? What might a fascination with menarche, menstruation, and menopause reveal about society’s views of women and women’s bodies?
- How has language been used to reinforce social biases in medicine?
About the Author
Maggie Kelly is an assistant professor of English at Elon University. Her research specialties include blood symbolism, the history of obstetrics and gynecology, and the rhetoric of embodied marginalization—especially as they all relate to medieval and early modern literature. Maggie received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
