Le Fanu's "Carmilla": The Magical Female Body beyond the Colonial English Rationalism (original) (raw)
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Sheridan Le Fanu s "Carmilla": A Different Vampire Story
The story "Carmilla" was written by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu in 1872. It is within a collection of stories published under the title, "In a Glass Darkly". Carmilla is the only vampire story in this book and it has been accepted as one of the most important works of vampire fiction. Le Fanu's story paved the road for Dracula and other vampire stories. It is assumed that he was inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Cristabel" (1816). This story is about a relationship between a young woman, Laura who lives in a remote castle in Austria and a stranger, Carmilla who comes to stay for three months. Later we learn that Carmilla is a vampire and all the girls in the surrounding area and Laura become ill because of her visits at night. Le Fanu creates a vampire story by combining traditional gothic elements and Irish folklore. With this, he aims at questioning Victorian sexual politics. This paper will analyse the story's traditional gothic and folklore elements and how Le Fanu subverts Victorian sexual politics through a vampire story.
Vampirism and Lesbianism in Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
2020
The Vampire is a mystical figure that embodied the most primitive sentiments and became an icon of the Gothic literature of the nineteenth century. Among these icons, we have the character Carmilla, better known as the vampire of Karnstein. The present work aims to analyze the novel <em>Carmilla</em>, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in the light of his textual corpus in order to discuss the historical and social circumstances to understand the work, as well as to outline a discussion between vampirism and lesbianism. In Brazil, the novel is little known and explored, presenting few studies of analytical nature involving the themes vampirism and lesbianism.
The Ominous Figure of the Female Vampire in Gothic Literature
2022
In the 19th century particularly, the usage of the vampire in the Gothic novel was increasingly prominent as fin-de-siecle anxieties intensified. Politically speaking the New Woman was a symbol of anarchic hysteria since she threatened male control. The New Woman was characterised by her education, pursuing academic growth, being sexually independent. The three focuses of analysis for this research are Carmilla (1872) by Joseph Le Fanu, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker and The Blood of the Vampire (1897) by Florence Marryat. The main objective of this study is to see the historical contextualisation of gender politics and female sexuality in the reflection of the vampire figure. In each text the representation of the female vampire demonstrates the conceptualization of gender and identity, the issues around inequity, social interactions, beliefs around the body, gender, and sociocultural stereotypes. The vampire metaphor is used as a key figure to address the discrepancies surrounding gender norms and how these norms reinforced cultural expectations of what it meant to be a man and a woman.
The Foremother of Vampires: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla and its Palimpsestic Shadows
Publicações Viva Voz, 2019
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, first published in 1871, has been instrumental in the construction of Vampire Fiction’s approach to gender and sexuality, exerting significant influence over vampire stories to this day. The present monograph’s goal is to establish the novella as a Foremother to the subgenre, and to investigate its influence on two specific and representative subsequent works. Through Gerard Genette’s notion of the palimpsest and Linda Hutcheon’s ideas about artistical adaptation as an almost biological enterprise, the analysis will explore the ways Carmilla has originated a tradition of subversiveness later built upon by others. The opening chapter will look to better conceptualize the notion of Foremother in light of the mentioned theoretical scope. The second chapter will turn its eyes to the novella itself, conducting a detailed analysis by focusing on four cardinal elements – centered around gender, youth, love and sexuality – in an effort to better understand its contextualized subversive value. Jumping 126 years into the future, the third will deal with Joss Whedon’s 1997 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, exploring the ways in which it expands upon Carmilla’s tradition of feminized subversiveness by etching – in a new way – the same four elements over the Foremother’s palimpsestic shadow. Finally, the fourth chapter will tackle the YouTube-based webseries Carmilla (2014), an acknowledged adaptation of the monograph’s central object. By understanding how the webseries furthers the novella’s essence by evolving around it, we can investigate its position as the palimpsestic result of Carmilla’s and Buffy’s combined influences. Ultimately, this monograph hopes to instigate a reflection, as the very notions of subversive gender and sexuality undergo cultural adaptations which might mirror the intermedial adaptations in stories that espouse them.
2020
Adaptations of classic vampire tales are not uncommon, however Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic novella Carmilla (1871-72), which predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula as one of the first vampire narratives, is one story that has seen many retellings. The story of young girls succumbing to unholy and perverse temptations has found its way into many book, radio, film, stage, television, comic, video game, and music adaptations over the last one hundred and forty years. More recently, the classic was re-imagined in a Canadian web series Carmilla (2014-2016), which differentiates itself from its traditional roots with its camp and comedic storylines and its representation of LGBTQ characters. This chapter examines how the story and characters have been explored across the Carmilla transmedia storyworld, including the web series, film, social media, and forthcoming novel.
": A Different Vampire Story Sheridan Le Fanu'nun "Carmilla" eseri: Farklı bir Vampir Hikayesi
2012
The story "Carmilla" was written by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu in 1872. It is within a collection of stories published under the title, "In a Glass Darkly". Carmilla is the only vampire story in this book and it has been accepted as one of the most important works of vampire fiction. Le Fanu's story paved the road for Dracula and other vampire stories. It is assumed that he was inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Cristabel" (1816). This story is about a relationship between a young woman, Laura who lives in a remote castle in Austria and a stranger, Carmilla who comes to stay for three months. Later we learn that Carmilla is a vampire and all the girls in the surrounding area and Laura become ill because of her visits at night. Le Fanu creates a vampire story by combining traditional gothic elements and Irish folklore. With this, he aims at questioning Victorian sexual politics. This paper will analyse the story's traditional gothic and folklore elements and how Le Fanu subverts Victorian sexual politics through a vampire story.
CARMILLA : A PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACH TO LE FANU’S SHORT STORY
Journal: Interstudia (Revista Centrului Interdisciplinar de Studiu al Formelor Discursive Contemporane Interstudia), 2015
There are several ways to explain a text and to decipher the secret messages hidden in it. In his essay on Jensen’s Gradiva, Freud demonstrates how a psychoanalytical approach provides an understanding of a text different from a classic literary analysis. Psychoanalysis reveals an unconscious state the characters may develop. Hence, a short story can be used as a base for that kind of study. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla obviously belongs to the gothic genre, and hence to the Fantastic as well. The Gothic novel is a specialized form of the historical romance, a form of fantasy about past history and alien cultures which has a meaning for its present audience through a variety of cultural reflexes. Its hallmark is a deliberate archaism. For Freud, horror fiction is a projection in heavily codified form of deeply instinctual drives. In Carmilla, we will mainly study the dream dimension. The main action indeed occurs at night and engenders a weird atmosphere in which dream and reality combine with subtlety. The reader never knows if what he is witnessing is reality or fantasy. Our psychoanalytical approach will then lead us to assert that transgression through dream becomes the keyword of the gothic genre. Keywords : psychoanalysis, vampire, gothic, unheimliche, desire, law, foreclosure, double
Homoromance and Homoerotica in Le Fanu's Carmilla
2015
This paper will examine the presentation of homoerotic and homoromantic themes in Joseph Le Fanu's Gothic classic Carmilla, specifically Carmilla's identity as a queer woman and how this identity motivates her to not only keep her queerness a secret but to navigate through the world as a creature of marginalization and otherness. Though there is a large amount of scholarly conversation about queer and genderqueer characters in literature, there is virtually no research on the Gothic genre and the literal “deviants” as a result of cultural anxieties of the otherness of these characters. The key theories that will be used in this analysis are Queer theory, Queer literary criticism, Feminist theory, and Gender literary criticism. This research focuses on qualitative articles and books from both the literary community and the gender studies community. This research not only seeks to narrow the gap between Carmilla and Queer literary criticism, but to extrapolate the romantic and dynamic relationship between the paradigmatic Victorian protagonist and the elusive and queer antagonist.