Sheridan Le Fanu

In Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu uses vampires to identify and challenge gender roles of women in the Victorian age. From the outset, Carmilla and Laura’s relationship appears to transcend mere homosocial characteristics; Carmilla awakens sensations in Laura which she has never known before because her sexuality has always been suppressed. This suppression is inherently motived by the dominant ideology in Victorian culture that lesbianism, and homosexuality more generally, are “unnatural” forms of sexuality

A Secretive Figure Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu portrays the narrator Laura as the prey of the vampire Carmilla, who is later acknowledged as the Countess Karnstein Mircalla. Laura is isolated living in the castle in Styria, and dreams of having friend. As a child, she sees a mysterious figure in her bedroom, who is revealed to be Carmilla. Twelve years later a carriage crash brings Carmilla into the narrator’s life. When she was welcomed into the schloss, she was not believed to be a vampire. When

The quickest way of describing Carmilla is as a Victorian lesbian vampire novel. This tends to raise a couple eyebrows in the room, so let me take a deep breath and explain that Carmilla is a gothic novel written during the Victorian era that addresses issues like ambiguity, memory, transgressive sexuality, and gives insight into the tensions that existed between Catholicism and Protestantism, Ireland and England. At face value, the novel hardly makes any mention of the political and social turmoil

An Analysis of The Judge's House This compelling 19th Century thriller by Bram Stoker has many typical elements of the 19th century ghost story genre. The author has used many rudiments, which make this a very popular ghost story. "The Judges House" which is set in an isolated setting, this can clearly be seen when the author describes it as "…desolation was the only term conveying any suitable idea of its isolation." Here the author wants to portray the sense of

repression, it was common for vampire stories to reflect the fear of sexuality that was rampant in society. Bram Stoker’s Dracula illustrated fears about sexual women in contrast to the woman who respected and abided by society’s sexual norms. Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s “Carmilla” represented not only the fear of feminine sexuality, but also the fear of sexuality between women. John William Polidori’s “The

centuries in human folklore. The first Anglicized representations of the creature in literature date back to the English poetry of the early 1700s, and were then followed in the fiction genre by such works as John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. For the audiences of the 18th century, vampires embodied many of the following common fears shared between the people: of illness, both mental and epidemic, of an embraced sexuality, particularly

Ruben Alejandro Mrs. Mary Smith AP Literature 20 September 2017 How to read literature like a professor There’s a lot of literary techniques used in “How to read literature like a professor”. One of the techniques is symbolism. In chapter 12 it talks about someone walking on a road and they encounter two roads that diverge into the woods. There’s a road that everyone uses and then there’s one that almost no one uses and he decides to take that road for some reason. “Two roads diverged into

Gothic literature has a long and complex history, which has spawned many different subgenres and even helped give rise to new ones altogether. One of the early subgenres of the gothic, was that of the female gothic. Based on the work of Ann Radcliffe, the female gothic takes the dark themes of it’s predecessors, but focuses on a central women figure, that is the heroine of the story. Since its inception, the female gothic has evolved in many ways. Even though it began as a way to reasses the depiction

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla: Bram Stoker’s Inspiration for Dracula “3 May. Bistritz. Left Munich at 8:35 p.m.” Abraham Stoker in this unassuming way begins his Gothic masterpiece, Dracula (The Annotated Dracula 1). Dracula has been called ‘imaginative’ and ‘original.’ , and Harry Ludlam calls it “the product of his own vivid imagination and imaginative research” (Senf 41). However, the originality of Stoker's Dracula is in doubt. By a similarity in the setting, characters and plot, in

vampire genre provided appropriate literary platform for writing about these anxieties and sexual desires through allegories of vampirism without specifically defining its subversive ideas; delivering them as ambiguous and cryptic. Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu even furthered the idea of vampire genre by presenting the first lesbian vampire, Carmilla. The vampire text became a medium for exposing the 'forbidden and unmentionable ' perceptions undermining the heteronormative discourses of Victorian