Sheridan Le Fanu Research Articles

The subversive subtext of Shakespearean allusion in Sheridan LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’

Early on in J. Sheridan LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’, Laura’s father rattles off the opening lines of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (p.14; 1.1.1-4). It is the most obvious but not the only allusion to Shakespeare in LeFanu’s gothic tale. This article identifies a handful of further references, notably to Cleopatra and Ophelia, and to instances of disguise in The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, and to cross dressing in Twelfth Night. It begs the question, ‘What is Shakespeare doing haunting LeFanu’s nineteenth-century text?’ Ultimately connecting these allusions, some more subtle than others, to the othering of Carmilla (and her associates) and to the twin corruptions of cross-dressing and suicide, the article finds that the sometimes only half-visible figures of Shakespeare’s plays act as alluring but corrupting forces within LeFanu’s diabolical tale not unlike the titular vampire.

Vampires: Outside Life, Outside Control

Vampires: Outside Life, Outside Control

Forbidden Aspect of Erotic Desire Embodied in the Figure of the Vampire in “Carmilla” and “Olalla”

During the Victorian period, there was a dichotomy for women. On the one hand, there was the image of an “Angel of the House”, who was basically the submissive wife within a strongly patriarchal system. On the other hand, women could also be portrayed as monsters/prostitute because they refused to fulfill the role of a perfect wife and preferred to have an uncontrollable sex desire. This research will focus on the analysis of women as “monsters” by using the nineteenth-century vampire stories “Olalla” by Robert Louis Stevenson and “Carmilla” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. These two works will provide an exploration into the forbidden or transgressive aspects of erotic desire embodied in the figure of the vampire, precisely, female vampire. Throughout this study, there are several transgressive elements depicted in the characters of Olalla andCarmilla. Firstly, those monsters are sexually empowered characters, Olalla and Carmilla posses a sex desire that should not be acceptable for a woman. Secondly, the short stories clearly establish a ‘role reversal’ in therelationships with their human partners, that is to say, the female vampires take the active role since their fangs are the elements of penetration (like a phallus) whereas their lovers take the passive role. And thirdly, the sexual orientation is considered transgressive, particularly, in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” that presents a homosexual relationship with a female friend, Laura.

Review: The Construction of the Supernatural in Euro-American Cultures: Something Nice About Vampires, by Benson Saler

Review: <i>The Construction of the Supernatural in Euro-American Cultures: Something Nice About Vampires</i>, by Benson Saler

Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out

Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out

Did the Classical World Know of Vampires?

ABSTRACT Did the classical world know of vampires? No. This piece asks instead what phenomenon of the classical world most closely anticipates the modern conceptualization of the vampire—a conceptualization extracted from the two classics of Victorian vampire fiction, Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Consideration is given first to a series of ancient entities in later Greek literature that approach a simplistic definition of “returning from the dead and eating people”: Phlegon’s Philinnion and Polycritus, Pausanias’s Hero of Temesa, and Philostratus’s Lamia and Achilles. But it is then contended that if one considers the full sweep of motifs associated with the modern vampire in the round, a better overall alignment is to be found for it with the Roman figure of the strix-witch, as described by Ovid and Petronius and later on by John Damascene and Burchard of Worms, for all that she is not actually dead.

Body and Blood: Literary Vampirism at the Intersection of Theological Hunger and Physical Waste

Bram Stoker's Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles all paint a picture of primeval hunger. But the satiation of this hunger sustains an undead, monstrous existence. Essentially an animated corpse, the vampire embodies what Julia Kristeva has described de facto as waste. The image of the vampire perverts everything that is sacred: signficantly, it reverses the ritual of the Eucharist. Yet in doing so, it fosters an uncanny exploration of theological hunger at the heart of bodily waste. Three different models of vampirism show us how Stoker, Le Fanu, and Rice play with the concept of vital hunger at the heart of waste. At times a monstered mother, at times an uncanny lover, the vampire always feeds, and in feeding spreads waste. This essay asks: how does literary vampirism make use of waste to explore theological anxieties?

The Vampire Lovers and Hammer's Post-1970 Production Strategy

This article firstly examines the artistic and commercial merits of The Vampire Lovers, which was adapted from the Sheridan Le Fanu novella Carmilla. The production of the film was subcontracted by James Carreras at Hammer to Fantale Films, a company established by Harry Fine, Michael Style and Tudor Gates. The article then proceeds by examining various different and competing artistic judgements that have been made about the film, and also the construction of its unusual dreamy atmosphere. It documents both its UK and US box-office performances and goes on to examine Hammer's post-1970 production strategy in more general terms and in relation to the overall financial performance of the company in the period 1967–72, just before and after The Vampire Lovers. Finally, it examines Hammer's receipt of the Queen's Award for Industry in 1968, the effect of its rolling production-line (or ‘pipeline’) model of film-making on the company's general level of profitability, and some of the consequences of Michael Carreras's assumption of managerial control at Hammer after 1970.

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Vampires that grew sick of Dracula

Bram Stocker’s Dracula (1897) is considered a cornerstone when the subject is vampires. Although there were important works written before Stocker’s, such as “The Vampyre” (1819) by John Polidori and Carmilla (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu, it was Dracula that established a vampiric genre and influenced countless works that came afterwards. Vampires in the contemporary, however, present some primordial differences when compared to the 19th century Count. Their relation with humans, who once were seen just as prey, evolves in the 20th and 21st century. It can be argued that these differences are due to the age those blood sucking monsters were created and “live” among society.

Mothering by Other Means: Parasitism and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

Who are my kin in this odd world of promising monsters, vampires, surrogates, living tools, and aliens? Bram Stoker’s Dracula was both a gentleman and an animal. He took on the form of bats and dogs, he controlled packs of wolves and rats, and he is likened to a panther, a lion, and a “wild beast” (247). The significance of Dracula’s “bestiality” (Arata 634) has been convincingly interpreted as a metaphor for fears of reverse colonization, anxieties triggered by Darwinian theories of humanity’s animal ancestry, or nineteenth-century panic surrounding cases of rabies.1 Dracula’s contagious hybridity undermines the purity of English bloodlines and patrilineage. In his landmark essay on Dracula, Stephen Arata notes that the Count threatens to deracinate English women and to release a “monstrous” sexuality within them that defies their domestic roles as wives and mothers (632). Similarly, Maurice Richardson famously links Dracula’s sexual monopoly on his ever-growing pantheon of vampire brides to the primal father figure imagined in Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Speculating about ancient human social structures, Freud posits a patriarch who hoards female sexual partners, leaving none available for his sons. Like Van Helsing’s Crew of Light in Stoker’s novel, the sons must band together and slay the father, freeing the tribe’s women to be more evenly distributed among them. Moreover, as Roxana Stuart points out, Stoker’s Dracula fuses fatherhood with sexual partnership, making “his sex partners his children, by turning them into vampires” (183). The Count does not operate through standard means of sexual reproduction, by which the genetic material from two organisms blends to create offspring that contains material from both parent organisms. Instead, by infecting his victims, Dracula changes their ontological status, transforming them into vampires. Dracula is monstrous in his animality, and he renders his victims monstrous through infecting them and gathering them into his horde of wives/children.

THE HISTORY OF CREATION AND DESIGN FEATURES OF THE BRITISH SERIES OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS “BOOKS FOR THE BAIRNS” (1896–1912)

The 19th century is called the “golden age” of a children’s book. At this time, a variety of children’s literature appeared, first of all in Britain. The model of a decorated book are the books of Kelmscott Press. However, it was precisely at this time that a series of children’s books with a modest design at affordable prices, such as the so-called “one-penny” series “Books for the Bairns”, emerged. Ideologist and permanent editor of Books for the Bairns William T. Stead was a well-known journalist, founder and editor-in-chief of periodicals, public figure, child rights defender and a fighter against child prostitution. In 1912 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but scandalous reports, imprisonment, and his interest in spiritualism made W. Stead’s im- age controversial. The concept of the series, created by Sted, is based on a combination of an adapted simplified literary translation and a detailed step-by-step visual story that accompanies the text. The chief illustrator and visual co-author of W. Sted was the Irish artist B. Le Fanu (Brinsley Le Fanu, 1854–1929). For B. Le Fanu, the illustration of the series was the biggest art project. At his time, B. Le Fanu was known for the illustrations to the works of his father — Sheridan Le Fanu, one of the founders of the Irish mystical novel. They have the characteristic features of the Victorian era. Making illustrations for children’s books, B. Le Fanu does not lose their fantastic nature, but combines them with a realistic drawing. Each cover of the series represents one of the main characters of the book. A simple but vivid picture, one or two characters on the cover, a landscape or interior outlined by several elements — that’s what the covers by B. Le Fanu were like. None of them are decorated with patterns or ornamental details. The artist consistently implemented the concept of simplicity and clarity suggested by W. Sted, but not primitiveness. The best volumes in the series are his illustrations of L. Carroll’s “Alice’s in Wonderland” and M. Servantes’s novel “The Adventures of Don Quixote”. The “Books for the Bairns” series, although not exquisitely designed and illustrated, has become a model for children’s literature publishers for half a century and inspired the appearance of similar series of cheap children’s books in Western Europe and also Russia and Ukraine.

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900. Richard Adelman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. v+233.

<i>Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900</i>. Richard Adelman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. v+233.

Ireland, Modernism, and Imperialism in Standish O’Grady’s The Queen of the World

Abstract Standish O’Grady’s narratives of Irish mythology have been regarded as the inaugural works of the Irish literary revival, with considerable dispute among scholars as to the nature of O’Grady’s influence. In 1900, O’Grady published a futuristic fantasy entitled The Queen of the World under the pseudonym Luke Netterville. This work has been largely neglected in studies of the Irish revival and its relations to the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. The following essay examines the modernist aspects of O’Grady’s novel in relation to contrary tendencies towards imperialism and rebellion that it exhibits. In the process, I discuss the fantastic, gothic, and racial aspects of The Queen of the World, particularly as they reflect the complex nature of O’Grady’s political thought and influence from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. This includes discussion of the novel’s affinities with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race as well as Irish gothic works by Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. I address the Chinese dimension of the novel in terms of Orientalism and the British Empire, while also considering it in the context of O’Grady’s influence on Patrick Pearse, leader of the 1916 rebellion against British rule in Ireland.

The Role of Light and Vision in Two Victorian Ghost Stories

ABSTRACTThis article demonstrates how two selected Victorian ghost stories address the problem of the unreliability and subjectivity of perception through the characters' experiences with the supernatural or the inexplicable. I focus on how Victorian ghost stories—particularly Margaret Oliphant's “The Open Door” and Sheridan Le Fanu's “The Account of Some Disturbances in Aungier Street”—induce hesitation both in characters and in the reader. This “moment of hesitation” is not only central to Todorov's definition of the fantastic but also highly relevant to the anxieties about vision and knowledge that existed in Victorian society. I argue that the stories use the theories and assumptions about vision that were current in the Victorian age to subvert the idea that sight is an objective conduit to the truth, and thus the stories both utilize a source of fear that was already present in Victorian society and offer a relevant social commentary.

The Monster's Transformation on American Radio (1930s–50s)

Radio listeners recognize a monster when they hear one, basing their imaginings on information they receive aurally. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, aliens, and various creatures are adapted for radio from the pages of classic horror and science fiction tales written by Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury. Radio, an aural medium, relies on sound and description and, therefore, is ideal for horror. For the audience, listening to the radio is a subjective experience. The listener fills in the details and is free to conjure the monster in the imagination. This article explores the monster in a selection of American radio horror and science fiction programs that aired between the 1930s and 1950s and poses two questions: how does radio aurally render the monster for listeners and how does radio aurally convey horror?

CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH GREEN TEA DRINKER: SHERIDAN LE FANU AND THE MEDICAL AND METAPHYSICAL DANGERS OF GREEN TEA

In Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872short story“Green Tea,”the Reverend Mr. Robert Lynder Jennings becomes obsessively engaged in a potentially subversive research project on ancient pagans, and finds himself experimenting with green tea as a stimulant to sharpen his mind, boost his productivity, and maintain his stamina through long, sleepless nights bent over books. One day, while riding an omnibus, Jennings sees two piercing deep red eyes staring at him, and gradually realises that they belong to a small black monkey, which was “pushing its face forward in mimicry to meet mine” (23). At first fancying the creature to be the “ugly pet” (23) of a fellow traveller, Jennings attempts to ascertain the monkey's mood, and “poked my umbrella softly towards it. It remained immovable – up to it –throughit!” (23–24). Gradually, he becomes convinced of the creature's demonic nature, and this grinning, screeching vision persecutes Jennings for the rest of his days, sitting on his books and interrupting him while he studies, shrieking curses and blasphemies to drown out his prayers, soliciting him to perform evil acts, and finally, commanding him to commit suicide, which he does, slitting his own throat with a single-edged razor. In the final analysis offered by Jennings's physician and confidant, the metaphysical doctor Martin Hesselius, a significant contributing cause to Jennings's nightmarish experience was his gradual self-poisoning by green tea.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Beneath the surface: the masculine self and body in Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’

This article examines the relationship between the masculine self and male body in Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story ‘Green Tea’ (1872), using a masculinity studies lens to analyze Mr Jennings’ destabilized masculinity within the parameters of Victorian male gender norms. I highlight the interwoven relationship between the masculine self and the body through looking at the physical depiction of Jennings, arguing that Jennings’ masculinity, his masculine self, is imprisoned as a reflection of the physical body; a relationship echoing Victorian gender norms regarding masculinity and the body. In the story, a demon follows and watches Jennings, appearing when Jennings is engaged in activity. Focusing on the relationship between the demon’s manifestation and Jennings’ activity, I show that the demon’s presence results from Jennings’ nonconformity to traditional notions of the masculine self. Le Fanu’s emphasis on the demon’s gaze serves to criticize Jennings’ masculinity as Jennings becomes submissive to the demon’s presence; as a result, this submission is mirrored in Jennings’ deteriorating physical body and health. By positing the masculine self within the body, the story acts to highlight Victorian society’s rigid male gender norms and the penalization of bodies that undermine those ideals.

Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” by Kimberly J. Lau

Reviewed by: Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” by Kimberly J. Lau Merja Makinen EROTIC INFIDELITIES: LOVE AND ENCHANTMENT IN ANGELA CARTER’S “THE BLOODY CHAMBER,” by Kimberly J. Lau. Series in Fairy-Tale Studies. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2015. 180 pp. $31.99 paper; $24.99 ebook. While Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) has never really been out of the critical debate regarding its fairy tale genre, Kimberly J. Lau’s complex, scholarly exploration of Carter’s preoccupation with sexuality and desire is a welcome addition to the discussion. The Bloody Chamber, as an acknowledged major literary text, repays such a lengthy focus on its content and context. As Lau argues, despite the collection’s patriarchal baggage, Carter never gives up on her exploratory and challenging renditions of heterosexual love. The utilization of the animal and the monstrous allows for alternate “marvelous sexual couplings and imaginative hybridities,” which enable Carter to escape not only phallocentric but also, more controversially, feminist expectations in a textual recuperation of heterosexual desire, love, and companionship (p. 11). (The “feminists” here refer to a narrow range of early radical readings that refuted Carter’s assertion that she was a feminist writer, albeit of a more postmodern persuasion.) Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” delights in the short stories’ eclectic intertextuality and multiplicity of meaning: Although “The Bloody Chamber” seems to promise an exit (if only one could track all the references, map the connections among them, and navigate their allusive, and elusive, meanings), it quickly becomes evident that the paths Carter has set cross and cross again; her labyrinth is as complex and confusing as the social constructions of gender, sexuality, and power that similarly foil most attempts at escape. (pp. 17-18) Lau’s critique is overly fond of the term “labyrinthine” to convey an inability of interpretation. It is certainly crucial to acknowledge the complexities of cultural power and oppression that infuse these representations of desire, and it is certainly valuable to encompass Carter’s pyrotechnics [End Page 296] of allusion, but Carter’s stories still convey meanings to their plurality of readers. Luckily, each of Lau’s chapters proffers just such an “escape” in a more satisfying analysis than the quote above suggests, fueled by a scholarly tracing and elucidation of the allusions, alongside detailed close readings, to articulate the richness of the stories. Charles Perrault, Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, J. K. Huysmans, Jean Cocteau, Bram Stoker, Sheridan LeFanu, and all the usual names are present in Erotic Infidelities and appropriately dealt with, but Lau’s special focus is on unpicking Carter’s critique of Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s inadequacy around feminine sexuality. She argues: Carter’s implicit critique of Lacan’s theory of subjectivity in relation to the mirror stage, her exceedingly clever invocation of Irigaray’s “nothing-to-see” (itself a condemnation of the very premise upon which Freud develops his theory of sexual difference), and her differently figured “marvellous wound” all begin to destabilize the primacy of the phallus, the primacy of the Law of the Father, and to suggest an outside to the Symbolic Order. (p. 58) Lau’s conclusion is that nonhuman metamorphosis, a Derridean “continuous becoming-Other,” in the tales points to an “alternate erotic” and “autonomous subjectivity” (both feminine and masculine) (p. 72). As those who are familiar with the critical debates surrounding Carter’s The Bloody Chamber will note, there is little innovation in this analysis of the social constructedness of feminine sexuality and alternate possibilities available through fabulation and metanarrative. Even the claim that the reading of the wolf tales is radical, in her section entitled “The Phallus Reconsidered: ‘The Werewolf,’” does not quite bear fruit, although Lau does shift the Irigarayan “touch” to licking, a “symbolic” that creates “a world outside of language though still shaped by the tongue” (p. 141). However, while the claim for a fresh take on the fairy tales was unsupported, the book is enjoyable; it rehearses exactly why the tales are so rich in their textuality, incorporates the latest ecocriticism...