"For the Blood is the Life": vampirism and Alterity in Le Fanu's Carmilla
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2595-8127.v26i1p61-79Keywords:
Carmilla, irish fiction, Gothic LiteratureAbstract
The following paper is an adaptation of an undergraduate thesis concerning Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1872), focusing on its aspects of alterity by means of a vampire story. The general aim of this article is to investigate Carmilla’s vampiric character as an allegorical manifestation of alterity (sexual, cultural and racial), through the exploration of the vampire legend as it unfolded in Europe and traversed into literature. The influence of Le Fanu’s own roots as an Irishman and the place of his work within the larger mosaic of the Irish Gothic tradition, are also greatly relevant to this discussion, since the “alterity reading” of the novella is inextricable from the different meanings of the vampiric motif within the earlier Gothic tradition as well as its relation with femininity and queer desire. The contributions of such scholars as Fred Botting (2005), Victor Sage (2004) and Sue-Ellen Case (1997), amongst others, are cited throughout.
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