#1 Carmilla Scholar

My sideblog dedicated to posting about scholarly articles and analysis on vampires, horror studies, and NBC Hannibal. I follow back from and am more active on carmillasboywife! (If you want the link to anything I post here, message me!)

[gothicmonsters]

"These feelings of dread and panic, paired with the desperate hope that the deluded crowd will snap out of it and come to its senses, lie at the heart of what makes Shirley Jackson’s work unforgettable. Tapping into her own frustrations and agonies, she painted one exquisite portrait after another of that precise juncture where blustery confidence yields to helplessness and terror. The sinister forces the heroine perceives are real, but they’re just ephemeral enough, by design, to make her doubt herself repeatedly. In the end, the self-possessed woman becomes the possessed."

—HEATHER HAVRILESKY, "Haunted Womanhood"

[gothicmonsters]

—HEATHER HAVRILESKY, "Haunted Womanhood"

[gothicmonsters]

Ghostly Time in ‘Lake Mungo’ (2008) by Dr. Adam R. Beach

[ripvaccinated2017-2021-deactiva]

maybe i will run up a fucking hill i guess

[funeral]

The house is a metaphor for the subconscious mind. When a vampire is invited into one’s house, it is symbolically invoked into one’s personal subconscious, where it is then free to feed upon one’s spiritual vitality. This is why the vampire’s visitations occur overnight, when one is asleep and dreaming, and most vulnerable to entities in the subconscious mind. The coming of the female ghost-vampire unfolds a tale of forbidden, exclusive female desire. Carmilla, in fact, represents the subconscious sexual instinct Laura has had to repress. 

[…]

By letting the vampire enter her dream-reveries/psyche, Laura is invoking a phantasm that can satisfy her secret repressed desire and destroy her at the same time in order to expiate her sense of guilt. But the descriptions of her vampiric visitations in terms of an unspeakable jouissance hint at the troubling fact that she might not want to be cured from her ‘evil’.

—Laura Sarnelli, Ghostly Femininities: Christabel, Carmilla, and Mulholland Drive

[bluebeardsbride-deactivated2021]

“Like that creature, I assert my worth as a monster in spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face, and redefine a life worth living. I have asked the Miltonic questions Shelley poses in the epigraph of her novel: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?” With one voice, her monster and I answer “no” without debasing ourselves, for we have done the hard work of constituting ourselves on our own terms, against the natural order. Though we forego the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth… If this is your path, as it is mine, let me offer whatever solace you may find in this monstrous benediction: May you discover the enlivening power of darkness within yourself. May it nourish your rage. May your rage inform your actions, and your actions transform you as you struggle to transform your world.”

— Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage [PDF]

[gothicmonsters]

All sacred creatures partake of monstrosity, whether overtly or covertly.

⁠—René Girard, "Violence and the Sacred"

[gothicmonsters]

There are many congruities between Gothic fiction and detective fiction but in the Gothic, crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form - the monster - that announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption. Furthermore, just as the detective character appears across genres in many different kinds of fiction (in the sensation novel, in Dickens), so Gothic infiltrates the Victorian novel as a symptomatic moment in which boundaries between good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, inside and outside dissolve and threaten the integrity of the narrative itself.

—Jack Halberstam, "Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters"

[congestedplanetarchive-deactiva]

Cannibalism In Literature And Film, Jennifer Brown // NBC Hannibal

[gothicmonsters]

Van Sant’s confusion about the larger cultural and philosophical issues at issue in this regard becomes apparent in [My Own Private Idaho]’s ending, which, as a number of critics have pointed out, differs dramatically from the ending published in the screenplay. In the film, Mike finds himself alone again in Idaho, standing on the road that earlier in the film reminded him of a ‘fucked-up face.’ He says, ‘I’m a connoisseur of roads. I’ve been tasting roads my whole life. This road will never end. It probably goes all around the world.’ At which point he collapses, only to be robbed by a couple of passersby and then pulled into yet another car by someone we cannot identify, while ‘America the Beautiful,’ in a slide guitar version, plays elegiacally in the background. In the screenplay, standing on a road in the country, Mike thinks about his failed quest to find his mother, to return home, and about his longing for a normal family, which he had earlier described to Scott as one, ‘you know, with a mom and a dad and a dog and shit like that’.

After succumbing one last time to narcolepsy, Mike is found lying on the side of the road by a passerby, who ‘puts Mike in his car and drives off down the road.’ In the published screenplay, that passerby is Scott Favor, which seems intended to verify Mike’s final thoughts, his revelation that ‘sometimes I had thought that God had not smiled on me, and had given me a bum deal. And other times, I had thought that God had smiled on me. Like now. He was smiling on me … for the time being …’ In mild understatement, Bergbusch comments that ‘it is perhaps because Mike’s speech rings somewhat hollow that Van Sant chose not to include it in the film'. He opts instead for the realistic and hence generally pessimistic conclusion filmed (which, like reality itself, maintains nevertheless a certain hopefulness, our ability to suggest, as have several critics, that in this case the person who picks up the sleeping Mike is a good Samaritan). But one wonders: why should the notion that one can make one’s own home or own family ring ‘somewhat hollow’? Why should this notion seem a necessary failure, or merely sentimental, when conventional understandings of both have been severely undermined by social realities such that many, many, many of us now live in a vacuum of legal, moral, and even conceptual legitimacy?

—Sharon O’Dair, "Cursing the Queer Family: Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis and My Own Private Idaho"

[gothicmonsters]

At a mere thirty-eight seconds, the actual dinner party scene consists of little more than a tilting shot of the elaborate dishes Hannibal has prepared, followed by his toast to his guests: “Before we begin, you must all be warned—nothing here is vegetarian.” The guests’ laughter at this condescending quip reveals that the true purpose of this lavish dinner is a ritual of conspicuous consumption in which the participants celebrate the assumed cultural superiority that makes them too aloof to bother with the mundane concerns behind the vegetarian lifestyle (e.g., animal rights, bodily health, environmental awareness). In fact, their reaction begs the question of whether the diners would even object if they knew the secret ingredient in the dishes before them, thereby tapping into the modern brewing discontent with the growing economic disparities of the world. Indeed, while Jennifer Brown recently concluded that “[t]he cannibal has become the reviled image of overindulgence, overspending, and overexploitation of resources,” Hannibal turns the tables, for the show highlights these traits in the non-cannibals at the party, thus calling into question the presumed bonds of affection that unite humanity.

Michael Fuchs and Michael Phillips, “Eat, Kill, … Love? Courtship, Cannibalism, and Consumption in Hannibal”

[gothicmonsters]

— Michael Fuchs and Michael Phillips, “Eat, Kill, . . . Love? Courtship, Cannibalism, and Consumption in Hannibal”

[gothicmonsters]

—  Victor Sage, 'Carmilla': 'I'll let you be in my dream, if I can be in yours'

[gothicmonsters]

Vampires were seen as pure evil creatures that were driven by an outstanding force to extend their lives by drinking the blood of the living. Le Fanu shows us that Carmilla is not the two-dimensional beast that the majority of vampire fiction of the time describes. There are a few scenes where Carmilla seems to be aware of her nocturnal life and despairing of her terrible plight. Carmilla only feeds because she must in order to continue her existence and does not wish to infect others with her curse or kill them with her nightly feeding. This seems evident in the attachment Carmilla makes with each of her victims. Some may think that she sees only her victims as preys. However, some may think that she really loves them.

Sabriye İkiz, “Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’: A Different Vampire Story”

[gothicmonsters]

Primarily, though, the story of the monster is a subconscious acknowledgment of something that we, as a culture, have difficulty accepting, ‘a truth about [humanity] that we would rather deny, but which the [monster] brings to the fore.’ We have been taught to believe that, as Seneca said, ‘Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.’ ‘That which does not kill us’, we are repeatedly told, ‘can only make us stronger.’ For every struggle, then, we believe that there is an ultimate payoff, an increase in happiness that is the natural result of surviving adversity. ‘We want the future to ‘redeem’ the past to make it part of a life story which has sense of purpose.’ We believe, innately, that all suffering results in redemption, that all stories have a happy ending. The possibility that this might not be true may be the most horrifying thing that we as human beings could be made to face. We don’t want to believe that suffering is just suffering, that there is no greater meaning behind it, that sometimes things, sometimes people, are just broken and they can’t be fixed. We don’t want to believe that sometimes the end of the victim, bloody as its beginning, is a sad and a purposeless one.

It is this horrifying truth that is unconsciously captured in every one of our most frightening tales, the story of the monster, the victim, whose suffering is non-redemptive, whose grim end is determined, not by conscious choice but by the uncontrollable results of cruel trauma. The story of the monster underscores the reality that our belief in redemptive suffering is sometimes morally problematic. What does it say about the survivor of trauma who is not now stronger, but in fact completely shattered? This implies that somehow the lack of a ‘happy ending’ is somehow the victim’s fault. If, as stated in The Book of Positive Quotations, ‘a diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure’, what is the value of something that crumbles under pressure? The simple answer is that, according to these generally accepted platitudes, the broken survivor has no value. They have in fact failed to act in a way that is ‘human’ and so are relegated to the exterior of society, outcast, expelled, staked, just as the monster is.

- Sarah Malik Bell, "Monster as Victim, Victim as Monster: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Redemptive Suffering and the ‘Undead’"

[gothicmonsters]

"Monsters are fictional creatures, without personal agency or a will of their own. ‘[They] are our children’, they do what we tell them to do. In this respect monsters are doubly victims. They are victims of both the traumatic incident and the author who created them, and both condemn the monster to a lifetime of trial and an almost always unavoidable and grizzly end. The pen seals their fate even as it writes them into existence. But, despite the fact that we have, in most cases, refused them a voice of their own, the monster still speaks. It asks us what we are so afraid of. ‘[It] asks why we have created [it].’"

- Sarah Malik Bell, "Monster as Victim, Victim as Monster: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Redemptive Suffering and the ‘Undead’"

[snailmailthings]

“The mad woman has been used as a trope for centuries by writers, but more often as a walk-on part: we are allowed short, horrifying glimpses of the mad Ophelia and the hallucinating Lady Macbeth, before they are hurried to their deaths; Bertha Rochester escapes her attic prison to cause fires and havoc, and is then put back before she, too, is sent to death. What ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ does is give the mad woman pen and paper, and ultimately a voice of her own. We hear from her, directly and in detail.”

— Introduction by Maggie O'Farrell to The Yellow Wallpaper (via filthiestlaugh)