#manor

[rulekkkk]

📍 Rukavishnikov Manor, Nizhny Novgorod

[chippersweetlune]

[lady-antiquarian]

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. I present to you the Domaine du Renard, the manor of our lady, where she and her staff come to disconnect from the world of Paris.

[pinterestisdeadandaikilledher]

[catherine-reznitchenko]

THE CROW

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

I read Manor from your link and it struck me how much Har longs to be killed by Manor. Har gets secret nightly visits, but the realization that he is being fed on and dying brings him joy instead of dread. “Oh, what sweet repose it must be to lie with him in the grave!” Not magnetism mixed with repulsion, just the former. Hedwige is drawn to Kostaki’s dead body through an intense mix of attraction and terror. Genderflipped in Family of the Vourdalak, the marquis feels “a mixture of untold pleasure and horror” when the foreign girl he thought to be a living sweet maiden becomes seductive. There are a few cases where the victim does not resist wasting away, as with the priest in The Dead Lover and the pious Laura in Carmilla; but in the end both still recount Clarimonde and Carmilla as horrors from which they were saved. Could Ulrich being gay be part of it? Maybe he read the theme of being pulled toward an undead suitor who is obsessed with taking you to their grave as forbidden desire, and instead of fearing and escaping it he embraces it?

I would say yeah, that seems likely. If you read the whole story as a queer allegory it falls into place very neatly along those lines; to Har's family and the rest of the village, something horrifying and awful is happening to Har. They resort to violent acts (staking) in an attempt to "protect" him from this fate, but are ultimately unsuccessful. In the end, from their perspective the story is a tragedy: Har is dead, dragged to the grave by his friend. But from Har and Manor's perspective, it would seem they got a happy ending. They are dead to their families and neighbors, adrift from their homes and their old lives, but they are together at last. It's a poignant comparison from a modern-day perspective; but to Ulrichs, writing this story in the 1880s, I think it was even more resonant.

To the rest of the world we are monsters; we are dead. But we are together, and we love each other, and we are happy.

[loveofbush2-0]

Noroton Manor

[witchnisia]

An amazing place to write books and letters...