#nina auerbach

[pissbataille]

bram stoker, dracula • anne rice, the vampire lestat • the annotated dracula • nina auerbach, our vampires, ourselves

[yvain]

Women writers of the Victorian era regarded the fairy tale as a dormant literature of their own. When Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre hears hoofbeats approaching her in the dark, ice-covered Hay Lane, “memories of nursery stories” immediately flood her mind, especially the recollection of “a North-of-England” monster capable of assuming several bestial forms. But the beastly apparition Jane expects turns out to be Rochester, the “master” whom she promptly causes to fall off his horse and who will eventually become her thrall. Rochester himself soon shows his own conversance with, and respect for, powers he associates with the magical women of traditional fairy tales. “When you came on me in Hay Lane last night,” he tells Jane, “I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse. I am not sure yet. Who are your parents?” When Jane replies that she is parentless, Rochester endows her with a supernatural ancestry. Surely, he insists, she must have been “waiting for [her] people,” the fairies who hold their revels in the moonlight: “Did I break one of your rings, that you spread the damned ice on the causeway?”

Here and elsewhere in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë takes even more seriously than her two characters do the potency of the female fairy-tale tradition to which she has them refer. Karen E. Rowe, who has so ably written on that tradition, was the first to show how fully saturated Jane Eyre is with patterns drawn from major folktales such as “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Blue Beard,” and, as a prime analogue for Jane’s developing relationship with the homely Rochester, from “Beauty and the Beast,” the 1756 Kunstmärchen (or literary fairy tale) adapted and popularized by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont.

Nina Auerbach, Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers

[vamqira]

Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach

[nosferatu-roberteggers]

“While it is unclear to what extent [Bram] Stoker was aware that his vampire represents the evil or repressed fantasies of his characters, it is the case that the associations of violence with madness and vampirism with sexuality are typical in the Gothic. True to the nature of the Gothic, Dracula is the external representation of Renfield's insanity, Lucy and Mina's sexuality, and Harker's episodes both of delirium and passivity […] vampirism is associated not only with death, immortality, and orality, but also with sexuality.

Further, in psychoanalytic terms, the vampirism is a manifestation of greatly desired and equally strongly feared fantasies. These fantasies have encouraged critics to point to the Oedipus complex at the center of the novel. Dracula, for example, is seen as the “father-figure of huge potency”.

— Phyllis A. Roth; “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (in “Dracula: Criticism” edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, 1997)

“I have never been so happy as that moment… as I held hands with Death.” // “I might ease your wound” // “Think you there is no burden upon myself? […] I fear little Friedrich is so strong and hungry, he's eating me weary.” // “I cannot resist you, my love.”

[sykes]

The intimacy, the sharing, the maternal suffusion, were the essence, in the nineteenth century, of the vampire’s allure. Le Fanu’s Laura never stopped feeling Carmilla’s feelings inside her, nor did she bother to question whether those feelings were good.

— Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves

[litteraeignotae]

[cor-ardens-archive]

Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

The early Christopher Lee is a freeing alternative to Lugosi. There is nothing foreign in his line readings: he rattles through the familiar speeches with brisk, British efficiency, making them as suitable for a London corporation as for a Transylvanian fortress. Lee's castle is spacious and modem, full of expensive furniture, abounding in sinuous columns and candelabra, its colorful rooms have just been painted; even its crypt ls sparkling. Anyone in the Hammer target audience would covet this art deco home, a pointed contrast to Lugosi's unlivable mausoieum. Lee's decor announces his allegiance to a sleek future, not a dusty past; his Castle Dracula is a streamlined respite from the suffocating clutter of the virtuous family's Victorian home. Before Van Helsing throws his curtains open, Lee himself has let the light in on a timid, claustrophobic domesticity.

Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach