#published journal article

[gothicmonsters]

—  Jaquelin Elliott, “This is my Becoming: Transformation, Hybridity, and the Monstrous in NBC's Hannibal”

[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’"

[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]

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”