Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla: Bram Stoker’s Inspiration for Dracula
“3 May. Bistritz. Left Munich at 8:35 p.m.” Abraham Stoker in this unassuming way begins his Gothic masterpiece, Dracula (The Annotated Dracula 1). Dracula has been called ‘imaginative’ and ‘original.’ , and Harry Ludlam calls it “the product of his own vivid imagination and imaginative research” (Senf 41). However, the originality of Stoker's Dracula is in doubt. By a similarity in the setting, characters and plot, in Bram Stoker’s Gothic work Dracula and the posthumously published short story “Dracula’s Guest,” Stoker is shown to have used Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic, Gothic, short story, “Carmilla”, as the basis and inspiration for Bram Stoker’s vampiric masterpiece, Dracula.
In 1897, Abraham Stoker published Dracula, a classic Gothic novel which continues to capture the hearts and imaginations of readers after nearly a century. The novel is written as a collection of journals, which are kept in a wide array of methods, letters and newspaper clippings. Dracula opens in Eastern Europe with a young solisitor named Jonathan Harker traveling to Transylvanian castle. The castle’s owner, Count Dracula, is cruel in the manner of great evil, and uses Harker to have himself safely ferried to England and its fertile hunting ground of London. Dracula soon becomes embroiled in the lives of a small group of friends who see him for the fiend that he is. These young people, aided by the aging Dr. Van Helsing vow to see Dracula destroyed, and they succeed in driving him out of England and back to his homeland. They follow hard upon and catch him just before he reaches the safety of his castle. Within sight of safety, Jonathan Harker and Quency Morris behea...
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The novel Dracula by Bram Stoker has plentiful examples of key concepts we have examined in class including: Purity and impurity, magical thinking, strong emotions such as disgust and shame, , formalization, and myth. In this essay I will summarize events that take place within the novel when the protagonists deal with Dracula and then relate these events to the key concepts to demonstrate why the characters view him as dangerous, and therefore something to be avoided completely.
This fictional character was soon to be famous, and modified for years to come into movie characters or even into cereal commercials. But the original will never be forgotten: a story of a group of friends all with the same mission, to destroy Dracula. The Count has scared many people, from critics to mere children, but if one reads between the lines, Stoker’s true message can be revealed. His personal experiences and the time period in which he lived, influenced him to write Dracula in which he communicated the universal truth that good always prevails over evil. Religion was a big part of people’s lives back in Stoker’s time.
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Vampires have been viewed with fear and fascination for centuries. Of all the vampires in literature, Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula is probably the most prominent vampire. Recently, there has been an upsurge of public interest in socially acceptable vampires, like the Cullens in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer. This essay will contrast Stoker’s Dracula with Carlisle Cullen, one of the newer vampires from the Twilight series. They will be examined in terms of their origins and how they dealt with immortality.
After analyzing The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth is the ideal vampiric figure, supporting Thomas Foster’s perspective about vampirism from his book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor. In fact, Roger Chillingworth, presents many instances of how vampires might act and appear in literature. Even though he is not a literal vampire, it does not
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Klüsener, Bea. "Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s vampire ladies as representations of Cesare Lombroso’s donna delinquente? ." Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.Germany (2010): Pg 1-12. Print.
From Transylvania to Hollywood, vampires have transformed from unfamiliar, mysterious personalities to one of the most dominant monsters in the horror genre today. Vampires are one of the oldest and most noted creatures in mythology, with many variations of them around the world. Although the most famous version is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, many variants have come before and after telling of the same legend with their own added ideas and modifications to relate to their cultures. Today, there is a multitude of literary and film works that convey and resurface peoples’ fear of vampires. As gothic works like Dracula, by Bram Stoker and Scooby-Doo! and the Legend of the Vampire directed by Scott Jeralds share certain traits reflective of the genre; These factors include setting, actions of each vampire, the initial reactions to news of them, and how their presence affects the people who live within the region the vampires inhabit.
Since the 19th Century, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has entertained its readers taking them to heights of excitement in the climax
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Le Fanu’s approach using gothic tropes is obvious here, as he uses the tabooed deviations from the sexual norm, to explicitly showcase the rise of the New Woman, chasing sexual freedom. One of the main differences between Dracula and “Carmilla” is the way each author interconnects the gothic trope of sexuality. Carmilla is portrayed as beautiful and majestic (Le Faun Chapter III). Whereas, Dracula is portrayed as a horrid, hairy and harmful looking man (Stoker Chapter II). While both Stoker and Le Fanu create creatures that both hold power over there victims, Le Fanu effectively uses Carmilla’s beauty, to portray her victims as more willing. Therefore, readers’ are lead to believe that Carmilla depends more on the act of seduction, referring to the very strong lesbian undertones. By drawing on this, Dracula is predominately a more vicious attacker. This separates Carmilla from her male counterparts as Carmilla is seducing victims in a very literal sense, opposed to Dracula whose victims are just under his trance. Therefore, what has already been alluded to in Carmilla’s case, becomes explicit in Stoker’s Dracula. This is apparent during Johnathan being tempted and repelled (Stoker Chapter III) by the three vampires. However, Dracula focuses mainly on facets of male homosexuality and male hegemony, and
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Dracula, the most famous vampire of all time, which readers were first introduced to by Irish author Bram Stoker in 1897 with his novel Dracula, which tells the story of the mysterious person named Count Dracula (Stoker). The book is an outstanding masterpiece of work, which is why it has been a prototype for various movie releases over the decades. Whenever a film director decides to make a movie on behalf of a novel the hope is that the characters concur from the novel to the movie, which leads to the exploration of the resemblances and modifications between the characters in Dracula the novel by Bram Stoker and Bram Stoker’s Dracula 1992 movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola.