Perhaps one of the biggest things to consider in relation to this argument is Carmilla’s ultimate hold over Laura and what that implies for Laura’s identity. The final lines of the novella discuss how the temptation to succumb to pleasure still haunts Laura, who, despite the passage of time, remains haunted by the memory of Carmilla: “[To] this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alterations– sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl…and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door” (ch.16). At this stage, arguing that Laura was simply under the vampire’s hypnotizing effect is moot seeing as Carmilla is extricated by the end of the novella. She no longer Blank is suggesting that Laura is repressing and projecting her experiences with Carmilla. This to say that the gaps are left for the reader to fill in. It is part of the attraction of Sheridan’s novella Carmilla to decide for oneself whether Laura does or does not have inherent homosexual desires. There is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that Carmilla provided a sexual awakening in Laura that would have otherwise gone unexplored due to her ignorance of homosexuality imposed on her by societal influence. She passes much of her time with women, which is to say that her experiences with women begin at one end of the spectrum. She confides in her female companions. Following her experiences with Carmilla one can then conclude that this tendency is merely introduced to her via Carmilla; Carmilla introduces her to who she really is, though regardless of her introduction to this sexuality she is restricted from pursuing this path via societal medication she overtly disliked. The 21st century is largely categorized by its progressive views; consider how Laura would fit into this society. No longer does there need to be a mediator for discussing homosexuality. The vampire was merely a tool for Sheridan Le Fanu to explore the implications of a denied sexuality in a world where homoerotic elements in literature would have been
The weight of the final product was 0.979 grams. A nucleophile is an atom or molecule that wants to donate a pair of electrons. An electrophile is an atom or molecule that wants to accept a pair of electrons. In this reaction, the carboxylic acid (m-Toluic acid), is converted into an acyl chlorosulfite intermediate. The chlorosulfite intermediate reacts with a HCL. This yields an acid chloride (m-Toluyl chloride). Then diethylamine reacts with the acid chloride and this yields N,N-Diethyl-m-Toluamide.
“Dracula, in one aspect, is a novel about the types of Victorian women and the representation of them in Victorian English society” (Humphrey). Through Mina, Lucy and the daughters of Dracula, Stoker symbolizes three different types of woman: the pure, the tempted and the impure. “Although Mina and Lucy possess similar qualities there is striking difference between the two” (Humphrey). Mina is the ideal 19th century Victorian woman; she is chaste, loyal and intelligent. On the other hand, Lucy’s ideal Victorian characteristics began to fade as she transformed from human to vampire and eventually those characteristics disappeared altogether. Lucy no longer embodied the Victorian woman and instead, “the swe...
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
In Case's article “Tasting the Original Apple,” it talks about the role that now the new woman has and how it comes into conflict with how men react towards it as stated “Dracula is often read as a largely reactionary response to the threat of autonomous female sexuality posed by the phenomenon of the "New Woman," with its anxieties about female sexuality being most clearly visible in Lucy Westenra's story. Particularly once she has been "vamped," Lucy's sexual assertiveness seems to link her with the New Woman. But Lucy's actions as a vampire, like those of the "awful women" (42) Jonathan encounters at Dracula's castle, perhaps owe less to the specific threat posed by the New Woman's insistence on sexual autonomy than to the ambivalences built into the model of Victorian womanhood from the start. Since ideal womanhood (and the ground of male desire) was characterized by a combination of total sexual purity and at least the potential for passionate devotion to a man, this model...
Dracula accentuates the lust for sexuality through the main characters by contrasting it with the fears of the feminine sexuality during the Victorian period. In Victorian society, according to Dr.William Acton, a doctor during the Victorian period argued that a woman was either labelled as innocent and pure, or a wife and mother. If a woman was unable to fit in these precincts, consequently as a result she would be disdained and unfit for society and be classified as a whore (Acton, 180). The categorizing of woman is projected through the “uses the characters of Lucy and Mina as examples of the Victorian ideal of a proper woman, and the “weird sisters” as an example of women who are as bold as to ignore cultural boundaries of sexuality and societal constraints” according to Andrew Crockett from the UC Santa Barbara department of English (Andrew Cro...
Laura unable to survive in the outside world - retreating into their apartment and her glass collection and victrola. There is one specific time when she appears to be progressing when Jim is there and she is feeling comfortable with being around him. This stands out because in all other scenes of the play Laura has never been able to even consider conversation with a "Gentleman Caller."
In contrast to the commonality of sex in Diaz’s Dominican world, sex in Kindred is secretive, violent, and has a negative connotation attached due to the culture norms in the early 19th century. Even though Rufus supposedly loves Alice, he repeatedly rapes her because “There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one” (124 Butler). Rufus uses sex as a form of violence against women, which could have been influenced by his father’s rape relationships with other slave women, during Rufus’s childhood. As a powerful white man Rufus is able to control Alice and since she is a slave and a woman, she is unable to refuse him, which is evidence to suggest women’s low status. Another example of the dark, violent depiction of sex in Kindred is the almost rape between Dana and the policeman. Her fear of rape allowed her to return home, which indicates that sex is a form of violence in this setting. Dana’s narration of the event signifies the negative depiction of sex and violence expressed in a black woman’s life in the early 19th
This essay will attempt to discuss the two gothic tales ‘Carmilla’ and ‘Dracula’ in relation to cultural contexts in which they exist as being presented to the reader through the gender behaviour and sexuality that is portrayed through the texts. Vampire stories always seem to involve some aspect of sexuality and power.
She is a shy, quiet girl who keeps herself at a distance. She loves glass figurines and prides herself on them. To her brother, she is seen as crippled because she cannot walk well and is socially awkward. This results in Laura’s reality being different than the rest of the family’s because she closes herself off into a space where it is only her. Amanda wants the best for Laura, for her to have a husband or finish business school, because she wants Laura to get out of the house and get living. However, Laura does not want to live in that world, and it is shown when she skipped her business classes and through her interaction with Jim, her high school crush. Jim is the only person who is able to take Laura out of her own weird reality, and bring her into the reality of an ordinary girl. Laura breaks through her reality when she talks about the unicorn horn that Jim broke off her glass figurine, she tells Jim that, “It doesn’t matter. . . . [smiling] I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish!” (Williams, 2009). Therefore, Laura being with Jim makes her feel a little less odd. This brings Laura out of her own reality for a bit, but then she retreats back into it when she finds out that Jim is engaged to someone else right after he kisses her. He broke her free of her own reality for a bit, just like how he broke the horn off of the
It is said in the character description that Laura “[has] failed to establish contact with reality” (Glass 83). This illustrates how Laura is childlike and naive, in that, Williams literally says that she has not established contact with reality. Laura is naive because she refuses to face life and all that comes with it, she is also childlike because she has sheltered herself and is unaware of her surroundings much as a child would be. Early on in the play the reader discovers that Laura had affections towards Jim when they were in high school. This, of course, will prove to be part of Jim’s easy manipulation of Laura. Shortly after this discovery, Laura’s gentleman caller, Jim, is invited over for dinner with the family. After having completed their evening meal, Laura and Jim go to another room and being
I believe she is a vampire because they bolt down the coffin hoping she will not escaped. As some days pass his mental condition worsens...
Vampires have been a popular figure in literary works for almost 200 years; from John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005), the figure of the vampire has changed and developed over time but still remains popular and recognisable throughout literary history. The figure of the vampire is often used to represent ‘the other’, or as a manifestation of social anxieties at the time of writing. This is why it is interesting to study the how the tropes found within vampire fiction differ between texts, and the reasons behind these differences or transformations in the figure of the vampire. I will look at a range of texts to study how sexuality
When he asks what she gives it to him for, she replies, “A—souvenir.” Then she hands it to him, almost as if to show him that he had shattered her unique beauty. This incident changed her in the way that a piece of her innocence that made her so different is now gone. She is still beautiful and fragile like the menagerie, but just as she gives a piece of her collection to Jim, she also gives him a piece of her heart that she would never be able to regain. Laura and her menagerie are both at risk of being crushed when exposed to the uncaring reality of the world.
...look" for the first time in her life. The Victorian element of the 1800s has been brought down to a more reasonable level through Lizzie. The wild feminist in Laura has been tamed by the life threatening experience and the overpowering devotion of her sister.
Following Laura's submission to her desires, the young girl loses all orientation to the domestic sphere, which is exemplified by her blatant neglect of her duties. Additionally, Laura begins to physically deteriorate, as "her hair grew thin and gray" and essentially becomes very reminiscent of a corpse The process of restoring the character to her former pure and virginal self is initiated by a fellow woman, her sister Lizzie. Thus, contrary to Tennyson's implication that women require the protection of a man, Rossetti's parable espouses the idea that a woman's savior can indeed be a member of the sex. Lizzie's mission to prevent her sister from sharing the same fate as the deceased Jeanie, despite its clear risks, is motivated by familial affection as opposed to the circumstances in The Lady of Shallot, which suggests that the "protection" rendered by the series of illusions, symbolic of a man's meditation of reality, is merely a stipulation of the Lady's "curse" (42; 1205) and not the manifestation of genuine