¡Hola Todos!
La entrada que subo hoy es un poco... peculiar, solo apta para fanáticos de la Literatura en Lengua Inglesa con cierto dominio del inglés. Lo siento. Dado que ya he recibido las notas de Irlanda y algunas personas me pidieron que subiera mis trabajos de investigación para leerlos, subo este en el que he obtenido "First Class Honours". Lo mismo haré con el de Arqueología. Siento decir que ambos estarán en inglés, dado que al estudiar en Irlanda mis trabajos fueron redactados en inglés. A los que lo leáis, ¡espero que os guste! :D
Hey Everybody!
Today I'm uploading one of the research papers that I've done during my semester in Galway, Ireland, just in case you're interested in Gothic Literature.
Best regards! :D
Luna.
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Victorian Attitude towards Sexuality and Gender
Behaviors
in Three Works of Gothic Literature
During the
nineteenth century, both the question of sexuality and "appropriate"
behaviour for each gender are a recurring theme that underlies much of the plot
of many literary works. Through this strong presence of sexuality and gender
questions in almost every story, novel and tale in Gothic Literature we can
deduce how it was the historical attitude towards sex and gender behaviours.
In this paper,
we will analyse three works by three influential authors of the nineteenth
century. First, we will analyse Carmilla
(1872) by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, in order to explain the Victorian attitude
towards homosexuality and the moralizing intention of the tale. Secondly, we
fill study Dracula (1897) by Bram
Stoker. This novel was highly influenced by Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, and we will focus on the
gender behaviour and established patterns of behaviour which are broken in this
book. Finally, we will analyse The Turn
of the Screw (1898) by Henry James, in which we will focus on the effects
of sexual repression and hysteria.
Carmilla
(1872), by Joseph Sheridan
LeFanu
Joseph Sheridan
LeFanu (1814 – 1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels.
According to Begnal (28), his work ranges from supernatural horror stories to
‘suspenseful detection’. He changed the stereotype of the typical ghost story
in order to create something different and at the same time relate his stories
with his society. If Begnal is right, through Carmilla we can obtain a privileged perspective of the cultural
context in which the tale was written.
In Carmilla we are presented with the story
of Laura, a young girl who has lived all her life isolated from the world in a
castle in Styria. When Bertha Rheinfeldt, the girl who was going to visit her,
suddenly and mysteriously dies, Laura is really sorry about the loss of her
potential friend and wanting companion; then her father and she witness a
carriage accident, involving a mother and her daughter. Both survive, but the
daughter cannot continue the journey; Laura’s father offers himself as a host
for the injured girl, and Laura and the girl, called Carmilla, became friends
quickly. Nevertheless, the nature of the relationship appears ambiguous and
closer than mere friendship.
Carmilla shows
an absolute adoration towards Laura, and an absolute feeling of possession
towards her young friend: "You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are
one for ever." (Sheridan LeFanu, 264). As the relationship evolves,
Carmilla becomes more and more possessive and dependant towards Laura, and
Laura starts to feel weak and depressed, “melancholic”. The physical intimacy
between the two girls is only insinuated, but still present; “It was like the
ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and
with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek
in kisses”(Sheridan LeFanu, 264).
As Laura’s sickness evolves strange things
start to happen in the castle; Carmilla vanishes from her room; a strange
plague starts to kill people in the near villages. Then is when General
Spielsdorf, the uncle of Bertha, reveals that his niece died killed by a girl
called Millarca. Finally, Carmilla is revealed as Mircalla, Countess Karnstein,
a vampire who has been dead and sucking girl’s blood during decades using
anagrams of her name to hide her real identity (Carmilla, Millarca, Mircalla).
The body of the vampire is exhumed and destroyed by imperial command, and Laura
and his father take a year of holydays in Italy in order for her to recover her
health and forgot the trauma.
According to
Begnal (43), LeFanu is remembered mainly for this tale. It was written twenty
six years before Dracula, and
according to Glover (29), Stoker acknowledged the inspiration for his famous
story in ‘Dracula’s Guest’ (1914). Begnal (43) also writes that this story is
mentioned in almost every study about vampire love.
Which makes
this story something different from the standard horror stories is the fact
that together with the detailed depiction of monstrosity, LeFanu includes the
fatal attraction that the vampire produces in her victim:
“From
these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must
allow, I used to with to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me. Her
murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into
a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her
arms.
In
these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous
excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of
fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes
lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of
abhorrence. This I know is a paradox, but I can make no other attempt to
explain the feeling.”
Sheridan LeFanu (264)
We
can read the entire tale as an allegory of sexual behaviour. The intimate
relationship between the two girls, much closer and physically involved than a
mere friendship, is what causes Laura’s sickness and melancholy.
Laura,
a girl who has lived in isolation all her life, knows nothing about affection,
love and sex. She longs a companion and the friendship that Carmilla offers to
her, but precisely because she does not know how to deal with relationships she
is completely unable to stop the relation until is too late.
In
this tale we can find both a critic to homosexuality and sexual submission. The
vampire, Carmilla, is presented as both unnatural and attractive, and we can
read in this a critic to lesbian relationships. During the Victorian period,
homosexuality was something forbidden both by church and state, and society
used to reject these tendencies. In this story, LeFanu shows the lesbian
seducer as an unnatural and dark creature, an ancient woman of charming
appearance ready to seduce young and innocent ladies. We can consider this tale
as a warning to young girls against this kind of lesbian relationships. The
lesbian seducer is presented an unnatural and evil, and is her presence and
influence which causes Laura’s sickness.
Nevertheless
Begnal (44) writes that with this tale the objective of LeFanu was not
critiquing or attacking the homosexuality, but “the self-destruction of a total
submission to sexuality”. According to Begnal, the analogy here is between the
way in Carmilla drinks the blood of her victim until she is destroyed and
completely submitted to her, and the way in which lust destroys physically and
morally the lives of those who surrender to it. There is also a comment on the
fact that, while it is true that it can exist a recovery from this submission
to sexuality, the recovery would never be complete; the last line of the tale
is clear about this fact:
“It was long before the terror of recent events subsided;
and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous
alternations – sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the
writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; ad often from a reverie I have
started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door”.
Sheridan LeFanu (319)
We
can conclude that in this tale LeFanu is doing a critique about the way in
which his society had evolved. Through the image of the surrender to a vampire,
LeFanu critiques the fact that society is corrupted and willing to surrender to
pleasure; even to a pleasure that in that period was considered aberrant and
unnatural, as the homosexual love. According to Begnal (44), this story is both
“a study of aberrant sexuality and […] a more general critique of society”. The
failure of the society is represented by the supernatural horror, the release
of the evil. Carmilla is the representation of the deadly sin of all LeFanu’s
society, and it addresses both to the practice of homosexuality and the general
submission of society to sexuality.
Dracula (1987), by Bram Stoker
Dracula is the vampire tale par excellence in western culture.
Written in the Victorian period, this is one of the most remarkable stories of
the Gothic Literature, mixing both the supernatural presence of the vampire –
Count Dracula – and the psychology of the characters of the novel. Its
narration mixes the epistolary style with diaries, and we are presented to
several narrators who speak in first person. This provides us a better
understanding of the story and a better perspective of the events taking place
on it.
According to
Glover (47) the important point of Stoker’s works in that he men in his stories
are not the idealized and strong men which was present in the Victorian period.
In Stoker the men do cry, and the
‘Victorian masculinity’ is replaced by a more complex psychology in the male
characters.
In Dracula it is present the idea of ‘male
hysteria’. During the mid and late nineteenth century, the ‘hysteria’ was
considered a female sickness caused by a sexual dysfunction. It was
characterized for converting the psychological stress in physical symptoms or a
change in self-awareness – like, for example, selective amnesia; as in the case
of Jonathan Harker after his ‘brain fever’.
The male
characters in Dracula often succumb
to his state of hysteria, and not only Jonathan Harker after being imprisoned
in Castle Dracula. The leader of the group of vampire hunters, Professor Van
Helsing, suffers also his own hysterics twice; after discovering that the
garlic flowers which were protecting Lucy Westenra from Dracula’s attacks had
been removed from her room by her mother, Van Helsing “break[s] down” and
starts to sob with “loud, dry sobs that seemed to come from the very racking of
his heart” (Stoker, 126). After Lucy’s death, John Seward describes how Van
Helsing had “a regular fit of hysterics” (Stoker, 162) in which he “laughed and
cried together, just as a woman does” (Stoker, 163). Seward details how he had
“to be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the circumstances” (Stoker,
163). In here we found a clear reference to the way in which men were supposed
to act in this kind of situation; Seward compares the hysterical behaviour of
Van Helsing with that of a woman, from which we can deduce that in the
Victorian Period men were supposed to be strong and stoic.
This is not the
only reference to the ‘appropriate behaviour of men’ during the Victorian
Period. As we read, we find lots of references about how men were supposed to
act.
“You can do more than any
that live, and your courage is your best help. […] You are a man, and a it is a
man we want.” (114)
“A brave man’s blood is the
best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble. You’re a man, and no
mistake. Well, the devil may war against us for all he’s worth, but God sends
us men when we want them” (139)
That going down to the
vault a second time was a remarkable piece of daring After reading his account
of it I was prepared to meet a good specimen of manhood, but hardly the quiet,
business-like gentleman who came here to-day. (209)
“We men are determined—nay,
are we not pledged?—to destroy this monster; but it is no part for a woman”.
(219)
A brave man’s hand can
speak for itself; it does not even need a woman’s love to hear its music. (221)
“Brave boy. Quincey is all
man. God bless him for it”. (304)
Stoker
According to
Valente (20) this shows a clear dependence on ‘virile display’, and a clear
fear of seeing themselves as ‘feminine’. All the men in the group of vampire
hunters (Jonathan Harker, Professor Van Helsing, John Seward, Quincy Morris and
Lucy’s fianceé, Lord Godalming) act as heroes facing a great danger, but always
acting in a narcissistic way.
Nevertheless,
confronted to this obsession that all the members of the group had of proving
their own masculinity is the continuous breakdowns of the members of the group
in hysterical attacks of feminine behaviour – the most remarkable are Jonathan
Harker’s brain fever and selective amnesia, and Professor Van Helsing’s and
Lord Arthur Godalming hysterics.
Opposed to
these panic attacks and hysterics we find Mina Murray/Harker attitude.
According to Valente (124), she ‘occupies a minoritized and yet idealized
social margin, that of properly feminine fragility, dependency,
non-self-sufficiency, heteronomy un sum, which came to attract increasingly
intense cultural investments with the fin de siècle emergence of its antitype,
the New Woman’.
At the moment
in which Dracula was written the role
of women was slowly changing, and this fact threatened the status of men in
society. In this novel we can see reflected how men tried to stand in their
places of strong heroism and stoicism but had continuous breakdowns in
hysterics and panic attacks, while Mina stands in her place, and according to
Valente (125) she is showing constantly ‘her masculine intellect’. In Dracula we can see how the mentality of
an entire society was changing, moving slowly towards a culture in which men
can be scared sometimes and women can stand strong; nevertheless, the
hysterical behaviour of men was considered really controversial in the time in
which Dracula was written, and we can
see that despite the fact that Mina is strong and intelligent she voluntarily
submits to the masculine authority. The ideas about what was ‘appropriate’ or
not for both genders were changing, but it was a slow and controversial change.
The
Turn of the Screw
(1898), by Henry James
The Turn of the Screw is one of the most famous short
novels by Henry James. It can be read both as a ghost story and as a story in
which we can see the effects of psychological illnesses in the figure of the
governess. The plot line is pretty simple; a young governess arrives to a house
to take care of the children of the family, and soon she discovers that there
are two ghosts haunting the children. The story is told in first person as a
sort of diary, but soon we discover that she is not a reliable narrator.
According to
Cargill (150), nobody but the governess sees the ghosts. She is the one who sees
them and identifies them – with the help of the housekeeper. They seem to be
Peter Quint, the handsome and deceased valet and the governess’s predecessor,
Miss Jeseel. Apparently they had an affair while they both were alive.
Cargill (150)
and Slaughter (211) quote the controversial Wilson’s article The Ambiguity of Henry James: “the
governess who is made to tell the story is a neurotic case of sex repression,
and the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess”. If
this is true, that would explain why she thinks that she is seeing the ghosts
of the unfortunate couple; she rejects sex despite the fact that she wants it,
and she rejects everything related to it, considering that this couple was evil
without knowing anything about them but the words of the housekeeper.
We can also see
traces of the governess obsessive behaviour in the fact that she is completely
in love with a man who she has seen only once in her life. According to
Slaughter (212), the apparitions that the governess sees are only ‘projections
resulting from sexual desire and frustration’. She sees the first ghost, the
handsome Peter Quint, right after meeting her new master. Goddard (207)
explains that the causes of her insanity are clear in the novel: ‘the sudden
change of scene, the sudden immense responsibility placed on unaccustomed
shoulders, the shock of sudden unrequited affection’. The governess immediately
falls in love with an unknown but handsome man, and feels the necessity of
impressing him, despite the fact that is probable that she is never going to
see him again. The immense distance in social class makes the love impossible,
and this makes the governess even more frustrated.
In this novel
we can read the behaviour which was expected during the Victorian Period from
women in general, and governesses specifically. They were expected to remain
virgin and innocent until they were married, or in cases like the one of the
governess – women who were consecrated to take care of the children of other
people for the rest of their lives, without having their own children or a
husband – to remain virgin and pure. The sex was a taboo theme, and
relationships like the one between Peter Quint and Miss Jessel were strongly
rejected.
Nevertheless,
we can see how in this novel Henry James warns us about the dangers of a total
repression of sexuality. In a similar way to that of Sheridan LeFanu in Carmilla, warning about the effects of a
total submission to sexuality through a supernatural allegory, James shows us
how a girl is driven into madness because of the complete sexual repression.
We can conclude
that during the Victorian Period, both gender and sexuality were controversial
themes and a subtle obsession for all society. There was a sense of awareness
about what the complete submission to sexuality could imply for those who
surrender to lust – as we can see in Carmilla
–, but it was also known what would imply the complete repression of this
sexual desire – as we can see in The Turn
of the Screw. The theme of gender and gender behaviour was an important and
controversial thing, and deciding what behaviours would be appropriate for each
gender was also a recurrent theme. We can find male characters suffering
hysterics and at the same time trying to keep strong and stoic, as it was
supposed to the men in their time; and intelligent and independent women
submitting voluntarily to the male authority, as it was supposed to the women
in their time.
In conclusion,
we can say that during the Victorian Period the theme of sexuality was slowly
moving to a middle point between the uncontrolled sexual desire and the
complete repression of sexuality, and that the gender behaviours were being
slowly modified from the ideal of strong and stoic man and weak woman wanting
protection towards something more balanced.
Works Cited
BEGNAL, MICHAEL H., Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, 1971, Associated
University Presses, Inc. Cranbury, New Jersey (p. 28, 43, 44)
CARGILL, OSCAR, The Turn of the Screw and Alice James in
The Turn of the Screw: An Authoritative
Text Backgrounds and Sources Essays in Criticism, Edited by Robert
Kimbrough, 1966, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (p. 150)
GLOVER, DAVID, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker
and the Politics of Popular Fiction, 1996, Duke University Press (p. 29,
47)
GODDARD, HAROLD C., A Pre-Freudian Reading, in The Turn of the Screw: An Authoritative Text
Backgrounds and Sources Essays in Criticism, Edited by Robert Kimbrough,
1966, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (p. 207)
SHERIDAN LEFANU, JOSEPH, Carmilla in In a Glass Darkly, 1993, Oxford University Press (p. 264, 319)
SLAUGHTER, MARINA, Edmund Wilson and The Turn of the Screw
in The Turn of the Screw: An
Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Sources Essays in Criticism, Edited by
Robert Kimbrough, 1966, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (p. 211, 212)
STOKER, BRAM, Dracula, 2011, Oxford University Press
Inc., New York (p. 114, 126, 139, 162, 163, 209, 219, 221, 304)
VALENTE, JOSEPH, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and
the Question of Blood, 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the University of
Illinois (p. 20, 124, 125)
