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Transgressive Desire and the Queer Vampire
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This paper aims to examine how the representative motif of vampire of the Gothic has been strategically deployed to introduce transgressive desire and particularly the so-called “unspeakable” desire of homoeroticism through the 19th century in a subtle and covert way, focusing on Polidori’s “The Vampyre, a Tale” and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Taken together, the queer vampires in the Gothic offer themselves as the location of transgression in Victorian culture, and therefore can be an excellent vehicle to interrogate the ideas of what is “normal” and subvert the hegemonic construction of Victorian culture in terms of class, sexuality, gender, nation or race. The sudden advent of Lord Ruthven or Carmilla―the eponymous hero and heroine of the novel respectively―leads to unhinge the life of Mr. Aubrey, one of ordinary English gentlemen or Laura, a typical English maiden unless she has a Styrian-born mother, from its normal course of love and marriage based on heteronormativity. Both Mr. Aubrey and Laura are strangely “drawn” towards that same-sex queer vampire and both of them die without successfully performing their duties as an English subject. For instance, Laura in her late twenties, who has never shown interests in going to a ball or getting married, is still missing her female friend Carmilla at the end of the narrative. She dies single without producing any male inheritor, which implies she tacitly resists the idea of idealistic womanhood as a child breeder. The queer vampire pictured respectively in the works either simply disappears as is the case of Lord Ruthven or goes through the traditional proceeding of its execution as is the case of Carmilla. But they neither disappear nor are punished before they succeed in vamping and, in so doing, infecting the apparently innocent disciples like Mr. Aubrey and Laura with vampirism. Laura, in particular, performs the unfeminine and transgressive act of writing and keeps spreading her unconventional experience of homoerotic desire not only to her female recipient of her letter but also to all the readers of the present time through her writing activity.
Abstract
This paper aims to examine how the representative motif of vampire of the Gothic has been strategically deployed to introduce transgressive desire and particularly the so-called “unspeakable” desire of homoeroticism through the 19th century in a subtle and covert way, focusing on Polidori’s “The Vampyre, a Tale” and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Taken together, the queer vampires in the Gothic offer themselves as the location of transgression in Victorian culture, and therefore can be an excellent vehicle to interrogate the ideas of what is “normal” and subvert the hegemonic construction of Victorian culture in terms of class, sexuality, gender, nation or race. The sudden advent of Lord Ruthven or Carmilla―the eponymous hero and heroine of the novel respectively―leads to unhinge the life of Mr. Aubrey, one of ordinary English gentlemen or Laura, a typical English maiden unless she has a Styrian-born mother, from its normal course of love and marriage based on heteronormativity. Both Mr. Aubrey and Laura are strangely “drawn” towards that same-sex queer vampire and both of them die without successfully performing their duties as an English subject. For instance, Laura in her late twenties, who has never shown interests in going to a ball or getting married, is still missing her female friend Carmilla at the end of the narrative. She dies single without producing any male inheritor, which implies she tacitly resists the idea of idealistic womanhood as a child breeder. The queer vampire pictured respectively in the works either simply disappears as is the case of Lord Ruthven or goes through the traditional proceeding of its execution as is the case of Carmilla. But they neither disappear nor are punished before they succeed in vamping and, in so doing, infecting the apparently innocent disciples like Mr. Aubrey and Laura with vampirism. Laura, in particular, performs the unfeminine and transgressive act of writing and keeps spreading her unconventional experience of homoerotic desire not only to her female recipient of her letter but also to all the readers of the present time through her writing activity.
참고문헌 (22)
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