Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures | Angelica Michelis (Essay Date September 2003)
ANGELICA MICHELIS (ESSAY DATE SEPTEMBER 2003)
SOURCE: Michelis, Angelica. “‘Dirty Mama’: Horror, Vampires, and the Maternal in Late Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction.” Critical Survey 15, no. 3 (September 2003): 5-22.
In the following essay, Michelis examines Sheridan Le Fanu’s symbolic treatment of mother and vampire in his short story “Carmilla,” and its connection to anxiety and the theories of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein.
Introduction
Similar to vampires preying on their unsuspecting victims only to sink their teeth into them so they will have to enter that haunted sphere where the past can never be put to rest, psychoanalytic criticism has been marauding gothic literature which by now has become one of its prime fields of critical activity. As Leslie Hill has pointed out so aptly:
Regarding the relations between analysis and literature, the result is not...
[The entire page is 10545 words long]
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