Presentation for Victorian Gothic course.

1. Deadly Desires:
The Uncanny, The Abject, and Gender
in “Carmilla”
Megan K. Mize

2. The Uncanny & The Abject
In the Gothic Genre
The Uncanny: Sigmund Freud
•
Connects the “uncanny” to aesthetics, studying what causes sensations of anxiety.
•
Aesthetics are a sublimated reflection of our repressed instincts and impulses.
•
The uncanny is that which troubles us by pointing us towards what is known and
familiar, but forgotten.
•
We experience the uncanny in adulthood because it reminds us of earlier psychic stages,
of aspects of our unconscious life, or of even the primitive human experience.
•
“They are a harking-back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding
feeling, a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from
the external world and from other people.”

3. The Uncanny & The Abject
In the Gothic Genre
The Abject: Julia Kristeva
•
The “abject” refers to the human anxiety caused by the possible loss of the
distinction between subject/ object or between self/ other.
•
That which we produce, then cast away.
•
"What disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions,
rules" (Powers 4)
•
The abject serves the dual purpose of representing the threat of destabilizing
meaning and motivating our reaction: a reestablishment of our borders.
•
Hence, in literature, the abject serves as catharsis: "an impure process that protects
from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it" (Powers 29 ).

4. Interpreting “Carmilla”
Repressed Desire
Incest & Molestation
Threat of Female
Homosexuality
Female Agency
Nationalism & Anxiety
Metacommentary on the
Genre

5. Meanwhile, Who’s
in Laura’s room... there?!
“The first occurrence in my
The Intersection of existence which produced a
terrible impression upon my
the Uncanny & mind, which, in fact, never
Gender in Carmilla has been effaced, was one of
the very earliest incidents of
my life which I can

6. The Abject &
Carmilla
“Now the truth is, I
felt rather
unaccountably
towards the beautiful
stranger. I did feel,
as she said, ‘drawn
towards her,’ but
there was also
something of
repulsion. In this
ambiguous feeling,
however, the sense of

7. The Role of Male Desire
Creates Female
Monster
Preserves the Abject
Object (Instability)
Destroys the Abject
Object

8. Visual Rhetoric Within the Text
Laura’s Narrative Brings to Light what would be Concealed

9. Bibliography
Adriano, Joseph. "'Our Dual
Existence': Loving and Dying in Le
Fanu's Carmilla"
Davis, Michael."Gothic's Enigmatic
Signifier: The Case of J. Sheridan Le
Fanu's Carmilla."
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny"
Kristeva, Julia. "Powers of Horror."
Major, Adrienne Antrim. "Other Love:
Le Fanu's Carmilla as Lesbian Gothic."
Nethercot, Arthur. "Coleridge's
Christabel and Le Fanu's Carmilla."
Singnorotti, Elizabeth. "Repossessing
the Body: Transgressive Desire in
Carmilla and Dracula."
Images by Sean Phillips, retrieved from
http://surebeatsworking.blogspot.com/