The Female Power of Carmilla essays

The Female Power of Carmilla essays The Female Power of Carmilla The short story Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu must have been an extremely controversial piece when it was first published. The topics in Le Fanus tale were not ones that appeared very often in the literature of the period in which it was written, and even if some writers did dare to tackle similar topics they never made it as obvious as Le Fanu did in this very sexual vampire tale. The Victorian period, which is the period in which Carmilla was first published, was very sexually repressed and most, so called, erotic scenes that were present in novels and prose at that time were extremely subtle and almost never involved vivid descriptions of the female form. Most descriptions consisted of the face and the beauty of a womans neck or hands because that was really the only skin that women of that time would have exposed when out in public. Le Fanu did not adhere to that style though, instead he chose to push the envelope as far as he possibly could and free his readers, for aw hile anyways, from the sexual repression that society had forced on them. Also, by bringing to light certain topics like lesbianism, Le Fanu was able to toy with societies ideas of gender and the roles that the different sexes were thought to observe. He chose to change the image of the stereotypical woman, which appeared in most of the works of that time, and provide his female characters with more stability than the other writers of the Victorian period did. He also chose to detract a lot of the strength that usually accompanied the male characters in Victorian literature, deciding the men in his story would not always have absolute control over his female characters. This concept went against the belief of the time that women were always submissive to the masculinity of men. Instead of providing the men of his story with this strength he chose to instill these qualities in C...