Mr. Rockhill wrote:
Quote:
> * and widely published academics specializing in
> Gothic and Victorian literature such as Dr.
> William Veeder of the University of Chicago
> (“‘Carmilla’: The Arts of Repression,†in
> GOTHIC: CRITICAL CONCEPTS IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL
> STUDIES, ed. Fred Botting and Dale Townshend )
Since you were so offended by my dismissal of your expert opinions, I dug up a copy of Mr. Veeder's seminal article, to make sure I was not being unfair to it, and to see if it had anything to counter my views. I'm afraid it was even worse than I remembered. Mr. Veeder's thesis is that Le Fanu's message is that Laura is a sexually-repressed lesbian. He bases this on a quote where Laura muses that memories are often dim when "passions" are "wildly and terribly aroused". He interprets this, more or less, as an admission that she has trouble remembering those times she got extremely horny (presumably with Carmilla); and seems to vaguely associate this idea in his mind with Freud's theories of psychological repression (with which however it which hardly fits), hence the title of the article.
So the entire article is based on a mistake. "Passions" and "aroused" had no erotic connotations in 1873. Laura was merely saying that terrible and traumatic experiences can interfere with memory. Freud, moreoever, was just 17 years old in 1873, so Le Fanu had never been exposed to his bizarre ideas and could hardly have been writing a story inspired by them. Moreover, if Laura is so sexually repressed, why is she (in Veeder's interpretation) talking openly about how wildly and terribly horny she gets?
Veeder then declares Laura to be an unreliable narrator, and spends the rest of the article hammering square pegs into round holes, dismissing what the text tells us as unreliable, and replacing it with his own fantasies. One of these fantasies is that a 6 year old girl attacked by a sadistic abuser, can't be trusted when she screams and cries in fear and anguish, because deep down she really wants it. "We must recognize", he writes, "that young Laura feels fright and shrieks out not at the advent or the acts of Carmilla, but at her vanishing." I don't know where this fantasy comes from, but it has no reasonable basis in Le Fanu's text. Read chapter 1, where the incident occurs, and judge for yourself.
Is this really an opinion in favor of which I should defer my own judgment?
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 4 May 17 | 04:40PM by Platypus.