Supernatural and Modes of Sexual Deviance - Essay Example

Title Author Institution Analysis of how the supernatural is used to figure modes of sexual deviance in Lady Audley’s Secret and Carmilla. O'Malley (2006) argues that different types of experts in the 19th century in Europe, such as parents, teachers, physicians and scientists were deeply involved in the location and identification of deviant sexualities. Authors may have been going by the same persuasion since books have been written on this theme. Carmillar and Lady Audley’s Secret are two texts authored by Sheridan Le Fanu and Elizabeth Braddon respectively. Both the texts have sexual deviance as a major theme exposed through the acts and power of evil supernatural forces (Maunder and Moore 2004). In Carmilla, Le Fanu shows how vampires engage in unacceptable sexual practices with people. An example is the relationship that Carmilla has with Laura. It is extremely lesbian because they are all women. Braddon has many displays of sexual deviance where evil manipulates people to engage in unnatural sexual relationships. An example is Robert’s homosexual lifestyle (Matus 1995). The book revolves a round the deviance in the catholic religion, sexual habits and their connection to the culture of the 19th century. This essay focuses on analyzing the way in which the supernatural is used top figure modes of sexual deviance in the two texts namely; Lady Audley’s secret and Carmilla. In Joseph Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Carmilla’s relationship with Laura goes beyond the normal levels of intimacy accepted for two women in heterosexual relationships in the 19th century. Carmilla is too demanding in the type of friendship she wants that Laura is left to wonder if she is a man disguising himself in order to have a better chance of wooing her. The vampire in Le Fanu’s story is a monster common in 19th century tales (Bernstein 1997). The vampire has connections to an abnormal sexual nature, sexual desires and sexual emotions. The story makes use of sexual nature and desires to create a link with the sexual nature and the dread for vampires. In Lady Audley’s the secret, when Robert sees Clara, he says that she is like George. Robert says of Clara that “she was very handsome” and that “she had brown eyes like Georges.” Roberts displays his homosexual tendencies by associating with George. He thinks that Clara’s companionship to him would just be a shadow of what George provides. In the novel, religion is shown as deviance or a world view appearing in a monstrous form (Cohen 1996). When Laura meets Carmilla, she gets an experience of Carmilla’s homoerotic activities. In Le Fanu’s Carmilla, he describes a vampire attack with these words, “I was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep” (Le Fanu 2010). Laura says of Carmilla that "holding me close in her pretty arms" she whispered in her ear. This can possibly happen because they show unacceptable practices of sexual deviance. In Lady Audley’s the secret, the non conformity in matters of sex is not associated with Lady Audley alone. Robert also talks about being attracted to his aunt in an incestuous manner. He also has a sexual relationship with George. Robert refuses to get married to Alicia because he prefers George (Braddon, 2006). Attraction to an aunt means that there are unnatural and deviant sexual thoughts and activities being entertained between the two. Robert and George have homosexual behaviors and at the same time Robert is attracted to his aunt. This is an evil mix up and confusion that shows the deviance and corruption in the novel as far as sexual relations are concerned. In Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, there is a display of sexuality and feeding at the same time. Death results from the bite of the vampire although it is also used to show orgasm. In this story the body being consumed and the one consuming are all female. The vampire is a supernatural being that derives pleasure from unnatural sexual activities and advances. Carmilla informs Laura, “I live in your warm life, and you shall die–die, sweetly die–into mine.” The vampire devours her sexual partners and kills them through a loving but cruel bite that begins as a kiss (Gilbert, 2011). There is a unity between the food and sex appetites since they are expressed with the mouth that the vampire uses to kiss and bite. In Lady Audley’s the secret, Robert says that he feels like the hero in a French novel because he is starting to have romantic feelings towards his aunt. The author describes Lucy Audley in the novel as a having some erotic fascination. This brings attraction to a kind of evil. Her power to fascinate with sexual intentions is strong and goes beyond human understanding. Le Fanu exposes the ways through which the vampire engages in sexual deviance by describing the dream through which the vampire targets Laura’s lips. Carmilla is on her knees suggesting that she is engaging in lesbian sexual practices. By fetisishing the mouth, the vampire is painted as involved with devouring people by way of sexual deviance and eating (Kyle 1998). The supernatural creature in the image of the vampire is also involved in non maternal reproduction as “the vampire lay in one of the most handsome rooms in the schloss.” The breast is made to be a sexual organ instead of being used for breast feeding. Carmilla draws blood from the chest of the victim and in this acts she combines death, sex and feeding (O'Malley 2006). The bites of the vampire feel death like but they give sexual pleasure as well. There is a possibility that the vampire’s victim feels that the bite is pleasurable because the resulting unconsciousness and strangulation show that there is sexual climax and death altogether. When Laura gets the bite from Carmilla she experiences a faster heart beat with a rising and falling heart beat which gives way to strangulation that results into a strong convulsion before she becomes unconscious (Kyle 1998). In Lady Audley’s the secret, Lady Audley is asexual and her sexuality is gothic, perverse and darkened. This can be deciphered from the symbol of the withering hot house flowers when “Robert and George penetrate her inner room.” The penetration rhetoric is meant to be erotic with some sexual connotation. Another symbol for this is the dank well that she says is dry although it has “green slime and black muck.” Feminity is seen in the novel as a kind of monster (Schipper 2002). The reproduction method in which life is drained away from a victim instead of life being given is shown in the stone imagery. The vampire stands “motionless more than a stone block.” She produces nothing and starves herself of normal nourishment but insists on feeding on others to kill them (Gladwell 1999). The reproduction of the vampire is seen through Carmilla’s “bathing of the whole body with a stain of blood.” By blood being rejected from the uterus, Le Fanu shows that blood consumption is linked to sexuality. Blood is removed from the body through the bite of the vampire as we as through menstruation. Both are ways of purging the body. As the blood from menstruation is lost the vampire consumes the one obtained from the bite. After drinking the blood of the victim, the vampire ends up purging herself by forcing the victim to consume her own blood. Through this the vampire is transformed (Le Fanu 2010). To Laura, Carmilla’s voice is terrible but tender and sweet. Laura is repulsed and at the same time attracted by the sexuality of the vampire. Laura confesses her being drawn to Carmilla but being repulsed as well. Vampires, she says, are desirable, bitter, sweet and dangerous. Whatever seems to be attractive to the appetite becomes bitter and in the end the consumer is consumed. The obsession of the vampire with deviant sexual linked feeding is clear in the words of Le Fanu that the existence of the vampire is sustained by the lust for blood (Marryat, Depledge 2010). In Lady Audley’s the secret, Mrs. Graham had the magic power of fascination that charms using words or can intoxicate through smiles. Sir, Michael Audley is said to be unable to resist the fascination in the blue eyes. Deviant sexuality is seen in Alicia’s words to her cousin that if his fascination is erotic then the fascination applies to the rest as well. The magic powers in Mrs. Graham are superhuman and supernatural. This supernatural nature is used to fascinate and charm sexual targets through the eyes. After this, the possibility of engaging in deviant sexual experiences becomes irresistible. Transgressive evil desire is seen through the lesbian activities of the vampire in which the vampire rejects both food and hetero-normative desires as well. Laura remembers that she saw a beautiful face staring at her from the bed side. She says “the face was for a young beautiful lady in a kneeling position with her hands under the coverlet” (Gaul, 2007).  Laura says, “I looked at Carmilla with pleasurable wonder then I stopped whimpering.” “She caressed me with the hands as she lay beside me on the bed, and “she drew me close, smiling.” Laura describes her getting soothed and falling into a deep sleep. After falling asleep she was a wakened by a feeling of two needles sinking deep into her breast, something that made her make a loud cry. The kneeling posture that Carmilla took, and her putting of hands under the coverlet could mean that she was giving oral pleasure to Laura, and even stimulating her manually. She got exciting feelings of “pleased wonder.” The caresses give Laura a soothing and arousal to the point where Carmilla bites her in sexual consummation with her fangs sinking deep into Laura’s breast (Gaul, 2007).  The lesbian Carmilla shows that by rejecting heteronormative desires, she is not rejecting sexual appetite but only turning it to transgressing forms that do not uphold the patriarchal order. Carmilla is thin but sexualized at the same time. Through this she disrupts the conceptions of men that slender women are chaste and sexual. Carmilla shows the existence of anorexia nervosa because vampirism rhymes with anorexia. Laura sees Carmilla as having a slender and pretty figure covered by the soft silk gown and decorated with flowers to s how the 19th century conception of the female figure (Le Fanu 2010). The flowers on Carmilla’s gown symbolize sexuality since they have a close association with the female genitals and are used as euphemism for menstrual blood. Such presentations are obviously evil and sexually deviant. The flowers are also a symbol for chastity because Carmilla is a virgin since she does not participate in normal heterosexual intercourse but gets her sexual satisfaction from feeding. The dichotomy of thin for chaste, and voluptuous for sexual, is not realistic because Carmilla and the anorexic are sexual creatures with intense desires that make them to consumer others. According to Anolik (2007) the 19th century was responsible for creation of perverse sexual practices because of the unnatural being set apart. The sexuality of vampires, especially the homoerotic sexuality of vampires was deviant, perverse and transgressive in nature. Carmilla goes feeding on her fellow females and in this way she takes in the female form which also resembles her. Starving herself and eating in vampire style does not make her refuse any sexual desire but she rejects the heterosexual relationships in which the female gets consumed (Bernstein 1997). This kind of feeding which is accompanied with sexual gratification is evil and deviant. Its transgression nature was evident to all in the 19th century even as it is now. In Carmilla, Laura likens the feeling of the bite from the vampire to the “ardor of a lover.” She also gets erotic dreams in which she is kissed by warm lips. The lips kissed for long and became loving as they went to her throat. Vampiric consumption in Carmilla is autoerotic because the vampire and the one being consumed are all female. The vampire is therefore eating a form of her female self. Carmilla says to Laura that she is hers and she will be hers and they will be one for ever (Gilbert 2011). Carmilla tells Laura, “I live in your warm life, and you shall die–die, sweetly die–into mine.” Since Carmilla sees Laura as a part of her body, her lesbianism as the vampire is similar to the autoeroticism of the anorexic because in vampirism the flesh of the consumer is consumed by self. This is a metaphor for although it happens in the same way as it happens in anorexic reduction of self. This kind of relationship and view of a sexual partner is abnormal and was viewed as deviant in the 19th century. There is a lot of sexual and religious deviance in Lady Audley’s the secret. The author displays the power of the cultural link in the mid 19th century between deviance in sexual and in religious practices (Cohen 1996). Unconventional feeding habits such as the one of the vampire and self starvation show autoeroticism and deviant sexuality because they go against ordinary sexual relationships. According to the doctors in Victorian times, men and women only experienced normal desire in the context of having normal object choice. For the women, their object was the male who engaged in bourgeois heteronormativity. In Carmilla, Le Fanu shows that vampirism is against the heteronormative union. Vampiric autoeroticism involves self consumption and links self starvation to too much feeding and in the process it undermines the traditional binary of a slender beautiful woman and the voluptuous, vampire (Cohen 1996). In Lady Audley’s the secret, Lady Audley is a bigamist and impostor. Robert and Talboys are led by the daughter of Sir Michael to see the portrait that reveals who Lady Audley is. This portrait proves that she practices bigamy. Sexual transgression is central to the book and sexual deviance is obvious (Braddon 2006). Conclusion The focus of this paper is to analyze the how the supernatural has been used to figure modes of sexual deviance in the text Carmilla by Sheridan L Fanu and Lady Audley"s secret by Elizabeth Braddon. Braddon shows that evil forces can drive people to engage in unnatural practices such as homosexuality as seen in the life of Robert Bradley. Lady Audley is a bigamist and also displays acts of sexual deviance. There are many cases in the novel where sexual practices are stretched out of proportion and people engage in homosexual and other unnatural acts of sexual fulfillment. In Sheridan Lefanu’s Carmilla, a supernatural being in the form of a vampire engages in deviant sexual acts with a woman. Carmilla the vampire is lesbian and has sexual relations with Laura. Her sexual satisfaction is obtained through biting her victims and even killing them. The victim experiences sexual arousal and climax through strangulation, unconsciousness and death. Laura had such experiences with Carmilla and she describes her as desirable, sweet and bitter at the same time, but also dangerous. The two texts are therefore used by their authors to show the reader how in the 19th century, sex was regarded and what was seen to be out of natural sexual practice. References Anolik, R.B. (2007). Horrifying Sex: Essays on sexual difference in Gothic Literature. McFarland & Co. Bernstein, S. D. (1997). Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Times. University of North Carolina Press.  Braddon, E.M. (2006). Lady Audley’s Secret Easy Read Edition. Read How You Want. Cohen, W. (1996). Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction. Duke University Press. Gaul, I. (2007). Women’s Sexual Liberation from Victorian Partriarchy in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. GRIN verlag. Gilbert, P. (2011). A companion to Sensation Fiction. 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