Abstract
There is little surviving documentary evidence that J.S. Le Fanu showed any enthusiasm for the Eastern Question. While articles from the era of his tenancy as owner and editor of Dublin University Magazine (1861–69), show that he may have harboured an interest in Irish politics, particularly from July 1867 onwards,1 no references to Hungary, the Austrian Empire or the Ottomans survive which might provide us with an insight into his views on events in Eastern Europe and beyond. The Austro-Hungarian setting for his vampire story Carmilla can, therefore, easily be dismissed as no more than a convenient one for a supernatural tale exploring lesbian sexuality (made necessary by the increasing redundancy of Catholic Italy and Spain as sites for the marvellous and superstitious), or else as a projection of his enduring interest with his own Irish situation. Certainly few scholars have paid attention to the geography or contemporary politics of the region in which the story is set (Styria), not even the group of Slovenian scholars like Dolar and Copjec who themselves hail from close to the unfortunate Laura’s castle.2
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Notes
McCormack, W. J., Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 221. McCormack lists the small number of political articles in the Dublin University Magazine written between 1867 and 1869, some of which may have been written by Le Fanu, although none with any certainty. In his letters to his cousin the Marquis of Dufferin, Le Fanu details his complaint about the Tory Brewster (21 January 1868) who became Chancellor, and used Le Fanu’s journalism to promote himself before dropping his friend, and was now accusing Le Fanu of having militated against him in the Dublin Evening Mail. At the end of the year (7 December 1868), Le Fanu is complaining to his illustrious cousin about the possibility of there being a Catholic Chancellor in Ireland, because he felt that it would prove divisive at that particular time. He never broaches foreign politics in the 12 letters to Lord Dufferin, now collected at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland.
Copjec, Joan, ‘Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety’, October, 58 (1991), pp. 25–43, at p. 36. Dolar, Mladen, ‘“I shall be with you on your Wedding Night”: Lacan and the Uncanny’, October, 58 (1991), 5–23.
Calmet, Augustin, The Phantom World: Or, the Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions etc, ed. and trans. Rev. Henry Christmas, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1850), II 6.
As in J. M. Rymer’s Vamey, the Vampyre; Or, the Feast of Blood (London: E. Lloyd, 1845–47), which is set in England, or Planche’s The Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles. A Romantic Melodrama in two Acts, Preceded by an Introductory Vision (London,1820) which is set in the Orkneys.
Bhalla, Alok, Politics ofAtrocity and Lust, (New Delhi: Sterling, 1989), p. 30.
Foster, Roy, ‘Protestant Magic: W.B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History’, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen Lane, 1993), pp. 212–32, at p. 220.
Le Fanu, J. S., Uncle Silas, ed. W. J. McCormack with the assistance of Andrew Swarbrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. xviii–xix.
Sage, Victor, Le Fanu’s Gothic (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 199. In earlier novels like The Cock and the Anchor (1845), Le Fanu had referred to the cormpt settlement era, as Sage successfully shows (Sage, Le Fanu’s Gothic, pp. 31–7).
Leger, Louis, A History of Austro-Hungary from the Earliest Time to the Year 1889, trans. from the French by Mrs Birkbeck Hill (London: Rivingtons, 1889), p. 315.
Szabad, Emeric, Hungary: Past and Present: Embracing its History from the Magyar Conquest to the Present Time (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1854), pp. 126–7.
Jelavich, Barbara, Modern Austria: Empire and Republic, 1800–1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 21–3.
Pribram, Alfred Francis, Austria-Hungary and Great Britain, 1908–1914, trans. Ian F. D. Morrow (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 39–41.
Judd, Dennis, Palmerston (London: Weidenfield and Nicholas, 1975), pp. 85 and 140.
Le Fanu, J. S., In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 318.
Copjec, Joan, ‘Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety’, October, 58 (1991), pp. 25–43, at p. 36.
Marigny, Jean, Vampires (London and Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 37.
Baring-Gould, Sabine, The Book of Were-wolves (London: Senate, 1995), p. 139.
Nethercott, Arthur H., ‘Coleridge’s “Christabel” and Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” Modern Philology, 147 (1949), 32–8. See also Silvani, Giovanna, Analisi di un Racconto Gotico: Camilla di J. S. Le Fanu, Quaderni dell’instituto di Lingue e Letterature Germaniche no. 3, Universita degli studi di Parma (Roma: Bulzoni, 1984), p. 31.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), pp. 224 and 267.
Piper, Horatio Walter, The Singing of Mount Abora: Coleridge’s Use of Biblical Imagery and Natural Symbolism in Poetry and Philosophy (Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987), p. 77.
Hall, Captain Basil, Schloss Hainfeld; or, a Winter in Lower Styria (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1836), pp. 1–3.
One such is J. G. Kohl’s Austria, Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Bohemia, and the Danube; Galicia, Styria, Moravia, Bukovina and the Military Frontier (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843). This book centres, like most others, on Styria’s many mines and the peasant customs rather than describing the deserted castles and dark gloomy forests which find their way into Le Fanu’s work.
Mason, Diane, The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture (Bath Spa University College: Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, 2003), p. 127.
Gilman, Sander L., Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Mauner, Georges, Manet: Peintre-Philosophe A Study of the Painter’s Themes (University Park and London: Penn State University Press, 1975), p. 96.
A later critic of Manet, Theodore Bodkin, is cited as arguing that Baudelaire, with whom Manet corresponded about his painting, understood the cat to be the familiar of a witch — Bodkin, Theodore, ‘Manet, Dumas, Goya, and Titian’ (letter), Burlington Magazine 50 (1927), pp. 166–7. Cited in Mauner, Manet, p. 94.
The Dark Blue, ed. John C. Freund, 4 vols (London: British and Colonial Publishing Co., 1870–73), II (March–August 1872), v.
He had served in the Liberal government of the 1840s and attempted unsuccessfully to bring relief to the Irish peasants against the wishes of Trevelyan. Nevertheless, he still supported the continued establishment of the Church of Ireland and opposed the setting up of a Catholic university — Ziegler, Paul, Palmerston (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 125.
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© 2006 Matthew Gibson
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Gibson, M. (2006). J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich (1867). In: Dracula and the Eastern Question. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627680_3
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