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Carmen Maria Machado's Carmilla - Coggle Diagram
Carmen Maria Machado's
Carmilla
goals: intro to victorian lit, victorian sex, and reading Carmilla
Vampire texts: classed society, rich folks, evil, conniving, blood thirsty, overly sexual
dangers of lust, desire, a monstrous sexual appetite
Joi in chat: "Limiting what people did with their bodies to reproductive means, in turn tends to create more "deviance" than prevent it"
How does Maria Machado introduce the text:
calls out LeFanu's edition for reproducing shame through erasure and censure: "i wished this edition to bear LeFanu's shame. I wish the reader to come to the book with a complete understanding of its inadequecy" (viii); it's fun, but it highlights the gaps/erasure;
Joi' in chat: "Look how dumb he looks trying to act like there wasn't a tragic love story here"
reminds us of queer histories and queer presents
"The ecclesiastics and doctors and fathers and uncles and barons and vampire hunters look less like well-intentioned protectors against a supernatural evil; their own accounts become highly suspect” (vi) --why reshift the perspective here? WHat's lost/what's gained in undercutting this form of knowledge production? If we shift perspective, we shift who is "bad" and how they MAKE bad guys bad; shifts in leadership and concepts of "what's best"
"unrepentant predator or ambitious proto-feminist" (vii); how we tell the stories and which perspectives we center
"inserting one's self into what is static and unchaning"--it's a little reader-response theory, and these frame devices allow for recontextualization sexual politics; it also is about intimacy;
How does
Carmilla
think through pleasure and intimacy?
Carmilla is affectionate (Chloe in in chat) not scary: vey tactile; emphasis on the lips (29)--super desirous
weakness as gateway to manipulation
"We Compare Notes" is a moment for Carmilla to call the assault a "shared experience"
“Her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear and soothed my resistance into a trance” (35) does sound like she’s being preyed on and less like she’s exploring her sexuality
--Cayley
yooo and the deeply ironic "“Your looks won me” making it seem like Laura has the power over carmillas experience (Brittany in chat)
""fellow citizens of a shared 'dream-city'" (v) Carmen Maria Machado frames Laura and Carmilla as dream-city?
Joi': If you were less pretty I think I should be very much afraid of you, but being as you are, and you and I both so young, I feel only that I have made your acquaintance twelve years ago and have already a right to your intimacy" -Carmilla pg. 11 in my version
red flag: a "right" to the body; "
paradox of "adoration and abhorrence" (36); if we have thoughts about what love
should
be, it's hard and weird and scary when desire doesn't fit that; it's a moment of the literary history of the closet?
"I live in your warm life, and you shall die--die, sweetly die--into mine" (35)--predatory behavor, grooming, questions
the history of giving an account of oneself and making sense of sexuality through self-narration
the edition as the edition: the use of footnotes and the use of illustrations
What's "queer" about this novel so far?
Camilla's mood swings (we don't get stability here)
Paloma: it seems that knowledge production/information traffics between men, and across medical,social, and domestic language/space, we are infantalizing women