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“The Weird And The Occult” In Carmilla And “The Portrait Of Roísín Dhu”, Eliza Lehman
“The Weird And The Occult” In Carmilla And “The Portrait Of Roísín Dhu”, Eliza Lehman
Senior Honors and Award-Winning Theses
This thesis brings together two Irish Gothic texts that contemplate queer intimacy and reveal similar logics of imagined Irish Catholicism. By reading Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla and Dorothy Macardle’s 1924 short story “The Portrait of Roísín Dhu” alongside Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007), this thesis examines the literary treatment of Irish Catholicism and queerness as “backward.” In both texts, the embedded narrative undermines the frame, allowing more subversive and complex themes to haunt the hopeful, nationalist frame of “The Portrait of Roísín Dhu” and the patriarchal, imperial frame of Carmilla.