Entre as sombras: o vampirismo em personagens femininas na literatura de horror.

Abstract

This research focuses on the analysis of female characters in texts that inaugurated the vampire figure in Gothic Literature, understood as one of the degrees of terror in Horror Literature, as conceptualized by França (2008). Our objective is to analyze how female vampiric figures are presented in the selected corpus, based on their comparison. For this purpose, we retrieved the poems: "The Bride of Corinth" (1797) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; the poem, rooted in a dark and romantic tone, reveals a vampiric figure emerging from a tomb to seek lovers and their blood; "Christabel" (1800) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which nebulously portrays the appearance of a curious and beautiful figure, Geraldine, and her involvement with a young woman, Christabel; and finally, the novella "Carmilla" (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu, which recovers traces of the latter poem. A beautiful and sickly young woman, Carmilla, is left in the care of a man and his daughter, Laura. Our theoretical contributions are Melton (1995) on the Gothic; Silva (2012) on literature and horror; Todorov (2012) on the fantastic in literature; and Delumeau (2009) on the fear associated with the female figure.