Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla Bram Stoker’s...

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla: Bram Stoker’s Inspiration for Dracula â€Å"3 May. Bistritz. Left Munich at 8:35 p.m.† Abraham Stoker in this unassuming way begins his Gothic masterpiece, Dracula (The Annotated Dracula 1). Dracula has been called ‘imaginative’ and ‘original.’ , and Harry Ludlam calls it â€Å"the product of his own vivid imagination and imaginative research† (Senf 41). However, the originality of Stokers Dracula is in doubt. By a similarity in the setting, characters and plot, in Bram Stoker’s Gothic work Dracula and the posthumously published short story â€Å"Dracula’s Guest,† Stoker is shown to have used Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic, Gothic, short story, â€Å"Carmilla†, as the basis and inspiration for Bram Stoker’s†¦show more content†¦In recent years, â€Å"Dracula’s Guest† has received a large amount of critical attention due to Stoker’s obvious debt to fellow Irishman Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s â€Å"Carmi lla† (Senf, 38). The story opens in Munich where a young Englishman is taking a holiday from his trek to the home of Dracula. The young Englishman of the story decides to take a walk to a deserted village despite the objections of others who know more than he about the area and its dangers. He is caught in terrible blizzard and is forced to find shelter. Shelter comes in the form of one Countess Dolingen of Gratz’s impaled tomb. Inside the tomb, he sees a young, pretty, pink-faced woman; the tomb is struck by lightening which destroys both the tomb and presumibly the woman. The Englishman is found, with the aid of a wolf’s yelps, by solders sent to search for him by Dracula. In 1871, Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published In A Glass Darkly, a collection of short stories including â€Å"Carmilla†, which can be directly linked to Abraham Stoker’s vampire stories (Roth 97). In the story, Laura, a young girl of six, along with her English father, retired from the Austrian Service, move to a lonely schloss in Styria. Laura is visited in her nursery by a beautiful young woman and is terribly frightened by her.. Sixteen years later, the lonely family gains aShow MoreRelatedAbraham Stoker and Theater1231 Words   |  5 PagesAbraham (Bram) Stoker began his life bedridden, weak, and helpless. Stoker, third of seven children, was born in Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin, on November 8, 1847 (Whitelaw 9). His parents were Abraham Stoker, from Dublin, and Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley, who was raised in County Sligo (â€Å"Bram Stoker†). He spent most of his early childhood laying in bed, watching his brothers and sisters play outside through a dusty old window. â€Å"As a child, he wondered if he would get sicker--if he would end