SOURCE: '"Animated Corse': Archetypal Travesties in Three Gothic Tales," in Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, pp. 69-90.

In the following excerpt, Andriano explores psychodynamic aspects of Gautier's "Le morte amoureuse, " contending that the female demon, Clarimonde, is a manifestation of Romuald's troubled unconscious.

The demonic feminine in Romantic and Modern fiction is often manifest in the gruesome figure of the animated corpse. Even when the apparition is a ghost or an automaton, authors often allude to the idea of an "animated corse" (as M. G. Lewis called his Bleeding Nun) or "the legend of the dead bride" (to whom Hoffmann compared Olimpia). Since the corpse is generally thought to be animated by a demon, if not by the devil himself, it is often vampiric, because (as James Twitchell has shown in The Living Dead) the vampire was...