Book Review

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Carmilla is an early vampire novel (it heavily influenced Dracula, which was written twenty-six years later). More specifically, it is Victorian Lesbian Vampire Erotica. People who think the Victorians were prudes clearly haven’t read Carmilla, in which a lesbian vampire seduces her victim night after night and day after day with “languid” movements and many “caresses.”

To be honest, I pretty much just summed up the plot for you in the paragraph above. The narrator, Laura, is a sweet, sheltered, somewhat spoiled but very nice young woman who lives in a “picturesque” castle in Styria (Austria). A lot of things in this book are “picturesque.” Here’s the kind of thing you can expect:

Over the sward and low grounds a thin film of mist was stealing like smoke, marking the distances with a transparent veil; and here and there we could see the river faintly flashing in the moonlight.

That’s as subdued as the landscape ever gets – there are castles and woods and churches and mausoleums and mist all over the place. Also a lot of dark carved wood furniture and tapestries. Carmilla, who will arrive in our story shortly, is put in a bedroom decorated by a giant tapestry that depicts Cleopatra being bitten to death by asps because nothing says “Get Well Soon” like a wall-size picture of a woman being killed by snakes.

Like every proper gothic heroine, Laura has a dead mom (it’s an absolute requirement in gothic fiction that the heroine’s mother be deceased). Laura lives alone in the castle with two tutors and her devoted father, and she longs for a friend. She thinks she’s about to gain a friend when her father’s longtime buddy, The General, schedules a visit. The General is raising his niece who is Laura’s age, but she dies of Victorian Novel Disease (symptoms: becoming progressively more pale, thin, and weak until finally fading away beautifully, with no inconvenient symptoms like sores, vomit, snot, or diarrhea to mar the loveliness of memory – it’s a whole Victorian thing). Laura is distressed because the death of a young person is of course very sad, but also she is personally disappointed because she has literally no friends, not one, in the world.

Eventually, Laura and her father witness a carriage accident. The two passengers are an older woman and a young woman, Laura’s age, who is unconscious. The older woman begs Laura’s father to take care of the younger woman, her daughter, Carmilla, for three months while older woman runs off on a super secret important mission.

She doesn’t actually beg so much as she orders, and she’s not like, “I’ll send you a check to cover the cost of her food” or “Oh, thank you ever so kindly.” It’s more along the lines of “I have things to do and you can’t possibly be as important as me, so take care of my kid; no, I don’t have a forwarding address and don’t ask her anything because the identity and history of the person you are now in charge of is totes none of your beeswax. Toodles.”

So off she goes, and to be honest I never did understand her role in the story other than that apparently she wanders the land dropping teenage girls at the doorsteps of single men who are the fathers or caregivers of other teenage girls. It’s a living, I guess.

The young girl turns out to be named Carmilla. She quickly regains her health – sort of. She’s always very slow moving (the word “languid” is used about 1000 times) and she never gets out of bed before the afternoon. She locks herself in her room at night and she’s quite sociable with the family except that she always sleeps right through morning prayers and church. She and Laura instantly discover that they have a strange connection because when Laura was a young child she dreamed of Carmilla, and Carmilla claims that she shared the dream. Carmilla recalls the dream as a pleasant one whereas Laura recalls it as a horrible nightmare that traumatized her for years – but Laura is much too nice to say so. Laura is very Midwestern. Carmilla is all, “Yay, we have this dream bond, wasn’t that dream great?” and Laura is all, “Well, it certainly was a thing, you betcha.”

Laura and Carmilla become very close – so close, in fact, that it freaks Laura out a bit. This is not a book about lesbian subtext. There’s no sub to this text. This is some serious text. Carmilla is clearly mad for Laura in an emotional and openly erotic sense, and Laura is both super turned on and super creeped out. Exhibit A: Carmilla’s speech when Laura questions her about her past and Carmilla refuses to answer:

Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die–die, sweetly die–into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.”

And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.

I’m not sure how much of this book is intended to be funny, but when Laura responds with this anticlimactic line, I laughed my face off:

Her agitations and her language were unintelligible to me.

Oh, Laura, you sweet summer child.

Anyway, most of the book involves Laura having progressively more and more troubled nights, with dreams of, for instance, being bitten on the chest by a huge black cat, and her dead mother telling her to “beware of the assassin.”

In the daytime, she feels tired, and as she gets weaker and weaker Carmilla gets creepier and creepier:

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.

Just to be clear, it’s not creepy (to me) that one woman loves another – what’s creepy is the all too accurate description of abusive possessiveness, control, and obsession. Carmilla is a vampire in the emotional sense as well as the physical (oops, spoiler, Carmilla is totally a vampire, DUH). In case you are still in doubt as to the nature of Carmilla’s affections:

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.”

How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!

Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled.

Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. “Darling, darling,” she murmured, “I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so.”

Laura has mixed feelings about this:

In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the feeling.

The rest of this is pretty spoilery, so read on with caution, ok? Not the vampire-harvesting-your-emotions caution, but I’m going to talk about the end of the book.

Frankly, the whole deal where they meet The General who hijacks a chapter with a long story about how Carmilla ate his niece and he tracked down her ancestry and so they go hunt down Carmilla and kill her off is not as exciting as you’d think. The fact that she doesn’t just sleep in a coffin, but rather she sleeps in a coffin which, seriously, is filled with at least seven inches of blood– that’s pretty impressive. Top that, Crimson Peak.

But we all know how a vampire goes out in the end so to modern readers these last chapters are kind of ho-hum. Of course, to Victorian audiences, those chapters must have been electric. Dracula hadn’t been written yet, and therefore had not yet given rise to a million clichéd scenes of vampires being staked. Other Victorian vampire novels, Varney the Vampire and The Vampyre, had been published, but had different kinds of endings.

The Victorians are famed for being prudes, but much of that reputation is unwarranted. Like everyone else in history, the Victorians had various counter-culture movements that were quite sexually daring. Meanwhile, Penny Dreadfuls, cheap magazines that only cost a penny, were famous for their luridly sexual and violent stories. The Victorians had both erotic art and out-and-out porn (one of the first things people did with cameras was put naked people in front of them), and they had marriage manuals that celebrated the importance of female orgasm in marriage, as well as health practices that, depending on the doctor and the year, believed in the importance of both male and female orgasm for proper overall health.

What makes a novel like Carmilla interesting is that it was not an under-the-table production. It wasn’t marketed as porn or sold as part of a Penny Dreadful. It was released in serial format in the magazine The Dark Blue, a literary magazine (in 1871 and 1872). The fact that Carmilla was published rather matter-of-factly should challenge our assumptions about The Victorians – but not too much. For the story to work with Victorian mores, Carmilla must be a sexual aggressor, and she must suffer for her actions and desires – and Laura can experience lust only because it is forced upon her (she is, in a sense, enchanted, which also means she can be read, in a real sense, as a rape victim).

Carmilla can be read as a straight up horror story, one with amazing imagery (the scene in which Laura dreams that she sees Carmilla standing at the foot of her bed in “her white nightdress, bathed, from her chin to her feet, in one stain of blood” made me yelp so loud I scared my dog). But it can also be read as a commentary on the awakening of female sexuality, as a story about abuse and control, and/or as a story about rape.

In Dracula, Mina is unambiguously a victim of rape – she is horrified and humiliated by her encounters with Dracula (refreshingly, Mina’s husband and friends do not engage in victim blaming in Mina’s case, although the story of her friend Lucy is more complicated and demands its very own essay). Carmilla uses a similar magic mind technique on Laura, but her experience is ambiguous, so the story could be read as either a story about rape or as the kind of old school romance in which “forced seduction” allows the heroine to have a sexual awakening without experiencing guilt.

I find it telling that Laura never wishes for a lover, only a friend. Laura craves companionship, and Carmilla craves possession and sex. But Laura is ever after haunted by the memory of Carmilla, and one suspects that Laura’s sexual desires are not going away any time soon:

It was long before the terror of recent events subsided, and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations – sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.

 

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Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

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  1. Heather S says:

    I have this book in a 1970s Scholastic paperback with a cover that manages to be both psychedelic and gothic. It’s fabulous. Google it. For reals.

  2. Lostshadows says:

    I assume her “mother”‘s role was, assistant who provides flimsy excuses as to why people suddenly need to take in a teenage girl for a while and moves vampire around to various locals so she’s harder to track down and stake when survivors grow suspicious. (Staying near your grave tends not to end well. Ask Lucy.)

    I read this back around the time I first read Dracula and completely missed the lesbian part. (I was pretty young and I don’t think I was aware of homosexuality’s existence yet.)

    I think I read it in a collection, so I don’t think it’s actually a novel. (Just checked and apparently it’s longer than I remember. (Novella) Maybe I skimmed a lot. (Though, if it got edited, it might be why I missed the lesbian element.))

  3. Konst. says:

    WOW! goes directly to my TBR list!! BTW there’s a free e-book (with illustrations!!!) on Gutenberg Project.

  4. Lily says:

    No reference at all to the modernization (a la Lizzie Bennet Diaries) on Youtube? https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbvYWjKFvS5rX2yv-k5AJ8oxPoZ9zHcpe

  5. jimthered says:

    Does anyone else think VARNEY THE VAMPIRE sounds like a comedy that could have starred Jim Varney?

  6. Doug Glassman says:

    I lucked out in having a Victorian Horror Literature seminar as one of my last classes, so we read this alongside Dracula, Frankenstein. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, etc. and had a lot of great discussions mapping the tropes through the decades. The first Twilight movie had just come out and we got a ton of mileage comparing Edward to Carmilla.

    That class is also the reason why I find it ridiculous that Jekyll/Hyde adaptations feel the need to add female love interests; the entire thing is a massive metaphor for repressed gay feelings. But that’s a topic for another essay.

  7. I’ve never read this classic, but your review made me cackle (seasonally appropriate crone noises of appreciation).

    @DougGlassman–I’d totally read that essay.

  8. bookworm1990 says:

    I actually just recently discovered that this book exists, so it’s crazy to me saying your review today! I’ve been doing a lot of mild researching of novels that influenced what we consider the classics and obviously found Camilla in relation to Dracula ( which, somehow, I was never required to read during my career as an English major). You have definitely sold me on reading it. I have very little knowledge of anything vampire and have not read much gothic literature, so the ending might actually excite me. Also, I would love to read your essay about Lucy and Dracula, just throwing that out there.

  9. MirandaB says:

    For another fun vampire read, try ‘Pages from a young girl’s journal’ by Robert Aickman.

  10. Sony says:

    I read a edited out, short story like version back when I was 13. It was creepy enough to give me terrors at night but i never got the sub-text. (Or may be I did, subconsciously, because that was the time I started getting into girls)

    I won it in a school competition, and a prude normal Indian school, i remember being shocked that my teacher choose this book for me, the awards being given away weeks after the actual contest, as this was quite different from general teenage reading.

    After reading this review I wonder if I need to credit the book with my sexual awakenings :O

  11. Kate says:

    I just got an email from Audible today advertising a new audio drama production of Carmilla performed, in part, by David Tennant. Audible gets me.

    Have you seen Carmilla the webseries? It’s Buffy meets The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, except 98% of the characters are lgbtq. It’s amazing.

  12. Heather S says:

    Speaking of GLBTQIA+ characters, I really hope one of you ladies is plotting a review of the Infinite Loop graphic novel coming out in November.

  13. CarrieS says:

    @Heather S: Oh yeah. Don’t know when it will post, but there is a review in the works.

  14. LucretiaM says:

    I love this review! I’m currently re-reading Carmilla so this was timely for me. The treacly phrasing is annoying at times, but I love all the “picturesque” descriptions of landscape, cemeteries, and dark and foreboding anything in the book.

  15. And Harriet Vane’s detective cover-story at Oxford in ‘Gaudy Night’ was research on Sheridan Le Fanu (in between falling in love with Peter Wimsey, of course) so that’s yet another romantic connection…

  16. John Moore says:

    I remember reading this back in the 1960s in my teenage years, and it made a huge impression on me (I too had no comprehension of the notion of lesbian sexuality). I read already read Dracula while still at school, but was unaware at the time how Carmilla had influenced Bram Stoker.
    I think I came across Carmilla in an anthology of supernatural tales, and couldn’t get the images out if my mind for a long time. I have read it several times since and am now enjoying the Audible version as I write this.
    Shortly after first reading it I saw Roger Vadim’s brilliant 1860 film Blood and Roses (his original – French – title was Et Mourir de Plaisir) and there was an account of huge crowds in France queuing round the block. The film made far less an impression over here but is available in DVD format. What is notable about the film – set in a post war estate in Italy – is the scene where Laura is first attacked by Carmilla, cleverly reproduced as something approaching a dream. The colour goes to black and white during this “dream” sequence, except that scenes in a hospital ward show a number of things in red – eg red surgical gloves, blood flowing into tubes etc, and this is very striking. The scene from the original story where Laura feels herself swimming against a river are also reproduced in the film to excellent effect. The film is not without fault, but it is memorable.
    Incidentally, for anyone who enjoys traditional vampire stories (not the current craze for crap vampire/zombie rubbish) and who has not read Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot” do yourself a favour and read it immediately. This is the only story where I felt spooked during a summers day with brilliant sunshine!

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