“Carmilla”
by Sheridan LeFanu
***
Can we blame the notorious
repression of the Victorian age for giving vampires their aura of forbidden
sensuality? By now, the association of vampires with violent sexuality is an
expected trope of the horror genre, given a kick start thanks to the propensity
of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula to
prey on nubile young women. But surely, I thought, before researching classic
horror stories for this month’s post, it took Anne Rice to bring gay vamps out
of the closet. Then I met “Carmilla,” Irishman Sheridan LeFanu’s 1871
Victorian lesbian vampire.
To an extent unusual for
his time, “LeFanu was concerned with penetrating the hidden recesses of
the psyches of his characters and mapping out the strange areas where the sense
of reality can manifest itself to cover equally what is perceived and
not-perceived,” editor E.F. Bleiler writes in his introduction to Best Ghost Stories of J.S. LeFanu. “As a
result, there is nothing in (Victorian) contemporary literature. . . comparable
to the perverse eroticism of ‘Carmilla’". (Despite the volume’s title, its
stories of the supernatural are not always about ghosts, leaving room for the
vampire, Carmilla.)
The story begins with a framing
device similar to that Emily Bronte had used earlier for her own story of
obsessive love, Wuthering Heights. A
narrator (nameless in the case of “Carmilla”) claims to have heard the story
from a source which quotes the original narrator, Laura,daughter of an Englishman who served in the Austrian military and used a small inheritance to settle into a feudal castle.
“Nothing can be more
picturesque or solitary,” Laura relates in her manuscript. “The road, very old
and narrow, passes in front of its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its
moat. . . sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface white fleets
of water-lilies.”
It’s a lovely place, but
so lonely that Laura, the only child of her widowed father, longs for
companions her own age. She looks forward to an anticipated visit from the
daughter of one of her father’s fellow officers, only to learn that the
daughter has died suddenly, the victim, as the old general writes, of “a fiend
who betrayed our . . . hospitality.”
While the general is
pursuing those he believes responsible for his child’s death, a carriage dashes
down the narrow road and wrecks in front of Laura’s castle. Laura and her
father rush to the aid of the passengers, an apparent noblewoman and her
injured daughter. The older woman declares that she is on an errand of life and
death, and pleads with the rescuers to take her daughter into their care until
she is able to return for her. Moved, perhaps by his daughter’s wish for
companionship, the father offers his hospitality for the injured girl,
Carmilla.
She and Laura are soon
fast friends. But as Carmilla recovers physically, Laura falls victim to a
debilitating illness. Its first symptom is a “sensation like two needles
piercing the skin” as she sleeps, followed by horrible dreams. Soon the old
general arrives, reporting that his daughter suffered from similar symptoms
before her death, and that he has followed the trail of the killer to Laura’s
door. With his arrival, Carmilla disappears and Laura faces the possibility
that her dearest friend is far from innocent.
But is Carmilla solely to
blame for Laura’s illness? Does she even have an independent existence, or is
she, as Bleiler says of many of LeFanu’s characters, one of the
“potentially evil mental fragments (that may assume) semi-independent
existence," brought to life in a lonely young woman's imagination? Read the whole story, and decide for yourself. Although not
available on Google Books, “Carmilla” is widely available from Amazon and other
sources. If your local library doesn’t have it, talk to a librarian about an
interlibrary loan.
(Next Friday, Adventure
classics deviates from its previously announced schedule to look at another tale
of the supernatural, “The Phantom Coach,” by LeFanu’s contemporary, Amelia
Edwards.)
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