Amira Shokr
Horror texts incite in us a sense of fear. As readers and audiences, what we do with those emotions revolutionize how the horror genre works. When we choose to locate and analyze the horrors within a text, we hold the power to identify and dismantle the boundaries that the text is using horror to highlight. If there is any thing we should do while encountering horror, it is to recognize the questions on which the horror sheds light. In Carmilla, the 1872 Victorian novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the text asks the questions, is it possible for people to experience deep, authentic intimacy with each other? To explore their desires and pleasures without boundaries? And what happens when those desires are suppressed?
Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality that the repression of sexuality was not in fact repression – that people talked about sex all the time, but through more indirect language (27). Published in 1872, Carmilla highlights the Victorians’ repression of sexuality, but the text also illuminates Foucault’s claim that sex infused language and discussion. More importantly, Foucault argued that sexuality was largely thought to be repressed due to the regulation of people through language, medicine, and social institutions. Foucault claims that people and the state are in charge of this regulation of sexuality censorship: “A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses” (25). What Carmilla does so beautifully is explore how this censorship can profoundly affect people’s relationship with intimacy, friendship, and desire. Furthermore, Carmilla sees intimacy as something that people touch but rarely experience to its fullest, as they are instead polluted by social norms and expectations. Carmilla is written with everyone in mind; its powerful queer plot uses horror to foreground how necessary intimacy is for the human condition.
Carmilla’s story unfolds with an English family, consisting of Laura, the nineteen-year-old protagonist, and her father, who live in Styria. They both witness a carriage accident involving Carmilla. Laura begs her father to invite Carmilla, a young woman around Laura’s age, to become a ward in their care. The father agrees, and thus begins Carmilla’s stay and budding relationship with Laura. Carmilla is described by Laura as “the most beautiful creature I had ever seen,” and their relationship becomes intimate both emotionally and physically (Le Fanu 25). Laura is repeatedly bitten by Carmilla, however, and gradually becomes ill; it is only when a family friend, General Spielsdorf, visits Laura and her father and explains that the same thing happened to his young female ward that they realize Carmilla is a vampire and kill her. By the end of the story, both Carmilla and Laura have died.
Laura is described as a nervous girl who had a traumatic nightmare as a child in which she was bitten by a beautiful woman in her sleep. We later find out that this is Carmilla, since Carmilla herself says she had the same dream and recognizes Laura. “I see you now; a beautiful young lady, with golden hair and large blue eyes, and lips-your lips-you as you are here. Your looks won me; I climbed on the bed and put my arms about you, and I think we both fell asleep” (24). Carmilla expresses this dream to Laura when they finally meet later in Laura’s life. Part of the reason for this shared experience, which leads to a more intimate connection, is how Carmilla works with traditional tropes within the gothic and horror genres.
Carmilla is a gothic text first of all in its plot, which is a “fragmented narrative” – told as an account written by Laura and sent to a mysterious narrator in the prologue of the novella (Botting 1). The setting is a castle in deep woods. As Laura describes it: “the forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade before its gate, and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries the road over a stream that winds in deep shadow through the wood. I have said that this is a very lonely place” (5). More importantly, Carmilla is a gothic text in the way it transgresses social boundaries. Fred Botting notes that “gothic excesses, none the less, the fascination with transgression and the anxiety over cultural limits and boundaries, continue to produce ambivalent emotions and meanings in their tales of darkness, desire and power” (1). Carmilla’s relationship with Laura is indeed one that tests the boundaries of social limits. Carmilla’s confessions of love to Laura are explicit, queer, and romantic. “‘Darling, darling,’ she murmured, ‘I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so’” (40), says Carmilla to Laura right after she confesses to Laura, “I have been in love with no one, and never shall, unless it should be with you” (41).
Carmilla also conforms to many horror tropes, such as the presence of a monster that is an “extraordinary character in our ordinary world,” one that evokes feelings of “disgust,” “revulsion,” and “nausea” (Carroll 31). The novella also represents “advanced state[s] of disintegration,” especially if we consider where Carmilla’s death takes place, which is in a decaying chapel. Indeed, representing Carmilla’s existence on the chapel’s grounds symbolizes the disintegration of a social structure (Christianity) that expressly opposes the existence of a socially transgressive vampire (Le Fanu 91). Most importantly, Carmilla embodies Noël Carroll’s traditional view that monsters “are un-natural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it. Thus, monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening. They are threats to common knowledge” (35). It is via this trope that Carmilla serves to approach audiences most threateningly, having them question how society defines the common knowledge surrounding sexuality, intimacy, and queer relationships.
Laura expresses emotional ambivalence towards Carmilla. “I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said, ‘drawn towards her,’ but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambivalent feeling, however, the sense of attraction prevails. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging” (25). Laura feels a sense of attraction to Carmilla that wins out over the feelings of repulsion. Part of the strength of the intimacy between the two women is their shared experience of the dream that becomes so much a part of Laura’s psyche. Laura may be repulsed by what she doesn’t know yet, Carmilla’s vampirism, but perhaps more interestingly, Laura is repulsed by the feelings of attraction and desire she experiences for Carmilla. “Carmilla strips its story of occult trappings that distract from the erotic interchange of identities between vampire and prey. Intimacy arouses these vampires, not blood or the moon,” Nina Auerbach notes in Our Vampires, Ourselves (48).
Auerbach’s analysis of Carmilla extends to the construction of vampirism itself—intimacy is part of arousal, which in turn suggests that vampirism represents a wider construction of the possibility for intimacy between people. Carmilla is aroused by the intimacy between her and Laura, but so is Laura. The words mentioned before – when Carmilla says to Laura “‘Darling, darling,’ she murmured, ‘I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so’” (40) – suggest that since their friendship is allowed to bloom, along with their shared experience, the intimacy between Laura and Carmilla will likewise flourish and break social boundaries. Auerbach notes that “Le Fanu’s…vampire invokes rather the horror inherent in the Victorian dream of domestic coziness, the restoration of lost intimacy and comfort” (44). This argument begs the question of how intimacy has been radically changed by Carmilla and Laura’s relationship. Carmilla and Laura become intimate through language and push the boundaries of intimacy when Carmilla confesses romantic ideas and emotions to Laura. Not only are emotions shared in discussion, but also physically when Carmilla touches Laura.
Illustration from Carmilla‘s publication in the serial The Dark Blue in 1872 (Source: Wikipedia)
When Carmilla bites Laura, she comes to Laura’s bedroom at night. Laura notes, “I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream…I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed…It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders” (46). In another moment, Laura states, “I saw Carmilla, standing, near the foot of my bed, in her white nightdress, bathed, from her chin to her feet, in one great stain of blood” (52). In both instances Laura finds it difficult to differentiate between dream and reality. Carmilla is standing with Laura’s blood on her and evokes horror in readers as we imagine the picture of the two in the bedroom. That being said, Laura expresses mixed feelings towards Carmilla: “Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet” (50). This language highlights a duality of pleasure and pain, something that intimacy harbors. Laura embodies the struggle that often prevents people from experiencing what intimacy is and what it could be. For Laura the intimate act of being bitten is not only the act of sharing blood with Carmilla, but it is also a representation of sharing emotionally intimate relations with another woman.
Laura and Carmilla’s relationship is queer not only in the sense that two women care for one another and engage in romantic conversation but also in how they transgress conceptions of intimacy through the supernatural capabilities of Carmilla’s vampirism. This includes not least their shared dreams and exchanges of blood. These vampiric actions position Carmilla as a horror text, but they also represent the ways that authentic intimacy is perceived as somewhat supernatural in its own right. Carmilla and Laura transgress social structures of heterosexuality and at the same time represent a more interesting interpretation of the possibilities for intimacy. As stated by Auerbach, “Carmilla and Laura not only share dreams or visions; they share a life” (43). Laura’s feelings toward Carmilla reflect this: “It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.’ Then she had thrown herself back in her chair…leaving me trembling” (29). Carmilla’s statement that she and Laura are one is a manifestation of this intimacy. Laura is affected by this confession and trembles, perhaps as a sexual response – or perhaps in terror. Both responses are related to one another and could mean that Laura is frightened of her sexual response – afraid of this stage of intimacy, which is unfamiliar to her and also not accepted by her society.
Perhaps the most interesting example of this response to intimacy is at the very end, after Carmilla has been killed, and when Laura remarks, “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” (96). Laura misses Carmilla and the compelling power of Carmilla’s presence prevails. Laura misses the intimacy she shared with Carmilla—the existence that they shared together. Carmilla is “diagnosed as a horror, she dies as a presence” and therefore lingers in Laura’s memory and, indeed, in her very being (Auerbach 46). The lingering presence of Carmilla is the haunting and terror of the novel.
Carroll notes that when monsters “cease to be threatening they cease to be horrifying” (31). In Carmilla’s case, if Laura stops seeing her as a monster, she will start seeing her as a lover, which indicates that the prospect of sharing emotional and physical intimacy with another woman is a threat to the order in which Laura lives. While Laura doesn’t kill Carmilla, she cooperates in the belief that Carmilla is a monster who preys on women, but that is just the rhetoric that is fed to Laura by the men in the novella who end up killing Carmilla. As Foucault believes, the policing of sexuality comes from everyone who participates in a given society, but principally those who define and regulate through institutions (25). The men in the novel see Carmilla differently: when General Spielsdorf sees Carmilla (though in his story she is known as Millarca) enter his ward’s bedroom, he describes her as “a large black object, very ill-defined,” which crawls, “as it seemed to me, over the foot of the bed, and swiftly spread itself up…where it swelled…into a great palpitating mass” (86). As Auerbach notes, “In her immateriality, the General’s Carmilla is a monstrous mystery, while Laura’s…Carmilla may be strange, but her face and the sensations she arouses are indelibly familiar, and her body is as material as a door” (45). But if we consider this line of thought, we must acknowledge what is at stake in Carmilla: Laura and the men around her see Carmilla as a profound threat to the social structures that define, maintain, and police sexuality, intimacy, and pleasure. And, in turn, they reveal that we can sometimes be our own censors—not aware of what structures we are unconsciously maintaining while limiting our desires.
Carmilla is a beautiful rendition of the premise of all texts within the horror genre regardless of medium: it asks audiences to think carefully about how fear is working within the realm of the story, but more importantly beyond the story – within the audiences’ own lives. Auerbach believes that “Carmilla is the climax and the end of a dream of an intimacy so compelling only vampires could embody it” (53), but Carmilla suggests that there are possibilities of intimacy within us that in part seem supernatural but that may in fact be suppressed by social structures – turned into the apparently supernatural precisely by this suppression. Carmilla ends with a haunting note to the audience and asks us to reflect on Laura’s fate. Will we end up like Laura, dying of a fight that is both internal and external—denying pleasures and desires that manifest an intimacy that rests within everyone? Laura poses a warning to us all; we will kill the things we desire and in turn kill the possibilities for intimacy, possibilities we ourselves confine to the imagination of horror.
Works Cited
Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. Routledge, 1996.
Carroll, Noël. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 46, no. 1, 1987, pp. 51–59.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Random House, 1978.
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Carmilla: A Critical Edition, edited by Katheen Costello-Sullivan, Syracuse University Press, 2013.
