Her canine teeth in the side of my neck
Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)
Light some taper candles and get your fake blood ready because it’s time for the Reading Lesbian Classics Samhain Spooktacular! Today I’m sinking my teeth into Carmilla, the original lesbian vampire novel and one of the first works of vampire fiction. Predating Dracula by 25 years, it tells the story of a deeply lonely young woman named Laura who lives with her father in a remote castle in present-day Austria. When a carriage full of unusual characters crashes outside their schloss, her father agrees to take in an injured member of their party, a young and beautiful girl named Carmilla.
The two girls establish a fast friendship, but before long, Laura begins to notice that Carmilla has some strange habits: she sleeps through much of the day, appears to sleepwalk at night, and refuses to pray or take part in religious ceremony. As for her appearance, she bears a striking similarity to a portrait of the long-dead Countess Mircalla Karnstein. Plus, she’s a little too beautiful for a supposed invalid,
Her complexion was rich and brilliant; her features were small and beautifully formed; her eyes large, dark, and lustrous. Her hair was quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long when it was down about her shoulders; I often placed my hands under it and laughed with wonder at its weight. It was exquisitely fine and soft, and in color a rich, very dark brown, with something of a gold sheen. I loved to let it down, tumbling with its own weight, as, in her room, she lay back in her chair talking in her sweet low voice. I used to fold and braid it, and spread it out and play with it.
If all that hair touching wasn’t gay enough, the strangest thing of all is Carmilla’s insistence on expressing romantic feelings toward Laura. Her desire for Laura is stated unambiguously, but where attraction ends and the hunger for blood and eternal life begins is less clear. When Laura asks Carmilla if she’s involved in “an affair of the heart,” she responds, “I have been in love with no one, and never shall… unless it should be with you… Darling, darling… I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so.” When Laura questions Carmilla about her origins and Carmilla refuses to provide any detail, she attempts to assuage Laura,
Dearest, your little heart is wounded. Do not think me 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.
She then kisses Laura, to which Laura reacts with “a strange, tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust.”
In this one interaction, we learn a few things. First, Carmilla is a vampire. Second, there is a part of her that thirsts for Laura’s blood. And third, Carmilla is unconditionally and irrevocably in love with Laura. I kid, but I do actually think that this passage is useful for understanding the relationship between Carmilla and Laura. Let’s start by looking at the many binaries Le Fanu establishes: strength/weakness, wildness/dearness, death/life, cruelty/love, and excitement/disgust. My first instinct when I look at this list is that Carmilla embodies the first half of each pair and Laura the second, but it’s actually quite a bit more complicated than that. Carmilla is both strong in that she’s a supernatural creature and weak in that she depends on human blood to stay alive. Both Laura and Carmilla are loving and cruel in their treatment of one another. And of course, the longer their relationship continues, the closer Laura comes to death and the more “alive” Carmilla appears.
This characterization of Laura and Carmilla as inverse images of one another—one could say Carmilla is Laura as seen In a Glass Darkly, the title of the collection in which Carmilla was originally published in full—continues elsewhere in the text. Where Laura is blonde and vivacious, Carmilla is dark haired and languid. Where Laura is passive, naive, and chaste, Carmilla is active, sensual, and sexually aggressive. Despite being opposites in many superficial ways, they are deeply attracted to and intertwined with one another, rapidly becoming one shared being rather than two separate people.
Their relationship to one another is uncanny, not simply in that it’s unsettling, but in the true Freudian sense of the word laid out in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” In German, the opposite of uncanny (unheimlich) is heimlich, which means known and familiar as well as secret and private. The unheimlich then is unsettling because it describes that which is unknown and unfamiliar until it’s suddenly revealed or made public. To put it in even more Freudian terms, the uncanny is that which is repressed, but nevertheless expressed, producing a strange, unsettling feeling.
In the case of Laura, Carmilla is the uncanny expression of Laura’s repressed or heimlich longing for companionship, desire to impose herself on the world, and same-sex attraction. None of these feelings can be safely expressed in the context of Victorian society, and as a result, a monster must appear to express them on Laura’s behalf. And express them she does. Laura begins to have vivid nightmares, first of a large, catlike creature attacking her in her bed, then of Carmilla drenched in blood. All the while, there are reports of local peasant girls dropping dead after a mysterious wasting illness and Laura herself becomes more melancholic and tired, though she insists nothing is wrong.
From here, things progress quickly. Laura and her father meet a series of men—a doctor, a general, a woodsman, a baron—who give them the tools to locate Carmilla/Countess Mircalla Karnsteins’s tomb where they find her sleeping body in a coffin filled with blood. The men then put a stake through her heart, decapitate her, burn her body, and scatter her ashes in the river. Laura never recovers from her encounter with Carmilla and dies soon after.
Do they dare speak its name? 💬
While the concept is invoked through all 160 pages of my edition of Carmilla, it isn’t called out by name until relatively late in the book, on page 115, and it isn’t used to apply to the relationship between Laura and Carmilla until even later.
You have heard, no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails in Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Serbia, in Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of the Vampire [emphasis added].
…For my part I have heard no theory by which to explain what I myself have witnessed and experienced, other than that supplied by the ancient and well-attested belief of the country.
Sorry for the bait and switch, but I couldn’t resist. You didn’t really think Le Fanu was going to use the word “lesbian,” did you? Per the OED, “lesbian” was first used in the contemporary sense of a woman who solely or primarily has sex with other women in the early 18th century, so it’s not inconceivable that a Victorian novel could have used it in a way we’d recognize today. That being said, it seems to have been pretty unusual for it to appear outside of erotica or literature in the burgeoning scientific field of sexology. As such, it’s neither surprising nor particularly noteworthy that Le Fanu didn’t call Carmilla what she clearly is: a lesbian.
How sexy is it? 🦪
Carmilla doesn’t have any explicit sex scenes per se, but Le Fanu’s descriptions of the vampire attacks on Laura are as sensual as they are sinister. In their first encounter, taking place years before the main events of the book, Carmilla begins by caressing Laura, making her feel “immediately delightfully soothed,” and then bites her not on the neck, which would be sexy enough, but on the breast. Later, when Laura begins receiving nightly visits from Carmilla, she describes the “vague and strange sensations” at their onset as being, well, wet, comparing them to the feeling of stepping into a river’s current and to the “peculiar cold thrill” of bathing.
If any of that seems like over-reading or cherry picking, here’s a longer passage in which Laura describes what she believes to be her nightly dreams:
Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.
Per Carmen Maria Machado, “if this isn't an orgasm, nothing is.” That being said, romance.io describes Carmilla as being “behind closed doors” and I’m inclined to agree. Proof that sometimes the sexiest thing of all isn’t sex itself, but the suggestion of it.
Lesbian classic cliché bingo! 🏳️🌈
Gonna be honest: I really did not think Carmilla was going to get bingo. I made this board with the norms of 20th century lesbian fiction in mind, but as it turns out so many of those norms—dead or absent moms, one or both leads dying, and of course, the impossibility of two women with the same hair color falling in love—are timeless. An impressive performance from our first non-lesbian author.
How can you read it? 📖
Carmilla is in the public domain, meaning that it can read it for free on websites like Project Gutenberg and Wikisource. That being said, I recommend seeking out the beautiful Lanternfish Press edition with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado. In her introduction, Machado invites the reader to insert themselves into the story, using their
fingertips and mouth and mind to locate the lacunae… the hallways haunted by the specters of truth and phantoms of passion. See if you cannot perceive what exists below: the erotic relationship of two high-strung and lonely young women. The shared metropolis of their dreaming. An aborted picnic in the ruins.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this instruction boils down to “keep an eye out for gay stuff in Carmilla,” but I think one would miss out on a lot by limiting oneself to that interpretation. Instead, I see it as an exhortation to pay attention to the gaps in the text, as well as to the passages that seek to engage the five senses. Put differently, it’s not an invitation to read the text looking for queerness, but to read queerly. I found myself thinking specifically of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Segdwick’s essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay’s About You.” Based on my reading of Sedgwick, to read reparatively is to center the reader’s pleasure, allow for surprise, and embrace a variety of interpretive possibilities rather than limiting oneself to received wisdom.
This is a practice I think a lot of queer readers, used to seeking out “representation” or even just enjoyment in works intended to marginalize and stigmatize queer people, understand intuitively, but I love that Kosofsky and Machado name it and actively encourage the general reader to partake. If you skim through Carmilla, you could dismiss it as just another piece of genre writing full of well-worn tropes—setting aside that the tropes were relatively new at the time of writing. But if you actually engage with it, pay attention to the sensations Le Fanu tries to evoke, and think through the ambiguities he presents to the reader, I think you’ll encounter something much more layered, complex, and enjoyable—and something a lot more queer. I know I have.
Sorry for the long absence. It’s been a weird and busy few months, but I’ve been doing a lot of reading. More soon.
Love,
Your local lesbrarian