Carmilla: A Vampyre Tale

I was originally introduced to the story of Carmilla via the web series of the same name that came out on YouTube in 2014. I have been wanting to read the original novella, the "gay" vampire story, the inspiration for Dracula, since first watching the web series. And finally, I have done it!

I loved this book. It was the perfect October read, especially with a cup of tea and creepy classical music playing in the background. The gothic vibes were well crafted, the story was fun and spooky, and the relationship between Laura and Carmilla was spicy, to say the least. Knowing when the book came out, I went into the story expecting to have to do some digging into the subtext to find the sapphic elements. But no digging was required! It was show more so much gayer than I could have possibly expected. The kissing, the descriptions of lips and breasts and beauty, the orgasmic description of the feedings, my GOD. I'm sure some historians would love to say that this is just how it is when gals are pals, but they'd be wrong. This is a gothic romance through and through.

The only disappointment was the ending, which seemed to go too fast and without enough full closure. I wish there had been a final goodbye, or a summation of some sort to the growing love between Carmilla and Laura, or at least a reflection from Laura on the love and affection and what it all meant. However, I think this critique is a very modern one, and, given the date of publication, it might be unfair for me to want that. But I still do. I guess it's time to go rewatch the web series show less

A young woman named Laura lives alone with her father in a remote Austrian castle, lonely because her only friend of her age and class recently died under mysterious circumstances. She’s delighted when a carriage overturns near the castle and a young woman named Carmilla must stay with them for a few months while she recovers. Carmilla won’t share any information about her past, does not participate in family prayers, and sleeps most of the day. Laura and Carmilla grow very close, physically and emotionally, and Laura realizes Carmilla looks exactly like her ancient ancestor Countess Mircalla. Young women in the nearby village are dying, and Laura falls ill, so her father takes her out of town for a few days. There they learn the show more true fate of Laura’s dead friend, at the hands (or teeth) of a new acquaintance named Millarca.

A fun, short read. So many of the modern-day tropes about vampires are explicit here, 25 years before Dracula was written. A female vampire is not something that was seen often for the next century, and her vampirism is also sexual, but in a very different way from that of traditional male vampires - she’s very emotional, often telling Laura how much they need each other and how they’ll die without each other. The vampirism itself is also much more focused on Carmilla hugging Laura’s neck than the penetration itself. Historically interesting, but also just entertaining and an easy read! If you haven’t read it before, you really should. The audiobook, read by Megan Follows, was excellent. show less

The first time I heard of this book was when I discovered the webseries adaptation that uses the same name. After that, I saw a lot of jokes online about how it was ‘Dracula but gayer’, so I was intrigued, to say the least. After doing some of my own research and reading the book for the first time in 2014, I ended up enjoying it so much that I wrote a chapter in my undergraduate dissertation about the book and the webseries adaptation.
So people weren’t wrong when they said that this is Dracula but older and gayer. It was actually written 27 years before Dracula was, and is much shorter, yes, but it also holds a lot of inspiration for what Dracula would later become. I also find it hilariously coincidental that both Sheridan le show more Fanu and Stoker are Irish.
So the novel is a first-person retelling, about eight years after the events of the main story, told by Laura, a young daughter of a single British father. Her mother, Austrian nobility, died a long time ago, and Laura lives in an isolated castle in the middle of Upper Styria. She makes a point of noting that the nearest inhabited village is miles away, making it clear to us that there is another village in between them, but it has been abandoned for about a century.
Laura is incredibly lonely, especially after one of her best friends (or rather, her only close friend) dies mysteriously and suddenly. As luck would have it, she soon makes a new friend in a companion who ends up staying with them for about three months – a young countess by the name of Carmilla.
Carmilla is beautiful, languid, and strange. She has moods and fits of excitability and then goes quiet suddenly. She sleeps all night and all day, waking up long past noon. And while she’s around, Laura’s health deteriorates. Oh, and there’s the nightmares, of course.
I always find it so hilarious how characters in vampire novels have no knowledge of vampires at all. Like, it’s a legend that has preceded the written word for centuries, and you’ve never heard of them? Really? How can you not tell that Carmilla’s behaviour is vampiric? For crying out loud, she never eats either. Like, literally, Laura can’t remember ever seeing Carmilla eat anything that isn’t chocolate, most of the time. (Although that part is super relatable.)
The novella goes quite smoothly, in terms of story – they discover the vampire, they kill the vampire, they move on, and Laura still occasionally dreams of the woman who seduced her. Maybe that last part isn’t so ‘normal’, but it is quite interesting that it happens. (More on this in a bit.)
It’s a classic vampire tale, before all these vampire love stories started becoming mainstream. It just so happens to be really gay.
It kind of makes sense that vampires would be gay, really. They’re already creatures that defy God and nature, why wouldn’t they also be deviant in that sense as well? Keep in mind, most classic vampire literature was written at a time when homosexuality wasn’t only frowned upon, it was considered a criminal offence. Vampires were a symbol of The Other in literature – the thing we do not understand and are afraid of. How more ‘Other’ can you get than homosexuality in the 19th century?
What is interesting, though, is Laura’s reaction to the whole thing. It could be because she grows up so isolate from everyone and not in England that she never actually learns about homosexuality in general, but by the end of the novel Laura hasn’t actually let go of her latent homosexual feelings – rather, she’s embraced them. She knows that she is attracted to women and that she was attracted to Carmilla, and she doesn’t ever change her perception of this fact. Yes, Carmilla was a vampire who wanted to suck her dry, but before she knew that, Laura did have a soft spot for her no matter how strange she thought she was, and the fact that she ends the novella telling us that she still dreams of Carmilla coming with her to bed shows us a lot about how Laura never tried to actively repress her own emotions.
Which, for the 19th century, is a pretty big deal.
All in all, this short pleasurable read gets a 3/5 from me. It’s a bit too short for my liking, and sometimes I got a bit lost in the narration of it, but I do enjoy the story immensely! show less

Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' (1872) is a short vampire tale that is interesting for two reasons other than that it works as story-telling. It is a bridge between the vampire lore of Eastern Europe as it had started to appear in English literature and 'Dracula'. It also has an unusual erotic aspect for the time.

It easily breaks into two halves. The first is the account of a vampire incursion in a Gothic setting where the reader can work out what is happening fairly quickly but not the human protagonists. The second unfolds the horror as explanation, leading to the necessary decapitation of the monster.

Le Fanu manages to make the story both English and foreign by having the family under threat as minor aristocratic tea-drinkers of ultimately show more English extraction who have settled in mysterious Styria after the father's service in the Austrian interest.

European aristocratic expectations and norms, including a protective attitude towards young daughters and 'wards', drive the story along but it is also clear that the predator species is of even higher local aristocratic lineage.

The imperial service class is threatened by the ghosts of a more ancient independent aristocracy without moral bounds and interested only in their own pleasures. The seeds of Anne Rice's vampires are here although Le Fanu's Anglo-Irish descent is probably of more interest.

The story undoubtedly influenced another Anglo-Irish writer, Bram Stoker, whose 'Dracula', a quarter of a century later, would further develop some of the motifs of this tale, weakening and transferring the eroticism from a female to male predator from an even darker barbaric aristocratic background.

There is much written (exaggerated in my view) about vampirism as metaphor for the relationship between England and Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century but Anglo-Irish ambivalence about the English ruling class to which it played a supporting role may have been a factor here.

What is more interesting is that the story is highly emotional. The old general who uncovers the vampiric evil appears to lose his reason (he does not) in hunting it down. There is tenderness, warmth and love within the households on which the vampire prey.

But the most intense emotion is the most ambiguous - the undoubted erotic charge between predator vampire (a woman presenting as a girl) and its victims, very young and vulnerable women. The predator offers something that disturbs and attracts at the same time. It is obviously sexual.

Le Fanu is exploring the disruptive power of desire. The vampires usually just take what they want as clinical murderous blood-sucking but (it seems) periodically (this was adopted by Stoker in 'Dracula'), they become obsessively interested in one beautiful victim who they 'groom'.

It is this process of 'grooming' that becomes fascinating because the account, ostensibly about a vampire, is, in fact, about seduction in Victorian society and, equally, about the vulnerability of 'innocence' in a world that is so good that it cannot recognise evil when it presents itself.

As readers we do not have to be enormously bright to get what is happening but, equally, there is no reason for the protagonists to identify evil when evil is not part of their cosy and kindly world of mutual care and regard. When tragedy strikes, it is beyond understanding. It shatters survivors.

The reader sits horrified as evil seduces the innocent in a way that makes the grand guignol of the final decapitation relatively trivial as horror. The innocent are only a 'kiss' or touch away from death - or would it be a 'fate worse than death' as Victorian culture understood this concept?

Loss of sexual innocence in the middle classes and existence as the undead are brought into alignment as 'fates worse than death', made all the more terrifying by Le Fanu's ability to reproduce the pleasures of seduction and the modes of grooming alongside an implication of an evil eternal life.

Incidentally, the Hammer Horror 'Karnstein Trilogy' based on 'Carmilla' is camp fun with 'The Vampire Lovers' (1970), the first in the series, not quite faithful to the original story and a 'cult favourite' if only because it goes wonderfully overboard with its portrayal of the lesbian erotic. show less

I was intrigued by the idea of a lesbian vampire story that predated Dracula, but once I started reading it I triple faked myself out. First, there was the modern introduction that provided a Gothic framing for the story -- written as a modern academic providing evidence that while this story was perceived as fiction when first released, recent diaries, etc., have suggested that the entire thing could have been based on real accounts the author personally knew!

This introduction was perhaps far too clever and had opposite its intended effect. Paired with the fact that the only author photo and bio on the back cover was that of the modern author of the introduction, and not Le Fanu himself, I developed this conviction that the entire show more thing was a con. That Machado had written it all. Even visiting the Wikipedia pages for the book and Le Fanu couldn't shake my feeling of unreality. Add on the very modern illustrations, and I just couldn't read this as a pre-Dracula Gothic tale, but it felt modern throughout.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing? After I emerged from the mists of this novel and dug a little deeper on the research, it became clear that this book was what it said it was. (Minus the gloss of it being a true if barely obscured account of a real vampire. Probably.) And that's kind of fascinating -- that it could have still felt so modern. Maybe just because so little period fiction with lesbian sensibilities survived to be handed down across ages.

Fun, but I would have preferred it without the introduction. show less

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.

This was a delight. Atmospheric, sensual, brooding, and wonderfully written, a true gem of Gothic literature. Carmilla manages to retain its spookiness all these decades later, because even though we’ve reached a level of vampire supersaturation in the media that J. Sheridan Le Fanu probably wouldn’t have thought possible, the central horror of the story—inviting someone into your home who is not what they appear to be—is still scary.

This is also a situation where the thin line between wanting someone and wanting show more to be someone that often exists for gay people is used to great effect.

”I wonder whether you feel as strangely drawn towards me as I do to you...”

There is much discussion about just how gay this novella is, but I’m not interested so much in analysing the exact authorial intent as I am with praising how well the final result has turned out. Carmilla is drawn towards Laura, both out of loneliness and desire, and at the same time she is bound to consume and destroy her. Laura represents both Carmilla’s idealised love interest and the person that she wishes she could be (innocent, mortal, guileless... heterosexual?) and yet knows she can never return to. Finding the woman you most want to be, falling in love with her, destroying her, being destroyed. Psychosexual to the max. The tragic erotic potential of the vampire is fully realised here, despite the relative chasteness of the story itself.

I have to laud Le Fanu’s prose too, because his descriptions—especially of landscapes—are so evocative I could picture them all in my mind with incredible clarity. The writing is wonderful the whole way through, always with a current of unease and feverishness, and even though you’ll see the ending coming from a mile away, getting there is great fun.

Read it for free here! show less

I liked this so much more than Dracula. For one thing, it's shorter. Another, not nearly as misogynistic. Third, the writing is truly beautiful. There also wasn't the whole romance plot in the middle about the marriage and the blah blah blah. This romance was sapphic and sinister (there's got to be some meaning that it's best we not unpack in the 21st century) and the whole thing was deliciously gloomy. If you're going to be inspired by a book and essentially create an entire genre based on it, it might as well be this one!