Carmilla & True Story Of A Vampire: Two Homoerotic Vampire Classics

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CARMILLA / TRUE STORY OF A VAMPIRE

BY J. SHERIDAN LE FANU / COUNT STENBOCK

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-908694-05-8

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2012 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

www.elektron-ebooks.com

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INTRODUCTION

Carmilla (1872), the first and most famous lesbian vampire story – beautifully executed in a poetic-turned-prose style with with a great deal of erotic collusion on the part of author J. Sheridan Le Fanu – takes place in the (psycho)geographical limbo of old Styria – where English manners meet European lores, in fantastical Gothic settings. A young lady, therein narrating her story, encountered Carmilla – the archetypal lesbian fatal woman, and her passionate doppelgänger – ten years previously. The bridges between fantasy, dream and reality burn with a lusty fire, but tens years later they are still aflame.

This is the story of a narcissistic female relationship; its intentions truly subversive for its time. The obsessive love of Carmilla is uncanny in its fervour, but it is also very real. She speaks of the greatest pinnacle of extreme pleasure – death (orgasm?). Dying and losing oneself in the ecstasy of love. Her tumultuous excitement mesmerises her friend. For she is a well-brought up Victorian girl, an innocent, and a passive in the world of the predominant male in the scenario – her father. Carmilla’s passion excites the young girl Laura, even as it repulses her. This ambiguity is frequently described. Pleasurable caresses that mingle with the aftertastes of disgust. A growing adoration that also feeds an abhorrence.

For such is this unholy threat! Carmilla’s breasts rising and falling with the ardour of a lover (for she is a lover) unnerve the young girl. The perplexion of the adolescent as she ponders on these passionate events mirrors not only the unknown erotic foreplay of the vampire’s nature; but also, importantly, the unknown loveplay of lesbianity. The foreplay that phallocentricity pretends simply cannot exist.

Not unlike the vampire’s aesthetics of dangerous eroticism; overwhelming sexuality and powers beyond patriarchal understanding. This is not to suggest the lesbian is Vampire; rather to highlight the belief in our patriarchal society that women together can really do nothing of any great importance (penetration); conversely if they do, it is the greatest subversive act known to mankind; not unlike that of the vampire.

The sexual morals of the time are all too evident, and Le Fanu writes with a remorseless collusion with Carmilla, as far as he possibly can. Carmilla’s disgust of the church, and vice versa.

The petty hypocrisy, as she sees it, of the fear of death. The non-procreational fatal woman, glittering on the brink of amorality, outside of neat Victorian society, has never been so charming, so intelligent, so gracious and graceful – or so threatening.

From beyond death or un-death, Carmilla seeks the flipside extremes of love and hatred. An exterior extension of Laura’s shadow, or alter-ego. On an incestuous or infant behavioral level Carmilla could be read as an epitome of the Mother-figure in Laura’s Elektra complex; evident in the absence of the girl’s real mother, and the dominance of her father and the lengthy approval-seeking Laura partakes in. Her relationship with Carmilla is a self-contained affair, that shames as it comforts and liberates.

The metaphor of female liberation as a vampiric ambience of the period, similar to the folkloric and atmospheric vampire – the woman who breaks from the bonds of proper feminine behaviour is the outsider or dissident, and is treated thus, in a form of xenophobia. As was common at this time, this female malady, this abberation of the weak female mind and flesh was given specifically sexual connotations. That the body and mind were feeble and susceptible to hysteria and unchaste uteromaniac behaviour was a very unrelenting and, in fact, enforced belief of Victorian patriarchy.

Now, in an era of feminist psychology, we can better understand that a female malady or psychological illness can be a consequence of the traditional feminine role, not a deviation from it.

This is not to suggest that lesbianism be construed in such a context, but that in this 19th Century era any attempt by a female to break from patriarchal ideals was then viewed as an abberation of the accepted behaviour. Then, if melancholy, depression, muteness, alcoholism and hysteria followed then it was because of the female flesh, not the society that had enforced the suffering. The weakness of the women’s physical beings is frequently reinforced in Carmilla, and it is explained as a symptom of the femininity. Carmilla’s supposed fall from a horse, although no apparent damage has been done; faintness, loss of rose-tinted colour, all symptoms of femininity not quite as it should be. Anything socially deviant was an act of madness, and there is a sense of Laura’s fear of being the only one to experience and know certain things.

It is very strange indeed to consider that the unchaste, immoral Victorian madwoman with her concupiscence, her dishevelled clothing and emotional mind – as the essential feminine nature – became such a cultural icon. An icon of fluidity; milk, blood, tears, flowers and all that is mutable and flowing; such as many Romantic heroines. Whilst this romanticised image may be aesthetically interesting, and seminal, it is well to remember that this concept kept women passive. Now, of course, we can view this kind of emotional expression as a protest, in a post-feminist context. We can read it as a subversion from the norm and see the Romantically-appropriated Ophelia as heroine. It is indeed shameful that what was termed female-madness and abberation then, has taken so long to become a symbol of defiance in our modern times.

The confusion of roles in Carmilla is our confusion also. Mother or lover? It is an erotic love; one of slow gravitation towards sensuality and forbidden terrains, and one that enhances feelings of the mystery of lesbianity and non-penetrative sexual love; also, importantly, of the mother-love inherent in all humans; suppressed, repressed, or not.

Whilst Carmilla is always described by Le Fanu as beatific and captivating, she is also ascribed the feline or serpentine qualities of the lamia. Nocturnal; with a sensual delight in her biting and sucking that is lovingly – lasciviously – detailed. Remembering this is Laura’s dream/fantasy, the orality of the breast sucking is highly symbolic. So too is the males’ intense gaze upon the bite mark; voyeurism is rampant. So Carmilla is not only Laura’s own libidinal desire, incarnate, but also a wet-nursing alternative mother. What therefore fascinates me so much concerning this story is the huge gap there appears to be between the Carmilla whom Laura knows, and the terrible Mircalla/Millarca the menfolk describe. Even after hearing the General’s story and surely (subconsciously) putting the pieces together to deduce that this is the vampire, Laura still smiles and welcomes the beautiful Carmilla unto her, only finally convincing herself that Carmilla is an evil creature after the men’s actions of destruction. Even at the very end of the tale, Laura sits dreading (half hoping?) to hear Carmilla’s step at the door.

As might be expected, elements of vampirism can be found in several works of the Decadent writers of the fin-de-siècle. In Count Stenbock’s True Story Of A Vampire (1894), we again encounter the traditional figure of the aristocratic vampire, except for one twist – the effete Vardalek is clearly homosexual. Apart from his feminacy he is, we learn, rather serpent-like; almost like a lamia. His victim is a young, vivacious, beautiful gazelle-like boy. The two strike up a loving relationship. The homosexuality of the story is obvious; the homophobic hysteria of the time symbolically recounted.

As well as the sexual tones of the story and the considered corruption of the lad, there is a parallel of the old sucking life from the young. A metempsychosis of sexual energy and vigour. The two-way encounter is beautifully told. The boy does not seem to struggle with defiance, but falls in a languid (post-orgasmic) swoon. The romance of the relationship is also devoid of terror and there is a beautiful and musical seduction.

Ultimately, the tale must be seen as a plea for sympathy with the outsider – the vampire as allegory for the homosexual in society. Vardalek is sorrowed by his predations, but nonetheless must follow the call of his unorthodox yearnings. Appropriately, the vampire is not killed or destroyed; he simply disappears of his own accord. Stenbock’s final irony is to set the tale in Styria – home of Carmilla, thereby aligning the first literary lesbian and homosexual vampires.

–Candice Black

I : An Early Fright

In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvelously cheap, I don’t really see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries.

My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension and his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the small estate on which it stands, a bargain.

Nothing can be more picturesque or