This project was submitted for the 2022 UC Davis English Critical Honors Thesis program
and is the sole intellectual property of Mariann Lactaoen.

DO NOT PLAGIARIZE THIS WORK.

University of California Davis

Mariann Lactaoen

English Critical Honors Thesis

Professor Kathleen Frederickson

June 8, 2022

Abstract

Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla is a work of Victorian vampire fiction with the distinct characteristic of featuring two sapphic female protagonists. The resulting dynamic is easy to judge through a gendered lens, as standards of Victorian femininity slot the two protagonists into the roles of the saint and devil-woman, with the narrator Laura taking the place of the saint and the vampire Carmilla taking the place of the devil-woman. I argue that such dichotomous thinking unnecessarily limits these characters and opt to, instead, view them through a liminal lens, understanding their ambiguity as essential to their female, monstrous, and queer identities and regarding queerness as descriptive of sexuality but also of non-normativity. I look at Carmilla as liminal in her existence as a vampire and Laura as liminal in her simultaneous vulnerability and repression as the story’s veiled narrator; the most significant form of liminality, however, is in the overlap between the two characters, as their intimate relationship oscillates between doting romance and blatant violence, and Laura reacts with ambiguous physical reactions that can be read as both desire and fear. The vagueness surrounding Carmilla’s and Laura’s intimacy leads to multiple readings of what they represent, as critics debate whether Le Fanu demonizes or romanticizes their young sapphic relationship. I look at evidence of both, finding the first to be more relevant to the in-text narrative and the second to be more relevant to sexual media marketed to sapphics in Le Fanu’s time. I conclude by reflecting on Carmilla’s immense influence on the vampire mythos by being the inspiration for Stoker’s Dracula, and the importance that Carmilla as a queer female takes as a turning point in that mythos.

Introduction

Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” sees fiction as the perfect vehicle for observing the abhuman, bringing “events which never or rarely happen in fact” into substance and allowing authors to “[overstep] the bounds of possibility” by portraying the horrible yet imaginable, beautiful yet strange, anticipated but hidden, and unseen but eerily recognizable. Fiction that presents the uncanny oft does so via literary monsters, abhuman creatures that allow people to view their fears manifested in a physical being albeit behind the safety of fiction’s suspension of disbelief. As fictional monsters span centuries of human history, they appear in a range of configurations: animalistic beings representing racialized stereotypes, sexless or hypersexual bodies hinting at queerness or sexual deviance, or physical aberrations jabbing at disablity and neurodivergence.

Of these monstrous forms, none are as striking as the Victorian woman. Standards for women during the Victorian fín-de-siecle ebbed and flowed alongside evolving ideas of science, resulting in Gothic monsters materializing in the female form. Perhaps the most influential are Laura and Carmilla of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, two young women of very different countenances that inspired Stoker’s Dracula, especially in their introduction of elements of queerness into essential vampiric lore. Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu published his novella Carmilla in 1872 as part of the short story anthology In a Glass Darkly. Dr. Hesselius introduces a frame narrative, logging the testimony of Laura, a young, wealthy girl living in a schloss in Eastern Europe with her father. Laura prefaces her experiences with the vision of an attack by a young woman visiting her childhood bedchamber, piercing her breast with two needles before disappearing. Laura, now nineteen, then describes the arrival of Carmilla, the strange yet alluring young daughter of a wealthy woman whose carriage violently crashes outside their schloss. While nursing Carmilla back to health, Laura and Carmilla develop an intimate emotional and physical relationship. Concurrently, young girls in surrounding villages die in circumstances suspiciously familiar to Laura’s attack as a young girl. The novella ends when these attacks are found to be the work of an oupire (vampire), and Carmilla is discovered to be the monster; a stake is driven through her chest before she is beheaded. Laura ends her testimony with ambiguous sentiment toward her vampiric companion, remembering her both as a beautiful girl and a ghastly, murderous beast.

Le Fanu’s novella is distinct in that it offers two female protagonists. Laura, the narrator, is easy for the reader to impress upon: she is frightened easily and must be comforted in moments of fear, creating a boneless protagonist that begs the reader to provide substance. Carmilla, on the other hand, is intense, mysterious, and, most importantly, a vampire – a literal monster. As the saintly innocent and violent fiend, it is easy to classify these two on opposite sides of a spectrum: Laura is the saint and Carmilla is the devil-woman.

Despite this obvious dichotomy, I would like to introduce another possibility that lends itself to the swirling depths of monster theory. Instead of upholding binary standards of Victorian women by seeing Laura and Carmilla as opposite ends of the same spectrum, I propose them as mirrors of each other – rather than being saint or devil-woman, both lie in the liminal space between. Approaching Carmilla with the implication that Laura and Carmilla share a homoerotic bond, I will explore the multiple levels of queerness supplied by their liminality, studying the textbook queerness in their same sex relationship but also the queerness in Carmilla’s monstrosity, in Laura’s constructed repression, and the debated nature of their relationship as a whole, supplemented with historical knowledge of science and sapphics of the Victorian fin-de-siecle. In doing so, I look to break the dichotomy suggested by Le Fanu’s use of two female protagonists and trace the legacy of Carmilla in the vampire mythos to the present.

Queer Monstrosity

In “Queer Is? Queer Does?” Janet R. Jakobsen pushes against standard definitions of queerness, looking for ways in which queerness permeates one’s entire being. Queerness exists entangled in complications “of embodiment, of resistance, of norms, and of the associated terms of normativity and the normal” (Jakobsen 512). Jakobsen navigates past thinking of queerness as a state of being and, rather, encourages one to “consider… the relation among the three forms of the term: verb, noun, and adjective,” as resistance to the norm requires multilevel understandings of what normativity means, especially because it is nearly impossible to separate oneself from normalcy completely (Jakobsen 517). They conclude, “To queer, we must… both rely on and trouble norms” (Jakobsen 530).

Jakobsen encouraging the use of “queer” beyond solely a sexuality- and gender-oriented term lends itself to Carmilla, as Carmilla and Laura’s uncategorizability allows them to perform queerness in multiple ways. The most obvious is in terms of sexuality: scholars agree that Carmilla is, at its most barebones, a lesbian vampire text, with the interactions between Carmilla and Laura portraying not only homosocial but homoerotic bonds. The only men in Styria are middle-aged and embarrassingly inept, floundering around to protect young women from the oupire but miserably failing; as a result, no character even marginally poses as a heterosexual counterpart to either the narrator or the eponymous character. Carmilla and Laura are inseparable, doting upon each other in their public appearances and constantly kissing and embracing each other in their private chambers.

A second way in which Carmilla expresses queerness is in her existence as a vampire: the monster in itself is a queer body. Sara Austin’s “Children of Queer Bodies” draws upon Jakobsen’s expansion of the definition of queerness, analyzing different iterations of the siren in both Andersen’s and Disney’s versions of The Little Mermaid. They find Andersen’s mermaid to be queer-bodied due to her existence “outside of the heterosexual economy” and Disney’s Ursula to be queer-bodied due to her posing “a sexual threat” as “the only octopus in a world of fish-people” (Austin 261). Queerness is, as Jakobsen iterated, not only limited to sexuality but expanded to mean opposition to a hegemonic norm. By this standard, Carmilla, too, is automatically a queer body, being the only vampire existing among a village of humans. If approaching via the viewpoint that family building exists to procreate, then Carmilla exists outside of the heterosexual economy, only fostering relationships with other young girls and unable to produce human offspring due to being both a woman and a vampire.

A third way in which Le Fanu’s characters express queerness through a Jakobsenian lens is by breaking ideals of Victorian femininity, betraying the separation between saint and devil-woman. This piece will now investigate the Victorian science that lends to such standards and its connections with monster theory and monster literature.

The Science to Monstrosity

In his crucial essay “Monster Theory (Seven Theses),” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen dissects the social and psychological forces that construct literary monsters. By evaluating them as manifestations of taboos in an author’s sociohistorical moment, Cohen finds that the monster “literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy… giving [these issues] life and an uncanny independence” that refuses to only exist on the page (Cohen 4). Cohen, conveniently, uses the vampire as an example: Stoker’s Dracula embodies “transgressive and compelling sexuality,” Murnau’s Nosferatu stands for “plague and bodily corruption” as a response to nascent fascism, Coppola’s Dracula pulls in analogies of HIV-AIDs, and Carmilla represents “sexual subtext [in the form of a] lesbian lamia” (Cohen 6). Cohen’s third thesis specifically labels the monster as “the harbinger of category crisis,” as monsters stand in as “disturbing hybrids… a form suspended between forms that threaten to smash distinctions” (Cohen 6). Monstrous liminality can be seen in iconic folkloric and mythological monsters – the werewolf transforms between human and beast, the harpy melds the anatomy of the human and the bird, and the Gorgon has entire snake parts connected to its body. These monsters are uncanny, vague, and strange, not fully crossing borders but, rather, hovering over them, occupying liminal space in a manner that yields a constant contested cultural space.

Just like the monsters that it studies, monster theory itself does not exist in a vacuum. Cohen sees that the monster “radically [undermines] the Aristotelian taxonomic system, refusing an easy compartmentalization of their monstrous contents,” proposing the influence of scientific categorization on literary monstrosity. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, sparking new interest in biological taxonomy for the general public toward the end of the nineteenth century. Darwinian ideals of evolution especially encouraged dystopian imaginings of a future with creatures and humans much different than that of the contemporary. Kelly Hurley finds:

The Darwinian narrative of the evolution of species was a narrative within which any combinations of morphic traits, any transfiguration of bodily form, was possible… Gothic plotting seized upon this logic as a device by which to generate a seemingly infinite procession of admixed embodiments (Hurley 7).

The unraveling of the neat edges of Victorian science allowed for the uncontrolled flow of corresponding reactions: interest in the new possibilities of evolved human beings, demand for stricter or looser categorization of species, fear of the creatures that spawn from evolution. All these reactions had the potential to spur the creation of monsters; as a result, monster literature soared.

One specific reaction to Darwinian theory was the reevaluation of the lines drawn between biological sex, as the anticipation for human evolution (alongside prejudices associated with eugenics) put great highlight on biological reproduction in terms of finding the perfect mate. The search for suitable childbearing mothers allowed for fictional exploration of women that would not fit such a category, contributing to fascination with the Victorian female monster. Hurley examines the Gothic monster through its physical attributes, going hand-in-hand with Darwinian ideals of what is biologically desirable. The chapter “Uncanny female interiors” specifically examines the monstrous woman, tracing her beastly identity and female identity melding to form a distinct abhuman subject. Hurley finds that Victorian social medicine theorized women as “incomplete human subjects… partially evolved from the state of animalism” (Hurley 119). The Victorian woman’s consciousness was explicitly tied to her physical form, contrary to a man’s consciousness transcending the physical space. This incompleteness of the Victorian female made women “erratic and unstable,” with disorders such as hysteria attributed to the female reproductive system. Such medical associations allowed female sexuality to “[emerge] as both causal and symptomatic of female abhumanness”: the monstrous female is a monster but, first, a woman, as her monstrosity is drawn from her sex and sexuality (Hurley 129). If man is the norm, then woman is the sexed, and the sexed is the Other, and the Other is a monster.

Because Victorian medicine so closely ties a woman’s physicality to her psyche, it is remarkably easy to turn a fictional woman into a Victorian monster. Simply corrupt some part of her physical being and she becomes a monster through-and-through. This flip-the-switch process of changing a woman into a monster, accompanied with the perceived incompleteness of a woman, results in Victorian portrayals only presenting women at either side of a sexual extreme. Hurley sees the “saintly or demonic, spiritual or bodily, asexual or ravenously sexed, guardians of domestic happiness or unnatural monsters” (Hurley 212). The emotional stunting of woman only allows her to be either angelic or demonic; one or the other, but never both. She is slotted into the category of either impossibly pure or supernaturally evil.

Le Fanu writing two female protagonists, alongside standards established by Darwinian standards of gender, produces the impression that these two characters must fall into the Victorian female dichotomy of saint and devil-woman. The novella, however, invokes these conventions only to undercut them. Laura and Carmilla, then, perform queerness via their liminal nature, as both cannot be fully slotted into the role of the innocuous or the demonic.

Liminality in Carmilla

The eponymous character in Carmilla is the easiest to read and categorize: she is standoffish, mysterious, and aggressive, but, most significantly, a vampire, the heart of this monster narrative. The novella begins with Laura’s attack by a young woman as a child, and, when adult Laura first meets Carmilla, she instantly flags her as “the very face which had visited [her] in [her] childhood at night” (Le Fanu 29). The reader is immediately made wary of Carmilla continues to keep an eye on her as young women in neighboring villages die in the same manner as Laura’s childhood attack. From her introduction, the reader expects Carmilla to be the devil-woman and receives satisfaction when she is revealed to be vampiric in Le Fanu’s final chapter.

To imagine Carmilla as liminal rather than solely monstrous requires a rejection of the dichotomy between good and evil. Carmilla is ambiguous in multiple ways: the vampire is an inherently liminal creature, and Carmilla expresses such ambiguity both in her vampiric physicality and in her intimate interactions with Laura.

In modern iterations of the vampire, from those in children’s media to those in vampiric pornography, Dracula is the prototype from which creators draw quintessential vampiric traits. Surprisingly, Carmilla precedes Dracula by decades, and scholars agree that Le Fanu’s vampire inspired that of Stoker, marking Le Fanu’s novella “a major influence within the development… of vampire lore” (Asjborn). The prototypical vampire before Dracula was the traditional Slavic vampire – this accounts for Le Fanu’s use of the word “oupire” derived from proto-Slavic language. This creature, depicted as “both plump and of peasant stock,” is prevalent in Eastern European folklore, which focuses less on the characteristics of the monster and more on defense it, including “the piercing of vampires with stakes” and “the process of a human turning a vampire through the exchange of blood” (Asbjorn 98). Carmilla is heavily associated with blood as she is found in the ruined church submerged in seven inches of blood, and her immortality ends as she is ultimately impaled with a stake, indicating that she marginally aligns with characteristics of the folkloric vampire. However, Carmilla flips the image of the plump bumpkin vampire by expressing herself as high-class, young, and attractive, initiating a sharp turn in the characteristics of the vampire. The vampires that precede Carmilla are wolfish and wild, but those that succeed her are pristine Victorian sex symbols that continue to appear in monster fiction today. Carmilla doesn’t fit into that category either. The Draculean vampire (originally created by Stoker but since reinterpreted by Hollywood) that follows Carmilla and continues to inform our interpretation of vampires today has a very specific set of supernatural powers – super speed, mind-reading, turning into a bat, etc. Carmilla cannot do any of these; she shares the qualities of being wealthy and having fangs, but otherwise cannot join the Draculean space. Carmilla lies between the folkloric vampire and the modern vampire, occupying an ambiguous position supplied by her female identity: she is a unique monster of simple allure, neither a plump hairy peasant nor a brooding count with potent superpowers.

The strange space that Carmilla occupies in the genealogy of her creature is made further liminal in that the vampire itself is uncanny – it is just human enough. Unlike the zombie, the vampire retains human consciousness; unlike the animalistic beast, the vampire retains human form. Carmilla embraces this semi-human uncanniness by taking on an ambiguous physical form which Laura sees as oscillating between that of a human and an animal. During a night terror featuring a bloodied Carmilla, Laura witnesses “a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat” (Le Fanu 54). Carmilla, like vampires before and after her, walks the border between human and animal, reinforcing the Gothic convention of the devil-woman that presents her monstrosity via physical aberration. The vampire is a liminal subject, and Carmilla occupies an even more contested space within that genus.

Carmilla’s liminality is obvious in her vampiric physicality, but Laura’s perception of her persona provides even more ambiguity, as their relationship toes the line between romantic and abusive. Her actions and, more importantly, her language meld statements of physical and emotional adoration with striking suggestions of violence. The most frequently evaluated dialogue from Carmilla is an excellent example of her oscillation between loving and hateful:

She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, ‘Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not 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.’ (Le Fanu 35)

Carmilla is completely uninhibited when she is around Laura: interestingly, she insists that she “[obeys] the irresistible law of [her] strength and weakness,” appealing to Victorian standards of women by linking her psyche directly to her physical yearnings (Le Fanu 35). Carmilla continues to appeal to Victorian standards as she regards Laura and herself having opposite countenances (“dear heart” vs. “wild heart”), slotting them into the saint/devil dynamic respectively. However, she spends the rest of the paragraph betraying that categorical border by seeing that their lives and hearts are one in the same, and that their love is both beautiful and torturous. Carmilla admits that their relationship puts her in “the rapture of… enormous humiliation” and, most strikingly, tells Laura that she “shall sweetly die” in order to become one with her (Le Fanu 35). Carmilla’s love is dedicated but also overwhelming and embarrassing; she is highly aware of this, feeling embarrassment herself, but continues to display her affection in all its paradoxical glory.

Laura’s and Carmilla’s paradoxical relationship continues even after Carmillla is revealed to be the vampire. After Carmilla leaves the schloss and Laura’s father speaks to the General about the monster, Laura stops using the name “Carmilla” to refer to her companion. She refers to the body lying in the coffin as “Countess Mircalla,” using Carmilla’s former name to distance her perception of her friend from the monster that had haunted her dreams and terrorized her community. Laura herself seems to classify Carmilla into the angel/devil complex, using the name Carmilla for the angel and Mircalla for the devil-woman. However, although Laura acknowledges this dichotomy, she still regards the true Carmilla as lying between the two personas. After a year of reflection, Laura ponders:

To this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations – sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing field I saw in the ruined church. (Le Fanu 110)

Laura herself sees both the tender lover and vile beast as inherent to Carmilla as a person, admitting that Carmilla occupies an “ambiguous” space in her psyche (Le Fanu 110). Carmilla’s liminality, in both her physiology and in her personality, are essential in understanding her as the novella’s Gothic antagonist. She is not only monstrous in her existence as a vampire, but also in her uncategorizability, a quality in line with the conventions of monster theory.

Liminality in Laura

As the narrator, Laura seems to be a blank slate for the reader to write upon. She is easily frightened, constantly confused, and curious to a fault; William Veeder points that she “is unnamed for forty pages, is never given a last name, and is not located specifically in time because she is an everyperson – all men and women in every era who overdevelop the conscious” (Veeder 199). Because Laura remains so neutral and innocuous, it is difficult to see her as anything but the saint, pulled along by the string of fate as her life is dominated by Carmilla’s assertiveness and confidence. However, Laura’s status as a narrator produces the possibility that she may not actually be unassuming, but, rather, hides her own impulsivity by manipulating her narration. Laura tiptoes around her words, leaving vague impressions up to the reader’s interpretation and, consequences, leaves it up to the reader to decide whether she’s angelic or not. Despite being the first-person narrator of the novella, even Laura presents herself with uncertainty.

A repressed narrator is not easy to write, and Le Fanu’s text occupies the groove between secrecy and oversharing to effectively communicate Laura’s ambiguous feelings. Veeder finds that:

To make effective his thematic concern with the dualities of existence and the powers of repression, LeFanu must develop techniques to make us active readers. With heroines so repressed as Laura and so indirect as Carmilla, we must be able to read between the lines, to discover what is happening below the verbal screens (Veeder 205).

Laura is excellent at casting a verbal screen. When she is first introduced and innocuously describes the beautiful nature around her family’s schloss, she interrupts her pastoral scene by turning to the fourth wall and requesting, “Judge whether I say truth” (Le Fanu 11). Laura openly acknowledges her own unreliability as a narrator, especially considering the emotional stakes that she has in Carmilla’s story and the trauma that remains after the novella’s events. Laura, then, struggles to maintain a saintly face while grappling with these issues underneath the veil: Le Fanu works Laura’s uncertain suffering into the very fabric of her narration.

The first way in which Le Fanu communicates Laura repressing her true persona is by keeping her nameless for as long as possible, allowing Laura to retain her identity as an everyman. For the first seven chapters of Carmilla, the narrator remains unnamed; in Chapter 8, her father finally says her name:

Carmilla was looking charmingly. Nothing could be more beautiful than her tints. Her beauty was, I think, enhanced by that graceful languor that was peculiar to her. I think my father was silently contrasting her looks with mine, for he said:

'I wish my poor Laura was looking more like herself' and he sighed. (Le Fanu 68)

It is notable that Laura’s father first names her when he is “contrasting [Carmilla’s] looks” with Lauras; not only is she unnamed and vague throughout most of the novella, but, even when she is named, she cannot exist as an individual. The form she takes here is explicitly liminal, as her father wishes she “was looking more like herself,” labelling her physical demeanor as specifically peculiar in comparison to Carmilla: she is neither “looking charmingly,” as Carmilla is, nor “looking… like herself” (Le Fanu 68). If a reader were to regard Carmilla and Laura as opposite sides of the female moral spectrum, Laura, when first named, occupies the awkward space between.

The second way in which Le Fanu communicates Laura’s knowing repression is via her relationship with Carmilla: if Carmilla’s liminality comes from sympathy tied to her cruelty, Laura’s comes from repressed carnal desire. Repeatedly throughout the novella, Laura expresses admiration for Carmilla that reads as sexual attraction, but reframes it or reiterates it before she fully explains her impulse. It begins when Laura and Carmilla first meet:

I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long when it was down about her shoulders; I have often placed my hands under it, and laughed with wonder at its weight. It was exquisitely fine and soft, and in colour a rich very dark brown, with something of gold. 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. Heavens! If I had but known all! (Le Fanu 33)

Laura’s first description of Carmilla is incredibly flattering, gushing that “there was nothing in [Carmilla’s] appearance to indicate an invalid” as she describes her slender build, graceful physicality, rich complexion, lustrous eyes, and thick, brown hair (Le Fanu 33). Compared to her descriptions of other women, Laura’s description of Carmilla is unendingly adoring, building higher and higher as her sense of attraction swells. However, at the end of this lengthy paragraph of admiration, Laura stops herself: “Heavens! If I had but known all!” Laura catches herself rhapsodizing about Carmilla and interjects her own thoughts, chastising herself for having homoerotic thoughts about her vampiric companion. She then states that Carmilla’s only negative trait is her secrecy, but even this negative quality is a result of Laura admiring and being curious about Carmilla.

Repression of homoerotic feelings toward Carmilla continues as Laura refuses to associate herself with her physical reactions to Carmilla’s advances. Laura does so by manipulating the language by which she describes such intimacy: for example, she puts blame on uncontrolled external forces rather than herself. When first describing Carmilla’s advances, Laura states, “From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me” (Le Fanu 35). Rather than crediting herself in resigning to Carmilla’s “foolish embraces,” Laura blames her “energies,” placing the blame on something that is seemingly disconnected from her inherently. Laura continues to manipulate the language surrounding Carmilla’s advances by reducing her actions to metaphors, as if to render them invalid by denying their truth. During a moment in which Carmilla is reduced to sobbing as she kisses Laura’s face, Laura explains her actions as “like the ardor of a lover” (Le Fanu 36). Despite the overpowering eros of the scene, Laura refuses to admit Carmilla as a valid lover; she is only like one. Perhaps the most striking example of these deceptive metaphors appears when Laura describes Carmilla approaching her in the night:

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 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, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious. (Le Fanu 60-61)

Laura denies the drawing of the hand, the kissing of the lips, and the caress: it is only as if these events happened. Laura denies her own agency in the situation and cites her heart, her breathing, and her senses as reacting, while what she considers inherent to her person is unconscious. Carmilla’s interactions are ambiguous, starting with romantic embraces and escalating into violent hostility, but so are Laura’s natural reactions. Laura’s heartrate increases and her breathing becomes short, but she doesn’t necessarily cite the source of her response. Is it fear? Or is it sexual desire? Either way, Laura refuses to admit that any of these responses are her own.

Queerness via Liminality

The ambiguity of Carmilla’s simultaneously romantic and violent outbursts and Laura’s simultaneously pleased and pained reactions are a subject of debate amongst critics. With the consideration that monsters are spurred out of societal taboo, it is reasonable to believe that Le Fanu wrote a same-sex story with a vampire in order to demonize sapphism; on the other hand, the positive sentiments that Laura maintains about her lover even after Carmilla’s death suggest a romanticization of sapphism, which is especially striking considering the newfound construction of sexual identity in the late nineteenth century. As scholars grapple between the two opinions, I opt to remain true to the themes of Carmilla and take up an ambiguous stance, arguing for both. In both of these viewpoints, I foreground the liminality of Laura and Carmilla; after all, it is their ambivalence that allows for this varied interpretation to occur in the first place.

Arguments for Laura’s and Carmilla’s relationship as abusive mainly draw from in-text diction during their intimate moments, as such language conveys a power dynamic that renders the intimacy nonconsensual. In their essay “The Language of Consent in Carmilla,” Rae X. Yan finds:

Laura… informs her confidante that even if she finds the experiences exciting and pleasurable, she cannot consent to the attentions now lavished on her… while she easily admits that she appreciates and desires Carmilla’s sexual attentions, Laura also finds her lover’s language and her accountable actions when Laura is under these spells “frightening” (Yan).

There is uncertainty regarding whether the relationship is simply erotically masochistic or wholly nonconsensual, but Yan specifies moments in which Laura “deliberately expresses her distaste for the way Carmilla dominates her and sees her”: Laura says that she may “wish to extricate herself” from intimate moments with Carmilla and feels that she is sedated “into a trance” in which her “energies seem to fail,” suggesting a power dynamic in which Laura is unable to knowingly and wholly consent to Carmilla’s advances (Yan, Le Fanu 35). Within the first chapter of their meeting, Laura regards Carmilla’s random bouts of emotion and admits that, during such outbursts, “[she] did not like her,” which is a strangely direct declaration from the otherwise vague narrator (Le Fanu 35). Nonetheless, Laura continues to accept Carmilla’s touch. Yan argues that Laura clearly enjoys Carmilla’s sexual attentions, but her tendencies to constantly describe them as paradoxically pleasurable and frightening reflects “unrecognized trauma of intimate partner violence” (Yan). Because the relationship between Carmilla and Laura is already unconventionally queer in multiple ways – in its sapphism and in its pairing of a human with a vampire – it is difficult to determine how healthy their relationship is by contemporary hegemonic standards of love and desire.

The ambiguity in the relationship between Laura and Carmilla is not only clear in Laura’s narration but also in her physicality during moments with Carmilla. Describing an intimate moment, Laura states:

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 has thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling. (Le Fanu 36)

Carmilla’s manner of showing affection for Laura spurs paradoxical feelings for the narrator. Here, Laura finds Carmilla’s sensuality embarrassing, “hateful and yet overpowering,” and claims that it “[leaves] her trembling.” There is a sense of repression here, especially in that she finds the actions “embarrassing” even though the two are alone: Laura experiences internal conflict as she is pleased by Carmilla’s embraces but embarrassed by their intensity or tabooness, and counters such strife by highlighting her negative reactions. The last line translates these conflicting feelings to the reader, as Laura is “[left] trembling by Carmilla’s advances.” This reaction is purposefully ambiguous: if one believes that Laura is repulsed by Carmilla, then the trembling is derived from fear, but if one believes that she is attracted to Carmilla, the trembling is derived from carnal desire. There then emerges a theme that Laura views Carmilla’s sensuality but cannot fully understand it. There exists a clear power imbalance between the centuries-old monster Carmilla and the frightened teenage Laura, and such pervasive ambivalence in each of their interactions marks their relationship as uncommunicative and henceforth unstable.

Or is Carmilla’s and Laura’s relationship a celebration of sapphism? Rather than pulling from Le Fanu’s in-text language, this side of the argument is more grounded in real-life Victorian sapphism, which pushed against the normative grain in remarkably similar ways to Carmilla and Laura’s fictional relationship. In Between Women, Sharon Marcus writes of the homosocial and homosexual bonds of women in Victorian Europe, tracing relationship ranging from friendship to familial kin to female marriage. One subject that Marcus explores is Victorian pornography, which catered to a disporportionately large female audience. Woman-focused pornography was “more explicit and enthusiastic about the sexually arousing effects of birching, being birched, or writing and reading about corporal punishment,” indicating that sadistic/masochistic kink between women was being written for the female gaze and found desirable for women across the sexual spectrum (Marcus 147). Such birching was often portrayed between adult and youth, but, more specifically, between mother and daughter. Carmilla and Laura fit neatly into this dynamic, with Carmilla being the centuries-old ancestor to Laura’s immediate family. During a night terror, Carmilla advises Laura to “beware the assassin” and strokes her hair while singing her lullabies to sleep, allowing Carmilla to take on the position of Laura’s mother while simultaneously occupying the sexual space of the bedchamber. Carmilla’s brand of “cruelty, which yet is love” fits well into the associations of sapphic sex and kink as enjoyed by queer women in Victorian Europen (Le Fanu 35). In that sense, therefore, Carmilla’s and Laura’s relationship doesn’t demonize sapphism at all; rather, it reflects the real desires of sapphic women in sexual media in Le Fanu’s era.

These two viewpoints of Carmilla’s sapphic relationship continue to be debated by scholars in literary and queer disciplines. The very existence of the debate goes to show the effectiveness of Le Fanu’s writing in terms of portraying liminality, as the debate itself only exists due to his unreliable narrator, her own orchestrated repressed nature, and her dually alluring and dominant lover. This, then, is a hallmark moment of monster fiction: not only is the monstrous character uncategorizable, but so is the very narrative that she builds around her.

Conclusion

Understanding the queer nature of the protagonists in Carmilla, whether via their bending of gendered stereotypes, their narrative manipulation and textbook monstrosity, or in their literal homoeroticism, speaks to the legacy that Carmilla herself lends to succeeding vampire mythos. In using a vampire to tell a sapphic story (or using a sapphic relationship to tell a vampire story), Le Fanu suggests a link between oversexualized monstrosity and homoeroticism; along the same lines, portraying two women that refuse to be put into the restrictive boxes of Victorian femininity as intimate partners implies that traditional femininity is incompatible with homosexuality. As Carmilla doesn’t fit into the already existing category of the Eastern European folkloric vampire, it can be seen that Le Fanu constructs a vampire mythos rooted in the characteristics of a queer woman, reinforcing Cohen’s claim that the literary monster is a mirror of the societal Other, regardless of whether it celebrates or demonizes this Other. These associations are especially significant when considering Le Fanu’s influence on Stoker, who wrote Dracula more than twenty years after Le Fanu’s publication. As Stoker was inspired by Carmilla’s uncanny charm, it is reasonable to assume that our modern Draculean prototype of vampirism is simply an extension of her; perhaps Dracula is simply Carmilla in a bigger cloak, creating a genealogy of Carmilla’s descendants as Dracula is reinterpreted in nearly every piece of vampire media that is published today. The result is astounding: although modern vampire fiction features vampires that are male, heterosexual, and predatory, they share a common ancestor grounded in standards of Victorian women and their performance of queerness, in every sense of the word.

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