Carmilla
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Publication
Carmilla was first published in the magazine The Dark Blue in 1872, and then in the author's collection of short stories, In a Glass Darkly the same year. The story ran in The Dark Blue in three issues; January (1872), pp. 592-606; February (1872), pp. 701-714; and March (1872), pp. 59-78.
There were two original illustrators for the story, both of which appeared in the magazine but which do not appear in modern printings of the book. The two illustrators, D. H. Friston and M. Fitzgerald, show some inconsistencies in their depiction of the characters, and as such some confusion has been made in identifying the pictures as part of a continuous plot.
Plot
A wealthy English widower, having retired from the Austrian Service, moves to a stately castle in Styria with his daughter Laura. When she is six years old, Laura receives a beautiful visitor in her bedchamber and claims to have been bitten on the chest, although no wounds are found on her and she does not actually recall being bitten.
Twelve years later, Laura and her father are admiring the sunset in front of the castle, when her father tells her of a letter he received earlier from General Spielsdorf. The General was supposed to bring his niece to visit the two, but the untimely death of his niece caused him to pursue other endeavors. The General ambiguously concludes that he will discuss the circumstances in detail when the meet later.
Then an accident renders a girl of Laura's age in the family's care. Her name is Carmilla, and both girls instantly recognize the other as per the 'dream' they both had when they were young. However, Laura notices that Carmilla looks the same age as she did twelve years earlier. After the carriage crash that rendered Carmilla into the care of Laura's father, she appears injured. Her mysterious mother assures Laura's father that her journey cannot be delayed for the sake of the girl and that she will have to leave her behind, to return for her three months hence. At Laura's request her father offers to watch her with care and the mother hastens away. Before she leaves she sternly notes that her daughter will not dispose any information whatever about her family, past, or herself and that Carmilla is of sound mind. Laura comments that this information seems needless to say, and her father laughs it off.
Carmilla and Laura grow to be very close friends, but occasionally Carmilla's personality seems to undergo abrupt changes and she makes unsettling romantic advances towards Laura. Carmilla will also not tell anything about herself, despite the constant agitation over this by her friend Laura. Even her religion remains undisclosed and when a funeral procession passes by the two girls and Laura begins singing a hymn, Carmilla bursts out in rage scolding Laura for singing when she may not be of similar religion. When a shipment of family heirloom portraits arrive at the castle, Laura finds one of her ancestor, Countess Mircalla Karnstien, dated two centuries before. The portrait resembles Carmilla exactly, down to the mole on her neck.
Carmilla is languid and grows tired easily during the daytime. She sleeps long hours and is of very mild temper. But when suspicious events that could lead to intelligence about herself or her ancestry are presented, she grows angry or aloof and distracts the conversation. Comments made about her resemblance to the painting, and her incredibly sharp teeth are met in this way.
During Carmilla's stay, Laura has nightmares of a fiendish cat-like beast entering her room at night and then biting her on the neck. The beast then takes the form of a female figure that does not breathe and then disappears out the door without opening it. Laura's health declines and her father has a doctor examine her. He speaks privately with her father and only asks that Laura never be left unattended.
Her father then sets out with Laura in a carriage for the ruined village of Karnstien, with Carmilla and one of the governesses entreated to follow after once Carmilla had awakened. In route to Karnstien, Laura and her father encounter General Spielsdorf who sends his own carriage back and joins Laura, as he too was heading to Karnstien before visiting them. The General then begins to tell his own ghastly story.
Spielsdorf and his niece had met a young woman named Millarca and her enigmatic mother at a costume ball. The General’s niece was immediately taken with Millarca. Similarly to how Carmilla was left in the care of Laura's father, The "Countess" convinced the General that she was indeed an old friend of his and asks that Millarca be allowed to stay with them for three weeks while she attends to a secret matter of great importance. She assured him that Millarca would not reveal the nature of her family or her mission while staying with them and then left.
The General's niece fell mysteriously ill and suffered exactly the same symptoms as Laura. After consulting with a priestly doctor who he had specially ordered, the General came to the realization that his niece was being visited by a vampire. The general hid in a closet with a sword and waited to see a fiendish cat-like creature stalk around his niece’s bedroom and then bite her on the neck. He leapt from his concealment to attack the beast who took the form of Millarca, but she took no damage and quickly fled through the locked door. His niece died immediately afterward.
They arrive at Karnstien and the General immediately asks a nearby woodsman where he can find the tomb of Mircalla Karnstien, so that he may remove her head and end the nightmare. The woodsman tells that the tomb was relocated long ago, by the hero who vanquished the vampires that haunted the region. But, he goes to find his master who knows all the monuments of the Karnstien family.
While the General and Laura are left alone in the ruined chapel, Carmilla appears. The General and Carmilla both fly into a rage upon seeing each other and the General attacks her with an axe, but is stopped by Carmilla’s grasp that weakens him. Carmilla flees and the General relates to Laura that Carmilla is also Millarca, and in reality the Countess Mircalla Karnstien.
The ordeal ends when the Countess’s body is exhumed and destroyed.
Influence
Carmilla, the title character, is the original prototype for a legion of female (and often lesbian) vampires. Though Le Fanu portrays his vampire's sexuality with the circumspection that one would expect for his time, the reader can be pretty sure that lesbian attraction is the main dynamic between Carmilla and the narrator of the story. Carmilla selected exclusively female victims, though only became emotionally involved with a few. Carmilla had nocturnal habits, but was not confined to the darkness. She had unearthly beauty and was able to change her form and to pass through solid walls. Her animal alter ego was a monstrous black cat, not a bat as in Dracula. She did, however, sleep in a coffin.
Carmilla is richly atmospheric, eerie, unsettling and deeply frightening to those of a nervous disposition. Its setting is a parochial section of Styria state, Austria. As such it sets the standard for Gothic vampire literature, a genre which is not usually dealt with, as vampire stories (such as Dracula) lean more towards horror than Gothic or romantic in style of writing.
As such, this novella absolutely succeeds at putting into words the feelings of the modern Gothic subculture. Not only did Carmilla set the standards for Gothic and vampire style and characteristics, it influenced a number of books and movies, most notably Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Although Carmilla is a lesser known and far shorter Gothic vampire story than the generally-considered master work of that genre, Dracula, the latter is heavily and directly based upon Le Fanu's short story. Harry Ludlam has said that Dracula is "the product of [Stoker's] own vivid imagination and imaginative research", it is clear that Stoker was heavily inspired by Carmilla and based his novel upon this.
In the earliest manuscript of Dracula, dated 8 March, 1890, the castle is set in Styria, but the setting was changed to Transylvania six days later, showing that Stoker had full cognition of Carmilla's influence from the onset of his notes for Dracula. However Stoker's posthumously published short story, Dracula's Guest is known as the deleted first chapter to Dracula, and shows a more obvious and intact debt to Carmilla, and the setting of Styria remains unchanged.
Both stories are told in the first person. Dracula expands on the idea of a first person account by creating a series of journal entries and logs of different persons and creating a plausible background story for them having been compiled. He also indulges the air of mystery far better than is executed in Carmilla, by allowing the characters to solve the enigma of the vampire along with the reader. The descriptors of Carmilla and Mina are similar, and have typified the now-stereotypical appearance of the waif-like victims and seducers in vampire stories as being tall, slender, languid, and with large eyes, full lips and soft voices. Both women also sleepwalk, and Carmilla was described as a suicide.
Stoker's Dr. Abraham Van Helsing is a direct parallel to Le Fanu's Dr. Hesselius and Baron Vordenburg are also parallel characters, used to investigate and catalyse actions in opposition to the vampire, and symbolically represent knowledge of the unknown and stability of mind in the onslaught of chaos and death. (Baron Vordenburg also influenced Dracula's Lord Godlming.)
Film and book adaptations
Carmilla has been the subject of a number of films. French director Roger Vadim's Et mourir de plaisir (literally "And to die of pleasure", but actually shown in England as "Blood and Roses") is based on Carmilla and is considered one of the greatest of the vampire genre. The Vadim film thoroughly explores the lesbian implications behind Carmilla's selection of victims, and boasts cinematography by Claude Renoir.
The British pulp horror movie house Hammer Films also had a go at Carmilla its trilogy Lust for a Vampire, Twins of Evil and The Vampire Lovers. Ingrid Pitt appeared in these as the anagrammatically renamed Mircalla.
In 1974 Joseph (Jose) Lazzar created Vampyres, which explored not only the erotic lesbian activity of the vampires, but the brutal, bloody vampire activity itself, which was usually not touched upon so heavily. As such the film was less Gothic and more of an horror film, extending the tale beyond the spectrum of the book. The characters Fran and Miriam (presumably named for 'Millarca') are similar to Laura and Carmilla.
The animated film Vampire Hunter 'D': Bloodlust includes a character named Carmilla who is the lingering spirit of a long-dead yet very powerful vampire countess who continues to rule her castle. This is one of a very few movies that portrays a vampire's spirit as having not only the capacity to physically manifest itself, but also the ability to reasonably and dynamically interact with living beings (i.e. one could carry on a normal conversation with her).
In 1998 Carmilla was updated to present-day Long Island, New York in a movie of the same name. The movie is the brainchild of Jay Lind, the writer, director, and producer for the film. Starring Maria Pechukas, Heather Warr and Andy Gorkey, and co-produced by Jeff Schelenker, Carmilla is a horrific, gory, erotic counterpart to the Gothic novel. While the movie is in no way Gothic or romantic, it shows a different side of the story presented in the book.
Though Carmilla was a seminal work for the genre of vampire fiction, there is also a modern tale that directly incorporates Le Fanu's character. Carmilla: The Return, written in 1999 by Kyle Marffin, begins in 19th-century Austria but follows Carmilla's life into 1990s Michigan.
External links
- An e-text of Carmilla: http://www.sff.net/people/DoyleMacdonald/lit.htp
- Carmilla: The Return by Kyle Marffin: ISBN 1891946021
- Repossessing the body: transgressive desire in "Carmilla" and Dracula (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n4_v38/ai_18981386/pg_1) An extensive criticism and comparison with emphasis on femininity and masculinity in the two works.